Nothing is mine.

Harry demonstrates his potions genius.

The Night is Descending

A low, blue vapour hung in the air of the Potions' lab, a strange eerie haze that rose from the cauldron perched upon Snape's desk and permeated the perpetual gloom of the room with a soft cool glow. Harry, climbing up onto his stool, took a deep breath of it, tasting the sweetness of mistletoe.

'Get down, Potter,' Snape drawled. 'Don't worry, your ego is more than large enough that we all know you're here without you needing to find a pedestal.'

Harry laughed. 'But what's in the cauldron? It's glowing like neon.'

Snape swept his wand out from his robes and tapped the board. 'In the cauldron, as Potter has evidently noticed, is a potion identical to the one you are about to brew following these instructions, except for one final secret ingredient. There are ten possible secret ingredients in the jars at the back of the room. Partner up, brew the weak love potion on the board, and then, using what you can detect about the potion on my desk, choose and add the final ingredient to test if you are correct.'

Hermione stuck her hand up.

'Granger…'

'Do we just add it, professor, or is there some kind of preparation we need to work out?'

'All ten ingredients should be added in the form you find them in.' Snape drifted across his desk. 'This lesson is to test your understanding of how groups of ingredients react with one another; anything further would be beyond the OWL level expected of you. Do not add more than the amount of ingredient specified on the jar labels; doing so may melt your cauldron into a toxic slush that will dissolve all the flesh from your bones.'

'Messy,' Harry said. 'Also potentially inconvenient.'

'Harry,' Hermione chided.

'I'm sure most of it would grow back,' he replied. 'And you don't really need all your fingers anyway.'

'Find a partner,' Snape instructed. 'Don't dawdle, or you'll have to continue at lunch…'

Ron stepped across beside Hermione. 'Sorry mate, every man for himself and all that.'

'Traitor,' Harry accused. 'Now I'll have to work with—'

A light tug came at his sleeve and Hermione's eyes widened.

'Is it Snape?' Harry asked. 'Please tell me it's not Snape.'

Ron snorted.

'They are in Slytherin,' Hermione said. 'But it's definitely not Professor Snape.'

'Malfoy!' Harry shook his head. 'No, Malfoy would have mentioned his father by now. And it can't be Parkinson or Zabini, because they're both incapable of walking quietly. And they don't shut up. It must be someone who's very anti-social and doesn't talk to people.' He laughed to himself. 'Is it Crabbe?'

Hermione buried her face in her hands. 'I'm so sorry, Greengrass, he's just been in a weird mood all year.'

'Goyle!' Harry turned around and met Daphne's cool, clear blue eyes with a small flurry of fluttering butterflies. 'Wow, Goyle, you're looking much nicer than usual. What did you do with your hair? It's… blonder than normal.'

The corner of Daphne's mouth curved up as she hooked that rogue lock of hair back behind her ear with her little finger. 'Potter, stop messing around and start brewing.'

'Of course, Gregorygrass.' He tugged his gaze away from the bright, golden sun swinging from her ear on a thread of crimson silk and glanced at the recipe. 'Well, the first bit looks boring. Dicing. It's a love potion, why would you dice things? You should do something more… lovey.'

Hermione groaned.

'Don't mind her,' Harry said. 'She probably thinks you're Muggle-born and is trying to suppress her murderous urges. We've nearly lost Ron three times this year to her irrepressible rage and prejudice.'

'Harry,' Hermione growled. 'Shut up.'

'See?' Harry asked Daphne. 'She just gets angry for literally no reason.'

Daphne poured a flask of last quarter springwater into the cauldron.

'Noooo.' Harry wrung his hands in despair. 'Why would you sabotage our work in this way, Greengrass? Wait, was this why you came over here? To sabotage my education?'

'Potter, it says on the board one flask of spring water bottled beneath the last quarter moon.' Daphne cocked her head and that lock of hair escaped, slipping free to fall across her face, and Harry was seized by the strangest urge to tuck it back behind her ear. 'I am not sabotaging myself.'

'But that's not lovey.' He pulled his wand out of his sleeve with two fingers and vanished the contents with a flick of his wrist. 'We want first quarter springwater, that's much more lovey, it's a growing moon—'

'Waxing,' Hermione said.

'What?'

'The moon doesn't get bigger, Harry,' she explained. 'You see more of it. We say waxing.'

'Well, then we want a waxing moon; the hopeful, getting brighter, happier one, whatever you want to call it, that one.' Harry ambled around the desk and borrowed a flask of first quarter springwater from the side. 'This is what we need. And then we need to slice those things that look like but probably don't taste like radishes really thinly so they just melt into the potion. Melting is good. You should make a love potion with love.'

Greengrass stared at him as he poured things into the cauldron, the corner of her mouth twitching each time Harry added mistletoe with a loving flourish between other ingredients. He brought a shimmering soft pink potion to a gentle simmer beneath her cool curious gaze, stirring it back and forth in little rhythms of threes until fine white steam rose from it in small spirals of faint spearmint fragrance.

'It just needs one last touch.' Harry glanced around. 'Because this is just love things, and you don't love love, you love someone.' He scratched the back of his head. 'Do you think I should add part of the person, like in Polyjuice?'

'Potter…' Snape drawled from the front. 'How have you managed to mess up this incredibly simple potion? Even Longbottom has done it mostly right.'

'The potion was all wrong,' he declared. 'Greengrass, can I have some of your hair?'

