CHAPTER THREE
+Mens mea cupit canare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
A few days passed in a blur of meaninglessness, unless one counted Heather Perkins, a sixth-year Gryffindor, placing the Thereoncewas Hex on a hapless Slytherin fourth-year. That meant Kyle St.-Pierre had spent nearly ten minutes speaking in limericks until Professor Sprout, who had been on her way to speak to McGonagall about something, happened by and managed to perform the counter-curse.
"I'm amazed I even remembered it," she told Harry later while he had been grading papers in the staff room. "The last time I remember anyone using it was in *my* sixth year - not that that was very long ago," she added defensively, glaring at him from under her gray cap of flyaway hair, "but still - a very obscure curse! A good thing, too; I think the only limericks St.-Pierre knew were the dirty ones, and the first-years were there and all! For example, 'There once was a girl from West Riding - '"
"Thank you! Er, I get the picture," Harry had said, scuttling away before Sprout could get any further in her recitation. /Oh, God... thank you for sparing me./ Unfortunately, that meant he spent the rest of the day wondering what could possibly rhyme with 'Riding', and what the rest of the limerick might be. Ron, of course, knew - and delivered an impressive oration at dinner that night.
"-so that's what the damn girl's been hiding!" he had finished triumphantly to applause from Professor Florescu, the Potions teacher, and a dirty look from Hermione.
/Brings back stuff,/ he'd thought fondly, heading back to his from dinner. Ron used to drive Hermione up the wall with stuff like that... he still did. Her reaction was still the same: bright-faced irritation and a lecture, even at twenty-seven and at the point where it became clear the part of Ron that was immature and loved dirty jokes would never change.
The limerick waltzed through his head for the rest of the night.
Now, two days later, the distraction of Kyle St.-Pierre's hexing had faded from general school gossip currents (mostly due to McGonagall's threat of summary detention for anyone caught reciting "There once was a girl from West Riding," which had become something of a sensation), and things had settled down to the point of mid-semester monotony. Harry found himself having to work on concentrating in his lectures, and several times had to resist the temptations to have the students do work from their textbooks (or dismiss them altogether) so he could have more time to worry over whether Draco had gotten his letter or not - and, if he had, what his reaction was. /And what about return mail?/ That was guaranteed to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb, by Fudge personally. Harry had never liked the man much, but prior dislike was rapidly starting to transform into intolerance.
On the third evening after his sending the letter out, Harry had learned - through Sinistra of all people - that Ron and Hermione were planning on leaving the next day. Surprised and a little hurt that Ron hadn't told him straight away, Harry made his way to the guest quarters on the other side of the faculty wing to take his friend to task. He went, he had to admit, out of a couple other ulterior motives: one, he wanted to find out if Ron knew anything about Draco getting his letter and two, he was hoping desperately to distract himself from the gnawing anxiety that had fastened itself on his stomach.
He knocked at the door to Ron and Hermione's room and, upon not receiving an answer, called "Ron! Hermione! Are you decent? It's... it's Harry!" When there was no answer to that either, he tried the door handle and was a bit surprised to find that the door was unlocked. /It's probably not a good idea to walk into an Auror's room uninvited,/ a little voice said. The voice was probably right, but Ron wouldn't leave his door unlocked if there was something important going on, or something classified that Harry wasn't supposed to know about.
Carefully, he opened the door a crack and peered into the room, hoping he wasn't about to get hit with a Stunning Spell, or something worse.
There was no one in the master suite. Harry was more than a bit curious now, so he stepped through the door and into the room fully, ignoring the little voice that was now steadily protesting at invading Ron and Hermione's privacy like this. He took a few shuffling, reluctant steps and was debating whether to call Ron again or to just turn around and leave when a voice said, seemingly from nowhere:
"Hey! Whaddaya want?"
Trying to push his heart back down into his stomach was difficult, especially considering he was looking around wildly for the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Harry fumbled for his wand and the voice, upon seeing this, said, "If you pull that, there's gonna be something nasty waiting for you, make no mistake."
"No!" Harry said to his invisible watchman. "No... I'm Harry Potter. I'm a friend."
"Oh! Well, that's different. Still, I'd keep that wand right where it is, if I were you." There was a clattering sound off to Harry's left, and he turned to try to localize it. Absurdly, the voice was coming from a corner table, upon which was placed a very familiar and very battered chess set, a chess set Harry must have played with a thousand times. He'd lost almost as many times - he'd only managed to beat Ron twice in all his memory, and once had been when Ron was high on painkillers taken for a broken arm in Quidditch and kept missing each piece the first time he'd tried to pick one up. Still, the set had never done this in Harry's memory, and he watched amazed as the black knight detached itself from the neat rank and file of his compatriots, spurring his horse to the corner of the board nearest Harry.
"Is Ron in?" Harry asked.
"The boss is busy," the knight told him, jerking his tiny ebony head in the direction of the suite's office door, which was closed. "He has important business to take care of - you can come back later."
"I'll wait," Harry told the knight, who bristled irritably.
"He's got important *private* business to take care of," the knight clarified with a scowl, "and you're not waiting. Don't make me come over there." The oddly tiny voice was deep and threatening, and almost ridiculous coming from a battered chess piece. Looking more closely, Harry saw that the horse's left ear was chipped and the tip of the knight's spear was broken off. "Well?" the knight said, "aren't you leaving?"
"I need to talk to Ron," Harry told the knight, feeling a bit ridiculous for arguing with a tiny animate chess piece. When he had played with Ron's set, the pieces had gradually started to try and escape, or plead with Ron not to let Harry use them. Given that, the knight's sudden assertiveness was a little off-putting. "Look, it's not a big deal, is it? I'll just wait right here."
