+Mens mea cupit cantare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
CHAPTER SIX
Faintly, he felt Draco's fingers on his face again, clasping his chin and unexpectedly cool in the warmth of the sun. Unresisting, he let the fingers turn his face to the side, trace minute patterns over his jaw. Let Draco's lips brush chastely against his cheek.
Mind and body froze and Harry thought he might stand like this forever: locked in place, the sensation of Draco's mouth perpetually upon him. From the corner of his eye, he could see Draco's gray eyes alight with daring, amusement, and something else, but his brain wasn't functioning enough to identify that last, mysterious thing. And did he want to, at any rate?
Draco broke the moment by turning away, but as he did, there was a smile on his face. Startled, Harry blinked. His mind moved sluggishly, Petrified by the moment and scrambling to catch up. He'd never understood Draco's smiles before, how much there was hidden behind them, and he struggled to figure out what this one meant.
"I always knew what to make of you, Potter," Draco said, half to himself and half to Harry, who watched him. "Or," he amended after a moment, "I did, anyway, until recently." He turned back and peered closely at Harry, his gray eyes bright in the sunlight. "It's very frustrating for a Malfoy, you know, having to admit that they don't know who their enemies are - or who their friends are, for that matter. Or for a Malfoy to not know what he wants."
"Would 'me' be enough?" Harry asked through a suddenly dry mouth.
"'Me' has always been enough for a Malfoy," Draco said. A slight, faintly apologetic smile flickered at the corner of his lips. "Thinking too much about certain things is a terrible, terrible thing... I should never have agreed to go along with Ron's little plan. You never should have found those diaries, for that matter... No, I suppose that couldn't have been helped. I should have simply told Ron to go and screw himself - wait, I think I've said these things already. But, you know, it helps to say them... sort of telling myself 'I told you so.'"
"I thought Malfoys didn't regret anything," Harry said lightly.
"Oh, we don't," Draco assured him. "Mostly, we become irritated with the thought that something could have been done so much better. And then we obsess over it a bit, consider it carefully..." The expression in Draco's eyes had something of both obsession and consideration in it, and Harry fought against a shiver. "And now I find that, well, there are so many other ways I wish I could do this - sweep you off your feet or make dramatic protestations of undying love, or some other dramatic nonsense. But the truth is, I *can't* do either of those things. This isn't one of those stupid Witch Weekly romances, you know."
"I figured that out for myself, thanks," Harry said, unable to keep an edge of irritation from his voice, "and I thought that we - that we were just going to let things happen." He took a couple of halting steps, tried not to wince as his traitorous left leg froze in protest. "And I don't exactly expect to be swept off my feet - and I would probably hit you if you tried to do that kneeling bit." /And I would, too/ he thought fiercely.
"Ah, but what if *I* wanted *you* to sweep *me* off my feet?" Draco asked with a sly look and a grin.
The question demanded no more answer than a smile, and Harry gave it freely.
"That was easy," Draco said. Again, he smiled, and there was honesty in it. The gray eyes were utterly open, evanescent in the sunlight. "You know, there used to be a time when I hated your guts, and a time when I resented the hell out of you, and a time when I would have given anything to have sex with you... But there was never a time when I felt like this."
Harry's mouth and brain felt like cotton. /There used to be a time when I hated your guts... when I resent the hell out of you... when I would have given anything to have sex with you./ But. Uncertain desire tugged at him, and Harry thought guiltily of dreams that had left him feverish and confused. /But there was never a time when I felt like this./ And he had to ask, the words rough and crude to his ears, "Like what?"
Unexpectedly, Draco shook his head. Yet the smile was still there. "There *aren't* words for it. Leave me that much, okay?"
And what could he do but nod? /There aren't words for it./ And that was true.
He wondered exactly how it was those simple words could have released him - later, when he had time for such thoughts again, he would continue to wonder. It had been a concession to admit that Draco had no words for their relationship, and that he didn't either... but it had not been one that had been humbling, or that had defeated him. Instead, it allowed him to spend hours doing what he had never thought possible: talking, laughing, being with Draco Malfoy.
He watched as Draco described, with all his old theatrics, how Pansy Parkinson had taken a nosedive into one of the carnivorous rose bushes during forbidden extracurricular flying sessions in their first year. Recalled the torture of getting up for midnight Astronomy lessons in January. Read parts of Snape's diaries with reverence and sadness, and a belated realization of what Severus had meant to Draco.
"The difficulty in being the outsider who is always right," Severus had written under his entry for March 9 in the second year of the diary, "is that people automatically assume your opinions to be tainted by disillusionment, jealousy, disenfranchisement, and a host of other ills. Naturally, I see *their* opinions as being tainted by prejudice, self-satisfaction, and the inevitable hubris that comes with believing one has the lion's share of power. I suppose I could remedy my own ills by attempting to become 'one of the gang,' so to speak, but then my motives would be questioned. 'What *could* the ex-Death Eater and human bat possibly want?' Fine. Let them question me. Ultimately they'll never like the answers they receive, when they find out that my answers to their questions were the right ones."
Harry listened as Draco described some of his talks with Severus, not hearing the words so much as he was simply listening to Draco's voice, the rise and fall and inflections of it. He let it flow over him, reveling in the moment as he had reveled in few things for such a long time. It was like flight, being carried along on Draco's slowly growing enthusiasm, being borne on thermals up and down, coasting on them without effort. And again he marveled that he could be so easy in Draco's presence, laughing, feeling himself freer than he had been in years.
/There aren't words for it./
Somehow, accepting that made things easier. Harry wasn't precisely sure how that was - after all, he had spent most of his life *not* accepting the inevitable. In his eyes, acceptance had been the same thing as resignation, and resignation always kept overtones of his old closet, of long hopeless days and frigid nights. Magic had brought a knowledge, fresh and startling, that he didn't have to accept the reality of a locked door, of gravity, of his domineering relations, and ultimately of Voldemort and the evil he'd sought to perpetrate.
/There aren't words for it./
The thought didn't bother him as he turned it over. It was... liberating, he decided, to simply *feel* it, whatever 'it' was, without worrying about how to define it with words. /Maybe they haven't invented it./
The notion had so completely caught him up that he didn't notice the changes: the odd stirring in a supposedly vacant hall, Draco's sudden agitation, the distant crash of a china vase on a marble floor.
Harry barely had time to register it: the doors of the study flew open, cracking back against the wall hard enough to splinter wood; there was a flurry of black robes, topped by blurred, determined faces; and a half-second before he could pull his wand and react, a shout of "Accio wand!" rolled across the room like thunder.
