Note: My Tuesdays are going to become very busy, so I'm going to update the fic on Sundays from now on.

WARNINGS for this chapter: torture in a flashback.

Chapter 30: The 31st of March

Benveniste explained to Slughorn that his spare 'laboratory' was urgently needed for an advanced project in applied potions for retrospective divination that was bound to bring about a major breakthrough in incorporeal necromancy, and without further ado, Harry and Draco were handed the keys for a storage room adjacent to the potions classroom. The room turned out to be spacious after they vanished a heap of squashed and rusty cauldrons, mildewed scraps of dragon hide, and overstuffed Muggle plastic bags with the sign for 'biological hazard'. Under the layers of rubbish, they found five perfectly functional burners, a generous selection of vials and bottles of different sizes, and a large sink, which, Harry guessed, was what qualified the dump as a laboratory.

Draco brought Snape's portrait down from North Tower and hung it up where bland daylight seeping through a small dusty window under the ceiling would reach him for an hour around noon. But no constructive exchange with the late Potions Master was possible until Draco revealed their true identity.

"Draco?" Snape's face stretched lengthwise and froze. "You look terrible."

"I know," Draco said.

"Potter?"

And all the venom that had gone to the wrong address since the Sunday tea at Benveniste's flew back at Harry like a bludger that had missed its target. Harry tried to remind himself that this was the brave man who had lied to Voldemort and stayed true to Dumbledore all these years, who had saved his life more than once, who had loved his mother. But Ewen's artistic interpretation of Snape's character made no space for these qualities.

When Draco filled Snape in on the details of their present condition and how it had come about, on his standing with the authorities and the fate of his parents, and on the highlights of the last blows of the war, Snape became, if anything, even more articulate in his critique.

"I won't deny that I am satisfied with the outcome of the conflict, in which you, Mr Potter, starred so glamorously. But please beware of falling victim to the illusion that you have earned your place in history by anything but luck. I am concerned, now more than ever, about the effect this turn of events will have on your immature character."

Harry wondered if his attempts to restore this man's reputation had been misguided.

"Nothing is so detrimental to professionalism," Snape continued, "nothing stands more in the way of perfection, than self-congratulatory glee. I do hope that the exquisite joke that piece of jewellery played on the two of you will finally teach you humility. Yes, that also concerns you, Mr Malfoy, but, of course, Mr Potter is in much more dire need of that lesson."

A truce was established when they divided the labour and the room. At Snape's insistence, Draco drew a line on the floor that separated it in two, and as long as they kept to their dominions, bickering stayed at bearably low levels.

Draco was assigned to brew the Polyjuice and the Spectrogenium—that was the name of the potion for regrowing eyes. Harry had to brew the rest. At first that only meant a batch of Invigoration Draught, but Benveniste kept adding items to the wish list. On the third day, she came down to the lab with a recipe that required tons of henbane, and tons of henbane took a good deal of Harry's half of the room. Later the same day, she added something called Screening Solution. Of that they needed dozens of gallons, and the rest of Harry's space was jammed with rows and rows of empty jerrycans, waiting to be filled.

Snape found his improved version of the recipe for regrowing eyes, with Draco's help, in—Harry's mouth went dry when he saw it—the Half-blood Prince's copy of Advanced Potion-Making.

"Hey, that's my—!" Harry broke off. "How did you get it?"

"Never mind how I got it. You still owe me an apology for the Sectumsempra, and I gladly take this book as rightful compensation. It's mine now."

Snape cleared his throat.

"How peculiar! I cannot remember mentioning it in my will, and I wonder what makes either of you think that it is anything but mine."

And so on, and so forth.


Meanwhile, the days were growing longer, but the amounts of homework were growing faster than the days, although the usual pre-exam peak was still far ahead. When Ewen joined him in the library, the end race seemed more bearable, but most of the time Harry had to study alone. When he walked past Ron and Hermione poring over their Charms essay, he almost gravitated towards them like an asteroid brought off track by a giant star, but restrained himself just in time. He couldn't bear another minute of pretending to be Malfoy with them, but if he were to confess now, he could scrap the Charms essay. It was due tomorrow nine o'clock, and he could hardly spare three hours explaining to Ron and Hermione why he hadn't told them earlier.

