Title: Blood Like Silver
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Background Lucius/Narcissa, otherwise gen
Content Notes: AU (Harry is a Malfoy), angst, violence, possession, Dark Arts, resurrected characters
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part
Summary: The Malfoys have destroyed four Horcruxes, including the one in their son, and are beginning the fight against a resurrected Voldemort. Harry and Draco return to Hogwarts in a blaze of rumors. Meanwhile, others lay their own plans.
Author's Notes: This is one of my "From Samhain to the Solstice" chaptered fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It's another in my "Like a Malfoy" series, and the immediate sequel to "Like Clouded Endless Stars." Read those fics first, or this really won't be understandable.

Blood Like Silver

Regulus lay on the shore of the lake and trembled in pain. He didn't know what had happened, didn't know if he should try Apparating—or if he could, as another bolt of agony shot up through his legs. It seemed better to call the one person who had always been loyal to him.

"Kreacher!"

The air rent itself apart with a miniature thunderclap, and the elf appeared in front of Regulus, far more hunched-over and twisted than Regulus remembered. His mouth dropped open, and he looked at Regulus, shaking so hard that he might not be able to help after all.

"Kreacher," Regulus whispered. "Take me home."

Kreacher's hands clamped onto his arms and hauled him upright and close. Regulus's head flopped, and he knew almost immediately that he wasn't going to be able to stay awake through this.

But it didn't matter. Not if he was going with Kreacher.

The air boiled around them, and they were gone—from the cave, into blackness.

"What can I tell my friends?"

Narcissa put her hand on Henry's shoulder, closing her eyes. His voice was stronger than it had been even yesterday, as he struggled with the aftermath of the ritual and a body that was free of the Horcrux for the first time since he was fifteen months old.

But she could still see how pale and motionless he had been at the end of the ritual, when he had passed out, and hear the trembling, cracking nature of his voice when he had asked for food yesterday.

"Mother?"

Narcissa opened her eyes and knelt down in front of him. Henry watched her with wide, round eyes that were identical to Draco's only in color. It was amazing how different they were, her sons, and yet how much she managed to love them both.

"I would prefer it if you told them nothing at all."

"Because Dumbledore might be influencing them?"

"That, and because they are regular teenagers."

Henry blinked. "I don't understand."

"They have little sense of discretion," Narcissa said, almost wincing at her own bluntness. But Henry was in this particular way a regular teenager, too, and she didn't want to confuse him by playing at word games. "They might blurt out the secret, or refer to it in such a way that someone else could tell what was going on. We also still do not know how much Dumbledore knows about Horcruxes."

Henry's mouth firmed. "That's right."

"Yes." Narcissa gathered her baby boy close. The idea that she would have to let him return to Hogwarts in three days was nearly too much for her. "For now, pretend that the Christmas holiday was normal, other than, of course, the attack by Crouch in King's Cross."

Henry nodded slowly. "I can do that."

Narcissa kissed his forehead, the scar that was becoming a paler and paler red by the day. "I know you can."

Regulus woke with a gasping cry, and Kreacher was immediately next to his bed, dripping water into his mouth. Regulus realized Kreacher was holding a wet cloth instead of a cup, but he didn't question why. He just closed his eyes and swallowed as soon as his throat grew wet enough.

"Master Regulus is being safe," Kreacher whispered. "But he must stay quiet."

Regulus pitched his voice low. "All right, I can do that. Has something happened to the house? Is—the Dark Lord here?" Regulus couldn't ignore the possibility that no one had managed to destroy the bastard's Horcrux yet, or that perhaps no one had managed to kill him even if he was mortal.

"Master Sirius is here."

Regulus blinked. "With Mother?"

"Mistress Walburga be dying ten years ago."

Regulus closed his eyes. He had known some time had passed since he'd entered the lake, because he had felt the ritual channeling his strength to a Black child of minor age and great strength, and there had been no one like that among his cousins when he'd gone after the locket. But he hadn't thought it would be this long.

"What year is it, Kreacher?" he whispered, and shivered as his lips cracked. Kreacher fed him some more water before he answered."

"It is being 1996 as of a few hours ago, Master Regulus."

Nearly twenty years.

Regulus wanted to shiver himself to death, but there was no time, no time. He lifted a hand in front of his eyes and stared at it. It looked no different than it had during the years, the hours, since he had last seen it.

"I didn't age."

"No, Master Regulus."

