Title: Vinculum

Date: July 16, 2004

By: NinjaBubble (L. King)

Warnings: SPOILERS (for #5 – Order of the Phoenix)

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Reasons

They ran into Malfoy and his gang outside the hall's large doors. It was an encounter that was unavoidable, but one Harry had wanted to stall nonetheless; he still had his doubts about Malfoy sleeping through his nightmares and was not looking forward to the taunts that would be coming if he was right. Ron and Hermione both stiffened, as though readying themselves for an attack, Harry simply stood, glaring at the blond. However, there was no verbal strike from the blond Slytherin, he simply stared intently at Harry for a few moments before sniffing and turning away. His band of loyal followers hesitated, confused, but when he made no motions of turning around they quickly followed suit and walked away.

Ron and Hermione eyed each other before turning their gazes to Harry, their confusion showing in their faces. Harry hid his under the calm glare he was still digging in to Malfoy's back, but when the other turned a corner and disappeared he faced his friends and shrugged. "I guess he's finally gotten to the point where he's above us completely," he said with a shrug. In truth, he felt almost disappointed. Malfoy definitely made him angry, there was no way he could try to deny that, but after spending so much time with the other, he had gotten use to his presence. Mentally Harry shook his head. Get use to his presence and that means I want him sneering at me again? Harry sighed and shook his head roughly to clear his thoughts before turning his attention once again back to Ron and Hermione. "Let's go visit Hagrid," he suggested, the tone of his voice not leaving room for any debate if there was going to be one.

After a short hesitation they nodded, smiles appearing back on their faces. "Sounds good," Ron said enthusiastically. At the same time Hermione mused, "I wonder what he was up to this vacation."

"As long as he doesn't have a three headed dragon waiting for us all for our next lesson," Ron stated warily as they headed out of the castle and across the grounds.

Hagrid was known for his interest in magical creatures, the more dangerous the better. Being half-giant, he didn't seem to be afraid of anything and, instead, had the tendency to believe creatures were far less dangerous than they really were. The three knew that Hagrid wanted to keep and raise a dragon than any other creature in the world, and had indeed gotten his hands on one and dubbed it Norbert. And there had been Fluffy as well of course. The three headed man-eating dog that the school had used to protect the sorcerer's stone. At the suggested image of a Fluffy and Norbert mix, the group shuddered.

Harry couldn't stop his mind from straying to Malfoy as they walked across the grass toward the forest and Hagrid's house. Why had he not sneered, or made fun of them? Why had he been looking at Harry during breakfast? Why was Harry even wasting the time thinking about the other boy? Shaking his head as though the action could clear his mind, he realized that he was being spoken to and looked up. "What?" His voice was testier than he had meant it to be, and Hermione looked taken aback while Ron eyed him questioningly.

"I was wondering what you did over vacation. I'm really sorry that I wasn't able to stay, but they were one refundable tickets and my parents and I always have Christmas together. I know that they would have been really disappointed if I didn't go," Hermione said with a downcast and apologetic sigh, she was looking at him with worry in her eyes as well. Apparently it was noticeable that something was wrong with him, she just looked confused as to what it was.

"Don't worry about it," Harry assured, trying to make up for his tone earlier as his mind raced as he tried to find something to tell them about vacation other than the truth. Not that they wouldn't be hearing it soon enough, the story would spread like wildfire. No doubt half the school would already know, if not more, by the time breakfast ended. It would probably be best for him to tell them instead of having to deal with the accusing questions of why he didn't mention it to them. "It was pretty boring. I got detention-"

Ron's eyes bulged and Hermione managed to look completely shocked and rather disappointed at the same time. "What?!"

Suddenly Hagrid's seemed a lot farther than it was a moment before. "The day you left I was walking down to lunch and ended up getting in this row with Malfoy."

"By a row, you mean you started insulting each other like you normally do, right?" Hermione asked expectantly. Obviously the other option had come to her mind and the likely hood of it, and she was not pleased what so ever.

Harry shook his head and her features settled into even harder disappointment, Ron was trying to hide the beginnings of a smile, apparently not wanting Hermione to see his approval. "No. Hagrid and McGonagall came along and Hagrid picked us up off the ground and had to tear us apart and hold us away from each other. Neither of them looked happy with us."

An exasperated sigh left Hermione's lips. "Well of course they weren't happy with you! Fighting without your wands!" Ron and Harry looked confused and she rolled her eyes. "Don't you listen to anything? Fighting with wands may be dangerous, sure, highly dangerous. But brawling with somebody and completely disregarding magic shows...well, it shows actual hatred. It's showing you would rather find satisfaction by feeling the pain your causing to somebody else than simply witness it." She glared at them, Ron still looked like he didn't fully understand; Harry had understood, but wasn't sure he quite appreciated the information. Could Hermione just for once not act like they were complete idiots when they didn't know something that she did? The girl continued. "So, what happened?" She asked expectantly after a moment's pause.