They didn't notice him, as he stole past on his way to the Transfiguration section, but his favourite spot by the window was taken by a group of Ravenclaw girls, and he meandered for a while until he found a small vacant table in a corner between the periodicals.

He settled with his books and his barely started draft, when he heard soft giggles above his head.

"Pretty Myrtie flirty flirty!" said a familiar voice in a strangely unfamiliar way.

Harry looked up and saw Peeves lying on the top shelf with a pile of issues of the Practical Potioneer under his head. Instinctively, Harry shoved his essay under the Standard Book of Spells, but it seemed that Peeves had no destruction in mind. His eyes were turned to the transparent shape floating above him. Myrtle circled slowly, and judging by Peeves' unrelenting attention, gave him an occasional glimpse under her skirt.

Harry pulled his essay back from its hiding place and opened the bookmarked page of Miranda Goshawk's classic. Just as he found the definition of substantive charms that he was going to cite, the Practical Potioneers came down like a waterfall and formed a small hill next to his table. Peeves had vacated the shelf and soared next to Myrtle.

"You're not going to laugh behind my back this time, Peevesy!" Myrtle drawled teasingly and turned her back to him. "What are you going to do? Fifty points if it goes through—"

Harry pressed his ears shut and tried to concentrate on substantive charms. But as soon as he went for his quill, his right ear went open.

"Naughty Myrtie talking dirty!" Peeves cooed.

This was not going to work.

"Hey, up there! I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm trying to study here," Harry said, and covered his essay protectively with his elbows, just in case. "Do you mind— er... I'm sure the girls' bathroom on the second floor is empty."

Two pairs of glassy eyes looked through him, as if he too had turned transparent. Myrtle sighed.

"Come, Peevesy. Get me moaning." And she floated down the aisle. Peeves followed peacefully, murmuring something. Myrtle giggled and they disappeared behind a wall of books.

Peeves tamed! By Myrtle of all people! Harry listened to the silence that reigned after their departure. With a flick of his wand he sent the potioneering journals back to the shelf, and finally turned to his essay. He copied the definition onto his parchment and was about to close the quote, when a muffled shriek somewhere behind rows of bookshelves broke the quiet again. There was a rumble of something heavy against the floor, and the distant voice of Peeves:

"Naughty hottie on the potty?"

For a few seconds there was silence, but then Peeves' voice sounded again, no longer surprised, but much more like his usual self, chanting louder and louder all over the library:

"Naughty hottie on the potty! Naughty hottie on the potty! Naughty hottie on the potty!"

Harry tried to ignore it, but there was something in the sound of the last word that made him pause. He removed his hands from his ears. There was an agitated whisper, and students roaming around, looking for the source of the trouble. Professor Sprout marched resolutely past. Another minute or two went by, and steps, whispers, and occasional giggles all seemed to have gathered in one place, somewhere down the aisle to Harry's right.

"Naughty hottie on the potty!" Peeves shouted right behind his back, made a pirouette above the table, slipped Harry's essay from under his hand, and flew in the direction of the commotion, cackling and waving with the parchment.

"Damn it!" Harry strode after him. "Give it back now!"

The crowd that had gathered at the entrance to the Restricted Section parted before him. Their faces glowed with anticipation of great amusement.

In the middle of the circle stood Ewen and Draco, flushed and dishevelled, Madam Pince behind their backs, her wand drawn. They were facing their Heads of House. Professor Sprout was furious, and Benveniste not smiling. Sprout was saying something about 'place and time', Ewen was nodding guiltily, and Draco was staring with hope at Benveniste. The idiots had got caught after all.

When they left, Ewen escorted by Sprout, and Draco, the lucky git, flanked by Ron and Hermione after another round of telling off by Benveniste, all eyes turned to Harry. A parchment airplane hit him on the forehead and fell before his feet. The definition of substantive charms was scrawled across its wings.


For the next two days Harry was goggled and giggled at wherever he went.

"Five Galleons on Potter!"

Harry caught sight of Zacharias Smith out of the corner of his eye, bowing over a scroll, on which Dane Sommers was making notes. As Harry gathered in the course of the morning, people were making bets on who would win in the duel. Because Malfoy and Potter were certainly going to duel. But twenty-four hours went by, and the public started to realise that no duel was forthcoming.

