Disclaimer: Hogwarts and its people still belong to JK Rowling, bless her cotton socks for letting us play with them.

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Chapter 4: All Horses Look Grey in the Dark

Up at the High Table (and it was weird not having Snape there glaring at him… not good, not bad, but certainly weird) Hagrid was in animated conversation with Madam Hooch, the Flying Instructor. "…And 'ere he comes now. All right there, 'Arry?"

"Hey, Hagrid. Um… about the horse... have you found anyone who can help?"

"Funny you should ask." Hagrid winked. "Turns out Madam Hooch knows a bit."

"I'll come out and check Hagrid's new pet after dinner, Mr Potter – how's that?" said Hooch, her fierce hawk's eyes a little less fierce than usual.

Harry beamed, relieved that there was finally a problem in the world he didn't have to be responsible for. "That'd be great. Thank you. I'll meet you there."

Outside the Hall he stopped at the foot of the staircases, which were lazily moving through the warm, late spring air, and thought how nice it would be to have the dorm room to himself for a little while, just to be able to lie down and rest for a half-hour without people pestering him with questions. He didn't want to know about the gossip about Malfoy – he'd been there as a witness for the real thing and after all the malicious rumour-mongering aimed at him – ironically enough, much of it coined by Malfoy – he didn't care to be a part of it from any angle. He was also a bit out of temper with Ron. He didn't like other people gloating when he, Harry, had taken the brunt of something nasty. So it irked to see such behaviour from Ron. Again, it was a case of not wanting to be involved in it from any angle.

"Was dinner that bad?" asked a painting, making Harry jump.

"Oh! No. I was just… thinking."

"Ah," said the painting. It was a portrait of an elderly wizard with a large gold chain around his neck and a fur cap. "Too much thinking can be dangerous. Or is it too little…?"

Harry left the painting of the wizard to work that out, and started up the stairs, ignoring the young woman in yellow robes who winked at him from another painting. He made it to the landing when a thought that had been nagging at him since he saw Malfoy walk in to the Hall suddenly took form:

He'd never seen a blind wizard.

Oh, Mad-eye Moody had his glass eye where his real one should be, but that wasn't the same as seeing someone put up a hand to feel if a door was open or closed. When Draco had been in the Forest the other night – in the dark and nervous as hell – he'd been ready with his wand to hex anything that startled him.

Maybe there were no blind wizards because they were too dangerous to be allowed outside. Maybe there were no blind wizards, period. After all, if you couldn't see to cast a spell, how could you aim one?

Instead of finding himself in the corridor leading along to the picture of the Fat Lady and the Gryffindor common room, Harry's feet had taken him down another flight of stairs and along a different corridor; a corridor which was darker and damper with flickering sconces. In spite of himself Harry wanted to make sure Draco had made it back safely to the Slytherin common room – at least that way he could be sure Malfoy hadn't managed to curse someone out of sheer nerves. Wait: there were voices ahead coming towards him. Given that the voices were trying to be hushed but too gleeful to really succeed, and given that he was deep in Slytherin territory, he opted for discretion over valour and hid in a niche behind a suit of armour.

Three students – sixth years whom Harry knew from shared classes: two boys from Ravenclaw and one from Hufflepuff – were tiptoeing along the corridor. Muffled giggles were a dead give-away that what they were up to wasn't within Hogwarts rules. Between them, wrapped up in an old tapestry, floated a long cylindrical object. Harry watched them go until they reached the corner. The bundle slipped. One of the Ravenclaws cursed, the second muttered: "Mobilicorpus," over the bundle, and then they were off again up the stairs. Harry sighed in relief.

It wasn't until he reached the next corner that he remembered what mobilicorpus was for. Well, maybe he was being suspicious…

He raced along the last of the corridors to the entrance to the Slytherin rooms and said to the portrait (a nasty looking witch holding a fishbowl with a barracuda in it instead of a lap-dog): "Has Draco Malfoy come here yet?"