"I don't think so," the knight said, jerking a bit on his horse's reins. The charger tossed its head and sidestepped, its tiny hooves clattering on the wooden chessboard. With a cry, the knight spurred the horse off the chessboard. The horse took one stride, gathered itself, and leapt off the side of the table.
One wild second later, Harry was trying not to be run down by the full-sized charger stomping and snorting in front of him. The horse rolled its eyes at him, shifting from massive hoof to massive hoof restlessly and pulling at the bit. Its rider, likewise fully armored and wielding a long and threatening - and very sharp - pike, glared at Harry through the slit in his visor and said with utter, frosty calm, "I told you, the boss is busy."
The pike dropped a bit, so the point was near level with Harry's nose.
Harry wondered if the chess piece remembered him and was holding a grudge.
"Dinadan!"
Ron's voice rang loudly in the tense silence, nearly making Harry faint with either relief or alarm - he'd been so distracted that he hadn't heard Ron's office door open and close, or Ron's footsteps coming up behind him. The knight jumped a bit in his saddle and the horse agitatedly tossed its head, liberally spraying Harry's face with foamy saliva. It was an effort to turn away from the knight, who still looked like he wanted to skewer the impertinent wizard, but Harry managed it - and wanted to turn right back around and *be* skewered. The look on Ron's face was not pleasant, sharper than the pike and twice as threatening.
"If you don't mind, get back to your station." It took a moment for Harry to realize Ron was talking to the knight not to him, and in that moment the knight saluted smartly, twitched his charger's reins, and vanished in a brief, muted thunderclap. Only a small chess piece remained on the floor, crudely carved and battered with much use. Ron picked it up carefully in the palm of his hand and restored it to the empty square where it had come from, and once again, the chess set was just... a chess set.
But Ron was not Just Ron when he turned to face Harry. His skin was pale beneath his freckles and the customary light in his hazel eyes was not there. No, it was hooded and cloaked, shuttered - gone, almost, but there was a little anger that prevented them from being completely lifeless. Feeling like a child again, or a very low species of flobberworm, Harry pulled his glasses off his nose and began to clean them, acutely aware of Ron staring at him. The fact that Ron was now little more than a pale, vaguely reddish blur did not lessen the sheer, disapproving force of Ron's presence.
"What are you doing here?" The words were low, strained, and suspicious.
"I needed to ask you something," Harry said in a small, uncertain voice. "I'm sorry if I was intruding on anything important... Or classified. Or whatever."
"Hm?" Ron glanced at him, and the suspicion lessened a little, but it was replaced by a distant sort of emotion Harry had trouble identifying. Was it sadness? It had been a long time since Ron had looked this way... and Harry could remember it. It had been when the blood from the final battle had dried and the dead were buried, the last time Harry saw Ron looking as he was looking now, worn out and old beyond centuries. "No," Ron continued softly, interrupting Harry's train of thought, "it's nothing important - I just needed to get a few things cleared up."
Sensing that Ron was being half-truthful at best, but unable to confirm it, Harry didn't pursue the matter. Instead, he hovered awkwardly for a few minutes, trying to decide between asking after his letter or simply fleeing. He hadn't reached a decision by the time Ron mercifully rescued him and asked the question for him:
"You were going to ask about your letter to Draco, weren't you?"
Harry nodded mutely. Although Ron vigorously denied it, Harry had always suspected there was a touch of the Seer about his friend - or else (and this thought was strangely not as comforting as it should have been) Ron knew him so well that Harry had absolutely no hope of ever entertaining a private thought in Ron's presence. There had been times when Ron had told him more or less what he'd been thinking, or how he'd been feeling, and it had been those times when Harry wondered why *he'd* never been able to read Ron that way. Something... always something had been kept back behind the plastic, passionate mask of Ron's face, a mask Harry had never been able to penetrate, and a mask Ron never really let him through.
It hurt a bit, thinking about that. /Let me in Ron... quit trying to take care of me./ There were times when Ron's mask of choice was frighteningly paternal.
"I don't think Fudge broke the charms on it," Ron said finally, with nowhere near the amount of victory in his voice Harry felt he should have had.
But then, Harry didn't feel victorious at all. The night before, he'd been trying to convince himself that doing an end-run around Fudge was like getting away with booby-trapping Crabbe and Goyle's cauldron during Potions while they were in school. Replacing Snape's scowling countenance with Fudge's impotent, wax-jacketed face hadn't been very difficult, but the exercise hadn't yielded much in the way of satisfaction; instead, it had set a slow, acidic burn in Harry's stomach that had yet to disappear.
"Maybe... you don't think he's holding it?" Harry asked. "He might not have been able to break the charms himself. Were you talking to him just now? I know you have a fireplace in your office." He became acutely aware that he was beginning to gabble and made himself shut up.
"I wasn't talking to him," Ron said quickly, turning away. He sat down heavily in a chair pulled up to the table holding the chess set and gestured for Harry to take a seat. Somewhat uncertainly, Harry did. "And anyway, Fudge isn't the kind of person to hold onto evidence that could possibly incriminate someone in dealings with the Dark Arts - no, he'll have that person hauled in for trial the second he got his hands on the smallest scrap of evidence. Believe me, if he found out you were writing to Draco, and that I was helping you, we'd both be in the interrogation cells in Azkaban right about now."
"You haven't gotten a reply, have you?"