"What?" Vaisey lay with his feet up on one arm of a loveseat and his head on the other. "No one wants to be your second?"

Harry was about to walk past and go to the dormitory without a comment, but heard Astoria's voice behind him.

"I'll be his second, if necessary."

Harry stopped. Vaisey whistled suggestively.

"Greengrass! Brave! You realise though that you're barking up the wrong tree?"

"Shut up, Vaisey," Gibbon said, "or I'll be your last."

The death suckers swarming around the fireplace roared with laughter. Sabrin tensed up, and her hand slid down to her wand.

"Hey, ignore them, they're not worth it," Harry said. There was a no-nonsense menace in Sabrin's face, but other than on her broomstick, she was just a tiny second-year. She was punching above her weight.

"I'm so sorry, Draco," Astoria said when they got out of earshot, "You must be feeling like shit, and they—"

"Astoria," she had no idea how he was feeling, "I'm fine, really. And it's absolutely no one's business."

"No, sorry, of course not." She blushed. "I'm proud of you that you're not getting into ridiculous fights!"

"No, no ridiculous fights for me." Harry patted her shoulder. "But thanks for the offer."

"He deserves a proper fuck-you though," Sabrin said gloomily. "Vaisey I mean." She contemplated. "Potter too."

Yes, Potter deserved exactly that, but not why Sabrin thought he did. The longer he was hiding, the longer he was playing along with this pathetic roleplay, the less sense it made. At first, being Malfoy, he enjoyed staying out of the crowd, but Ewen put an end to his solitude, not that Harry complained. Then, being Malfoy, he could temporarily make peace with the fact that he was shagging Malfoy's lover (and accomplice). But now everyone knew that he was shagging Malfoy's lover, and he was forced to deal with the implications. There wasn't even a practical reason left to keep the secret, let alone a moral one. Now, being Malfoy was a lie and nothing else.

Astoria and Sabrin were shooting daggers at the idiots by the fireplace. Wait a second! Had he made new friends? Oh god, why did life have to be so complicated?! Harry turned and marched to the dormitory. Not now. Not yet.


After forty-eight hours, everyone was packing for the Easter holidays, and after seventy-two, the castle was empty, except for a handful of students whose whole families had been killed in the war, and another few whose whole families were in Azkaban. In a broad sense, Harry belonged to the first group and Draco to the second, but unlike the rest of them, they did not avoid each other. On the contrary, they shared their meals peacefully in the Great Hall, to everyone's bewilderment.

"Last time I saw you together you were trying to murder each other," Myrtle said, with a nostalgic note in her voice. She was sitting on the table next to Harry's glass of pumpkin juice, with her feet on the bench.

"You haven't been paying attention recently," Draco said.

"You weren't exactly friends with Peeves either, and now you're—" Harry decided not to finish the sentence. "Didn't he use to bother you?"

"Ah! Boys grow up," Myrtle said, like she was speaking from fifty years' experience. "He had to learn to express his feelings for me in a more elegant manner."

"Oh, he did? Great!"

"But Myrtle," Draco put down his spoon and left his soft-boiled egg unattended, "if Peeves is so grown up as you say, was it necessary to shout about us all over the school?"

"You were doing it behind our bookshelf. No wonder Peevesy got a bit territorial."

"What d'you mean 'your bookshelf'?"

"Oh. We always have sex there. That's our spot."

"And how were we supposed to know? It didn't say—"

"Wait," Harry said. "You and Peeves have sex?"

"Of course! That's part of being in an adult relationship!" She looked down at him, like he was a hopeless kid.

"But, Myrtle, no offence, okay? Out of sheer curiosity, how do you have sex without— I mean, you don't have—"

Oh no, this was going very wrong.

"What?" Myrtle dived on him and shrieked into his face. "What is it that Myrtle doesn't have? Say it! No mouth?! No clitoris?! No vagina?! Poor Myrtle cannot have sex, because she doesn't have the equipment!" She puffed out a gust of cold air and turned over Draco's egg. Harry steadied his pumpkin juice just in time.

"I said no offence..." he put in meekly and glanced around. "Do you have to shout again?" The orphans of the war, who sat huddled together at the Gryffindor table, were staring.

"You boys are all fixated on your penises," Myrtle hissed down at him with catastrophic disdain. "You're nothing without them!"