His wand leapt from the pocket of his robe, tearing a hole in the fabric, and streaked across the room. It landed in the outstretched hand of a tall, broad-shouldered Auror, who turned and gave it to Lavender Brown, who had stepped out from behind him.
Lavender Brown. And the tall Auror - Fortius, what his last name was Harry didn't know. Another woman, lithe and cold with short-cropped hair and a piece of her right ear missing... Harry was a moment in placing her name. Undine, or something similar. The three of them were Ron's team. Or had been, at any rate. The three of them moved around to Draco, circling him, wolflike and silent in their movements.
"Blinker!" Draco shouted. The Aurors stiffened.
Blinker appeared with a whipcrack. His huge eyes took in Fudge and the knot of Aurors, Draco standing in the midst of them, and Harry off to the side. Harry could see his own reflection in the massive pupils, not obscured by the terror that regret that filled them.
"I is sorry, Master - Blinker is so, so sorry," the house-elf stammered before Draco could open his mouth. "You know I is not allowed to tell you hand-before about the Ministry persons, sir, when they is coming to see you. And I know I's going to have to shut my ears in the oven door again, sir, but Blinker swears it - he swears it! - that he would have told Master-sir about the Ministry, if he could."
"Just go, Blinker," Draco said. "Forget about the damn oven."
Blinker seemed to want to protest this, but vanished at a furious look from his master. The echo of the house-elf's disappearance faded out into charged silence, broken only by the rustling of robes and, to Harry's ears, the thunderous beat of his heart. He bit his lip as a twinge of pain shot up and down his thigh and tried to force himself to relax as the silence dragged on.
"I never thought I'd live to see such a thing," Fudge said, his voice shaking with a fury that did not reach his eyes. No, *those* glittered with cold triumph in the flabby redness of Fudge's face, and darted wetly between Harry and Draco. Harry forced himself to stay still and not turn to look at Draco; he could see Draco from the very corner of his vision, and the pale figure was absolutely still. /Stay like that,/ Harry told himself, watching Fudge as the Minister looked back and forth, moistening his lips.
After a moment to allow his pronouncement to sink in, Fudge continued: "I would never have thought it - two of our heroes in the war and one of them a hero from his birth, an inspiration to all our people in the darkest times... the other a recipient of our highest honor - our highest honor! - and both of them caught consorting with a known Death Eater..."
Harry's heart clenched at Fudge's words. /Ron!/ "Where Ron?" he demanded, the words flying from his mouth before he could stop them. "What have you done with him?" Suddenly, Ron's joking pronouncements about an official inquiry didn't seem so funny. As if they ever had been.
"Oh, it's not what I *have* done to him," Fudge said coldly, but with a certain amount of relish. "It's what I *will* have done to him. As an Auror, he knows what the penalties are for what he's done - and I can personally assure you that he *will* pay them. And, as for you..." Fudge paused, pursing his lips thoughtfully, his eyes shining with a fanaticism that made Harry ill. "As for you, you will be confined to your rooms at Hogwarts - I will contact Professor McGonagall about having you removed from the teaching rotation. And guards, of course. For your own safety, naturally."
There were too many, too many things happening. Harry missed the last of Fudge's words; fear for Ron, and for Draco whose pale face was now surrounded by the black shapes of the Aurors, gripped him. /He knows what the penalties are... and he will pay them./ -- those words still filled his ears. Denial chased after fear. /They won't do anything to Ron,/ he told himself fiercely, willing himself to believe it.
But Draco... Involuntarily, Harry turned to look.
He stood there, face painted over with Malfoy superiority, gray eyes utterly fearless. He caught Harry's gaze over Fortius's shoulder. And there, for a moment, was nothing of the man Harry had not yet gotten to know.
But then Draco offered up a smile on those thin, bloodless lips, and it was half-mocking, half-sad.
Harry struggled to form some reply - words, a smile to answer Draco's, a shrug, tears - and found that he could not. His body seemed detached from the rest of him, the part of him that could control it, and it was leaden, unresponsive.
Fudge, who had been observing the byplay in his own silence, broke into Harry's concentration. He bustled over the Draco, radiating self-satisfaction and not a little vengeance. Although he could look Draco in the eyes directly, Draco still seemed to stare down at him from a great height, and for a moment Harry had the wild impression that Fudge would somehow give in, call off this nightmare, and go away.
When Fudge broke his gaze, though, it was to step back and gesture for the Aurors to take Draco away. "Undine, you and Fortius take care of Mr. Malfoy... Ms. Brown, if you will?" He gestured to Lavender, who stepped around Fortius, her expression grim. She paced up to stand next to Harry, who saw that he could not catch her glance - that she was purposely avoiding it, despite the resoluteness of her stride. Fudge ignored this and said pleasantly, "Fortius, would you take care of... preparing Mr. Malfoy for transport?"
"*Petrificus totalus!*" Draco's eyes barely had time to open wide before the spell hit him - his lips were parted, and Harry saw that they had opened to reflexively speak the countercurse. "Mobilarcorpus!" Fortius boomed, pointing his wand at Draco's helpless body, and that body, robes frozen almost comically in place, lifted up and began to move under Fortius's direction. The woman, Undine, fell into step behind the two, keeping her wand at the ready.
It was on Harry's tongue to say that doing such a thing to a defenseless wizard was wrong, but he held himself back. /Why?/ he asked himself bitterly instead as Fortius's heavy footsteps faded into the anteroom. He heard the distant whip-snap of Blinker's appearance, the high, quavering question and Undine's terse reply.
Harry felt fury welling up within him. It wasn't the cold anger that had seen him through the war and the deaths of friends, the disciplined and directed sort that had kept him alive enough to feel anything. No, it was burning hot, and blistered through him, the kind he remembered from a childhood left years behind - images of his aunt swelling up like a mutant blowfish raced through his head, thoughts of Cedric, thoughts of Ron after an accident had almost killed him - and he thought for a wild, irrational moment of going for his wand. It was right there, achingly close - he wouldn't have to even summon it, he could simply tackle Lavender, who was improbably shorter and lighter than he was, and take it from her.
Except she was eyeing him speculatively, and was now saying, "Don't try it Harry. Please don't."
For a moment she was a fellow Gryffindor, a year-mate, the girl who had lost her best friend in a Death Eater raid in Exeter. For a moment only, but it was enough for Harry to regain control of himself. Still, though, he wanted answers - and he suspected that Lavender, from the tense and deeply uncertain light in her eyes, wanted much the same from him.
