Disclaimer: Characters and settings not mine. Plot (if such a nebulous ramble can be glorified as such) is. Space Bunnies reference is from a computer game (i.e. not mine, either, darn it).
Spoilers warning (because I haven't posted one in ages): this story is AU from the end of book 4 onwards, but this chapter contains spoilers for book 5.
ooOOoo
Chapter 55: Keeping Mum, Malfoy Style
Padfoot curled up between Harry and Draco, on the other side of Harry to Luna. It was quite snug, Harry decided. It was a shame he'd eaten so many marshmallows because the sugar wasn't going to let him get to sleep anytime soon, even if he could sleep through the potted thunder of Hagrid and Neville's snores from the other side of the hollow.
He sat up and poked the fire. A faint gleam alerted him to the fact he wasn't the only one awake: Draco's eyes were slitted half-closed as the Slytherin stared up at the stars.
"Y'awake?" Harry whispered.
"No."
Harry snorted quietly. There was something pale near the fire. "Hey, a marshmallow." He picked it up and blew off the dirt.
Draco's lip curled. "Are you going to eat it?"
"No. I'll see if Simon wants it. I felt kind of mean earlier, telling him to get lost after he carried me out of the Glasshouse."
"What happened there?"
"Um, I don't want to wake the others…" Harry untangled his legs from the blanket. He was careful not to wake Luna, who had one hand curled by her mouth. Her mouth moved; Harry leaned close just in time to hear her mutter: "Those Space Bunnies must die…" It was a little disturbing, but she looked so delightful he wanted nothing more in that moment than to kiss those half-parted lips, warm and soft as they looked in sleep, but another pale pair of eyes had opened and they weren't Luna's or Draco's: Snuffles was awake.
The Animagus regarded Harry sleepily.
Harry ignored him and crept up out of the hollow to where a darker lump against the first hint of morning suggested a horse might be asleep.
Draco followed him. Making even less sound and to Harry's great displeasure, so did Snuffles. Harry was a little wobbly on his feet still. He skidded on a rock and would have grazed his knees, but Draco grabbed his elbow. "Ta," Harry whispered.
Draco shrugged, but continued to steady him the rest of the way up.
Simon lifted his head as they approached, but, lazy beast that he was, didn't stand up. He accepted the marshmallow from Harry's hand trustingly, then rolled it around in his mouth and dribbled it out. Perhaps it was the strange texture, because Simon adored sweets.
"Well, it was dirty anyway," Harry said. "No, I don't have anything else. Eat the ruddy thing off the ground, you picky horse," he scolded in a whisper as Simon checked his pockets as best as he could without actually getting up. Simon sighed a great hollow sigh and stared off mournfully at the treetops of the Forest.
"So?" murmured Draco.
The two boys and dog settled themselves on the side of the horse away from the hollow. Simon didn't seem to mind them leaning against him, although he had his feet tucked on the opposite side which made it hard for him to turn his head around to properly investigate the dog that was so impertinently taking advantage of the horse's body heat. He settled for whuffling in Draco's hair, sending pale strands out like a dandelion clock before Draco hurriedly brushed his hair down again with one hand as he pushed the horse's nose away with the other.
Harry quickly ran through the nasty minutes he'd spent in Hufflepuff's Glasshouse, including the mistletoe he'd thrown away there and how Simon had seemed unaffected by the switches in gravity.
"Funny how he knew where to go," Draco remarked. He patted the horse's shoulder. "I wonder if it was the shoes?"
Harry frowned, thinking. "Probably. It was funny how he seemed to, I don't know, to sense where the centre of the world was, though. I wonder if all horses can do that."
"What, run around rescuing people trapped in splintered dimensions?"
"Er… yes."
"Huh. Hell of a research project finding out." Draco's teeth gleamed in the night.
Harry grinned, too. "I wonder how you'd get funding?"
"Hogwarts must have something. I hear the Ministry gives out grants for the weirdest projects. Luna should apply – she might be able to prove her Space Bunnies."
"I wouldn't be surprised. Although she doesn't seem to like rabbits much."
"It's the cute little twitching noses. Never trust something with a twitching nose."
Reminded of Wormtail, Harry couldn't disagree. But… "You made a cute ferret."
"That is never to be mentioned again."
"Fair enough. So… what were you saying before about the Vivicus Charm? I've never heard of it before."
"Not many people have. It's not practical. And… I'd rather not say anything more in front of a creature you've warned me is virtually a mobile listening device for Lupin."
"He won't report back."