She rose above the table and gave her superiority a spatial expression.

"But Peeves is no boy. Peeves is a man of imagination! You don't need a body, if you have imagination!"


Harry didn't dare guess what myths about Malfoy and Potter were being concocted after all the things shouted in the past few days. Luckily, it didn't occur to anyone to bother them in their underground lab, and when he took a break from brewing, Harry sometimes went there to read, lest he hurt Peeves's territorial feelings regarding the library.

Draco was banned from the library altogether, and spent all his time in the dungeon. When the holidays started, Draco began working on the Spectrogenium. Every now and then, he called Harry to come over to his side of the room, sat in a chair, and threw his head back and his eyes open in front of him.

"How is it supposed to feel?" Harry asked, squeezing the potion out of the pipette carefully into one eye, and then into the other.

Malfoy pressed his eyes shut.

"Not like I've cut a bucket of onions."

He staggered blindly to the sink, and the first load of Spectrogenium went down with a loud glug.

Draco started all over again, and an hour later, the transparent brew was simmering in his cauldron. Snape did not take his eyes off him.

"Hold it slanted, at eighty-five degrees."

Draco corrected the angle of his spoon and continued stirring.

"That's eighty-three."

Draco raised the tip without a word. His hand twitched.

"More smoothly."

Draco was drawing perfect circles in the sparkling liquid.

"You'd think you're trying to catch a snitch in your cauldron," Snape said blankly. "More slowly."

Draco slowed down. His lips were moving voicelessly.

"Potter! Your Invigoration Draught will turn to methamphetamine, if you don't stop staring at Mr Malfoy and turn the heat down."

"Why is it important to keep it slanted?" Harry asked.

"For you, Mr Potter, it's important to—"

"Shit! I lost count." Draco peered into his cauldron, swore under his breath, and splashed its contents into the sink with a groan. "Can you please shut up when I'm counting?"

"Mind your language, Draco."

"I think what Malfoy is trying to say is 'Professor, why don't you go for a stroll around the castle? Professor Black in the Headmistress's office will be overjoyed to see you.'"

Draco rolled his eyes. Snape's lips curled sourly.

"Did it ever occur to you, Mr Potter, that I would have long left this celebration of dilettantism, if your so-called artist had bothered to connect my neck to my torso?" Snape's body paced up and down in the background for demonstration, but his head stayed hanging in the air. "Mr Malfoy has kindly asked for my assistance. If it is no longer needed, feel free to dispose of this misfortune in oil in whichever way you deem most appropriate. I thought Mr Filch had reasonable plans for it."

Draco had rinsed the cauldron, threw a handful of scarlet jequirity beans into his mortar and started crushing them like they had done him some deep personal wrong. Snape watched him intently, but found no fault in his technique, and started critiquing his social attitudes.

"After Crabbe and Goyle, I'm hardly surprised by your choice of friends, Draco. But your tendency to surround yourself with individuals inferior to you in talent and accomplishment is worrying. A less than mediocre portraitist who—"

"Sir!"

Snape flinched.

"If you mean Ewen Arling," Draco said with an icy face and the heavy stone pestle in his hand, "he is not inferior, he is not a friend, and it's not a choice!"

Snape blinked silently as the penny dropped.

"Does Lucius know?"

"Who cares about Lucius?" Harry could not stay silent. "Lucius is locked up for good."

Snape didn't deem that worthy of a reply. He glanced left and right between the two of them. No doubt, he had caught a glimpse of Harry and Ewen kissing, while he was still hanging in North Tower. Now it wasn't difficult to puzzle together the rest. "I thought poor judgement was the only thing you two had in common. I didn't realise you shared so much more."

"Sharing takes maturity," Harry blurted out, and regretted it immediately. Snape didn't shut up about maturity for the rest of the evening.


Something had changed the moment Snape had brought up Lucius. Draco had gone silent and way too concentrated on portioning the ingredients. Harry wouldn't have given it much thought, if the same hadn't happened the next day when he got into another fight with Snape about the post-war Kingsley-slyle justice. But then he noticed that two of the five burners they had found were gone, and Draco was absent from the Marauders' Map for three evenings in a row. All Harry's alarms went off at once. Last time he had observed this pattern was when Draco was repairing the Vanishing Cabinet.