Fudge, at least, appeared to have everything he wanted, and he turned to face Harry with a bright, patronizing smile, the folds of his face draped in luxurious benignity. The man had gained weight since the conclusion of the war - it had been an ongoing process - and now he strutted up to Harry and Lavender, stuffed full of his own satisfaction.
"Miss Brown will take you home by Portkey," Fudge told him, as if imparting a profound yet joyous secret. "In deference to you and your... reputation..," the slight lowering of his voice told Harry that Fudge was starting to view that somewhat dimly, "... she will be your only escort until a few more Aurors arrive to secure your rooms. And I will, of course, be keeping all of this out of the papers for as long as I can - like you, I have little desire to let the general public know that their great hero, the famed Harry Potter, their Boy Who Lived, is consorting with a known enemy and avowed Death Eater."
"Somehow, I don't think the papers are going to be clear of that for long," Harry said coldly. Lavender made a soft, imploring noise, but Harry rode over her. "What are you going to do with Draco? And what are you going to do with Ron?"
"Mr. Weasley has already been dealt with for the time being," Fudge spat. "As for Malfoy" - the name was uttered like the filthiest curse - "he will of course be going to where he *should* have gone years ago. The Ministry will be rescinding his exile in light of these recent developments. He *will* be going to Azkaban to join the rest of the Death Eater scum there as food for the Dementors. And you... Mr. Harry Potter..." Fudge's voice went cold, dead, and so like Voldemort that Harry wanted to attack, "You may be able to get out of this unscathed. You might get your teaching job back... but I would think about choosing an advocate to represent you in the Ministry. Choose him or her wisely - you'll need another Ludo Bagman, I think, to get you out of this."
Ludo Bagman: object lesson. A Death Eater who had eluded justice after Voldemort's first rising only to be caught during the second, caught running top-secret Ministry messages. Sentenced to Azkaban for a life that did not last much longer than a few months before a few allegedly rogue dementors had gotten into his cell. Despite Bagman's spectacular and hideous death, Harry knew that it had stuck in Fudge's craw that the man had been able to escape detection for so long, had fooled all of them with apparently little effort.
"And be glad you never got to draw your wand," Fudge added as Lavender touched Harry's elbow to steer him out of the room. "If you had," Fudge continued, undeterred, "I would have added aggravated assault and drawing your wand with intent to harm to your list of charges."
The last words, uttered nearly as a shout, for Lavender and Harry were by now in the anteroom: "And the list is long enough!"
The Portkey was, Harry saw, the same one Ron had used to transport them to the forest just this morning. Looking upward, he saw that the sun was edging toward mid-afternoon. Had it only been a few hours, then? He eyed the beaten-up cowboy hat with suspicion.
"Take it," Lavender said. "We only have thirty seconds or so."
Harry obeyed. As the wait dragged interminably, he opened his mouth to ask, "Why?"
The question was distorted by the pull of the Portkey as it snatched body and word through space and spat them back out in Hogsmeade. "Why?" still hung in the air between them once they arrived.
"You wouldn't understand it," Lavender said flatly. She stowed the Portkey in her robes and straightened them. An absent hand touched her hair, a gesture Harry remembered from their schooldays: she was nervous. "You wouldn't understand it," Lavender repeated, "and even if you could, I wouldn't explain it. Now come on - I can't guarantee that Fudge has kept to his word and not leaked the news of you and... Malfoy to the press. We need to get to Hogwarts fast."
"We were friends, Lavender," Harry pursued as they began to move through the back alleys in the direction of the school. "What kind of Gryffindor would do this - betray a friend? A *superior*?" Ron had headed up her team, Harry knew. "What did you do? Go straight to Fudge the moment Ron asked for Draco to be brought into the diary investigation? Or did you just wait until you thought he and Draco were getting too friendly?"
"What kind of Gryffindor would consort with a Death Eater?" she asked in turn, the question low and furious. The look she gave him from underneath the shelf of brown hair was just as scathing. "What kind of Gryffindor would *help* a friend do that? *Why* would a Gryffindor do either one of those things?"
"You wouldn't understand it."
"So we're equal then." Lavender gripped her robes and stalked on, Harry right beside her despite the ache in his leg. Those were the last words spoken between the two of them until they arrived at Hogwarts and saw a familiar figure rushing toward them.
"Harry!" Celeste Sinistra darted up, robes swishing in her haste. The heels of her shoes clacked rapidly on the floor like machine-gun fire. Her wand was gripped in a white-knuckled hand and she looked ready to use it, but upon seeing Lavender, Sinistra reluctantly pocketed it. "Harry, thank Merlin you're here," she said between agitated breaths. "We just now got an owl from the Minister - " Her eyes drifted down to the prominently displayed Auror badge on Lavender's robes, and her breath caught. "I see then that it's true."
"Yes, it is." Harry felt his voice drop, and he was reminded forcibly of Hogwarts at night - the echoing, listening hallways that were at once too small and too large, silent and lifeless but uncannily aware. And this was daylight still, with the sounds of the castle during daytime - students shouting in the distance, footsteps, Filch snarling in some nearby hidden passageway. "Could I see Minerva?"
"Unfortunately, she has left for the Ministry offices in London," Sinistra said. She had begun to regain her composure and when she spoke again, her voice had regained its typical unruffled calm. "She will be taking over your classes once she gets back, though, until we can find a replacement. I'm sorry, Harry, but she also said... She said that we were to accommodate the Aurors as best we can."
"Of course. You don't need to apologize for it." Harry sighed at the resigned expression on Celeste's face, and wished that he didn't have to say such a thing. "I just... I just need to go to my rooms." God, he was tired suddenly. His mind had the course to his rooms plotted out already - he could walk the path in his sleep, had done it on occasion, and right now his leg ached with unrelenting fire. He wanted to detach from all of this, badly, and wanted the distance of even a troubled sleep. He could feel himself swaying where he stood.
The day was suddenly very heavy.
Lavender stared at him, and the stony expression on her face was so far removed from the one Harry remembered from Hogwarts. Was she wondering if he was trying to fake her out? /You wouldn't understand./
"You best go to your office first," Sinistra said with her characteristic mildness. Despite her tone, there was worry in her dark eyes. "Dr. Granger is in there waiting for you - she has been since early afternoon." She turned to examine Lavender, who met her scrutiny with defiance, although there was something of the disapproving teacher in Sinistra's gaze. "I assume," Sinistra said at length, "that Professor Potter will be allowed to visit his office to gather anything he might need? He still needs to finish grading those fourth-year Slytherin essays."
