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Chapter Eighteen—Flashpoint

"There's more information on Salazar's Snakes here than we've ever been able to gather before," said Hermione briskly, pushing the sheaf of parchment across the library table to Harry. "And even then, it's not much."

It was Harry's usual day to take charge of Teddy, but he was sick with a slight cold this morning, and Andromeda had decided to keep him at home. Harry wondered idly how she'd keep him in his bed. Perhaps by telling him that if he got sick often enough, he wouldn't be able to attend Hogwarts next autumn. Hogwarts was the source of most of Teddy's hope and anxiety

"Why not?" he said, when Hermione coughed to remind him that there was a conversation in front of him and he was expected to pay attention to it. He checked the monitoring spells on his children—light loops of magic on his wrist that would pull taut when his intervention was needed—and found Lily still peacefully sleeping in her cot, and James and Al, in the corridor, still playing at wizards' duel with a pair of sticks that Harry had found in the yard and Transfigured into play wands. A solemn warning that he would take them away the moment James hit his brother with the stick had so far prevented any incidents.

"Because they're better at covering their tracks than we suspected," said Hermione in a tone of disgust, shoving her hair out of her eyes. "I think they must put all their efforts into hiding. Certainly their actual attempt at torturing you didn't work that well."

"It would have, if their information was as complete as they thought it was," Harry said quietly. A drawing of a typical Salazar's Snake, in green mask and black cloak, stared up at him. He shook his head and shoved it aside, searching for more relevant information. "Or if they captured Draco alone."

"Yes," said Hermione, plainly not interested in thinking about what Draco's fate would have been if Harry wasn't there. "But, Harry, the whole thing is odd. As you pointed out, they received a warning that you were in Diagon Alley, but why did they wait three whole hours to capture you? And then they seized a lucky chance—"

"Or unlucky—"

"Yes, or unlucky," said Hermione, with a little roll of her eyes to say that she didn't care much about what name he chose to use, "when they might have waited all day and never found it. It's just odd. What were they waiting for?"

"What did you learn?"

"There was a letter," said Hermione, becoming animated again as she dived through the paper. Harry checked the monitoring spells; the faint whisper of a nightmare had passed through Lily's head, since she was breathing a little harder than usual, and Al and James were arguing about what exactly a Body-Bind did. "We got a copy of it before it dissolved, luckily."

Harry stared at her. "Dissolved?"

"Yes." Hermione gave him an even look as she handed the copy over. "That was another odd thing. There were sophisticated charms protecting that letter, even though it's simple. And when we tried to penetrate them and find out who the real writer was, the ink just turned watery and ran off the paper." She shook her head. "I don't know what to make of it. They have high-level magic backing them—the glamours on their hideout were impressive—but then they act stupid about it."

"The Death Eaters were like that, too," Harry reminded her absently as he read the letter. The entire thing consisted of two lines, and a strange signature.

To the ones who would help us protect our world, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are now in Diagon Alley, and should remain there for some time.

The Chaired Lady.

"Yes," Hermione said again, "but that was a function of their leader, and Voldemort's insane ambitions. If we could figure out who the leader of Salazar's Snakes was, we'd know a lot more, of course. But at the moment, I'd settle for figuring out what they want."

Harry traced the lines of the copied letter with one finger. Something besides the signature was bothering him. Perhaps it would come to him, as the revelation about the scar on Draco's forehead had, if he was just quiet and let his mind stew for a moment. "I suppose you never learned how they obtained my signature?"

He looked up in time to see Hermione smirk a bit. "Actually, we did," she said. "We did discover a stock of Polyjuice Potion in the house—"

"You couldn't learn who owned the house?" Harry asked, distracted by that sudden passing thought. "That ought to lead us straight to the Snakes' backer."

Hermione gave him a disgusted look. "Ten years in the Blood Reparations Department, and you still haven't learned how many pure-bloods own houses under assumed names and through a tangle of paperwork accounts that all lead back to each other?"

Harry shrugged. The thought in his mind struggled and bubbled like a baby bird trying to knock through its shell. Lily stirred and mumbled, but fell asleep before Harry could rise from the chair. Al was now arguing that he had blocked James's latest attempt at a Body-Bind with a Shield Charm, and that he had so done it. Harry drew back from the monitoring spells a bit so that he could avoid the inevitable chorus of, "Did not!" "Did so!" that followed. "Sorry. Go on."