Ron shook his head. "To be honest, I don't expect we'll get one. The Ministry is strict with incoming mail to the Death Eaters in exile - they're much worse with the outgoing. Everything Draco sends out is checked over for *anything* -- charms, magic ink, code words. I expect Draco knows this, and I don't know if he'd been keen on having the Department of Internal Affairs you and he are pen-friends. The department probably wouldn't be very happy about it, themselves. I told him to write me if and when he wanted to... but I'm not holding out hope. And I'm guessing you heard that part of our conversation anyway."
Harry stared at Ron across the table. How many times had they sat like this? Ron, as usual, was staring fixedly at the chess pieces, as if they offered him answers to the questions he couldn't answer. Maybe they did. But questions like these, though - where were the answers for such things? Harry didn't know. *He* certainly didn't have them.
"Could I see him?"
"I'll see what I can do," Ron said softly. His hand had stolen up to his chest and was absently rubbing at the skin over his heart, and his gaze had become preoccupied, turned inward, his eyes staring through the chess pieces without actually seeing them. "There are a couple people in the department who owe me favors... They'll look the other way if I ask them to."
"Are you having second thoughts?" Harry asked. He found himself leaning forward, his entire body attenuated to Ron's, searching wildly for any way to anticipate Ron's response. All he got was that distressing blankness, the expression of almost-resignation on his best friend's face. Some treacherous part of him prayed that it wouldn't be so. /You promised!/ it told Ron accusingly. /You promised you'd help me out!/ What Harry said aloud, though, was: "If you are, it's... well, I mean, it's your *right*. I don't want you to get fired."
"I already told you I don't *care* about getting fired," Ron said, sounding almost petulant. Harry thought guiltily that Ron had picked up on his internal monologue and was - quite rightfully - being resentful. "At least," Ron continued, "it doesn't seem like a big deal right now. No... it's just something else I need to take care of. Don't worry about it - I'll figure out a way." He favored Harry with an unexpectedly shrewd look. "And don't worry about me, either, for that matter."
Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm *supposed* to worry about you, idiot."
"Don't let Draco know that," Ron advised him with an evil smirk and was, suddenly, truly himself again. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got things to take care of - big, important Auror Things, don't you know."
"Yes, sir, your Aurorness," Harry muttered, sensing that Ron was doing little more than diverting him. /Not worry about him, my ass,/ he thought to himself as Ron saw him to and practically propelled him out the door. /Who does he think he is?/
The answer was two-pronged: Ron was an Auror, and Ron was his best friend. A combination of the two meant that Ron would do whatever he felt would be best for Harry, no questions asked - or tolerated, for that matter. It was occasionally endearing. Mostly, it was annoying. Right now, it was troubling; Ron was hiding something, and Harry had *that* pleasant thought to gnaw on for the rest of the day and into the night. He was still chewing on it when he woke up in the morning, and that the question - unsatisfying as it was - had left no room for breakfast.
Ron and Hermione left shortly after the students dispersed for first period. Harry saw his friends down to Hogsmeade, shadowing their coach in his hawk form and trying to think of flying instead of the unhappy clench in his stomach as he watched them Apparate back to their home in London. He drifted in idle circles, coasting the air currents, for a couple hours - he had a free class that morning, and he was determined to not spend it grading papers - before reluctantly heading back to the school.
For the first time in a long time, he didn't feel the usual rush of warmth and happiness that came over him whenever he saw the castle. From his earliest memories of the place, even from his first days at Hogwarts, the castle had been his home more truly than Privet Drive had ever been. The Burrow had been his ideal home, the Weasleys his ideal family for all their problems, but Hogwarts... It had been the first place he'd been able to eat without worrying about Dudley stealing his food, or do anything without fear of being locked up. For all its danger - and Draco, who had been the thorn in Harry's adolescent side - it had been the first place he could call his own.
/No wonder you're back here,/ he thought as he flew in through his open window. The stuffiness of his bedroom closed uncomfortably around him, abrasive against the memory of the cold wind smoothing through his feathers. He transformed back, straightening his robes and gazing about himself in a sudden wave of self-disgust. Everything was so... so ordinary. A bed, desk, the occasional decoration.
Ordinary.
/Isn't this what you want, Potter?/ he asked himself. /Ordinary? That's all you ever wanted before. There was a time when you would have given your right hand to have ordinary./
/Well, now you have it, and you don't bloody know what to do with it./
/Ron and Hermione have ordinary. They have a family. What do you have? Some freakish... freakish *thing* about an old enemy. And you don't even know how you feel about *that*. Be glad you have ordinary, Potter - it's the only thing you'll ever have./
/Draco./
Once again, Harry could see him standing in the window of his bedroom. Such an... ordinary bedroom. /That word is getting a lot of mileage./ In former days he would have thought Draco to have decorated his bedroom with Muggle body parts, chains, and posters of heroic Death Eaters of years past. What he had seen, though, had been...
It had been ordinary.
A bed, desk, the occasional decoration.
The man standing within it, gray eyes watery in the unfocused morning light, body tense with unspoken words, ordinary. Harry had seen the terror in his eyes just before he'd revealed himself - an ordinary man, reacting in the fear of the moment. /And you followed him,/ he added. /You saw what happened to him when Ron went away./
He'd been in awe of the splendor of the Malfoy manse - marble everywhere, gold and gilt dancing at the corner of his vision. Statues of ancestors and paintings with condescending sneers, talking silently. The thick rugs on the floor had muffled his footsteps, the mahogany of the banisters had slid under his fingertips like silk. Everywhere there was money, even after what the Ministry had taken away by way of "reparation", money and beautiful things.
And in the middle of all of it had been Draco, walking slowly, ordinary.
/But what you feel for him.../ Harry paused in his own thought. /What I feel for him - it isn't./
/What do I feel for him?/ That was another snarling question.