Lavender opened her mouth, closed it without making a sound, and nodded grudgingly.
Harry barely stood still long enough to thank Celeste. /Hermione!/ Some of his weariness lifted as he limped to his office, a thankfully short distance away. Lavender stuck close by him, silent as they reached the office door, which was shut. Tentatively, Harry reached for the lock - had he warded it before leaving it last night? He couldn't remember - and was surprised when it opened easily.
"Harry!" Hermione jumped up from the chair she'd been in, hand flying to her mouth. "Oh, God, Harry!"
She took one, two, three quick and staggering steps until she could fling herself into his arms. Harry caught her weight against him, slightly uncomfortable with hugging his best friend's wife - dismissed it with the fierce thought that she needed this, that maybe *he* needed it - and tried to think of something to say. All he could come up with were soft, soothing nonsense words that failed to reassure him.
Hermione pulled away, scrubbing her face with the cuff of her robe. Flushing a bit, Harry fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which she took with a wavery, grateful smile and a "thank you." The words were hoarse, roughened by tears. "Thank you," she said again, more clearly this time. "I'm sorry... I'm a terrible mess, aren't I?" She didn't even appear to notice Lavender.
"What have you found out?" Harry asked softly, wondering at why he was keeping his voice so low. Lavender was likely to think he was trying to initiate Hermione into the conspiracy, if she wasn't already. "Has Miner - er, Professor McGonagall found out anything?"
"Ron asked for her as his advocate with the Ministry," Hermione said around the muffling folds of the handkerchief. "That's why she's in London now, to consult with Arthur and Molly... and then, oh Harry - and then she's going to Azkaban."
Harry's stomach clenched in reflexive, icy dread. He felt the fugitive coldness of a Dementor's fingertips at the back of his neck, raising the hairs there. For a brief moment he heard his mother screaming, his father shouting, and green obscured his vision. "Azkaban," he echoed dully when he found his voice again. "Why?"
"Minerva said Fudge was calling it 'protective custody.'" The derision in Hermione's voice told him exactly what she thought of Fudge's choice of words. Her gaze slid over to Lavender, who was hanging back by the door, and hardened. Harry wondered if she knew, or at least suspected, Lavender's role in her husband's arrest. "I keep thinking about the time when they took Hagrid to Azkaban because of that basilisk - and I keep thinking about how frightened Hagrid was..." The words were trembling as fiercely as Hermione. "But he's there, in custody, and that's all I know for sure. They're not even letting Molly or Arthur see him - and Arthur has Ministry clearance! I think Fudge is worried they're going to break him out, like Crouch did...
"They won't let me see him," Hermione continued hopelessly. A strange smile caught up the edges of her lips. "I don't know how he is, if he's safe - of *course* he's not safe... I can't think about this - I should be trying to formulate some kind of defense. I should be *helping* him, not - not *blubbering* like some helpless little girl. But..." Her voice trailed off as words knotted up in her throat, and Harry felt his heart convulse just looking at her. "I can't do it, Harry. Not now."
In all the years he had known Hermione, he had never seen her this unhinged. An image of her during the war came to him: her hair pulled back neatly in a bun, brown eyes intense in a calm face as she pored over coded parchments. The perpetual chaos of Ministry officials swirled around her, and she had been the calmness in the center of it.
And so it was difficult to reconcile that image with the puffy-faced, exhausted woman hunched over in her chair. Her hair had returned to its twelve-year-old puffiness, wild and tangled around skin made pink with tears. Her left hand, clutching one of Harry's handkerchiefs, shook - whether it was with the force of her grip of exhaustion, he couldn't tell. He was staring at her so hard, trying to come up with something of his own to say, that he missed her first soft-spoken words.
"Malfoy," she whispered, lips twisting around the name, strangling it. "This is his fault."
"No!" Harry said. The look Hermione turned on him should have incinerated him where he stood, but it did not and he forged on. "If you're going to blame Draco, Hermione, blame me too."
"I want to Harry," Hermione told him miserably. She barked a short, harsh laugh. "I've spent the entire morning trying to hate you, ever since Ron didn't come home and Minerva owled me to tell me what was happening... The first thing I thought was, 'I'm going to kill him as soon as I see him.' But... I knew I couldn't do that." A sharp breath punctuated the sentence, and Hermione paused before continuing: "To tell you the truth, Harry, I couldn't understand why Ron would do this. He knew it was dangerous... he knew what Fudge would do to him if he ever found out. But he did it anyway. And now... now we're both paying for it. Why? Why is that?"
Her words tore into him. "I didn't want him to," Harry said, desperately trying to defend himself. "I told him again and again not to do it, that I wasn't worth what would happen to him. I'm still not worth it, Hermione. I'll *never* be worth it."
"Of course you would," Hermione whispered sadly. The smile she turned on him was so deeply grief-ridden it snarled around his heart and made it difficult to think past the ache in it. "To Ron, you're always worth it... And that's why he did it." Wonderingly now: "That's why... I don't know why I didn't see it."
"Don't feel bad, Hermione," Harry said, wincing at the awkward words. Inwardly, though, he thought /I didn't see it either./ And no matter how many times Ron had told him that he didn't mind the danger, that it was worth it to see Harry happy, that *Harry* was worth the danger... He hadn't seen it.
Just as he hadn't seen the signs of those Aurors coming for them, not until it was too late, with Draco unable to defend himself and his own wand torn away. Just as he hadn't seen the danger until it was too late, he hadn't fully understood the reason or depth of Ron's sacrifice. The realization struck him with the force of something heavy and unforgiving, the flat of a sword blade across his ribs, and he railed bitterly against it.
Some things could not be accepted.
TBC.
Notes:
1.) In case you can't tell, I subscribe to the Ever-So-Evil!Bagman theory. If you don't, just indulge me for the purposes of narration.
2.) The carnivorous rose bushes are not my own invention, but were inspired by something else. The original carnivorous rose (in the singular) belongs to the TTDSDG crew from the Gundam Wing fandom, a land I used to frequent quite often. Was feeling nostalgic today.
3.) There are two more chapters planned for this story, and then at least one more fic after this, dealing with all of the Ministry junk as well as Snape's diaries. I'm sorry, but I like Sadist!Fudge, and he was just too insistent to be ignored... as was Severus.