It was already half past ten. The parchment looked cold and pale in the light of the round white moon which hung low over the horizon and stared straight into the window of the boys' bathroom. Harry looked at the outline of the seventh floor corridor. Suddenly, a dot with the name Draco Malfoy materialised at the very spot Harry had expected it and started moving towards the Grand Staircase.

Harry swung the cloak over himself and was about to follow Malfoy in his footsteps, when the door opened and Filch's crooked nose shone orange in the light of a candle. Mrs Norris slipped between his legs and made a round of the cubicles until she stopped at the washing basin, sniffing, not three feet from where Harry was hiding under his cloak. He froze.

"Come on, darling, there's no one there," Filch said. "And even if there was..." He yawned.

Mrs Norris kept sniffing and gave a vigorous meow.

"They have a holiday, we have a holiday, too. Let them first give us a pay rise if they want us working during the holidays."

Mrs Norris's yellow eyes glinted ominously, she meowed again, but the pay rise argument made an impression. She trotted solemnly across the bathroom and Filch's shuffle faded slowly behind the closing door.

When Harry's eyes readjusted to the moonlight, Draco had disappeared again. He was not in the Gryffindor tower, or on his way there, he was not in their potions lab or anywhere close, the only moving dots Harry could see were those of Filch and Mrs Norris and they were still too close to come out of his hiding place. Harry started scanning the grounds, and finally there he was! Draco's dot trembled at the back of greenhouse four. Damn, what was in greenhouse four?

Before Harry could conjure a vision of the greenhouse in his mind, Draco's dot started towards the exit. It moved steadily back to the Castle, through the front door, to the Entrance Hall, as if he was coming back from a Herbology class on a nothing-to-write-home-about school day. Minutes later, he was in the dungeons, in their potions brewery. Harry closed the map and headed downstairs.

He could hear each and every one of his own steps in the silence of the dungeon, no matter how hard he tried. He removed Draco's shoes halfway through the dark corridor, but even his socks were no match for the paws of Mrs Norris.

Two triangles of yellow light were spread on the floor, two doors stood ajar. Harry heard the rumble of empty cauldrons coming from the potions classroom and peeped inside. Draco was rummaging in the brewing supplies, examining and discarding one cauldron after the other.

Harry slipped through the door, when Draco got hold of a small silver cauldron and was giving it a thorough examination. He shoved the rest of them back into the cupboard and headed for the door but stopped suddenly, listening.

"Potter?"

Harry clutched the fabric of his cloak and tried not to breathe.

"Spying on me again?" Draco peered into the corridor. "Why is there a pair of shoes standing there?"

Shit! He should have vanished them.

"Now, come on, Potter, this is ridiculous! If you want to know something about me, why don't you just ask?"

"What are you doing here in the middle of the night?" Harry said, pulling down his cloak.

"What are you doing here in the middle of the night, Potter?"

"Spying on you, obviously. Why did you go to the Greenhouses?"

"To pick fluxweed for the Polyjuice. It's a full moon."

"Oh."

Malfoy wasn't lying and Harry felt like an idiot.

"Where are you taking this cauldron?"

"Next door."

"Bullshit. Polyjuice is best in copper, and Spectrogenium in gold, that's what you told me yesterday," Harry said. "You're taking this cauldron to the Room of Requirement, am I right? What are you doing there?"

Draco raised his chin.

"Masturbating."

Sure. Harry knew this tactic very well by now, but he was no longer as easily unsettled by explicit stuff.

"Okay. And how, please educate me, how do you masturbate with a cauldron?"

Draco smirked. "As Myrtle said, use your imagination!"

"Right. And what about the burners? We had five burners, now we have three?"

"Do you miss the burners? I didn't know you were a multitasker. Never seen you brew on more than one burner at a time." Malfoy had been friendly enough to leave him one to work with.

"Well, I've never seen anyone masturbate with two burners at a time. And I must admit, all my imagination is able to come up with in that department is highly destructive to bodily tissue."

Draco chuckled silently, walked out of the classroom without a word, and entered the lab. Harry followed, talking to his back.

"You know what I think? It's all much simpler. You're using those burners, and those cauldrons for their intended purpose, namely to make potions. And I don't care if you also draw sexual pleasure from it, but I do care if this has something to do with your father."