"That's going to be a problem," Regulus breathed. He had never thought of dying and coming back to life, but he had spent the short conscious time since he'd come out of the lake assuming that he would have aged and could maybe convince people that he had simply disappeared from Britain until it was safe to return. Not if he still looked like a teenager, though.

He sipped some more water, this time from a cup, and smiled a little as he recognized the taste of a healing potion. Kreacher had always been clever enough to brew it himself. "What is the status of the war against the Dark Lord, Kreacher?" he asked. "The short version."

Kreacher's ears twitched, hard. Then he said, "He is being killed by Henry Malfoy, who was Harry Potter. But only temporarily. He is coming back. No-good Master Sirius is always whining about it. He is finding the locket."

Regulus shivered, while his brain caught a bit. Narcissa. She had married Malfoy. Could her son have been the one Regulus had lent his strength to?

It didn't explain what had happened, why he would have been called Harry Potter—or Henry, a name Regulus found it hard to imagine any Malfoy or Black giving their son—or why Regulus had somehow returned to life.

He sighed. "All right. The long version. Tell me everything."

"Harry!"

Harry gave Ron and Hermione a wan smile. Hermione started to hurl herself at him, and then checked her motion, biting her lip. Ron tapped his closed fist lightly on Harry's shoulder, stared at Draco long enough to acknowledge him, and then sat down in the seat across from Harry in the train compartment. Hermione sat beside Ron, her eyes huge.

"We heard Crouch attacked you at the train station!"

"Yeah, but Father held him off."

Harry looked right at Hermione when he said that. He knew she would probably never be fully easy with Lucius Malfoy, and he understood that. Father hadn't changed his mind and asked Fudge to start supporting Muggleborns for grand idealistic reasons. He had only done it to make Harry happy. It wasn't easy to accept a blood purist.

He didn't need Hermione to like Father. He just needed to make sure that she wasn't accusing Harry of being a blood purist himself, or a traitor or something, for not rejecting his family.

Hermione's mouth firmed, but she nodded and tucked her hands under her legs. "Did the Aurors catch Crouch?"

"No," Draco said, his voice flat with frustration. "We'll probably only see him again if he attacks, and then we might not have time to call the Aurors."

Harry said nothing. He knew that Draco was going to do his very best to wound someone else who attacked Harry at this point, and maybe kill him.

And honestly, at this point, Harry found it hard to blame him. They had both come out of the ritual with different side-effects. Harry had found himself clearer-minded, able to think about things more easily from other points-of-view, like Hermione's. He wasn't as quick to get angry, and he understood some spells and theory better.

Draco, on the other hand, had come out intensely protective of Harry. Mother had said that effect might lessen as he got back the strength he'd sacrificed for Harry in the ritual, but for right now, it meant Draco was like a barely leashed attack dog when it came to Harry's safety.

"Did you hear about the Dark Mark being seen last night?"

Harry's attention snapped towards Ron again. Draco sat up. "No," Harry breathed. "What happened? Did they see Crouch? Voldemort?"

Ron flinched at the sound of the name, but didn't say anything about it. "Nobody could report anything because everyone was dead," he mumbled. "Amelia Bones and two of her house-elves. They all died."

Harry closed his eyes. He knew Susan Bones in their year, vaguely, and he could just imagine how it would feel losing a relative, now that he had relatives he would actually be upset about losing. "Fuck," he muttered.

"Harry, language!"

"Granger, shut up!"

"Draco, be quiet," Harry said, but pressed his leg into his twin's to calm him down. "Sorry, Hermione. It's just—wow. It was just her house? No other place was attacked?"

Hermione turned away from glaring at Draco and shook her head. "No. They can't even figure out for sure why she was attacked. Just being the Head of the DMLE doesn't seem like it would necessarily make her important to V-Voldemort, you know? He hasn't attacked any other Department heads."

"Maybe he knew she was the only competent person in the Ministry besides Dad," Ron muttered.

"Maybe she had something he wanted," Draco said, in the kind of tone that meant it was for Harry's ears only.

Harry thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe it was some kind of favor to Crouch, if she was involved in his initial arrest," he said. "It's not something we can know. So who's going to be the Defense professor now that the former one was—exposed?"

Hermione turned white for a second, and Ron, glancing back and forth between her and Harry, was the one who answered. "There's someone coming from the Ministry. An Auror named Kingsley Shacklebolt."