"There was a stock of Polyjuice Potion," Hermione said, returning with a bit of a ruffled-feathers stare to her original statement, "and I was able to track down the owners of some of the hairs they used. It wasn't hard; they were generally plucking it from the heads of apothecaries when they bought the ingredients for the potion. Have you seen a woman who looked like this before?" She waved her wand, murmuring a complex charm Harry didn't know, and the sudden image of a small, gray-haired woman spun out of the tip and into the air in front of him.

Harry sat up with an exclamation. "I did!" he said. "She was the one who came up to me the day that I took Teddy for ice cream. Said she wanted my signature for her daughter who'd been crippled in the war."

Hermione nodded. "And she really does have a daughter who was crippled in the war—but she wasn't the one who asked for your signature. It was someone Polyjuiced as her. That's how they managed to put your genuine signature on that letter about Malfoy."

Harry bit his lip thoughtfully. The suspicion he'd entertained was a bit closer to the surface than before, but still not ripe yet. "Once again," he said, "there's a level of intelligence there, but their execution—" He shook his head.

"Of course, some of that can be explained by caution," Hermione said knowledgeably. "They aren't ready to move yet, so they tried to crouch low and do things that would escape the knowledge of the Blood Reparations Department."

"But kidnapping us was fairly stupid, if that's what they really want." Harry tapped his fingertips together.

"I know." Hermione spread her hands helplessly. "But I think—well, they didn't torture you physically. It was only because that woman slapped you that I managed to find you at all. I think they meant that box to break you."

"But—"

"Mentally," Hermione said. "If they could break your wills, they might have been able to convince you to do what they wanted more easily."

Harry nodded slowly. "Get Draco to confess that he really had murdered Esther Goldstein, for example. And maybe even his wife."

"Exactly. And what couldn't they do with a Savior of the Wizarding World who was tame to their will? They might even have done it because they know that you can throw off the Imperius." Hermione looked grim. "But most people know that by now, so that doesn't narrow our pool of suspects by much."

Harry looked at the lines in front of him. They stared blandly back. Of course, since this was just a copy of the original letter, maybe he shouldn't expect it to look all that threatening, Harry thought.

To the ones who would help us protect our world, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are now in Diagon Alley…

Abruptly, Harry sat up, staring at the letter. And the idea swelled and burst in his head as unstoppably as the conviction that Draco had been up to something dastardly during their sixth year.

To the ones who would help us protect our world…

"That's it," he said quietly. "It's two. At least two."

"What?" Hermione demanded, leaning forwards like a hunting hound.

"The groups," Harry said, looking up, knowing that his eyes must be on fire. He'd sometimes uncovered insights like this in his work with the Blood Reparations Department, and his eyes always looked like that when he did. "We say that Salazar's Snakes are making some brilliant moves and some dumb ones, but what if they're not making all the moves? What if they're making the majority of the dumb mistakes, and the people warning them and brewing the Polyjuice and controlling the manor where they were headquartered are part of a different group? A smarter one?"

Hermione closed her eyes and shook her head for long moments.

"What?" Harry asked, unable to keep his voice from sharpening a little. He'd used Dreamless Sleep for the last two nights, and his temper seemed worse each time, as if the dreams of Draco contained some essential mineral that he needed to keep calm. But Ginny had gone off to practice with a happy smile this morning, which made him somewhat regretful that this was one of the nights when he'd have to sleep without the potion. "What did I miss?"

"I'm scolding myself," Hermione whispered. "Harry, of course that's it. I'm stupid not to have seen it at once, especially given the current political climate." She opened her eyes and beamed at him.

"Well?" Harry nearly wanted to spring across the table and choke the breath from her. "Tell me."

"Pure-bloods and Muggleborns are at each other's throats all over," Hermione began quietly, steepling her fingers. "It's not just the extremist groups anymore. We can hardly speak to the Muggleborns who left the wizarding world; we're kept so busy fighting rumors of laws that are going to favor pure-bloods, or actual legislation passed by wizards who are mad enough to want Muggleborn children Obliviated of the memory of ever having magic instead of sent to Hogwarts. The rumors are coming from disparate sources, which puzzled us, because we're much better about tracking them to their roots, usually."