(Ovid)
CHAPTER SIX
Faintly, he felt Draco's fingers on his face again, clasping his chin and unexpectedly cool in the warmth of the sun. Unresisting, he let the fingers turn his face to the side, trace minute patterns over his jaw. Let Draco's lips brush chastely against his cheek.
Mind and body froze and Harry thought he might stand like this forever: locked in place, the sensation of Draco's mouth perpetually upon him. From the corner of his eye, he could see Draco's gray eyes alight with daring, amusement, and something else, but his brain wasn't functioning enough to identify that last, mysterious thing. And did he want to, at any rate?
Draco broke the moment by turning away, but as he did, there was a smile on his face. Startled, Harry blinked. His mind moved sluggishly, Petrified by the moment and scrambling to catch up. He'd never understood Draco's smiles before, how much there was hidden behind them, and he struggled to figure out what this one meant.
"I always knew what to make of you, Potter," Draco said, half to himself and half to Harry, who watched him. "Or," he amended after a moment, "I did, anyway, until recently." He turned back and peered closely at Harry, his gray eyes bright in the sunlight. "It's very frustrating for a Malfoy, you know, having to admit that they don't know who their enemies are - or who their friends are, for that matter. Or for a Malfoy to not know what he wants."
"Would 'me' be enough?" Harry asked through a suddenly dry mouth.
"'Me' has always been enough for a Malfoy," Draco said. A slight, faintly apologetic smile flickered at the corner of his lips. "Thinking too much about certain things is a terrible, terrible thing... I should never have agreed to go along with Ron's little plan. You never should have found those diaries, for that matter... No, I suppose that couldn't have been helped. I should have simply told Ron to go and screw himself - wait, I think I've said these things already. But, you know, it helps to say them... sort of telling myself 'I told you so.'"
"I thought Malfoys didn't regret anything," Harry said lightly.
"Oh, we don't," Draco assured him. "Mostly, we become irritated with the thought that something could have been done so much better. And then we obsess over it a bit, consider it carefully..." The expression in Draco's eyes had something of both obsession and consideration in it, and Harry fought against a shiver. "And now I find that, well, there are so many other ways I wish I could do this - sweep you off your feet or make dramatic protestations of undying love, or some other dramatic nonsense. But the truth is, I *can't* do either of those things. This isn't one of those stupid Witch Weekly romances, you know."
"I figured that out for myself, thanks," Harry said, unable to keep an edge of irritation from his voice, "and I thought that we - that we were just going to let things happen." He took a couple of halting steps, tried not to wince as his traitorous left leg froze in protest. "And I don't exactly expect to be swept off my feet - and I would probably hit you if you tried to do that kneeling bit." /And I would, too/ he thought fiercely.
"Ah, but what if *I* wanted *you* to sweep *me* off my feet?" Draco asked with a sly look and a grin.
The question demanded no more answer than a smile, and Harry gave it freely.
"That was easy," Draco said. Again, he smiled, and there was honesty in it. The gray eyes were utterly open, evanescent in the sunlight. "You know, there used to be a time when I hated your guts, and a time when I resented the hell out of you, and a time when I would have given anything to have sex with you... But there was never a time when I felt like this."
Harry's mouth and brain felt like cotton. /There used to be a time when I hated your guts... when I resent the hell out of you... when I would have given anything to have sex with you./ But. Uncertain desire tugged at him, and Harry thought guiltily of dreams that had left him feverish and confused. /But there was never a time when I felt like this./ And he had to ask, the words rough and crude to his ears, "Like what?"
Unexpectedly, Draco shook his head. Yet the smile was still there. "There *aren't* words for it. Leave me that much, okay?"
And what could he do but nod? /There aren't words for it./ And that was true.
He wondered exactly how it was those simple words could have released him - later, when he had time for such thoughts again, he would continue to wonder. It had been a concession to admit that Draco had no words for their relationship, and that he didn't either... but it had not been one that had been humbling, or that had defeated him. Instead, it allowed him to spend hours doing what he had never thought possible: talking, laughing, being with Draco Malfoy.
He watched as Draco described, with all his old theatrics, how Pansy Parkinson had taken a nosedive into one of the carnivorous rose bushes during forbidden extracurricular flying sessions in their first year. Recalled the torture of getting up for midnight Astronomy lessons in January. Read parts of Snape's diaries with reverence and sadness, and a belated realization of what Severus had meant to Draco.
"The difficulty in being the outsider who is always right," Severus had written under his entry for March 9 in the second year of the diary, "is that people automatically assume your opinions to be tainted by disillusionment, jealousy, disenfranchisement, and a host of other ills. Naturally, I see *their* opinions as being tainted by prejudice, self-satisfaction, and the inevitable hubris that comes with believing one has the lion's share of power. I suppose I could remedy my own ills by attempting to become 'one of the gang,' so to speak, but then my motives would be questioned. 'What *could* the ex-Death Eater and human bat possibly want?' Fine. Let them question me. Ultimately they'll never like the answers they receive, when they find out that my answers to their questions were the right ones."
Harry listened as Draco described some of his talks with Severus, not hearing the words so much as he was simply listening to Draco's voice, the rise and fall and inflections of it. He let it flow over him, reveling in the moment as he had reveled in few things for such a long time. It was like flight, being carried along on Draco's slowly growing enthusiasm, being borne on thermals up and down, coasting on them without effort. And again he marveled that he could be so easy in Draco's presence, laughing, feeling himself freer than he had been in years.
/There aren't words for it./
Somehow, accepting that made things easier. Harry wasn't precisely sure how that was - after all, he had spent most of his life *not* accepting the inevitable. In his eyes, acceptance had been the same thing as resignation, and resignation always kept overtones of his old closet, of long hopeless days and frigid nights. Magic had brought a knowledge, fresh and startling, that he didn't have to accept the reality of a locked door, of gravity, of his domineering relations, and ultimately of Voldemort and the evil he'd sought to perpetrate.
/There aren't words for it./
The thought didn't bother him as he turned it over. It was... liberating, he decided, to simply *feel* it, whatever 'it' was, without worrying about how to define it with words. /Maybe they haven't invented it./
The notion had so completely caught him up that he didn't notice the changes: the odd stirring in a supposedly vacant hall, Draco's sudden agitation, the distant crash of a china vase on a marble floor.
Harry barely had time to register it: the doors of the study flew open, cracking back against the wall hard enough to splinter wood; there was a flurry of black robes, topped by blurred, determined faces; and a half-second before he could pull his wand and react, a shout of "Accio wand!" rolled across the room like thunder.