Shaking his head, Harry tore himself from his thoughts and made himself concentrate on the simple procedure of picking up his briefcase and heading out his door, resolved to finish grading the last quiz he'd handed out to the second-year Gryffindors. He followed through on that resolution, and by the time he finished writing the grade on "Zamuner, Aileen's" scroll, it was nearly time for class and he'd managed to forget much of the uncertainty of the morning. And even Draco to some extent.
He gave his lecture to his second-year Gryffindors with all the spirit they'd usually expected of him and tolerated their half-transfigured beetles (which were supposed to be buttons) with good grace, although Emory Price's button still had its legs and tried to scuttle up the sleeve of Lisa O'Malley's robe when Emory let his attention wander.
"GET IT OFF!" Lisa shrieked, flailing her arms wildly.
The beetle-slash-button flew through the air like a missile, straight into the right lens of Harrison Glover's glasses.
Harrison's shriek was nearly as high as Lisa's. He toppled over backwards, his head narrowly missing the edge of the table behind him. As he lay too stunned to do anything more than stare blindly up at the ceiling, the beetle made its bid for freedom and streaked off into the confused milling of the students. As carefully as possible, Harry pushed his way through the second-years, overhearing Emory's lament that he had *almost* gotten it right - he sounded much more grief-stricken over the loss of his nearly-successful beetle than worried over whether or not Harrison had a concussion - and hovered over Harrison, who was rubbing his head and staring about owlishly.
Just as Harry was beginning to entertain thoughts of fetching Madam Pomfrey, Harrison blinked and came out of his daze. The children heaved a collective sigh of relief, although Emory still continued to loudly lament the loss of his beetle. Before Harry could shepherd the students back to their desks, the bell rang and there was the traditional wild stampede to get out of the room before he could assign homework - which he did anyway, over the scuffling of shoes and chairs on the floor.
Smiling a bit at the response, one of which he never tired, Harry followed the students out of the hallway and saw them off to lunch. The last thing he heard before the whole herd of them turned the corner to the Great Hall was Emory saying, "I *can't* believe he got away..."
It was so routine - responding to a series of near-disasters - Harry was in some danger of feeling that things had gotten back to normal. So it came as a shock, then, when he saw a small, swiftly moving missile heading down the hall straight for him. He tried to duck, but by the time he registered the menace it was too late to even duck.
Pig collided with Harry's head and bounced off, hooting like a thing possessed. Harry managed to catch the miniscule owl before he hit the floor, and hung on despite Pig's best efforts to wriggle free. The owl was hooting shrilly, drawing curious looks from passing students, and a slightly suspicious one from Minerva, who thankfully restricted her comments to a sniff - she probably knew what all this was about, Harry thought sulkily - and continued on her way. Whispering heartfelt commands for Pig to shut up, Harry tried to get a firm hold on Pig's body with one hand while untying the scrap of parchment from his leg with the other. It wasn't easy, as Pig seemed to think this was some sort of game and wriggled happily, hooting at the top of his lungs.
Finally, though, he managed it and let Pig go. Pig hummed contentedly and fluttered about for a moment before landing on Harry's shoulder and proceeding to pick at the fabric of his robe.
"You were dropped when you were little, weren't you?" he asked Pig, who hooted to assure him that, yes indeed, he had been. Sighing and wondering why Ron persisted in using the tiny owl (no... he knew exactly why), Harry cracked open the seal of the envelope and pulled the letter out. It was simple and to the point:
Harry -
I'll be in my office next Sunday catching up on "paperwork." Meet me there at nine or so (in the morning.) Thanks.
Ron hadn't bothered signing it - his singularly bad penmanship was an effective enough signature for anyone who knew him and tried to decipher his writing. Ron didn't even have an office, other than the tremendously messy, paper-filled spare room in the flat he and Hermione lived in and the briefing room he shared with the rest of the Aurors at the Ministry, to which he would never invite Harry in a million years. No... it was to another place entirely, and Harry really *did* feel guilty this time as he suppressed a surge of excitement that had usually come with some impending bout of rule-breaking, at least in the former days.
The office in question was Liber's, a tiny and thoroughly disreputable pub just on the wrong side of Knockturn Alley. Harry shuddered, thinking about the one and only time he'd been in there, which had been because Ron had asked to meet him and Harry, not even bothering to ask directions, had found himself directed there by the most hostile-looking witch he'd ever seen. It had turned out that Ron had wanted to tell him he'd decided to ask Hermione to marry him, but in Harry's opinion, that was still no excuse. The place had been - and, given the pace of change in the wizard world, probably still was - a hole.
Still... the promise of seeing Draco made a fugitive excitement skitter across Harry's nerves. He began to walk, suddenly energetic, ignoring the pain in his leg. He could no longer run, but felt he could - his heart raced on a spike of adrenaline, outpacing the hasty, awkward shuffling of the rest of his body.
For a moment he *felt* it.
What 'it' was... he could not say, but it was unlike anything in his past experience. Unlike his grief over his parents, the distant ache brought by loss in the war, this was true and undiluted - he *felt* it coming from some deep part of him, welling up like water, taking hold of him, and he was helpless in its grip.
And he was *wanting* to be, that was the terrible strangeness of it. It was good, and he wanted to be swept up in it, to just go with it for the first time. It wasn't the bitter, haunting fear of memory - no, he fought that always - but something else he could not put a name to because he'd never felt it. He moved swiftly down the hall, Ron's note clutched in his hand, mind already spinning out on its flight past the walls of the castle, racing ahead like his heart in anticipation.