Harry nodded. He understood. He felt a brief pang that he hadn't been able to do his work for the Department lately, or he would have known about this burgeoning political firestorm himself, but his family and Draco had been more important. When this current mess was over, Quidditch season might be over, too, and then Ginny could stay home with the children more often while Harry returned to helping out with Blood Reparations.

"But if there are a few groups working together—" Hermione stopped suddenly, and her lips became bloodless.

"What is it?" Harry asked quietly. He knew no single supremacist group had the kind of reputation that could make her look like that. The most violent ones also tended to be the smallest, since they regularly fell out with each other.

"Harry," Hermione said, and her voice was so fragile that Harry stood, rounded the table, and embraced her. "Oh, Harry. I think—I think it's pure-blood and Muggleborn supremacist groups working together." She tilted her head back so that she could look up at him through watery eyes.

"What?" Harry said. "Hermione, that's—that's ridiculous. They never agree on anything, so what could they both want that would persuade them to work together instead of killing each other?"

"A war," said Hermione. "They want another war, Harry. They might agree to work together for a little while if they knew that at the end of that time, they'd get to kill each other. That's what we'll never give them, of course." Already she was sitting up, gathering her strength and becoming the strong woman Harry knew and adored, though she made no move to leave the circle of his arms as yet. "So long as the Blood Reparations Department exists, they can't do what they want with impunity. And they'll try to eliminate us. And you, since they know that you're sure a big proponent of tolerance, and there are a lot of people who'd back you just because you're Harry Potter. And Malfoy—"

"Got caught up in one stray tendril of this massive thing," Harry finished, quiet himself now as the vision of devastation that had reached Hermione struck him. "They're probably hoping that his arrest for the murder of Esther Goldstein would outrage the pure-bloods enough to do something."

"Or they're hoping that the immense brutality of the murder would outrage the Muggleborn community." Hermione wiped at her eyes with her robe sleeve. "Or both." She sucked in her breath. "Oh, Harry! They're probably planting and planning incidents like this all over, hoping that one will become a flashpoint of violence. They might have expended so effort on Malfoy just because it's a good setup and because you're involved."

Harry opened his mouth to say that Draco was quite worth a herculean effort all by himself, but Hermione was already rising and saying, "I've got to get back to the Ministry and contact Shacklebolt right away. He needs to know—"

The world went white and gold.

Harry felt an immense wind pulling him, tugging, rippling him forwards. The library floor was going from beneath him. The tunnel of light that he had seen the other times he held Draco's hand and turned his wounds into scars spiraled before him, a lazy maelstrom about to suck him down.

Harry tried to think of his children, but the whirlwind did not stop pulling him when Al and James flashed through his head. He tried to imagine the pressure of Lily's small fists against his neck, and thought he felt the wind slow a bit.

But he was still going.

Desperate, he pictured Hermione, felt the weight and warmth of her in his arms again, heard her concerned voice, and felt humbled before the strength of the dedication she had sunk into the Blood Reparations Department. She was his friend, one of his best friends, and if he went somewhere else, he would never see her again.

The light ripped open in front of him. For just a moment, Harry caught a glimpse of himself, a faint and shadowy version of him, on the other side of what seemed to be a thick pane of glass. He was hugging a taller figure whose face Harry couldn't see, since it was buried in that Harry's shoulder, but from the white-blond hair, it was unmistakably Draco. On Harry's other shoulder, ruffled and hopping from foot to foot to keep her balance, was a snowy owl who looked just like Hedwig. An open cage on the ground beside the other Harry's foot said that she was a new gift.

Harry closed his eyes, not acknowledging what looked like the story he'd been dreaming, and ripped backwards with all his might, clutching the image of Hermione in front of his heart like a talisman. Softness beat against his face. He refused to look. He turned his head aside.

I am not in you, he told the mirror image in his head. I am not of you. I do not want you. Leave me alone!

The force pulling him ceased, and he sagged to his knees, and then stumbled sideways and hit the library table a stunning blow with the side of his head. He swore, not at all softly, and raised a hand to his temple as pounding footsteps told him his sons were approaching.

"Daddy?" Al's frightened and concerned voice asked.

