Harry Potterverse still not mine. Last time I claimed otherwise lots of friendly men in white coats came and took me to an interesting building where they gave me little pills and a really groovy white coat with, like wrap-around sleeves, man.

A/N: This chapter: Draco makes a joke and gets a second-hand pair of gloves (okay – not a very good pun… and his joke won't be much better than mine).

Thought for the day: I always find it odd in the books that although Slytherins are meant to be ambitious, they don't seem to have the nonce to pull off their ambitions. You'd think sooner or later one would come along who realises that one good direction for ambition is to be good to people and honestly and passionately believe in promoting their welfare. Or is the ambition of Slytherin meant to be purely personal/family-name orientated? Would Mahatma Gandhi, for example and with all due respect, have been a Slytherin?

OoOOoo

Chapter 9: The Timeless Story of a Boy and His Horse

The young girls and Millicent went back to the castle as soon as they were sure Draco was going to be safe. Millicent didn't seem to think Draco's safety was in any way helped by Harry Potter's proximity, but left anyway after giving Harry a level "watch yourself, mate" look. "I'll ask a house elf to send something out for you," she said. "Watch the sun, Draco. It's getting strong enough to burn."

"Yes, Mum. I won't touch it."

"You'll not be so sarky when you need me to make up my sunburn cream for you."

"Sorry," Draco grinned. "Oh, and Milli?"

"Yes?"

There was an abrupt shift of mood from light to serious. "Thanks."

Millicent smiled slightly. "You're welcome. Right, you two," she said to the young girls. "Let's get those books you needed for History."

"But we don't have your liquorice –" Daisy began, but was cut off by Trudi.

"Oh, for Salazar's sake… don't argue!"

Millicent raised her eyebrows in amusement as she looked back over at the three by the horse. "I'll send out a house elf. Anything else?"

"It might be an idea if you tell the headmaster we found Malfoy," Harry said.

Millicent shrugged. "I guess. How many search parties per day are we budgeted for? All right, then, you two..."

As she led the two girls back to the main doors, Draco said, "She'd make a good teacher one day."

Harry didn't think she had the brains to be a teacher.

"People can surprise you, Potter," Draco said, yawning, having correctly interpreted Harry's snort of disagreement. "Now… where in Merlin's name have you brought me now? I can smell fresh water."

ooOOoo

It was Luna and the horse who had chosen the spot near the lake. Mainly the horse, really, who had almost dragged Luna (and by association Draco and Harry) away from the barn and the borders of the forest. And apart from the tension between Harry and Draco, it was a pleasant picnic.

The horse had grazed nearby for a time, gradually relaxing until it kept its head down for minutes at a time without nervously lifting it to peer around at the castle and the forest. What it thought of the squid sunning itself in the shallow waters nearby was anyone's guess, but it didn't seem to be worried by the giant monster. Now it was stretched out in the sun, occasionally twitching an ear at a fly. The picnic became even more pleasant when Draco stretched out and fell asleep in the sun, too. Harry was in the same lazy mood. The picnic that had floated out to them (the horse barely blinked at the flying basket) had been large, but since none of them had eaten much that morning (or in Draco's case, in the last twenty four hours), it was demolished in short order. And now Draco's soft snores (punctuated by snorts when his nose was tickled by grass) seemed to contribute to the lassitude of the morning. Harry and Luna lay side by side on their backs and stared up into the blue sky, trying to see shapes in the clouds.

Harry had to give Luna full credit for imaginary cloud shapes – she had quite a range and described them in such detail he could see the mugwumps and bull kelpies she swore actually existed outside of cloud patterns.

"But how do you know they exist?" Harry kept asking.

"Why should they not?"

Harry didn't feel this was particularly logical, but was too sleepy to argue. "I dunno…" he said around a huge yawn.

"Exactly. This summer… well, if everything comes right again, I want to go to Australia to look for a bunyip. My uncle says they're a folk memory of an extinct animal, but Daddy says they still exist. So they're going to take me to Australia this summer, I hope."

"Sounds like quite the world tour you'll be having this summer. Is this the uncle who owns a horse?"

"Yes."

There was a subtle tension there that alerted Harry. "Do… you see him often?"

"Oh, yes. It's not like I have a lot of family – only Daddy and Uncle, now."

"You said he was your mother's brother." Harry wasn't particularly interested, but it would be intriguing to find out just how far into reality Luna ventured in any one conversation.

"I guess I did."

She yawned, which set Harry off again. When he got control over his jaw again, he said, "It must be nice to have family you care for. I've got an aunt and an uncle and a cousin, but they hate me."

"Really?" Luna didn't sound like she thought he was being melodramatic like most people would; she sounded like she was weighing up scenarios. Harry found that amazingly refreshing. "Do you hate them back, then?"

"I guess, yeah. But there're other people in the world for me to hate and it gets a bit, I don't know, a bit thin in places."