+Mens mea cupit canare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
A few days passed in a blur of meaninglessness, unless one counted Heather Perkins, a sixth-year Gryffindor, placing the Thereoncewas Hex on a hapless Slytherin fourth-year. That meant Kyle St.-Pierre had spent nearly ten minutes speaking in limericks until Professor Sprout, who had been on her way to speak to McGonagall about something, happened by and managed to perform the counter-curse.
"I'm amazed I even remembered it," she told Harry later while he had been grading papers in the staff room. "The last time I remember anyone using it was in *my* sixth year - not that that was very long ago," she added defensively, glaring at him from under her gray cap of flyaway hair, "but still - a very obscure curse! A good thing, too; I think the only limericks St.-Pierre knew were the dirty ones, and the first-years were there and all! For example, 'There once was a girl from West Riding - '"
"Thank you! Er, I get the picture," Harry had said, scuttling away before Sprout could get any further in her recitation. /Oh, God... thank you for sparing me./ Unfortunately, that meant he spent the rest of the day wondering what could possibly rhyme with 'Riding', and what the rest of the limerick might be. Ron, of course, knew - and delivered an impressive oration at dinner that night.
"-so that's what the damn girl's been hiding!" he had finished triumphantly to applause from Professor Florescu, the Potions teacher, and a dirty look from Hermione.
/Brings back stuff,/ he'd thought fondly, heading back to his from dinner. Ron used to drive Hermione up the wall with stuff like that... he still did. Her reaction was still the same: bright-faced irritation and a lecture, even at twenty-seven and at the point where it became clear the part of Ron that was immature and loved dirty jokes would never change.
The limerick waltzed through his head for the rest of the night.
Now, two days later, the distraction of Kyle St.-Pierre's hexing had faded from general school gossip currents (mostly due to McGonagall's threat of summary detention for anyone caught reciting "There once was a girl from West Riding," which had become something of a sensation), and things had settled down to the point of mid-semester monotony. Harry found himself having to work on concentrating in his lectures, and several times had to resist the temptations to have the students do work from their textbooks (or dismiss them altogether) so he could have more time to worry over whether Draco had gotten his letter or not - and, if he had, what his reaction was. /And what about return mail?/ That was guaranteed to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb, by Fudge personally. Harry had never liked the man much, but prior dislike was rapidly starting to transform into intolerance.
On the third evening after his sending the letter out, Harry had learned - through Sinistra of all people - that Ron and Hermione were planning on leaving the next day. Surprised and a little hurt that Ron hadn't told him straight away, Harry made his way to the guest quarters on the other side of the faculty wing to take his friend to task. He went, he had to admit, out of a couple other ulterior motives: one, he wanted to find out if Ron knew anything about Draco getting his letter and two, he was hoping desperately to distract himself from the gnawing anxiety that had fastened itself on his stomach.
He knocked at the door to Ron and Hermione's room and, upon not receiving an answer, called "Ron! Hermione! Are you decent? It's... it's Harry!" When there was no answer to that either, he tried the door handle and was a bit surprised to find that the door was unlocked. /It's probably not a good idea to walk into an Auror's room uninvited,/ a little voice said. The voice was probably right, but Ron wouldn't leave his door unlocked if there was something important going on, or something classified that Harry wasn't supposed to know about.
Carefully, he opened the door a crack and peered into the room, hoping he wasn't about to get hit with a Stunning Spell, or something worse.
There was no one in the master suite. Harry was more than a bit curious now, so he stepped through the door and into the room fully, ignoring the little voice that was now steadily protesting at invading Ron and Hermione's privacy like this. He took a few shuffling, reluctant steps and was debating whether to call Ron again or to just turn around and leave when a voice said, seemingly from nowhere:
"Hey! Whaddaya want?"
Trying to push his heart back down into his stomach was difficult, especially considering he was looking around wildly for the owner of the unfamiliar voice. Harry fumbled for his wand and the voice, upon seeing this, said, "If you pull that, there's gonna be something nasty waiting for you, make no mistake."
"No!" Harry said to his invisible watchman. "No... I'm Harry Potter. I'm a friend."
"Oh! Well, that's different. Still, I'd keep that wand right where it is, if I were you." There was a clattering sound off to Harry's left, and he turned to try to localize it. Absurdly, the voice was coming from a corner table, upon which was placed a very familiar and very battered chess set, a chess set Harry must have played with a thousand times. He'd lost almost as many times - he'd only managed to beat Ron twice in all his memory, and once had been when Ron was high on painkillers taken for a broken arm in Quidditch and kept missing each piece the first time he'd tried to pick one up. Still, the set had never done this in Harry's memory, and he watched amazed as the black knight detached itself from the neat rank and file of his compatriots, spurring his horse to the corner of the board nearest Harry.
"Is Ron in?" Harry asked.
"The boss is busy," the knight told him, jerking his tiny ebony head in the direction of the suite's office door, which was closed. "He has important business to take care of - you can come back later."
"I'll wait," Harry told the knight, who bristled irritably.
"He's got important *private* business to take care of," the knight clarified with a scowl, "and you're not waiting. Don't make me come over there." The oddly tiny voice was deep and threatening, and almost ridiculous coming from a battered chess piece. Looking more closely, Harry saw that the horse's left ear was chipped and the tip of the knight's spear was broken off. "Well?" the knight said, "aren't you leaving?"
"I need to talk to Ron," Harry told the knight, feeling a bit ridiculous for arguing with a tiny animate chess piece. When he had played with Ron's set, the pieces had gradually started to try and escape, or plead with Ron not to let Harry use them. Given that, the knight's sudden assertiveness was a little off-putting. "Look, it's not a big deal, is it? I'll just wait right here."