A moment of silence passed before Harry responded. "Well, they took us to Dumbledore and he told us that he had enough of our fighting and used Vinculum on us." The raven-haired teen explained, his mind still mulling over Hermione's explanation of fighting. It made sense in a way, it would make sense why the professors had taken the fight so seriously, but he still wondered if there was something else happening. Something more than just trying to end the constant squabbling between two students.

Hermione gasped, eyes wide; Ron looked confused again. "Are you serious? How far? And where..." She looked around. "Where is he then?"

Harry sighed, feeling oddly disappointed yet again at the reminder. "He made it six feet. Dumbledore had to leave yesterday for an emergency Ministry meeting and he reversed it before he left. He said that we had made great improvements," he explained carefully.

"What are you talking about? What's this...Vinculum spell you're talking about?" Ron wondered, eyes going between Harry and Hermione.

"It's an old spell they stopped using ages ago," Hermione said, taking it as her place to explain such things. "It's used to bond people together so that they can't go further than a certain distance than each other. In this case, Harry's and Malfoy's was six feet." She turned to Harry, looking more than a little apologetic.

Ron's eyes had become wide. "You had to stay six feet away from Malfoy for the entire vacation?!" He exclaimed. "Merlin, mate, I'm sorry. What did you do the entire time?" He paused. "Whose house did you sleep in? Did he make you sleep in those dripping dungeons he calls a home?" He asked in quick succession, shaking his head the whole time. "I'm so sorry I forgot about asking you to come home with me. Mum had just broken her leg and we were all panicking about who was going to take care of her and everything, and it was just the day before."

He would have gone on, but Harry waved his hand dismissingly, not wanting to hear any more excuses about why he had been abandoned temporarily for the holidays. It had been happening over summer, so what was the difference with Christmas vacation? "Don't worry about it Ron. It wasn't as terrible as you would think." He stopped as they had arrived at Hagrid's, the other two giving him strange looks as though he had grown another head. "What?" Harry asked innocently, turning back around to face Hagrid's door. Together they moved to the door and knocked loudly. They waited a few moments, but silence greeted them. A rough ten minutes passed by as the three knocked and then turned and waited on the steps, thinking he might have been in the forest. Over summer it seemed, Dumbledore had spoken to the centaurs about Hagrid's entering the forest and they had come to an agreement of some sort, because Hagrid had no problems with them.

"Well, where do you think he is?" Ron wondered, looking around the cabin as though expecting to see Hagrid come around the corner at any moment.

Hermione sighed and shrugged. "Maybe he's on another assignment for the Order," she suggested, looking from one boy to the other, neither looked too happy with the idea, and she obviously wasn't as well. "We could always try to ask McGonagall or Dumbledore, the least they can ell us is that they can't tell us, right?" She looked at the both of them again, Harry saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, but he was too busy staring out into nothing, thinking bout Malfoy, to pay much attention to her. Apparently Ron had his interest in something else at the moment as well, because she gave a loud sigh. "Well fine then, if you really don't care at all then we won't do anything. Let's go back then, I'd at least like to find out if we an get any information." She stood and started stalking off toward the castle, Harry and Ron were quick to follow.

It ended up that Hermione was right. McGonagall simply told them that it was not their business to be wondering about Hagrid all the time and that they had more important things to do with their time, such as studying their classes, a statement that was completely true, considering that classes had become even increasingly harder since fifth year. However, the answer had told the three enough and they left McGonagall's office silently, just to start talking in the hall about the possibilities of what their friend was doing.

"Maybe he took Gwarp to try to talk to the giants into peace?" Harry wondered dully, knowing that the other two were getting suspicious with his silence. He was normally right in there with the conversation, smiling and talking, acting alive.

Hermione shook her head. "No, I don't think so. You remember what Hagrid told us last year of what happened to those giants who didn't want to join Voldermort, how they had to hide out in those caves and were tortured or killed when they were found. I don't think he would risk anything like that happening to Gwarp."

They continued to discuss different possibilities until they came to the Gryffindor common, loud with people, and made their ways up to their own rooms, meeting back down a few minutes later, books in hand. Harry had completely forgotten that he had homework to do over break and he was suddenly almost sick at looking at the piles of work he had to do.