The witch raised an eyebrow, much like Snape di-…had used to do. "No. I thought I heard his voice a moment ago, but I could not see him. Nor did he give me the password." She looked puzzled, and a little anxious.

"Thank you," said Harry, and sprinted back the way he had come.

The twisting, turning corridors had one advantage: When he rounded a corner and ploughed into Crabbe and Goyle they didn't have time to pick themselves up off the floor and find who had knocked them down before he was up and gone again. In the entrance hall he stopped to ask the portrait of the wizard with the gold chain and fur hat if he'd seen three students with a rolled-up tapestry go past. When the wizard told him he'd seen the trio sneak out the front doors and around to the left, Harry was off and out the doors. He skidded on the flagstones out the front. A pair of first year Hufflepuffs looked over at him anxiously, possibly worried he was going to start foaming at the mouth and throwing a fit. Harry reminded himself for the umpteenth time that telling people 'Yes, I am Harry Potter, now get over it' was little use, really, and demanded: "Where did those three sixth years go?"

The two little girls shrank back, but pointed to the side of the castle.

"Thank you." Great. Harry should have guessed the lake. He ran down the grassy lawn, past the trees and bushes where he'd spent summer hours drowsing with Ron while Hermione studied, and out to the little jetty.

Waves lapped and sucked at the wooden pillars but that was all. Even the Giant Squid was off sleeping somewhere else. Nobody other than Harry was here. Harry scowled and smacked himself in the forehead.

Those girls hadn't just pointed at the lake – they could just as well have been pointing at the barn and the meadow… or the Quidditch Pitch, for that matter. But after Dumbledore's warning about staying away from the pen with the horse in it, Harry thought he could made a fair bet that it wouldn't be the Quidditch Pitch. He forced his legs back into a jog and puffed his way back up the slope, cursing all Malfoys with what little breath he could spare.

He was halfway across the meadow when he saw them.

"HEY!" he yelled. As one person, the trio turned to look. When they saw it was only one person – and when they saw who it was, they continued levitating their tapestry-wrapped bundle over the wooden wall of the pen.

Harry heard the loud bang of the horse's hooves smacking into the gate even from there. "DON'T DO IT!" he shouted. His legs were burning, and so were his lungs, but he broke into a run.

One of the boys laughed – "Oh, come on, Potter – we're doing you a favour as much as anyone in this school!"

Then he waved his wand. The tapestry unrolled, and sent something – a body – spinning into the air. The boy with the wand clambered up to the top of the wall for the second it took to lower the motionless body to the ground. Harry heard him say: "Finite incantatum," and then the trio were off and running back to the castle. One of the Ravenclaws called back over his shoulder – "Your word against ours, Potter! Don't mess this up!"

Knowing as many spells as he did, Harry could have cast several words against them and messed them up pretty seriously indeed, but he didn't have time. He hauled himself up the outside of the pen, dreading what he would see.

At first glance everything was quite calm.

But the bucket of water was tipped over with a big horse-shoe shaped dent in the side, and hay had been spread over half of the large area. If the horse hadn't eaten any of it, a few dark piles showed that the horse had eaten something in the last day or so. Draco, sitting up slowly and shaking dust out of his hair, had been lucky enough to land in one of the piles of hay.

Over on the other side stood the horse. From the height Harry was at it looked less threatening. The length and strength of leg and muscle weren't so obvious. And the head looked finer now that the slightly convex profile of its nose was not accented. But those ears were still flat back, giving the animal a wicked serpentine look, and the black eyes glittered with menace. Harry readied his wand. "Malfoy," he hissed. "Malfoy. Can you hear me?"

Draco looked up and managed a reasonable approximation of Harry's location. "I'm blind, not deaf," he snapped, his gaze ghosting somewhere past Harry's right shoulder. "Where the hell am it?"

"You're in a pen out the back of Hagrid's barn."

Draco lost what little colour he had. "Shit. What else is in here with me?"

"The horse."