"I don't think so," the knight said, jerking a bit on his horse's reins. The charger tossed its head and sidestepped, its tiny hooves clattering on the wooden chessboard. With a cry, the knight spurred the horse off the chessboard. The horse took one stride, gathered itself, and leapt off the side of the table.
One wild second later, Harry was trying not to be run down by the full-sized charger stomping and snorting in front of him. The horse rolled its eyes at him, shifting from massive hoof to massive hoof restlessly and pulling at the bit. Its rider, likewise fully armored and wielding a long and threatening - and very sharp - pike, glared at Harry through the slit in his visor and said with utter, frosty calm, "I told you, the boss is busy."
The pike dropped a bit, so the point was near level with Harry's nose.
Harry wondered if the chess piece remembered him and was holding a grudge.
"Dinadan!"
Ron's voice rang loudly in the tense silence, nearly making Harry faint with either relief or alarm - he'd been so distracted that he hadn't heard Ron's office door open and close, or Ron's footsteps coming up behind him. The knight jumped a bit in his saddle and the horse agitatedly tossed its head, liberally spraying Harry's face with foamy saliva. It was an effort to turn away from the knight, who still looked like he wanted to skewer the impertinent wizard, but Harry managed it - and wanted to turn right back around and *be* skewered. The look on Ron's face was not pleasant, sharper than the pike and twice as threatening.
"If you don't mind, get back to your station." It took a moment for Harry to realize Ron was talking to the knight not to him, and in that moment the knight saluted smartly, twitched his charger's reins, and vanished in a brief, muted thunderclap. Only a small chess piece remained on the floor, crudely carved and battered with much use. Ron picked it up carefully in the palm of his hand and restored it to the empty square where it had come from, and once again, the chess set was just... a chess set.
But Ron was not Just Ron when he turned to face Harry. His skin was pale beneath his freckles and the customary light in his hazel eyes was not there. No, it was hooded and cloaked, shuttered - gone, almost, but there was a little anger that prevented them from being completely lifeless. Feeling like a child again, or a very low species of flobberworm, Harry pulled his glasses off his nose and began to clean them, acutely aware of Ron staring at him. The fact that Ron was now little more than a pale, vaguely reddish blur did not lessen the sheer, disapproving force of Ron's presence.
"What are you doing here?" The words were low, strained, and suspicious.
"I needed to ask you something," Harry said in a small, uncertain voice. "I'm sorry if I was intruding on anything important... Or classified. Or whatever."
"Hm?" Ron glanced at him, and the suspicion lessened a little, but it was replaced by a distant sort of emotion Harry had trouble identifying. Was it sadness? It had been a long time since Ron had looked this way... and Harry could remember it. It had been when the blood from the final battle had dried and the dead were buried, the last time Harry saw Ron looking as he was looking now, worn out and old beyond centuries. "No," Ron continued softly, interrupting Harry's train of thought, "it's nothing important - I just needed to get a few things cleared up."
Sensing that Ron was being half-truthful at best, but unable to confirm it, Harry didn't pursue the matter. Instead, he hovered awkwardly for a few minutes, trying to decide between asking after his letter or simply fleeing. He hadn't reached a decision by the time Ron mercifully rescued him and asked the question for him:
"You were going to ask about your letter to Draco, weren't you?"
Harry nodded mutely. Although Ron vigorously denied it, Harry had always suspected there was a touch of the Seer about his friend - or else (and this thought was strangely not as comforting as it should have been) Ron knew him so well that Harry had absolutely no hope of ever entertaining a private thought in Ron's presence. There had been times when Ron had told him more or less what he'd been thinking, or how he'd been feeling, and it had been those times when Harry wondered why *he'd* never been able to read Ron that way. Something... always something had been kept back behind the plastic, passionate mask of Ron's face, a mask Harry had never been able to penetrate, and a mask Ron never really let him through.
It hurt a bit, thinking about that. /Let me in Ron... quit trying to take care of me./ There were times when Ron's mask of choice was frighteningly paternal.
"I don't think Fudge broke the charms on it," Ron said finally, with nowhere near the amount of victory in his voice Harry felt he should have had.
But then, Harry didn't feel victorious at all. The night before, he'd been trying to convince himself that doing an end-run around Fudge was like getting away with booby-trapping Crabbe and Goyle's cauldron during Potions while they were in school. Replacing Snape's scowling countenance with Fudge's impotent, wax-jacketed face hadn't been very difficult, but the exercise hadn't yielded much in the way of satisfaction; instead, it had set a slow, acidic burn in Harry's stomach that had yet to disappear.
"Maybe... you don't think he's holding it?" Harry asked. "He might not have been able to break the charms himself. Were you talking to him just now? I know you have a fireplace in your office." He became acutely aware that he was beginning to gabble and made himself shut up.
"I wasn't talking to him," Ron said quickly, turning away. He sat down heavily in a chair pulled up to the table holding the chess set and gestured for Harry to take a seat. Somewhat uncertainly, Harry did. "And anyway, Fudge isn't the kind of person to hold onto evidence that could possibly incriminate someone in dealings with the Dark Arts - no, he'll have that person hauled in for trial the second he got his hands on the smallest scrap of evidence. Believe me, if he found out you were writing to Draco, and that I was helping you, we'd both be in the interrogation cells in Azkaban right about now."
"You haven't gotten a reply, have you?"