His wand leapt from the pocket of his robe, tearing a hole in the fabric, and streaked across the room. It landed in the outstretched hand of a tall, broad-shouldered Auror, who turned and gave it to Lavender Brown, who had stepped out from behind him.
Lavender Brown. And the tall Auror - Fortius, what his last name was Harry didn't know. Another woman, lithe and cold with short-cropped hair and a piece of her right ear missing... Harry was a moment in placing her name. Undine, or something similar. The three of them were Ron's team. Or had been, at any rate. The three of them moved around to Draco, circling him, wolflike and silent in their movements.
"Blinker!" Draco shouted. The Aurors stiffened.
Blinker appeared with a whipcrack. His huge eyes took in Fudge and the knot of Aurors, Draco standing in the midst of them, and Harry off to the side. Harry could see his own reflection in the massive pupils, not obscured by the terror that regret that filled them.
"I is sorry, Master - Blinker is so, so sorry," the house-elf stammered before Draco could open his mouth. "You know I is not allowed to tell you hand-before about the Ministry persons, sir, when they is coming to see you. And I know I's going to have to shut my ears in the oven door again, sir, but Blinker swears it - he swears it! - that he would have told Master-sir about the Ministry, if he could."
"Just go, Blinker," Draco said. "Forget about the damn oven."
Blinker seemed to want to protest this, but vanished at a furious look from his master. The echo of the house-elf's disappearance faded out into charged silence, broken only by the rustling of robes and, to Harry's ears, the thunderous beat of his heart. He bit his lip as a twinge of pain shot up and down his thigh and tried to force himself to relax as the silence dragged on.
"I never thought I'd live to see such a thing," Fudge said, his voice shaking with a fury that did not reach his eyes. No, *those* glittered with cold triumph in the flabby redness of Fudge's face, and darted wetly between Harry and Draco. Harry forced himself to stay still and not turn to look at Draco; he could see Draco from the very corner of his vision, and the pale figure was absolutely still. /Stay like that,/ Harry told himself, watching Fudge as the Minister looked back and forth, moistening his lips.
After a moment to allow his pronouncement to sink in, Fudge continued: "I would never have thought it - two of our heroes in the war and one of them a hero from his birth, an inspiration to all our people in the darkest times... the other a recipient of our highest honor - our highest honor! - and both of them caught consorting with a known Death Eater..."
Harry's heart clenched at Fudge's words. /Ron!/ "Where Ron?" he demanded, the words flying from his mouth before he could stop them. "What have you done with him?" Suddenly, Ron's joking pronouncements about an official inquiry didn't seem so funny. As if they ever had been.
"Oh, it's not what I *have* done to him," Fudge said coldly, but with a certain amount of relish. "It's what I *will* have done to him. As an Auror, he knows what the penalties are for what he's done - and I can personally assure you that he *will* pay them. And, as for you..." Fudge paused, pursing his lips thoughtfully, his eyes shining with a fanaticism that made Harry ill. "As for you, you will be confined to your rooms at Hogwarts - I will contact Professor McGonagall about having you removed from the teaching rotation. And guards, of course. For your own safety, naturally."
There were too many, too many things happening. Harry missed the last of Fudge's words; fear for Ron, and for Draco whose pale face was now surrounded by the black shapes of the Aurors, gripped him. /He knows what the penalties are... and he will pay them./ -- those words still filled his ears. Denial chased after fear. /They won't do anything to Ron,/ he told himself fiercely, willing himself to believe it.
But Draco... Involuntarily, Harry turned to look.
He stood there, face painted over with Malfoy superiority, gray eyes utterly fearless. He caught Harry's gaze over Fortius's shoulder. And there, for a moment, was nothing of the man Harry had not yet gotten to know.
But then Draco offered up a smile on those thin, bloodless lips, and it was half-mocking, half-sad.
Harry struggled to form some reply - words, a smile to answer Draco's, a shrug, tears - and found that he could not. His body seemed detached from the rest of him, the part of him that could control it, and it was leaden, unresponsive.
Fudge, who had been observing the byplay in his own silence, broke into Harry's concentration. He bustled over the Draco, radiating self-satisfaction and not a little vengeance. Although he could look Draco in the eyes directly, Draco still seemed to stare down at him from a great height, and for a moment Harry had the wild impression that Fudge would somehow give in, call off this nightmare, and go away.
When Fudge broke his gaze, though, it was to step back and gesture for the Aurors to take Draco away. "Undine, you and Fortius take care of Mr. Malfoy... Ms. Brown, if you will?" He gestured to Lavender, who stepped around Fortius, her expression grim. She paced up to stand next to Harry, who saw that he could not catch her glance - that she was purposely avoiding it, despite the resoluteness of her stride. Fudge ignored this and said pleasantly, "Fortius, would you take care of... preparing Mr. Malfoy for transport?"
"*Petrificus totalus!*" Draco's eyes barely had time to open wide before the spell hit him - his lips were parted, and Harry saw that they had opened to reflexively speak the countercurse. "Mobilarcorpus!" Fortius boomed, pointing his wand at Draco's helpless body, and that body, robes frozen almost comically in place, lifted up and began to move under Fortius's direction. The woman, Undine, fell into step behind the two, keeping her wand at the ready.
It was on Harry's tongue to say that doing such a thing to a defenseless wizard was wrong, but he held himself back. /Why?/ he asked himself bitterly instead as Fortius's heavy footsteps faded into the anteroom. He heard the distant whip-snap of Blinker's appearance, the high, quavering question and Undine's terse reply.
Harry felt fury welling up within him. It wasn't the cold anger that had seen him through the war and the deaths of friends, the disciplined and directed sort that had kept him alive enough to feel anything. No, it was burning hot, and blistered through him, the kind he remembered from a childhood left years behind - images of his aunt swelling up like a mutant blowfish raced through his head, thoughts of Cedric, thoughts of Ron after an accident had almost killed him - and he thought for a wild, irrational moment of going for his wand. It was right there, achingly close - he wouldn't have to even summon it, he could simply tackle Lavender, who was improbably shorter and lighter than he was, and take it from her.
Except she was eyeing him speculatively, and was now saying, "Don't try it Harry. Please don't."
For a moment she was a fellow Gryffindor, a year-mate, the girl who had lost her best friend in a Death Eater raid in Exeter. For a moment only, but it was enough for Harry to regain control of himself. Still, though, he wanted answers - and he suspected that Lavender, from the tense and deeply uncertain light in her eyes, wanted much the same from him.