Harry sighed. Father had said Shacklebolt was close to Dumbledore. Not that it really mattered, he reckoned, since he wouldn't be taking those classes. Uncle Ted was continuing to offer him and Draco lessons and would also, as Mother had put it, "make sure they were not suffering from the ongoing effects of the ritual."

"D'you think he'll be better than the madmen and Death Eaters we've had so far?"

Ron and Hermione started discussing it, while Harry felt a little burst of gratitude that they were including Lupin among the "madmen." Draco leaned over to him. "How are you holding up?" he whispered.

"We just got on the train a few minutes ago, Draco."

"More like half an hour."

Harry shrugged to concede the point. "I'll be all right. I'm taking those potions that Aunt Andromeda left for me, and you know they're in those tamper-proof flasks. Tonks and Uncle Ted will be there to watch over us. Dumbledore has to know that convincing Defense professors to approach us before hasn't worked out."

"You would think."

Harry smiled slightly and squeezed his brother's hand in his. "It won't be perfect, but it will be all right."

Hermione turned around to ask him a question about OWLS, and Harry jumped into the conversation, grateful to discuss something that wasn't his safety or health.

Regulus stood quietly in the shadows of the staircase, watching his brother sprawl on the couch in front of the flames and talk to the bottle of Firewhisky he was drinking from. Or maybe to the golden locket glittering around his neck.

Regulus sighed. He had considered revealing himself to his brother, had dreamed when he was dying of seeing Sirius again. But Kreacher was right that a Horcrux getting hold of Sirius made it too risky.

Sirius tipped his bottle back, took a huge drink, and went back to rambling about Harry Potter. Regulus still didn't understand how the magical world could have thought the Dark Lord defeated by a baby, but maybe there had been a lot of people desperate to clutch at any scrap of hope.

"If he would just see that they aren't the best parents for him," Sirius whispered. "Yeah, the Potters died, but it's not like I knew they would. I just—do you know that James and Lily's marriage was disintegrating?" he demanded, apparently of the absent Henry Malfoy. "They wanted to have a child, so badly, and they couldn't! There was nothing for it but to kidnap one of Narcissa's twins! Not like he would have had a good life!"

Regulus rolled his eyes a little. Sirius had always wanted to do something—speak up against their mother, taunt people, play pranks, run around in circles if that was all he could do. He had never learned that patience and waiting and quietness were sometimes necessary to solve problems.

Or that some problems weren't his to solve. Which it sounded like the Potters' childlessness hadn't been.

"She still had one. What was she so upset about?"

This time, Regulus closed his eyes. He had to hope that it was Azkaban that had made his brother so callous, or the locket he wore. The Sirius he knew would never have spoken so lightly of taking someone's child away.

"Not like they missed him, not really," Sirius muttered, and tilted back the bottle for another drink.

Regulus crept soundlessly back up the stairs to the hidden room where Kreacher had first brought him. No way he could approach Sirius, not right now. He would have to reach out to other members of the family first.

And work on destroying that bloody Horcrux.

"When you are ready, Mr. Malfoy."

Harry took a deep breath and held his wand over the patch of sand they were Transfiguring into glasses today. He thought he was actually starting to see relationships between the Transfigurations they did, like glass being made from sand.

You hopefully see the bloody relationship, with the OWLS approaching.

"Commuto arenam!"

The air around him flickered. Harry thought he saw a small white bolt leap from his wand to the sand.

And then his desk exploded.

Harry found himself falling face-down on the floor, his arm wrapped defensively around his head, while wooden splinters flew in all directions and people shouted. McGonagall shouted more than anyone else, lifting shields that Harry thought, hoped, were protecting other students from his explosion. And then everything was over but the ticking sound and the subdued chatter of frightened children.

"Mr. Malfoy!"

Harry licked his lips and stood up. McGonagall was glaring at him with her lips so tight that she looked as if she would never smile again. Hermione and Ron were gaping at him from behind their own overturned desk.

"Er," he said weakly.

"What was that, Mr. Malfoy?"

"I don't know!" And Harry didn't. He hadn't practiced many spells over the holidays—Mother would have had a fit after the ritual, and he'd been too depressed to do it before—but his Transfiguration had been fine last term.

"Did you get a new wand?" McGonagall approached, hand held out imperiously for his. Harry gave it to her and watched her turn it in circles, frowning at it as if it were a deadly weapon.

Well, of course it was. But she was treating it more like one than the other wands in the classroom.