"So you save up your hate for those around at the moment?"

Harry paused to consider this. When he was away from the Dursleys he pretty much forgot about them. "Can you make hate wait until you've got time for it?"

There was a slight chuckle from Luna. "I guess so. Why not? Maybe it's like love. You can love someone to bits and not think about them until you see them again, or something reminds you of them."

"What about when you're in love with someone? You can't stop thinking of them, and at the weirdest times…" He blushed as she propped herself up on her elbow and grinned down at him.

"Why, Harry Potter. Are you in lurrrve?"

Harry felt his face grow hotter. "No. But…"

"You had a crush on Cho last year."

Merlin, his face was going to spontaneously combust. "You… know?"

Luna flopped back down and folded her hands over her stomach. "Oh, everyone knew. She made sure we did."

"God."

"Don't worry. She's very pretty. Are you over her?"

"I am now."

There was a muffled snort of laughter from the direction of Draco. Harry sat up and glared. "You're supposed to be asleep, Malfoy!"

"What, and miss this conversation?"

Luna threw some grass stalks at him. But she was grinning. "So in the interests of self-disclosure, who have you had a crush on?"

Draco rolled over and yawned, covering his mouth with his hand politely. "Me? Oh, my mirror, of course. Such a shame being blind."

Luna laughed. Harry couldn't believe his ears. "Was that a joke, Malfoy?"

"Maybe. A better one is: 'my horse walked into the Leaky Cauldron. The bartender said, "Why the long face?" and my horse said, "I'm a horse."' How's that one?"

"It was old when Muggles told it… and for the hundredth time, he's not your horse," grumbled Harry, but Luna was almost crying with laughter.

"'I'm a horse! I'm a horse!' That's the funniest thing I've heard since…" She paused and ticked off her fingers, abruptly sober. "Wednesday. Yes, Wednesday."

Draco's blind eyes stared up at the sky in amazement. "Good God, Luna," he drawled, "do you actually catalogue these things?"

"I'm a Ravenclaw. We're supposed to notice things."

"There's noticing, and then there's obsessing."

Harry wondered why Luna was still smiling, then realised Draco wasn't trying to be insulting. Just… a Malfoy. Possibly this was banter by his standards, but he'd never come across it in Draco before. Luna seemed happy with it, fortunately for Draco, because blind or no, Harry would chuck him in the lake if he turned on Luna. Or made a move on Luna. Or… well, pretty much did anything outside of these Dumbledore-condoned horse minding sessions with Luna. There was something about her that should be protected, maybe because there were so few genuinely nice people in the world.

If Harry wanted her help with his History homework he doubted he'd need to bribe her with liquorice.

ooOOoo

Harry was appalled to find that Luna and Draco had beaten him out to the horse after dinner.

That afternoon, after Harry had shown him the mess in the barn (the furious horse had been left in the pen for the meantime – Harry would need to find a bribe to sweeten up the horse's temper after this indignity), Dumbledore had frowned and walked slowly around to the other side of the castle, past the Quidditch pitch and up towards where the back of the castle nestled into the craggy hills. There, he had waved his wand. Out of the ground grew thin saplings, which bent over and twined around each other until they formed a long fence line enclosing a respectable-sized field. A small grove near the top of the hill wove themselves into what looked like a decent-sized hut.

"Well?" asked Dumbledore. "Do you think Hogwarts' latest resident will like it?"

Harry looked over the new paddock and stable and grinned. "There don't seem to be any monsters."

"Ah. Then how will he know it's his home?"

"I'll make him a letterbox with his name on it. When he gets a name, of course. It's brilliant. Nice and quiet… and far from the forest. Is there some way for me to tell if a wolf or something comes near? How do the Muggles deal with this sort of thing?"

"Unfortunately the good Arthur Weasley is kept busy tidying up after the occasional creature forays out of the Forest. It's warded, of course, but what with the Death Eaters disrupting everything around to keep us isolated, not to mention the way this new barrier which is effectively on top of the perimeter, the wards are operating at less than full efficiency." He sighed. "Even though the barrier now seems to be impermeable, I dread to think what is happening to those poor Muggles living within range of the forest on the other side of it… there's nothing to stop any vampires or werewolves from wandering." He sighed.

"If the horse managed to come through the Forest, do you think people could have come through, too?" Harry asked, worried at this new threat; even more worried, however, by this revelation that the mysterious barrier everyone had been talking about was now confirmed by Dumbledore to have solidified. "There might be some Muggles in the forest…"

"Well, Harry, it might be possible, but I think our equine friend was an anomaly. The centaurs would have alerted me if a Muggle was nearby." Dumbledore paused, looking up at the weathered hills. "I will put wards on this area. If anything comes near which should not, I will be aware of it."