Ron shook his head. "To be honest, I don't expect we'll get one. The Ministry is strict with incoming mail to the Death Eaters in exile - they're much worse with the outgoing. Everything Draco sends out is checked over for *anything* -- charms, magic ink, code words. I expect Draco knows this, and I don't know if he'd been keen on having the Department of Internal Affairs you and he are pen-friends. The department probably wouldn't be very happy about it, themselves. I told him to write me if and when he wanted to... but I'm not holding out hope. And I'm guessing you heard that part of our conversation anyway."
Harry stared at Ron across the table. How many times had they sat like this? Ron, as usual, was staring fixedly at the chess pieces, as if they offered him answers to the questions he couldn't answer. Maybe they did. But questions like these, though - where were the answers for such things? Harry didn't know. *He* certainly didn't have them.
"Could I see him?"
"I'll see what I can do," Ron said softly. His hand had stolen up to his chest and was absently rubbing at the skin over his heart, and his gaze had become preoccupied, turned inward, his eyes staring through the chess pieces without actually seeing them. "There are a couple people in the department who owe me favors... They'll look the other way if I ask them to."
"Are you having second thoughts?" Harry asked. He found himself leaning forward, his entire body attenuated to Ron's, searching wildly for any way to anticipate Ron's response. All he got was that distressing blankness, the expression of almost-resignation on his best friend's face. Some treacherous part of him prayed that it wouldn't be so. /You promised!/ it told Ron accusingly. /You promised you'd help me out!/ What Harry said aloud, though, was: "If you are, it's... well, I mean, it's your *right*. I don't want you to get fired."
"I already told you I don't *care* about getting fired," Ron said, sounding almost petulant. Harry thought guiltily that Ron had picked up on his internal monologue and was - quite rightfully - being resentful. "At least," Ron continued, "it doesn't seem like a big deal right now. No... it's just something else I need to take care of. Don't worry about it - I'll figure out a way." He favored Harry with an unexpectedly shrewd look. "And don't worry about me, either, for that matter."
Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm *supposed* to worry about you, idiot."
"Don't let Draco know that," Ron advised him with an evil smirk and was, suddenly, truly himself again. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got things to take care of - big, important Auror Things, don't you know."
"Yes, sir, your Aurorness," Harry muttered, sensing that Ron was doing little more than diverting him. /Not worry about him, my ass,/ he thought to himself as Ron saw him to and practically propelled him out the door. /Who does he think he is?/
The answer was two-pronged: Ron was an Auror, and Ron was his best friend. A combination of the two meant that Ron would do whatever he felt would be best for Harry, no questions asked - or tolerated, for that matter. It was occasionally endearing. Mostly, it was annoying. Right now, it was troubling; Ron was hiding something, and Harry had *that* pleasant thought to gnaw on for the rest of the day and into the night. He was still chewing on it when he woke up in the morning, and that the question - unsatisfying as it was - had left no room for breakfast.
Ron and Hermione left shortly after the students dispersed for first period. Harry saw his friends down to Hogsmeade, shadowing their coach in his hawk form and trying to think of flying instead of the unhappy clench in his stomach as he watched them Apparate back to their home in London. He drifted in idle circles, coasting the air currents, for a couple hours - he had a free class that morning, and he was determined to not spend it grading papers - before reluctantly heading back to the school.
For the first time in a long time, he didn't feel the usual rush of warmth and happiness that came over him whenever he saw the castle. From his earliest memories of the place, even from his first days at Hogwarts, the castle had been his home more truly than Privet Drive had ever been. The Burrow had been his ideal home, the Weasleys his ideal family for all their problems, but Hogwarts... It had been the first place he'd been able to eat without worrying about Dudley stealing his food, or do anything without fear of being locked up. For all its danger - and Draco, who had been the thorn in Harry's adolescent side - it had been the first place he could call his own.
/No wonder you're back here,/ he thought as he flew in through his open window. The stuffiness of his bedroom closed uncomfortably around him, abrasive against the memory of the cold wind smoothing through his feathers. He transformed back, straightening his robes and gazing about himself in a sudden wave of self-disgust. Everything was so... so ordinary. A bed, desk, the occasional decoration.
Ordinary.
/Isn't this what you want, Potter?/ he asked himself. /Ordinary? That's all you ever wanted before. There was a time when you would have given your right hand to have ordinary./
/Well, now you have it, and you don't bloody know what to do with it./
/Ron and Hermione have ordinary. They have a family. What do you have? Some freakish... freakish *thing* about an old enemy. And you don't even know how you feel about *that*. Be glad you have ordinary, Potter - it's the only thing you'll ever have./
/Draco./
Once again, Harry could see him standing in the window of his bedroom. Such an... ordinary bedroom. /That word is getting a lot of mileage./ In former days he would have thought Draco to have decorated his bedroom with Muggle body parts, chains, and posters of heroic Death Eaters of years past. What he had seen, though, had been...
It had been ordinary.
A bed, desk, the occasional decoration.
The man standing within it, gray eyes watery in the unfocused morning light, body tense with unspoken words, ordinary. Harry had seen the terror in his eyes just before he'd revealed himself - an ordinary man, reacting in the fear of the moment. /And you followed him,/ he added. /You saw what happened to him when Ron went away./
He'd been in awe of the splendor of the Malfoy manse - marble everywhere, gold and gilt dancing at the corner of his vision. Statues of ancestors and paintings with condescending sneers, talking silently. The thick rugs on the floor had muffled his footsteps, the mahogany of the banisters had slid under his fingertips like silk. Everywhere there was money, even after what the Ministry had taken away by way of "reparation", money and beautiful things.
And in the middle of all of it had been Draco, walking slowly, ordinary.
/But what you feel for him.../ Harry paused in his own thought. /What I feel for him - it isn't./
/What do I feel for him?/ That was another snarling question.