Fudge, at least, appeared to have everything he wanted, and he turned to face Harry with a bright, patronizing smile, the folds of his face draped in luxurious benignity. The man had gained weight since the conclusion of the war - it had been an ongoing process - and now he strutted up to Harry and Lavender, stuffed full of his own satisfaction.
"Miss Brown will take you home by Portkey," Fudge told him, as if imparting a profound yet joyous secret. "In deference to you and your... reputation..," the slight lowering of his voice told Harry that Fudge was starting to view that somewhat dimly, "... she will be your only escort until a few more Aurors arrive to secure your rooms. And I will, of course, be keeping all of this out of the papers for as long as I can - like you, I have little desire to let the general public know that their great hero, the famed Harry Potter, their Boy Who Lived, is consorting with a known enemy and avowed Death Eater."
"Somehow, I don't think the papers are going to be clear of that for long," Harry said coldly. Lavender made a soft, imploring noise, but Harry rode over her. "What are you going to do with Draco? And what are you going to do with Ron?"
"Mr. Weasley has already been dealt with for the time being," Fudge spat. "As for Malfoy" - the name was uttered like the filthiest curse - "he will of course be going to where he *should* have gone years ago. The Ministry will be rescinding his exile in light of these recent developments. He *will* be going to Azkaban to join the rest of the Death Eater scum there as food for the Dementors. And you... Mr. Harry Potter..." Fudge's voice went cold, dead, and so like Voldemort that Harry wanted to attack, "You may be able to get out of this unscathed. You might get your teaching job back... but I would think about choosing an advocate to represent you in the Ministry. Choose him or her wisely - you'll need another Ludo Bagman, I think, to get you out of this."
Ludo Bagman: object lesson. A Death Eater who had eluded justice after Voldemort's first rising only to be caught during the second, caught running top-secret Ministry messages. Sentenced to Azkaban for a life that did not last much longer than a few months before a few allegedly rogue dementors had gotten into his cell. Despite Bagman's spectacular and hideous death, Harry knew that it had stuck in Fudge's craw that the man had been able to escape detection for so long, had fooled all of them with apparently little effort.
"And be glad you never got to draw your wand," Fudge added as Lavender touched Harry's elbow to steer him out of the room. "If you had," Fudge continued, undeterred, "I would have added aggravated assault and drawing your wand with intent to harm to your list of charges."
The last words, uttered nearly as a shout, for Lavender and Harry were by now in the anteroom: "And the list is long enough!"
The Portkey was, Harry saw, the same one Ron had used to transport them to the forest just this morning. Looking upward, he saw that the sun was edging toward mid-afternoon. Had it only been a few hours, then? He eyed the beaten-up cowboy hat with suspicion.
"Take it," Lavender said. "We only have thirty seconds or so."
Harry obeyed. As the wait dragged interminably, he opened his mouth to ask, "Why?"
The question was distorted by the pull of the Portkey as it snatched body and word through space and spat them back out in Hogsmeade. "Why?" still hung in the air between them once they arrived.
"You wouldn't understand it," Lavender said flatly. She stowed the Portkey in her robes and straightened them. An absent hand touched her hair, a gesture Harry remembered from their schooldays: she was nervous. "You wouldn't understand it," Lavender repeated, "and even if you could, I wouldn't explain it. Now come on - I can't guarantee that Fudge has kept to his word and not leaked the news of you and... Malfoy to the press. We need to get to Hogwarts fast."
"We were friends, Lavender," Harry pursued as they began to move through the back alleys in the direction of the school. "What kind of Gryffindor would do this - betray a friend? A *superior*?" Ron had headed up her team, Harry knew. "What did you do? Go straight to Fudge the moment Ron asked for Draco to be brought into the diary investigation? Or did you just wait until you thought he and Draco were getting too friendly?"
"What kind of Gryffindor would consort with a Death Eater?" she asked in turn, the question low and furious. The look she gave him from underneath the shelf of brown hair was just as scathing. "What kind of Gryffindor would *help* a friend do that? *Why* would a Gryffindor do either one of those things?"
"You wouldn't understand it."
"So we're equal then." Lavender gripped her robes and stalked on, Harry right beside her despite the ache in his leg. Those were the last words spoken between the two of them until they arrived at Hogwarts and saw a familiar figure rushing toward them.
"Harry!" Celeste Sinistra darted up, robes swishing in her haste. The heels of her shoes clacked rapidly on the floor like machine-gun fire. Her wand was gripped in a white-knuckled hand and she looked ready to use it, but upon seeing Lavender, Sinistra reluctantly pocketed it. "Harry, thank Merlin you're here," she said between agitated breaths. "We just now got an owl from the Minister - " Her eyes drifted down to the prominently displayed Auror badge on Lavender's robes, and her breath caught. "I see then that it's true."
"Yes, it is." Harry felt his voice drop, and he was reminded forcibly of Hogwarts at night - the echoing, listening hallways that were at once too small and too large, silent and lifeless but uncannily aware. And this was daylight still, with the sounds of the castle during daytime - students shouting in the distance, footsteps, Filch snarling in some nearby hidden passageway. "Could I see Minerva?"
"Unfortunately, she has left for the Ministry offices in London," Sinistra said. She had begun to regain her composure and when she spoke again, her voice had regained its typical unruffled calm. "She will be taking over your classes once she gets back, though, until we can find a replacement. I'm sorry, Harry, but she also said... She said that we were to accommodate the Aurors as best we can."
"Of course. You don't need to apologize for it." Harry sighed at the resigned expression on Celeste's face, and wished that he didn't have to say such a thing. "I just... I just need to go to my rooms." God, he was tired suddenly. His mind had the course to his rooms plotted out already - he could walk the path in his sleep, had done it on occasion, and right now his leg ached with unrelenting fire. He wanted to detach from all of this, badly, and wanted the distance of even a troubled sleep. He could feel himself swaying where he stood.
The day was suddenly very heavy.
Lavender stared at him, and the stony expression on her face was so far removed from the one Harry remembered from Hogwarts. Was she wondering if he was trying to fake her out? /You wouldn't understand./
"You best go to your office first," Sinistra said with her characteristic mildness. Despite her tone, there was worry in her dark eyes. "Dr. Granger is in there waiting for you - she has been since early afternoon." She turned to examine Lavender, who met her scrutiny with defiance, although there was something of the disapproving teacher in Sinistra's gaze. "I assume," Sinistra said at length, "that Professor Potter will be allowed to visit his office to gather anything he might need? He still needs to finish grading those fourth-year Slytherin essays."