"I don't want to chance it. It, um, involves people who aren't us."
"Death Eaters?"
"Don't look at me like that, Potter. Yeah, some. But not necessarily in a way that would make them your enemy."
"I don't want to surprise you or anything, but Death Eaters have been trying to kill me for a while now. So if this person is a Death Eater he's bound to be my enemy."
"Well, I guess you're right. I mean, Snape hated you and you hated him… that was pretty genuine. He was a Death Eater, so that must have made him ever such an obvious enemy. And I guess the way he spied on the Dark Lord and gave his life defending Hogwarts kind of made him your enemy, too…"
"All right, point taken. You're not saying there's another spy out there, are you?" Hope kindled for a moment.
"No. In fact I'm not saying anything until that cur of Lupin's is sent out of earshot."
"Snuffles, go on. Back to the fire. Go on, boy. Now, Snuffles." Harry pointed and glared until Snuffles slunk back down the slope, burly frame still radiating displeasure at the 'cur' comment. Harry watched until the dog curled up on the blanket next to Luna.
"That thing does a worse sulk than Simon," Draco remarked.
Harry nodded, deciding for the sake of continuing peace not to mention how irate Draco got whenever anyone referred to Simon as 'that thing'.
"Okay. What'd you want to talk about?"
"Well, first I want your wizard's oath that what I tell you isn't going to be passed on in any way, shape or form to anyone else."
"You've got it, providing it's not going to be used to harm me or anyone I care about."
"Very Slytherin of you. And that's fair enough. But let me add the proviso that should you wish to act in any way on this information, it will be in accordance with my wishes, otherwise it will be as if you had never come across this information."
Harry's head churned. "Again, fine, providing no harm to me or mine."
"Good. Because I only learned of the Vivicus Charm because it hurt someone I know, and I don't want you using the information against the people involved. Except the Dark Lord, of course, and anything you can do against him is fine by me."
He kept his voice very low.
"Sounds promising. So what do you know?"
"Not too much. Only that he – the Dark Lord – began trying out some spells seventeen and a half years ago. At some point a young woman was called in to assist. She got hit by the backlash of one of his spells… or so she thought. She found out later it had been a deliberate experiment done on her because she was six months pregnant and her husband had displeased the Dark Lord somehow. Don't ask how he'd pissed him off, because I don't know.
"Well, the Dark Lord was experimenting with the Vivicus Charm. It works by looping the biological imprint of the body back to the point of application of the charm. The mind keeps freewheeling in time, fortunately, otherwise you might as well be repeating your life over and over again. But the body stays young. It sounds like the ideal way of obtaining immortality except for a few nasty side-effects, which the Dark Lord was trying to unkink when he chose the pregnant woman for his experiment. He'd tried it on Muggles, I think, maybe even a Squib or two, but because of the difference in magical gradient the results were, er, messy to put it nicely. But with a Pureblood witch the charm worked like, well, like a charm. Apparently the experiment was a raging success… providing you weren't the mother or the baby, of course. It froze the development of the baby she was carrying for two whole months and probably would have kept it that way indefinitely. But of course the baby was too much use as a research subject for that to be allowed.
"The woman and her husband found out the Dark Lord wanted to use the baby for further experiments. So they took all their courage – and took a big chance, under the circumstances, given they didn't know how deep loyalties ran – and confided in a friend. Their luck held true, and the friend, instead of turning them into the Dark Lord as traitors which would have advanced his standing in the Death Eaters enormously, the friend agreed to help them counter the Vivicus. Damned brave of him, too, because they were all going against the Dark Lord's orders, and you know how You-Know-Who gets when anyone stands between him and immortality." Draco paused to give a meaningful stare at Harry's scar. "To make a complicated potions-based story short, she and her husband and the friend who countered the charm worked in great secrecy and developed a new potion… and all I know about it is that it's got some mistletoe involved somewhere. And that it worked. So the charm was broken and the baby resumed normal development and was born in the normal fashion as a normal, healthy infant, although the stress of extended pregnancy may have been the reason the woman was never able to have any other children. The Dark Lord decided that line of research had been a failure, thank Merlin. He went with another variation on the charm. The husband became busier with the political side of the Dark Lord's agenda, but I think the woman and the friend were still involved with the research –"
"You've got to be joking," Harry exploded with a whispered hiss. "How could she help the monster who'd treated her unborn child like a guinea pig? And how could Vo-" (he truncated the name at Draco's wince) "-oldie think she would ever be trustworthy after he'd done that to her?"