"Dad!" James echoed, but with a reproachful tone to the word, as though Harry had played a shameful trick by getting down on the floor.

"I'm all right," Harry said quietly, opening his eyes, and reaching out to gather his sons against him. Hermione's wand flicked in the corner of his eye, and he felt the pain on the side of his head ease. She had probably removed the wound before James or Al could catch sight of it, and Harry was grateful.

He hugged his children for a long moment, and then something soft whirled against his hair.

White owl feathers.

The same kind that had covered his face and hands the night that Draco had taken the wounds from the mirror, and Harry had healed them.

Harry turned his head away from them, and looked up at Hermione. Her face was paler than it had gone when she figured out what the supremacist groups working together might mean.

"I think you should figure out the curse as soon as possible, Harry," she said. "For everyone's sake." She paused for a long moment, then added, "And maybe you should stop seeing Malfoy. Just for a little while."

"Not possible," Harry said, and spat out a feather that had lodged in the corner of his mouth. "As you saw, it can attack me anywhere, so there's really no point in trying to escape it by avoiding him. Besides, I need to tell Draco what we learned about the supremacist groups."

Hermione sighed at him, but nodded. "Fine. You and Ginny are still coming over to dinner tonight?"

"Yes," Harry said at once. He could hear Lily crying, and Al was giving quiet little sobs, too. His body thrummed with the ancient instinct to comfort them. "I'll be fine, Hermione." He ignored her incredulous snort. "I will," he insisted.

In the end, she helped him settle Lily down with a bottle before she left, and gave him an intensely skeptical glance as she went out the door.

Harry ignored it, and bowed his head to smell Lily's hair and watch the motions of her tiny fingers on the enchanted, floating bottle as he rubbed Al's back soothingly. The best thing to be done with those aspects of his life he couldn't change was to ignore them.

He and Draco would defeat the curse, and he would learn whatever it was that Ginny wanted him to learn in those sessions with the therapist, and he and Hermione would fight this war, and he would take care of his children. That was normal. All of it was normal. And he would be all right because he had to be.

And the Harry and Draco of that other story would not be real, because he refused to allow them to be. Besides, if there were two of them in their story, and they both existed and were happy with one another, what the fuck did they need him for?

Draco had a small smile on his face as he paced around his mother's rose garden. The peacocks kept away from this part of the house; Draco was entirely alone except for the roses and a few lazy bees buzzing around them, and the sparkling pool nearby, which produced its own water and was always a placid green no matter what the color of the sky.

Draco was proud of himself. He had finally the taken the initiative and reached out to those offers of help that had always been there and which he could have accepted earlier, after ten years of doing nothing. He had contacted Blaise Zabini.

Blaise's face had been cautiously pleased when he stared through the green-tinted flames and saw Draco peering back. "Draco! To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"We?" Draco asked curiously. He'd known that Blaise had bonded—casually, the kind of bond that could be dissolved as easily as any Muggle marriage—but he'd never known who it was with, since he'd torn up the invitation to the wedding when it arrived.

Blaise grinned at him, and made a gesture to someone beyond the fireplace. Millicent Bulstrode moved into view, leaning against the mantle as she regarded him with cool, considering eyes. Draco blinked. He hadn't expected that Blaise would marry Millicent, whom he'd ignored or taunted for her ugliness in school.

"Congratulations," he said awkwardly. "I suppose that your bonding must have been—er, fruitful." He knew the wedding invitation had come more than five years ago, which meant that Blaise and Millicent had lasted longer than he would have thought.

Blaise tossed back his head and laughed. "Oh, I married and parted from Emily a long time ago," he said. "I didn't mind her fucking other people, but I insisted that she be clean while she did it, and she could never keep that part of the bargain."

Draco shivered in disgust.

"Blaise and I aren't married," Millicent observed calmly, in that voice of hers that had always been too deep for a woman's. "Just living together." She gave Blaise a faint smile that Draco could sense had a thousand undertones he didn't know and might never know.

Suddenly, he wished he knew them. He had ignored these people who had been his friends in school for far too long.

He wondered, just as suddenly, if Blaise could be part of some supremacist pure-blood group. It wasn't like he'd know. And Blaise had always despised blood traitors like the Weasleys; he never would have fucked Ginny Weasley no matter how attractive he thought she was.