Lavender opened her mouth, closed it without making a sound, and nodded grudgingly.
Harry barely stood still long enough to thank Celeste. /Hermione!/ Some of his weariness lifted as he limped to his office, a thankfully short distance away. Lavender stuck close by him, silent as they reached the office door, which was shut. Tentatively, Harry reached for the lock - had he warded it before leaving it last night? He couldn't remember - and was surprised when it opened easily.
"Harry!" Hermione jumped up from the chair she'd been in, hand flying to her mouth. "Oh, God, Harry!"
She took one, two, three quick and staggering steps until she could fling herself into his arms. Harry caught her weight against him, slightly uncomfortable with hugging his best friend's wife - dismissed it with the fierce thought that she needed this, that maybe *he* needed it - and tried to think of something to say. All he could come up with were soft, soothing nonsense words that failed to reassure him.
Hermione pulled away, scrubbing her face with the cuff of her robe. Flushing a bit, Harry fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which she took with a wavery, grateful smile and a "thank you." The words were hoarse, roughened by tears. "Thank you," she said again, more clearly this time. "I'm sorry... I'm a terrible mess, aren't I?" She didn't even appear to notice Lavender.
"What have you found out?" Harry asked softly, wondering at why he was keeping his voice so low. Lavender was likely to think he was trying to initiate Hermione into the conspiracy, if she wasn't already. "Has Miner - er, Professor McGonagall found out anything?"
"Ron asked for her as his advocate with the Ministry," Hermione said around the muffling folds of the handkerchief. "That's why she's in London now, to consult with Arthur and Molly... and then, oh Harry - and then she's going to Azkaban."
Harry's stomach clenched in reflexive, icy dread. He felt the fugitive coldness of a Dementor's fingertips at the back of his neck, raising the hairs there. For a brief moment he heard his mother screaming, his father shouting, and green obscured his vision. "Azkaban," he echoed dully when he found his voice again. "Why?"
"Minerva said Fudge was calling it 'protective custody.'" The derision in Hermione's voice told him exactly what she thought of Fudge's choice of words. Her gaze slid over to Lavender, who was hanging back by the door, and hardened. Harry wondered if she knew, or at least suspected, Lavender's role in her husband's arrest. "I keep thinking about the time when they took Hagrid to Azkaban because of that basilisk - and I keep thinking about how frightened Hagrid was..." The words were trembling as fiercely as Hermione. "But he's there, in custody, and that's all I know for sure. They're not even letting Molly or Arthur see him - and Arthur has Ministry clearance! I think Fudge is worried they're going to break him out, like Crouch did...
"They won't let me see him," Hermione continued hopelessly. A strange smile caught up the edges of her lips. "I don't know how he is, if he's safe - of *course* he's not safe... I can't think about this - I should be trying to formulate some kind of defense. I should be *helping* him, not - not *blubbering* like some helpless little girl. But..." Her voice trailed off as words knotted up in her throat, and Harry felt his heart convulse just looking at her. "I can't do it, Harry. Not now."
In all the years he had known Hermione, he had never seen her this unhinged. An image of her during the war came to him: her hair pulled back neatly in a bun, brown eyes intense in a calm face as she pored over coded parchments. The perpetual chaos of Ministry officials swirled around her, and she had been the calmness in the center of it.
And so it was difficult to reconcile that image with the puffy-faced, exhausted woman hunched over in her chair. Her hair had returned to its twelve-year-old puffiness, wild and tangled around skin made pink with tears. Her left hand, clutching one of Harry's handkerchiefs, shook - whether it was with the force of her grip of exhaustion, he couldn't tell. He was staring at her so hard, trying to come up with something of his own to say, that he missed her first soft-spoken words.
"Malfoy," she whispered, lips twisting around the name, strangling it. "This is his fault."
"No!" Harry said. The look Hermione turned on him should have incinerated him where he stood, but it did not and he forged on. "If you're going to blame Draco, Hermione, blame me too."
"I want to Harry," Hermione told him miserably. She barked a short, harsh laugh. "I've spent the entire morning trying to hate you, ever since Ron didn't come home and Minerva owled me to tell me what was happening... The first thing I thought was, 'I'm going to kill him as soon as I see him.' But... I knew I couldn't do that." A sharp breath punctuated the sentence, and Hermione paused before continuing: "To tell you the truth, Harry, I couldn't understand why Ron would do this. He knew it was dangerous... he knew what Fudge would do to him if he ever found out. But he did it anyway. And now... now we're both paying for it. Why? Why is that?"
Her words tore into him. "I didn't want him to," Harry said, desperately trying to defend himself. "I told him again and again not to do it, that I wasn't worth what would happen to him. I'm still not worth it, Hermione. I'll *never* be worth it."
"Of course you would," Hermione whispered sadly. The smile she turned on him was so deeply grief-ridden it snarled around his heart and made it difficult to think past the ache in it. "To Ron, you're always worth it... And that's why he did it." Wonderingly now: "That's why... I don't know why I didn't see it."
"Don't feel bad, Hermione," Harry said, wincing at the awkward words. Inwardly, though, he thought /I didn't see it either./ And no matter how many times Ron had told him that he didn't mind the danger, that it was worth it to see Harry happy, that *Harry* was worth the danger... He hadn't seen it.
Just as he hadn't seen the signs of those Aurors coming for them, not until it was too late, with Draco unable to defend himself and his own wand torn away. Just as he hadn't seen the danger until it was too late, he hadn't fully understood the reason or depth of Ron's sacrifice. The realization struck him with the force of something heavy and unforgiving, the flat of a sword blade across his ribs, and he railed bitterly against it.
Some things could not be accepted.
TBC.
Notes:
1.) In case you can't tell, I subscribe to the Ever-So-Evil!Bagman theory. If you don't, just indulge me for the purposes of narration.
2.) The carnivorous rose bushes are not my own invention, but were inspired by something else. The original carnivorous rose (in the singular) belongs to the TTDSDG crew from the Gundam Wing fandom, a land I used to frequent quite often. Was feeling nostalgic today.
3.) There are two more chapters planned for this story, and then at least one more fic after this, dealing with all of the Ministry junk as well as Snape's diaries. I'm sorry, but I like Sadist!Fudge, and he was just too insistent to be ignored... as was Severus.