"He didn't know she found out she was used as the experiment. She never let on. Neither did her husband or their friend. And I guess the Dark Lord always thought she was fanatically loyal to him… he knew other members of her family, you see."
"Merlin…" Harry's mind whirled. It spun out a startling thought. "She… was she your mum? Were you the baby?"
Draco regarded him without expression. "There's a reason I'm an only child. I very nearly wasn't even that."
Harry sucked in a sharp breath. "I don't get it. I really don't get it. How can your parents support him after what he did?"
"Father is Machiavellian… and that's putting it politely. Mother rarely lets anyone see her true feelings. But I suspect she's always waited for an opening. Revenge served up cold and all… That's why you mustn't ever tell anyone how I know about the charm. Certain people might get suspicious. And I don't ever want anyone tracing back something this dangerous to my family, not when I could have kept my mouth shut."
"If I hadn't already sworn to keep it secret, I would now," Harry said sincerely, awed if slightly astounded by this confidence.
"Huh. Gryffindors."
"Mock us at your peril, Slytherin." Harry grinned, although he was trying hard to hide how appalled he was at this latest story of the adventures of Tom Riddle.
Draco snorted.
"So you were born two months late? That's… strange."
"I'll say. Glad I don't remember any of it. When Mother gets cross with me she tells me the story of how she and Father were going through an astrological stage and wanted an intellectual Gemini child. Unfortunately, what with the delay, they ended up with a flashy Leo."
Harry laughed softly. "Ouch. Like me. So when's your birthday?"
"July thirty-first."
"Oh. Double ouch. Just like me. And Neville."
There was enough moonlight to show pale eyebrows rising. "You're pulling my leg."
"Nope. No pulling of legs going on. It's been too strange a day for shenanigans like leg-pulling."
"Or larrikins."
"Or lollygagging."
They chuckled. It was a little forced, as if both of them needed to lighten the atmosphere after the horrible things Draco had told. Then Harry said, "What in Merlin's name does lollygagging mean?"
"I don't really know. Er… a larrikin is a foolish person, isn't it?"
Harry stretched out his legs. "That'd be us," he said comfortably. "You know, I think there was something fishy about that mist that came out of the cauldron."
"Not fishy. Mistletoe-y. Mild intoxicant. Kind of. I never would have told you all that stuff about my birthday otherwise."
"I won't tell anyone if that's what you're worried about."
"I know. But it's still, I don't know, kind of embarrassing."
"If you say so." Harry rested an arm back on Simon. Simon was real and good and nothing to do with Voldemort or vile experiments or potions. His fingers drummed on the horse's rump as he considered something. Simon twitched his tail in his sleep. "The friend. That was Snape, wasn't it."
"Yeah. That's how come I know there's a potion to counter the Vivicus. I just don't know how you make it."
"Knowing there's something is a start. Although I'd like to be sure Voldie is really using the charm before I try chucking potions at him."
"You'd feel a complete pillock standing there with him dripping wet and completely failing to melt."
"I don't think I'd be standing there long in that case," Harry said. "There would be a definite and immediate breaking of sound barriers as I leg it over the horizon. And how come it's suddenly me who's throwing potions at him? Why not you?"
"Because I'm Slytherin and cunning, which means letting the idiotic Gryffindor gallop around shouting 'huzzah!' as he tries to be a hero while running a ninety-nine percent chance of getting bumped off," Draco stated, as if such facts should be obvious to Harry.
"Thanks. That's very kind."
"I have long been famed for my kind nature."
"That's what your mother wants you to think."
"She loves me." Draco smiled sweetly.
"You have a very strange family."
"And you've only met three members of it. Not counting Sirius Black and Aunt Bella, of course… they're the completely mental branches I try not to think of."
"There're more Malfoys? Merlin help us… Hang on – your mum doesn't know how the potion and charm work, does she?"
"She's our best hope on that score now we don't have Snape. We could try asking Flitwick, but…"
"I think he's getting suspicious of our questions." Harry paused. "You don't think you mum'd seriously go up against Voldie, do you? I mean, your dad's his biggest supporter. Your mum wouldn't disobey her husband, would she? He's –"
"Don't tell me what my father is. Even if it is true." Draco sighed heavily. "As for Mother, I got a letter from her. She never said as much, but there are hints she's displeased. She kept calling Father 'Lucius'. She only calls him that to his face. Otherwise it's 'my husband' to her friends or 'your father' to me. I think Father did something beyond the pale…"
"Kill Snape?"