"Well?" Blaise asked. "What is your pointy little face darkening about now?"

Licking his lips cautiously, Draco told them as much of the truth as he dared. And he felt it begin to come back to him as he spoke—the duck and play, cut and dodge, of speaking with Slytherins. Blaise and Millicent might be active in politics, and they might have their secrets, but so did he. They really had no more idea what his life had been like in the past ten years than he had about theirs.

As he described the situation, Blaise grew more and more quiet, Millicent more and more intense and interested. She asked rapid-fire questions about the murder and Salazar's Snakes that showed a great deal of intelligence, and by the end she looked like some nundu on the hunt.

"We can help," she said. "I have—well, contacts that the Ministry wouldn't know anything about. And I'm fairly certain that I can find out who owned that manor they imprisoned you in." She grinned faintly. "I've done a bit of trade in hidden sanctuaries and shuffling the paperwork of ownership myself."

Draco nodded. "What will you want in return?"

"For now? Don't be a stranger," Millicent retorted. "After that, I've got a few projects that it would look good if Harry Bloody Potter showed approval for."

Draco nodded again. He was not sure that he trusted Millicent, but he had to begin somewhere. And he really didn't think that she or Blaise would have drawn him in like this only to sell him out later. There would have been polite hints that his politics and theirs were too far apart, and there the conversation would have ended.

Still, as he prepared to withdraw from the Floo connection, he couldn't help but ask, "Why are you suddenly so interested in helping me?"

Millicent cocked her head. "You mean you never knew?"

"Never knew what?"

"I'm a half-blood." Millicent rolled her eyes at his stunned shock. "Not about to join the people who think, not to put too fine a point on it, that I shouldn't exist. And Blaise does what I tell him to."

And then the conversation ended.

Draco grinned a bit and pushed himself to a faster walk. He'd once done his best thinking when he moved around outdoors. And it was better for him to spend a little time in the sunshine every day than brood uselessly in the Manor the way he often did.

He was thinking what other old friends he could contact—he'd once had Crabbe's Floo directions somewhere, and he thought his mother still did—when the wind began to blow around him, and the air turned thickly golden.

Draco flung himself to his knees, grabbing one of the rosebushes. The thorns scratched wildly at his hands, but he didn't care. He wasn't going down any tunnel. Now, just when his life had begun to go well again and he had the hope of its going better still, he was not about to vanish into another world.

He lifted his head, eyes squinting against the light, and saw it parting like a storm to reveal a vision beyond curtains of rain. He saw himself lying on the ground in this very garden, his head in Harry's lap. Harry was carding his fingers through his hair, smoothing Draco's brow over and over again. His voice was deep and soothing; Draco knew instinctively that it would be, though he couldn't actually hear it. Around them twisted tumbled rose petals, as though they'd been fighting among the flowers before this quiet scene.

Draco thought his double looked shadowy and stretched thin, as though he were bereft of substance somehow.

But the wind was not going to snatch him into that world to make the other whole.

He bowed his head and thought with all his might of Millicent, of her dark brown eyes, of the sudden way her face had cleared when she saw a way to both help Draco and turn the situation to her own advantage—

And the wind stopped. The light was gone. Draco lifted his head and stared down at his hands. They bore scratches from the roses, of course, but it was the petals on the ground and splayed across his legs that caught his attention.

They smelled—rotted. They smelled like the scent Harry had described the night Draco's arm had been scarred by the exploding mirror glass.

"What is happening to us?" Draco whispered, and, healing or not, he badly wished Harry was there at that moment.

The next moment, he wished it even more. Something snatched him from behind, and bore him into the air. Twisting, scrabbling wildly for his wand, Draco managed to see what it was.

A fist of water had formed itself out of the pool. Everywhere Draco looked, he took the reflection of his own face from the glassy wave. And then it snapped to around him and hauled him beneath the surface.

The wounds on his hands from the roses stung and burned. Draco thought that, combined with the surge from the water, marked the advent of the fourth scar and the third violent attack from a reflective surface.

But this time, Harry wasn't here to save him.

He battered uselessly against the water, his legs striking nothing, and his desperately held breath leaked through his lips in tiny bubbles of air, and his ears were ringing, and behind his eyelids the darkness was red, red as roses, dark as roses, as he drowned and drowned and drowned.