"But if I –"

"Harry. If anything comes along that seriously threatens a horse who has just trampled a vrikolaki to death, I think it better if you were safely in the castle." His blue eyes as they peered over the half-moon spectacles were grave. "I promise you I will protect this horse of yours…" and his eyes regained a hint of a twinkle. "Who am I to get in the way of the timeless story of a boy and his horse?"

ooOOoo

That was something for Harry to think about when he went to the pen to find the horse after dinner: a boy and his horse.

When the horse proved to have disappeared, Harry felt panic seize his chest. It was a tense ten minutes before he tracked the horse down to the new field, where Luna and Draco were walking around the fence line while the horse grazed near the gate.

A boy and his horse? More like a horse and his boy, Harry thought, angry after the initial relief at finding the horse unharmed. Even when the horse lifted its head and pricked its ears at Harry, looking almost pleased to see him, he wasn't mollified. Harry went to check it was all right and found that for once it was uninjured. "Keep up with that attitude," he murmured, patting the horse on the blanketed shoulder. The horse considered him for a moment, then bent its neck around and scratched its head on Harry's shoulder, nearly knocking him over. "Hey," laughed Harry. "I'm not an itching post, you know."

The horse decided that if this was so, grass was more interesting. Harry gave it an affectionate pat on the back and went over to see what Luna and Draco were doing.

Luna waved to him and then put a finger to her lip. Draco seemed to be walking quite well without any contact with Luna, but there was a bit of arm-waving going on. His hands were held away from his body, sometimes in front of him, sometimes to the side, as if he were walking waist deep in water and touching the little waves lapping around him. He seemed to have some odd sort of gloves on, too.

Careful to step quietly, Harry ventured closer. It was a shame Luna had asked him to keep quiet: right now Draco was walking like the living dead – it really was too good an opportunity to pass up without making a comment. Harry made a mental note to say something later.

"Now where is the horse?" Luna was asking.

Draco's face tensed in concentration. Then his hands with their odd fingerless gloves came around to point down the slope. "Over there…" he said slowly. "Up – no. Downhill from here. Twenty-seven meters away. By the… by the gate."

"Excellent. Now, where is the oak tree?"

Draco paused. "There," he said, pointing to a young oak. "But the gloves want to point over towards the Forest and I can't get a number in my head for the distance… I guess there are so many oaks there it weighs on the locator spells."

"Hm. That's worth considering. Now, where is Harry Potter?"

Draco turned towards the castle, and then an expression of annoyance and disappointment settled on his face. "They aren't working. Typical bloody Potter; he's broken my gloves…"

Luna was grinning as she winked at Harry. "Tell me what they say."

"Ah, all right… he's standing there –" he jabbed a finger at Harry "– two point six meters away."

"Sounds about right," said Harry, carefully not laughing when Draco jumped. "Where did you get those?"

Draco gathered himself together again, smoothing down his hair with one hand while the other stopped touching the breast of his robes where his wand would have once been. "Dumbledore gave them to me."

"Professor Snape made them," Luna supplied happily.

"How do you know that?" Draco snapped, glaring in her direction. "I hadn't told you that yet."

Luna shrugged. "There are potions that need to be made in the dark. I went and asked Professor Snape about the Diopsid Glow once. He showed me the gloves and explained how to make them."

Draco looked stunned. "You're joking!"

"No, or I'd be talking about horses going into bars."

"But… but that's Dark Magic… it uses banshee tears and -"

"Daddy wrote me a note. He looked up the spells and said that if Professor Snape agreed, I could research them. It's misclassified Dark Arts, anyway."

Harry frowned. "Snape was teaching you Dark Arts?"

"No," Luna said, her dreamy air evaporating into the annoyance she usually only showed around Hermione and other sceptics. "He just helped me out with my research when I was curious about something. He's not stupid – if he hadn't helped me I would have just gone looking by myself and maybe done some damage." She smiled. "Being Loony Luna has its advantages."

Harry looked away, embarrassed. "Don't call yourself that…"

"Everyone else does," she replied pragmatically.

"Better than Ferret-features," Draco drawled, smirking.

Luna burst out laughing. "Maybe a little. But the thing is people expect me to do something daft, so they think if they head me off with a lesser danger I won't go and blow myself up."

"Hmm. Still doesn't give me any ideas on how to use 'Ferret-features'."

"Could be worse," Harry said moodily. "They expect me to merrily go out and slay Voldemort."

"Feeling sorry for yourself, are we, Potter?"

"Just because you'd rather Voldemort kills me so you can go and be his happy little henchman –"

Draco tilted back his head, sneering. "Don't presume to know what I'd rather, Potter. Besides, the Dark Lord isn't going to want a blind wizard." The sneer evaporated, replaced with a genuine smile that reached his blind eyes. "I guess there's a bright side to everything."