The look on his face was one Harry would treasure for the rest of his days. "The… the horse? The horse from the other night? Not some Blast-ended Skrewt or baby bloodsucking monster-du-jour? Just my horse?"

"Yeah. Except he's not your horse. And he seems kind of angry as animals go. He's been hurt. And he's not happy at being locked up. And right now he looks really pissed off that you're in there with him. Hagrid's been warning people not to go into the pen…"

"So Messrs the Intellectual Ravens and… I think it was a Hufflepuff… they decided to chuck me in here and put me out of their misery?"

"That looks like the plan, yes."

"So how do you come into this, Potter? Come to make sure the job is finished?"

Harry sucked in his breath. "God, Malfoy, but you're the biggest idiot to walk the Earth since the dinosaurs. No, I'm here to tell you not to make any sudden moves. You're too far from the gate to use that, so I'm going to come down into the pen and together we're going to levitate back over this wall… Um… No, we're not. Damn." The horse had raised its head and had one eye fixed on Harry in a way he didn't like. "Preferably without using my wand, okay, because this horse seems to hate the sight of them by the way he's watching my hand… We'll climb out. I'll show you where the handholds are. Well, direct you to them, anyway." Harry pushed his wand back into his pocket.

The horse seemed to relax a fraction – the muscles under the gleaming black coat shifted slightly, and the ears weren't quite so flattened. But when Harry swung his leg to climb down into the pen the horse snorted and sidled closer to Draco. Harry froze.

Draco should have frozen, too. He pushed himself to his feet, a little wobbly without his eyes to tell him where the horizon was. "Tell me which way the wall is, Potter," he said.

The horse moved forward, its skin shifting over sleek muscles like oil on water. It brushed past Draco and knocked the boy down.

"Ow! What did you do that for?"

"It wasn't me," said Harry from between gritted teeth. His head was pounding with tension now. Damn – he was going to have to hit the horse with a spell… he had no idea what that would do. If he stupefied it, it could fall and break its neck. Those long legs and slender ankles looked ridiculously fragile when compared to the bulk of the body, and the whole thing crashing down… what if it landed on Malfoy? It would squash him into a blond Slytherin pancake.

And Malfoy, Merlin help him, was trying to stand up again. This time the horse didn't rush him. It stalked closer, step by step, tossing its head and sniffing the air for enemies. Draco held his hands out flat in front of him, side by side and palms to the sky. The horse would bite them off.

Or so Harry was expecting. So his eyebrows flew up in surprise when the horse didn't rip Malfoy's hands off at the wrists, and instead blew gusts of air into them, sniffing carefully as if trying to remember. Harry saw the moment the horse did: the ears relaxed and came forward, and the thick muscles bunching from the crest of the neck down through the shoulders and along the spine smoothed out. Draco raised a hand and tried to stoke the long nose, but the horse moved its head sideways and away. "I think it remembers me from the Forest," he said softly.

Harry nodded, then realised there was no way Malfoy could have seen that. "Yes. But it doesn't mean you should stay there. It might remember other things. Like how much it hates people at the moment." Carefully watching to see how the horse would react, Harry slowly climbed down into the pen. "Easy there," he said to the horse. Draco had managed to put his hand on the horse's neck and had his fingers in the black mane. When Harry put his hand out the horse shied, dragging Draco over.

"Oof. Potter, what did you do now?" he snarled from the ground. He sat up, listening as the horse came back. "It's standing right over me, isn't it?" he said quietly. "I can feel its shadow on my face."

"Yes. Give me your hand."

Draco grudgingly held out a hand and Harry took it, carefully pulling the other boy to his feet without startling the nervy horse. "So," Malfoy said. "How do we get out of here?"

"Climb the wall, I guess… Hang on a minute. Someone's at the gate. Who …?"

The latch of the gate clunked as it was lifted from the outside, and the horse raised its head, perhaps getting ready to charge at the exit. Wood creaked as the gate began to open. A slim figure sipped through the gap.

Harry's jaw dropped when he saw who it was.

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