Days passed in a blur of heavy loads of homework and late Quiddich practices. It no longer mattered if it was before, during, or after season, they practiced anyway. Ron had improved dramatically as keeper and was definitely holding his own in the games, Ginny had turned out to be an amazing chaser, despite the warnings that Ron gave her about the sport being too dangerous for her. Malfoy kept strangely quiet except for unconvincing retorts thrown here and there. Harry wondered if he was sick, while Hermione and Ron simply enjoyed not having to deal with him and still dragged about the boy in private, not seeming to notice that Harry did not join in such discussions. He instead sat in silent irritation, wondering why they had to rag on the boy when no harm was being done.

It was the Thursday after vacation and Harry was still overloaded with work from the beginning of the week. Staying up late did not do everything, he simply didn't have enough hours in each day to do everything that he needed to do. The common room had emptied out around midnight and he successfully managed to not tell Hermione and Ron about three-fourths of his homework that he had left to do, and convinced them not to wait up for him as he made the last adjustments to his potions essay – somehow he had gotten an Outstanding on his Potions O.W.L. the year before and was now in Snape's N.E.W.T. class, his dreams of being an Auror not quenched. They had eventually headed off to bed, leaving Harry trying to at least get finished what was due the next day, and that would proved hard within itself.

Realistically he had barely finished half of his homework, all of it hastily done and he'd be surprised to be getting 'A's on any of them. In a way he was thankful for the amount of homework every night, it kept him up late and meant that when he did go to sleep he was too exhausted to dream; most of the time at least. He fell asleep over his papers and books somewhere around three in the morning. It was one of those exception nights.

He jerked himself awake a few hours later, before anyone else was awake. His chair fell backward and landed with a thud, waking him up as he rolled out of it. Shaking his head and pressing the heals of his hands to his eyes, Harry laid on the floor for a few minutes, taking deep breaths before he pushed himself up and looked around. Nobody had come down, he hadn't woken anyone up. Breathing a sigh of relief he bent down and picked up his chair. His books were still laid out, ink had crusted in his quill and he would need to wash it out before he could start writing with it again.

Checking the time, he found it was already a quarter before five, and it would be at least another hour before people started getting up. There was no real reason to go up to bed, but he went up anyway, though it was just to grab new clothes before he headed off to take a bath. Ron kept him up to date on what the prefect's bath password so that he could go in particularly late at night or early in the morning and enjoy the beautiful baths without getting caught by any of the other prefects.

Harry spent half and hour soaking in the bath, not even taking the energy to do a few laps in the giant, pool-like tub. He washed his hair and soaped up, enjoying the feeling of being clean. As the water and bubbles began to drain, he pulled himself out and wrapped a fluffy towel around his hips while he took another to use on his mop of hair and dry his upper-body. Towel around his head, he didn't hear the portrait open and didn't realize anyone else was in the room until he turned around. His arms fell from his head, towel hanging limply from a hand as he stared across at none other than Slytherin prefect, Malfoy.

Malfoy didn't say anything as he finally stepped away from the portrait and went around to grab towels for himself before starting the flow of the bath for himself. Harry couldn't stand the silence. He had just started getting use to not having the other padding around beside to him when he suddenly ran into the subject that had been haunting him for the past week. Stuck between drying, wanting to flee, and wanting to stay, he said the only thing that came to mind, a question that was the reason for the haunting. "Why are you ignoring me?" He asked quickly, suddenly feeling like git for saying it afterwards; but, not being able to take it back, he stood straight and stared at the other, waiting for an answer.

Seconds ticked by and turned into minutes, and Harry was just about to leave, rather irritated with the other, when Malfoy chose to speak, halting Harry with his hand half-way to his pants. "It seemed like you had enough to deal with, without me making fun of you all the time," he answered truthfully, not taking his eyes off the flow from the spouts.

Harry thought he must have heard wrong, but he had been listening too hard for that to be an excuse. "What do you mean?" He wondered back, eyes hooked on the other teen, unable to pull his gaze away.

The Slytherin shrugged. "You were screaming loud enough to wake the whole of the Forbidden Forest. You couldn't have actually thought that I was able to sleep through that, could you?" Malfoy asked back, finally pulling his silvery eyes away from the bath and turning them on Harry.

If he hadn't been facing Malfoy, Harry might have blushed. "You never said anything about it," he protested. "I was sure that if you did wake up that you would be making comments about it. But, you haven't." It was proving much harder to have the conversation now that he was actually facing the other boy, but it seemed to be going well enough so far.

"I never knew you actually had nightmares Potter," Malfoy said as though it was completely obvious and most pertinent to the conversation at hand. He explained himself a moment later. "There's nothing funny about how you wake up at night."

tbc...