Shaking his head, Harry tore himself from his thoughts and made himself concentrate on the simple procedure of picking up his briefcase and heading out his door, resolved to finish grading the last quiz he'd handed out to the second-year Gryffindors. He followed through on that resolution, and by the time he finished writing the grade on "Zamuner, Aileen's" scroll, it was nearly time for class and he'd managed to forget much of the uncertainty of the morning. And even Draco to some extent.
He gave his lecture to his second-year Gryffindors with all the spirit they'd usually expected of him and tolerated their half-transfigured beetles (which were supposed to be buttons) with good grace, although Emory Price's button still had its legs and tried to scuttle up the sleeve of Lisa O'Malley's robe when Emory let his attention wander.
"GET IT OFF!" Lisa shrieked, flailing her arms wildly.
The beetle-slash-button flew through the air like a missile, straight into the right lens of Harrison Glover's glasses.
Harrison's shriek was nearly as high as Lisa's. He toppled over backwards, his head narrowly missing the edge of the table behind him. As he lay too stunned to do anything more than stare blindly up at the ceiling, the beetle made its bid for freedom and streaked off into the confused milling of the students. As carefully as possible, Harry pushed his way through the second-years, overhearing Emory's lament that he had *almost* gotten it right - he sounded much more grief-stricken over the loss of his nearly-successful beetle than worried over whether or not Harrison had a concussion - and hovered over Harrison, who was rubbing his head and staring about owlishly.
Just as Harry was beginning to entertain thoughts of fetching Madam Pomfrey, Harrison blinked and came out of his daze. The children heaved a collective sigh of relief, although Emory still continued to loudly lament the loss of his beetle. Before Harry could shepherd the students back to their desks, the bell rang and there was the traditional wild stampede to get out of the room before he could assign homework - which he did anyway, over the scuffling of shoes and chairs on the floor.
Smiling a bit at the response, one of which he never tired, Harry followed the students out of the hallway and saw them off to lunch. The last thing he heard before the whole herd of them turned the corner to the Great Hall was Emory saying, "I *can't* believe he got away..."
It was so routine - responding to a series of near-disasters - Harry was in some danger of feeling that things had gotten back to normal. So it came as a shock, then, when he saw a small, swiftly moving missile heading down the hall straight for him. He tried to duck, but by the time he registered the menace it was too late to even duck.
Pig collided with Harry's head and bounced off, hooting like a thing possessed. Harry managed to catch the miniscule owl before he hit the floor, and hung on despite Pig's best efforts to wriggle free. The owl was hooting shrilly, drawing curious looks from passing students, and a slightly suspicious one from Minerva, who thankfully restricted her comments to a sniff - she probably knew what all this was about, Harry thought sulkily - and continued on her way. Whispering heartfelt commands for Pig to shut up, Harry tried to get a firm hold on Pig's body with one hand while untying the scrap of parchment from his leg with the other. It wasn't easy, as Pig seemed to think this was some sort of game and wriggled happily, hooting at the top of his lungs.
Finally, though, he managed it and let Pig go. Pig hummed contentedly and fluttered about for a moment before landing on Harry's shoulder and proceeding to pick at the fabric of his robe.
"You were dropped when you were little, weren't you?" he asked Pig, who hooted to assure him that, yes indeed, he had been. Sighing and wondering why Ron persisted in using the tiny owl (no... he knew exactly why), Harry cracked open the seal of the envelope and pulled the letter out. It was simple and to the point:
Harry -
I'll be in my office next Sunday catching up on "paperwork." Meet me there at nine or so (in the morning.) Thanks.
Ron hadn't bothered signing it - his singularly bad penmanship was an effective enough signature for anyone who knew him and tried to decipher his writing. Ron didn't even have an office, other than the tremendously messy, paper-filled spare room in the flat he and Hermione lived in and the briefing room he shared with the rest of the Aurors at the Ministry, to which he would never invite Harry in a million years. No... it was to another place entirely, and Harry really *did* feel guilty this time as he suppressed a surge of excitement that had usually come with some impending bout of rule-breaking, at least in the former days.
The office in question was Liber's, a tiny and thoroughly disreputable pub just on the wrong side of Knockturn Alley. Harry shuddered, thinking about the one and only time he'd been in there, which had been because Ron had asked to meet him and Harry, not even bothering to ask directions, had found himself directed there by the most hostile-looking witch he'd ever seen. It had turned out that Ron had wanted to tell him he'd decided to ask Hermione to marry him, but in Harry's opinion, that was still no excuse. The place had been - and, given the pace of change in the wizard world, probably still was - a hole.
Still... the promise of seeing Draco made a fugitive excitement skitter across Harry's nerves. He began to walk, suddenly energetic, ignoring the pain in his leg. He could no longer run, but felt he could - his heart raced on a spike of adrenaline, outpacing the hasty, awkward shuffling of the rest of his body.
For a moment he *felt* it.
What 'it' was... he could not say, but it was unlike anything in his past experience. Unlike his grief over his parents, the distant ache brought by loss in the war, this was true and undiluted - he *felt* it coming from some deep part of him, welling up like water, taking hold of him, and he was helpless in its grip.
And he was *wanting* to be, that was the terrible strangeness of it. It was good, and he wanted to be swept up in it, to just go with it for the first time. It wasn't the bitter, haunting fear of memory - no, he fought that always - but something else he could not put a name to because he'd never felt it. He moved swiftly down the hall, Ron's note clutched in his hand, mind already spinning out on its flight past the walls of the castle, racing ahead like his heart in anticipation.