"No, Professor McGonagall, it's the same as it's always been."

"Hmmm." McGonagall gave him an intensely skeptical look, as if to say that she knew he was lying but couldn't see how, and held out his wand to give back to him. "Please go to the hospital wing after class, Mr. Malfoy. Sometimes overpowered magic is the first sign of a fever."

Harry concealed a sigh. Draco was going to have a fit. So were his parents when Draco inevitably wrote to them. "Yes, Professor."

"You okay, mate?" Ron whispered as McGonagall waved her wand and repaired most of the damage to the classroom. She didn't try with his desk, Harry noticed. It was probably in too-small pieces. He moved over to share Ron and Hermione's. "I've never seen something like that happen, even with Seamus!"

Harry smiled weakly at him. "Yeah. I really don't know what caused it. I was just casting the spell like normal."

"Did something happen over the holidays?" Hermione asked, staring at him intently.

"Crouch's attack. I don't think I got hit by any of the spells he flung, though."

"Maybe something minor no one noticed at the time. It's good you're going to Madam Pomfrey to get checked out."

Harry nodded meekly. His family would say the same thing, not that he was going to bring that up to Hermione.

And not that he thought that was really it. A better idea had come to him, one that he couldn't share with anyone who hadn't been a part of the ritual to remove the Horcrux from him.

What effect would a Horcrux have on a child's magical development, if it had been with him from the time he was fifteen months old?

"Well, I can't find anything wrong, Mr. Malfoy. I would take it easy for a while, and perhaps practice some of the advanced spells before you use them in class."

Draco stood by with his arms folded as the mediwitch declared Henry "fine" and "cured." He wondered darkly what a proper Healer from St. Mungo's would say. They would be going there as soon as Mother heard about this, but for now, he kept silent as he and Henry walked out of the infirmary.

"What do you think is wrong?" Draco asked, when they were several corridors away.

Henry twisted his wand and raised a Privacy Charm around them. It expanded so rapidly and strongly that Draco's ears popped. He winced, and Henry winced back.

"Sorry. I think—I think my magic is overpowered because of the lack of a certain barrier that was in place."

Draco felt his eyes widen, his lips form the word Horcrux, but he bit it back. There were still portraits here—as there were in most places in Hogwarts—and for all he knew, some of them could read lips. "I—see."

"I don't know that for certain. But it's not like anything else has changed. And I told you that my mind seemed clearer, and I was able to see more sides of a question?"

Draco nodded. Henry had discussed how he could see Granger's and Weasley's point-of-view about their family more clearly. Draco hadn't been impressed by the idea that the removal of the Horcrux had made Henry less sympathetic to Mother and Father and their decisions, but he hadn't wanted to say anything.

"My mind is clearer in general. I think I'm retaining more spells from the books. Remembering them better. So that could have an effect, too."

Draco nodded again. It made as much sense as any other theory. And in the meantime, he would write to Mother and Father, who would make an appointment for Henry at St. Mungo's, and sneak him out through the Floo if they had to.

"So I'll just have to be careful." Henry rolled his eyes. "When I left Transfiguration, there were already people saying how I must have been training in secret to defeat Voldemort or something."

"Be careful." Draco hated that rumors were always spreading about Henry, but it seemed true that there was no way to really control them.

Henry gave him a strained smile. "Yeah, I'll have to."

Lucius was so deep in thought as he stepped into the library, wondering how to get Narcissa to agree to his plan, that he didn't notice the silence at first. Then he glanced up, and started at the ice coating the fireplace mantel. The fire itself had frozen into utter stillness, frosted over, so that it shone like a fairy light.

Narcissa sat at the library table with a piece of parchment clenched in front of her in shaking hands. Lucius knew that she had been performing Arithmantic calculations to try and locate Horcruxes other than the one in Grimmauld Place, but he couldn't think of any location she could have uncovered that would make her react like this.

Not when they had removed one from their son.

Lucius rushed over to her and gripped her hands. "Darling, what's wrong?" he whispered.

Narcissa stared at him with eyes as blank as a starry sky and turned the paper so that he could read it.

It was a letter. Her fingers were clenched atop part of the writing, so Lucius couldn't read the whole thing, but the signature was clear enough.

Regulus.

Lucius's breath went out of him, and he gathered his wife close. Narcissa was starting to shake. The ice atop the mantel and the fire had begun to shatter.

And then it truly broke, as Narcissa began a storm of weeping, and Lucius held her.