"My father?!" Draco turned around abruptly. A faint sparkle of alarm flashed behind the mask of anger. "What in Merlin's name can it have to do with my father?"

"I don't know. But your father, and your mother, are in Azkaban. And you want them out. Are you trying to get them out?"

"Potter, what rot are you talking! My mother is getting out in two and a half years' time anyway, or sooner, if that fake witness is worth anything. And my father, well..." Draco's eyes glinted coldly. "Am I not better off without him? I'm the de facto lord of the Manor!"

Harry remembered vividly that the Malfoy house-elves were of a different opinion, but that was not the point. "He's your father, you love him."

"Love!" Draco scoffed.

"You don't wish him to suffer a sudden Dementor attack any more than your mother."

"So what then?" Draco crossed his arms. "If I'm brewing a potion to keep Dementors out of his system, there is no crime in that!"

"There is no potion to keep Dementors out of your system!"

"What do you know about potions?"

Harry felt like an idiot again, but he clenched his jaw and tried not to look the way he felt. His instincts were screaming at him that Malfoy was up to something, and they had been right about that before. That he was hiding in the Room of Requirement to brew an innocent anti-Dementor draught—Harry would never buy that.

"Malfoy! You are on probation. If you're caught doing something illegal, there will be no trial. You'll go to Azkaban straight away. And then, all the work to keep you out of it last summer, was it all for nothing?"

"Oh, please don't play the saviour card on me again. You just had to answer a couple of questions, Knox did all the work."

"Does his work count less then?"

Draco started measuring the fluxweed.

"He got you out of a life sentence, I'm still wondering how!"

Draco pressed his lips.

"By the way, what happened to your Unforgivable Curses? How come they didn't charge you for the Imperius on Rosmerta?"

"Oh, that one I owe entirely to you!"

"Me?"

Draco left the fluxweed in peace, and grinned. "When they arrested me, they peeled my wand. That is, your wand— I mean, my ex-wand. You won't believe what they found. All those Imperiuses, and Cruciatuses... And of course, they wanted to hang them all on me."

"So?"

"It was not difficult to prove that some of those Imperiuses and Cruciatuses happened after my wand decided to make off with you."

It took a second for the message to sink in.

"So Knox negotiated a beautiful plea bargain," Draco continued. "They forget about the Unforgivables that happened before the thirty-first of March last year, and we forget about the Unforgivables that happened after."

The thirty-first of March. Harry tried to remember. After he had vented about it on Potterwatch, the war turned into a noisy blur. His mind took it somewhere to a safe place, like a dangerous toy away from a toddler. But now Draco was peering into his eyes, and this reminded him of— Harry knew what happened on the 31st of March.

He lowered himself onto an empty jerrycan.

Draco sat on a full one beside him. "Who did you actually cruciate?"

"Carrow. Amycus," Harry said.

"Good choice."

"You?"

"Rowle, Dolohov, Goyle, Greyback..."

Harry regretted he had asked.

"Yaxley... Various people. One time," Draco swallowed, "I got to— I had to do it to Lucius Malfoy."

"Bloody hell."

Draco stared at Harry's socks.

"On the bright side, we didn't cruciate anyone but filthy Death Eaters, did we?" He gave Harry a nudge on the shoulder. "You know what Rowle told me?" A strange smile played on Draco's lips. "He actually preferred my Cruciatus over Bellatrix's. Because, for extra fun, she always made him shit his pants, and I didn't."

Harry raised his eyes from the jerrycan Draco was sitting on to his face. Draco was not that silent broken man on the verge of collapse anymore. His cheek had returned, but it was mixed with something else Harry could not understand. It had been a year since that time at the Malfoy Manor, it had been months since they had been forced into this impossible arrangement with swapped bodies, but Harry felt that he had not come a step closer to understanding why.

"Why?" he said.

"Hm?"

"Why didn't you tell her, Bellatrix, that it was me?"

"Why?" Draco said.

"It's the thirty-first of March. It's been a year—"

"Oh yeah. We could raise a glass to it. Let's see if Slughorn has some suitable poison for the occasion."

"Answer my question. Why didn't you tell Bellatrix?"

"What does it matter now?" Draco's face darkened. "Aren't you satisfied with the result?"