"That'd be one thing. Mother wouldn't have liked that."
"They weren't…?" Harry hadn't got any hints of a romantic attachment between Severus and Narcissa, but people change over the years…
Draco blinked and then frowned in mild horror. "No. I really couldn't see that one happening. But they did respect each other and Mother wouldn't have forgotten him countering the Vivicus charm. In effect it saved my life as well as hers… or gave me one; let me know when the verdict is in on a definite time for a person to begin being, um, a person." He scratched his nose, frowning as if annoyed at his inability to find the right words. Well, Harry was exhausted, too. "Mother wouldn't have forgotten a debt like that – not one which came from allowing the existence of her only child."
"Shame your dad didn't remember that before he…" Harry trailed off. "Sorry."
Draco shrugged, although it was obvious Harry had stung him, however unintentionally. "Yeah. Well. So you can see why you can't say anything to anyone… I probably shouldn't have, but I needed you to see how I might have some insight into the Vivicus. It doesn't mean you have free rein to go blabbing to your chums the details. If any of this gets back to the Dark Lord my parents will be dead – and he'll be so paranoid after Snape betrayed him he won't need more than a sniff of a hint of the chance of someone possibly considering betrayal for that someone to end up on the business end of his wand."
Harry couldn't in all honesty say he minded if it was Lucius, especially after he'd slipped Tom Riddle's haunted diary to Ginny… and corrupted Severus, let's not forget that, he reminded himself… but he hadn't disliked Narcissa from the little he'd known of her. He didn't like her, of course, especially after meeting the snooty adult version at the World Quidditch Cup, but it certainly didn't give him any right to put her life at risk. Besides, the whole point was moot. "Your parents are safe from anyone finding out. Blockade, remember?" He sighed. "Even if your mum knows the key to the charm and the potion to counter it, we can hardly owl her for the recipe."
Draco scowled at his hands, which were locked around his knees. Harry had often caught him staring at his hands when pondering deeply on the nature of reality... or possibly the nature of his cuticles. "I know. I hope I don't have to ride through that barrier again…"
"It was bad?"
Draco cut a scathing, sideways glance at him. "No. It wasn't bad. It was fucking appalling."
"Hmm." Well, we don't have to solve all the problems tonight."
"No, we're taking the night off from striving for world peace, remember?"
"Oh, that's right." Harry smiled. He leaned back against Simon and stared up at the stars until the memory of a prophecy evaporating into mist intruded into his thoughts… he skipped past it, trying not to think how gullible he'd been, being lured into the Ministry by the promise of seeing his father's ghost… a lie planted in his mind by Voldemort, who had managed to slip into Harry's mind through his scar. Sirius had nearly died when he came to save Harry. The Occlumency lessons with Snape should have stopped Voldemort's access, but things had boiled over between Snape and Harry, culminating with Snape catching Harry about to look into his Pensieve, and…
Things would have been different if Severus rather than Snape had been the teacher. Or maybe if Harry's curiosity hadn't taken over his good sense yet again. He'd found out later from Hermione that looking into someone else's Pensieve was about as bad as manners got. But if so, why hadn't Dumbledore told him when he pulled Harry out of his in fourth year?
In retrospect, Harry knew he should have gone back and apologised, but he'd been too angry with Snape for shouting at him. Again. The memory of Snape hurling a jar of cockroaches at him hadn't been great motivation either.
Snape probably wouldn't have listened, and there were loads of jars of nastier things than cockroaches around. Mind you, if he'd brained Harry with one of those, maybe Harry would have been unconscious in the Infirmary when Voldemort threw all those images of his father's ghost, trapped and suffering in a small glass sphere, out for Harry to see. Maybe then he wouldn't have seen them and fallen for them.
It was a funny old world. Things could have been so different if only he'd been conked by a jar of cockroaches. He'd occasionally wondered what Snape had hidden in his Pensieve…
If he'd learned Occlumency, Harry wouldn't have fallen for the Voldemort's tricks and he wouldn't have gone to the Ministry of Magic in the middle of the night. But he had. And there, instead of finding his father, he'd found a broken glass sphere with a recording of Trelawney spouting some nonsense about defying the Dark Lord. Harry had had nightmares for months afterwards, his mind replaying the horror of seeing Sirius get hit by a curse from Bellatrix LeStrange and stagger backwards through a moving curtain… but it wasn't the first time being an Animagus had saved Sirius' life: he'd not been able to explain it to Harry beyond it being an instinctive move that had him change from a wizard with terrible injuries to a shaggy black dog with terrible injuries that was spat back out by the curtain and rolled unconscious behind the body of a Death Eater. Quick action by Moody and Tonks had got him out of the way and safely back to Grimmauld Place. Remus, Molly Weasley and Tonks had nursed Sirius back to health, although it had taken some time for his magic to regenerate enough to allow him to turn back into a man.