"That's what I was saying," Luna said. "Anyway, let's stop arguing before the horse comes up and bites someone. You know he doesn't like it."

"True," said Harry rubbing at his arm where the bruises were turning purple. "When did Dumbledore give you the gloves, Malfoy?"

"Oh, about an hour ago. I was testing them out around the stairs when Luna found me."

"They're excellent," Luna added enthusiastically. "I wonder if Professor Snape made another pair? There are so many photophobic creatures and if I had some gloves like those I'm sure I could find at least one a week, especially if my uncle takes me to Bolivia…" She trailed off, looking briefly worried, then shook her hair away from her face. "But that's ages away. Do you think you can find your way back to the horse without falling over again, Draco?"

"Only one way to find out…"

ooOOoo

Draco did fall over. Twice. But the hillside was tricky enough for Luna and Harry, and Draco didn't complain. Much. Harry was still trying to work out this new Draco Malfoy. There was a new determination to him, and a quiet one instead of the brash posturing he was used to seeing. The second time Draco fell over he tumbled head over heels into a thick stand of heather, and when Luna dug him out he was laughing.

"Quidditch should have such soft landings!"

Harry couldn't disagree with that, and grabbed Draco's other arm to help him up, grudgingly cheered by the Slytherin's good mood. "Are you coming to see my horse or not?"

"That's my horse, Potter," Draco shot back, still smiling.

"The horse belongs to the horse," Luna said unusually firmly.

"Don't you think it's time the horse had a name?"

ooOOoo

They settled on Simon. Draco wanted to call it Salazar and Harry wanted to call it anything other than Salazar (and secretly suspected Draco had only suggested it to wind him up). Luna suggested Simon.

"We shouldn't give him a guy's name," Draco protested. "How's it going to sound if you say you're worried because Simon isn't eating properly, or Simon ran away from you, or worst of all, if Simon bit you?"

"He's got a point," said Harry. "I don't want to have to go looking for him, calling out 'Yoo-hoo, Simon, where are you Simon?' I've got enough problems."

"Like what?" Draco sneered.

"Like, oh, I don't know… how about petty-minded Slytherin students selling me out to every media hack they come across, or monsters rampaging around Hogwarts, or the occasional passing minion of a Dark Lord or a Dark Lord in person if he can fit me into his busy schedule, or exams…"

"When you put it like that, yeah, I guess being blind isn't so bad," Draco snapped back.

"Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself –"

"Me?!? What about all this whining: Oh, poor little me… everything's out to get me… why isn't the world the way I think it should be?"

"Hello, Pot? This is Kettle."

Draco's pale cheeks had points of colour. "I'm not feeling sorry for myself," he hissed. "In case you hadn't noticed, I'm getting on with things. Unlike everyone else in this castle, who all seem to be living under a siege mentality… Ouch!"

"Ow!"

The horse – Simon – had had enough of the argument. When Draco and Harry stopped bickering long enough to rub their arms and glare at (or just to the left of) the newly-christened Simon, the horse simply snorted and went back to grazing.

After a moment Draco muttered, "We're the sentient beings. Should we be putting up with being chastised by a horse?"

"Are you going to argue the point with him?"

Luna sighed. "Being sentient doesn't mean we're automatically kings of the world."

"You sound like Granger and her daft 'free the house elf' campaign," Draco sneered.

"I do not! I'm nothing like her." Luna glared at Draco. "And what I meant was that we may think we're in charge of the horse, but I think Simon thinks he's in charge of us."

The trio considered this for a minute.

"Is that a bad thing for a horse?" Harry asked. "I mean, he did defend Draco this morning. Maybe if he thought Draco was in charge Simon wouldn't have stayed and fought."

"That's true," said Luna, chewing on her index finger as she eyed the horse. "But I've been thinking…"

"Merlin save us…"

"I think you've already used that one this week, Malfoy," Harry growled.

"So it's useful. Go on, Lovegood. What have you been thinking? Enlighten we poor mortals."

"All right. I've been thinking that as this is a plain, ordinary horse, and plain ordinary horses – especially stallions – might need some sort of hierarchy to stop them from getting aggressive (well, that's what some of the books I've been reading said and I don't think Simon is going to do anything more than give us a nip when he thinks we're behaving like foals), then maybe we should start training him."

"For what? The Grand National?"

"Well… He looks like he could be fast enough…"

"That was sarcasm, Lovegood," Draco grumbled. "And the Grand National is a top-notch horse race over jumps, Potter," he added. "That mental 'huh?' of yours was strong enough for me to hear. Muggles think they run it and several other systems, but legalised gambling is really a way for Gringotts to exchange Galleons for Muggle money."

"I didn't know that."

"No, that would have been because you were raised in a cupboard…"

"I was raised in a cupboard!"

"Like we're really expected to believe that!"

"Believe what you want. Luna, you were saying…?"

ooOOoo