"I am, but I want to understand, I want to understand why you do the things you do. I want to—"

"You want a lot, Potter! What I do now has nothing to do with what I did a year ago."

"I want to understand what to expect from you! I want to—"

"You want to find a hero in me, right? So you don't feel too bad for keeping me out of Azkaban. I must disappoint you. There is none."

"But why—" Suddenly, Harry felt a rush of unbearable heat, as if his skin caught fire.

"Why what?! Why I didn't tell Bellatrix?" Draco's voice thundered in his ears. "Because I was unable to do anything at all! There was no will left in me! Nothing! There was only one thing I wanted—to not be there at all. I should have made a wide berth around all that dark nonsense. Did I have a choice? I did, but not then. I did long before that. And I made the wrong one! That's all. Happy?"

"Stop it! Malfoy! Stop it!" Harry shouted. He had slipped from his jerrycan to the stone floor and burned. And then he lost all sense of having distinct body parts, and turned into a single shapeless mass of pain. The last thing he saw was a flash of Malfoy's frightened face above him, and then everything was black.


"Wha–? Wha' was that?" Harry tried to open his eyes, but they were tearing, and his brain failed to piece together a coherent image.

Someone pushed something soft under his nape. A cool hand touched his forehead.

"Take this," said a voice that sounded like his own but not quite. A vial was pressed to his lips, and bitter-sweet liquid gushed into his mouth. Harry's vision cleared.

"Malfoy?" Harry was lying on the floor. Malfoy's face hung over him. "What was it?"

"Your Invigoration Draught."

"No, I mean—" Harry clambered slowly into a sitting position. Snape's head had woken up and was watching the scene with bewilderment.

"It must have been one of those fits I used to have after the thirty-first of March last year," Draco said, massaging Harry's temples. "My body remembers."

Harry almost asked what, but realised that he knew the answer.

"It hasn't happened to me before. It's the first time. Why did it happen?"

"Because you ask why too much!" Draco checked his pulse. "Let's not talk about it."


The flagstones were hard and cold, and Harry made an attempt to stand up, but slid back to the floor. He pulled out his wand.

"Accio shoes!"

With a deafening crash a portion of the wall in the corner flew to pieces, shards of stone and plaster showered inside, Draco covered his potions with his body and took a good deal of the fountain of dust. The shoes burst through the hole in the wall, and fell, soiled and disfigured, before Harry's feet.

"What the fuck!" Harry picked up what was no longer a shoe.

"Better stay away from your wand after being cruciated." Draco vanished the mess, filled an empty cauldron with water, and put it on a burner. "Your power gets out of control. You try to light a candle and set the whole house on fire."

Malfoy was brewing something. Harry hoped it was tea.

"I just wanted to accio my shoes. I'm freezing."

Draco flicked his wand, and an empty henbane sack transformed into a blanket. A few minutes ticked by and Draco pressed a warm steaming cup into Harry's hands.

"Why did you actually cruciate him?"

"Huh?" Harry swallowed the first sip of tea and warmth spread in his vessels.

"Carrow. Why did you cruciate Carrow? It's my turn to ask why."

"He was a filthy Death Eater, wasn't he."

"I was a filthy Death Eater too, you didn't cruciate me. Why Carrow?"

Harry tried to remember. He was in the Ravenclaw Tower, he—

"He insulted McGonagall. Spat at her."

"Wow! Noble! Defending a lady's honour!" Draco sneered. "Was it necessary?"

"What?"

"To cruciate him? I mean, you could have stunned him, you could have tied him up..."

"We did, eventually."

"Mhm. But you cruciated him first. Nice. Did you enjoy it?"

"Enjoy?!"

"Come on! The Carrows tortured innocent students. Didn't you feel good when you did it?"

Harry clenched his teeth. Honestly, he had felt good, very good even, to see Carrow writhe and thrash helplessly. It was almost as satisfying as the warmth of the cup in his hands right now. Draco smirked knowingly.

"You know what I felt when I tortured Rowle, Dolohov, Goyle, Greyback, Yaxley, and my father?" Draco pronounced each word with pointed clarity. "I felt the tip of His wand against my back, and I felt like the last piece of shit. And now you tell me, Potter, who is more dangerous on the loose, me or you?"