Harry was glad Voldemort hadn't known about Sirius' Animagus form. Although why Wormtail hadn't mentioned it to his master, he didn't know. Harry made a mental note that when the Blockade ended he would force Sirius to be more cautious; it was likely Voldemort knew about Sirius being an Animagus by now – the sight of a large black dog at the MoM that night must have been discussed at Death Eater meetings – or tea parties or down at the local Death Eater pub or whatever it was Death Eaters did to socialise – by now. Pettigrew hadn't been there that night; he was the only one who might have made the connection between a large black dog and Sirius Black in time to finish off what Bellatrix had started. In fact things might have been very different right from the beginning of fifth year if Sirius had accompanied them to King's Cross station the day Harry went back to Hogwarts instead of staying at home where it was safe – oh, he'd wanted to go to the station, of course, but when Harry had pointed out how much more valuable Sirius was to him long term rather than as a dog barking farewell on a platform, Sirius had seen the sense of it (although he'd definitely not been happy about it). Harry wouldn't have put it past Draco, whom Harry had seen on the platform, to put two and two together and get an Animagus who was important to one Harry Potter, and Draco would have passed that on to his father, who would have passed it on to Voldemort, who would have found Sirius somehow and used him to bait a trap so Harry gave him the prophecy... But he hadn't.
Funny old world.
And why was Harry worrying about all that now? It wasn't as if any of the maybes had ever happened. Sirius was alive and Voldemort hadn't seen the prophecy – Harry and Dumbledore were the only ones who knew the full version.
But the memory of that prophecy evaporating before his eyes kept intruding. If Harry had learned Occlumency or been unconscious in the Infirmary and not been tricked into going to the MoM, he never would have heard the prophecy. Harry had; Voldemort hadn't. So maybe things had worked out in his favour after all. Maybe the universe hated Voldemort. That was a cheerful thought. Maybe something about the universe wanted Harry to hear the prophecy and learn about how his birthday and his defiant parents had sent him hurtling down this tunnel of fate… him, Harry Potter, and not Neville Longbottom, also born on the same day.
And now it turned out Draco shared the birthday, too. What a strange coincidence.
"I don't suppose your parents defied him three times or anything?"
"You've got to be joking. They wouldn't dare. Twice, maybe," Draco added, after considering for a moment. "Maybe that was what got Father off-side with him. And countering the Vivicus Charm was definitely against his wishes, although no-one was supposed to know what his wishes were, of course – he could hardly tell Mother she was his guinea pig."
"Hmm. I don't suppose he ever… oh, I don't know… marked you as an equal in any way?"
"What?"
"Just asking."
Draco stared at him. He blinked. "Actually… after I was born he was trying to be all jolly. Well, as jolly as someone can be when they have glowing red eyes, although apparently he could be quite charismatic when he was younger. Pre-scales. So he picked me up – I think I was about a week old – and jounced me up and down, and said in his attempt-to-be-jolly-Uncle-Dark-Lord way, 'Mark this one; he's going to be trouble'."
"Oh." It didn't sound like much. Certainly not enough to let Harry off the hook, prophecy-wise.
"Then I threw up on him."
"Huh?"
"Don't laugh – apparently I had a bit of trouble holding down my food when I was very young. I grew out of it. Millions of babies have that. In my case, it resulted in projectile vomiting."
"You threw up on the Dark Lord?"
"All over his face. I was a week old. It was hardly premeditated. He shouldn't have been throwing me up and down after I'd just eaten. Needless to say, he didn't want to be my godfather after that."
"Oh, Merlin… What an awful thought."
"Yeah. Must have been bad enough for you, having my deranged second cousin assigned to assist your moral development – look what I nearly got."
"So who is your godfather?" Harry was half expecting to hear Draco say Snape, but was a little disappointed.
"I don't have one. It got too political. So I guess I'm responsible for my own moral welfare." He smirked at his hands, as if they had just done something clever.
Strange Malfoy person from a strange Malfoy family…
Harry considered matters for a time, weighing up scars and prophecies and the nature of equals.
"It sounds like you marked him as an equal," he said eventually. "Good shot."
ooOOoo