'No.'

Harry turned toward the other half of the bench. 'Hermione?'

'No, Harry.'

'Okay, you were my first choice really, Ron—'

'Absolutely not, mate.'

'Fine!' Harry pulled out three of his own hairs.

Snape appeared over the top of the cauldron and plucked them from his hand. 'In your first year in this castle, we have numerous long parts of lessons devoted to making sure even the most witless student knows not to throw random things into their cauldron, Potter.'

'It's not random. This is a love potion, it should be for someone.'

'These are your own hairs.'

'Maybe it would help raise my self-esteem?' Harry suggested.

'The last thing this school needs is your ego inflating any further,' Snape replied, rather acidly in Harry's opinion, peering into the cauldron. 'This isn't even close to what you're meant to be brewing.'

Harry gave him a proud grin. 'It's a much better love potion made from the same ingredients.'

Snape watched the steam spiral up with an unreadable gleam in his dark eyes. 'Miss Greengrass, is any of this your work?'

'No, professor.'

'I thought as much.' He took the ladle from Harry's hand and gave it three stirs back and forth with a deep frown, then scooped some out and into a vial. 'Since this is a much enhanced version of the potion on the board, but contains the same ingredients, you can still do the exercise.' Snape pressed the ladle back into Harry's hand. 'Take a third, and no more than a third, of the written measurement of whichever ingredient you believe to be the correct one to add. Potter… stop inventing new potions in my classes—' he stoppered the vial '—regardless of how effective they might be, they are not going to be on your OWL exam.'

'I'm sure I can wing those.' Harry laughed to himself. 'See, Greengrass, wing, because—'

'I know.'

'But you didn't laugh.'

Daphne stared back at him, a strange little glint in her bright blue eyes. 'It is bad enough that I have to work with you.'

'What? You came over here.'

'Because there was nobody else left. I would not choose to work with you if there were better options.'

'But Snape had only just said it,' Hermione intervened, peeking into Harry's cauldron. 'Harry, what is that?'

'A love potion.' He watched the soft rose pink surface bubble gently, reminded, for a moment as the fine white steam hung over it like a dusting of icing sugar, of Turkish Delight. 'Are you sure I can't borrow some of your hair, Greengrass? You have that really cute bit that keeps falling over your face, so not that bit, but maybe some of the rest?'

Hermione groaned.

'She's not a Muggle-born, Hermione,' Harry promised. 'I think.'

'My family has been recorded as perfectly Pure-blooded for near two thousand years.'

'There you go, Hermione.' Harry digested that. 'Wow, that is a long time to only marry your cousins.'

A strangled snort of laughter escaped Ron.

'Your family was no different until your mother,' Daphne said. 'You are Pure-blooded by all but the most extreme definitions of it.'

'Wait…' Harry narrowed his eyes. 'You're not secretly my cousin, are you?'

'No.'

'Damn.' He shook his head. 'I could have lived with marrying you through some kind of unfortunate but highly improbable and contrived contract situation, you're really rather pretty, but now my options are basically just Malfoy. I don't think I have any other Pure-blood cousins.'

Daphne's lips twitched.

'Is that nearly a smile? Or some kind of mild seizure?' Harry asked.

'Shut up.' Hermione pointed at the back of the room. 'Go and choose an ingredient that won't melt your cauldron and all your limbs.'

'I don't know what's in the cauldron at the front, though.'

'A poison,' Daphne murmured. 'Drinking even a little bit of it leaves you craving more, but the more you drink, the more it poisons you until you eventually die.'

'So for reasons known only to Snape, we need to turn love into that.' Harry poked his wand back up his sleeve and strolled back through the benches past where Neville and Parkinson laboured alone over their cauldrons. 'What's in the jars?'

Daphne appeared beside him, quiet as a ghost. 'Ashwinder scales, acromantula silk, powdered salamander claws, yew berries, dried mistletoe leaves, and crushed fireflies.'

'It's got to be the fireflies.'

'Why?'

'Because you're adding things to love,' Harry said with a cheerful smile. 'If you add heat to love, you just get, I don't know, more hotter love? If you add sticky stuff to love, you get some kind of clingy love, I guess. If you add healing things to love, you get something that definitely isn't poisonous. Yew berries are poisonous, but I swear Snape said something about them making every potion vapourless at some point, so it can't be them. Dried out mistletoe would probably just ruin the love, but it won't make it poisonous. But fireflies are meant to be bright and live for like a day or something, so adding crushed fireflies is very much not lovey. It's like, you get all the bright lovey bits and then you horribly crush it, like drinking love and finding it was a horrible slow poison.'

'That is the worst explanation I have ever heard.'

Harry scooped up about a third of a palmful of crushed fireflies. 'Have you got a better one, Greengrass?'

Daphne swiped that rogue lock of hair behind her ear and bit her lip. Suddenly, it very much felt like Harry's stomach was full of fireflies, extremely uncrushed ones that swirled around in a tight hot tingling ball leaving little, warm glowing lines behind them.

'Exactly.' He wandered back across and tossed the real crushed fireflies into the potion. 'And now we wait for my genius to be proven correct.'

Violent bubbles rose from the soft pink potion as the crushed fireflies dissolved; the fine white vapour spiralling off it turned to a choking thick blue smoke that held an eerie, ethereal blue glow as cold as ice.

He leant forward to sniff it, tasting the frost-cool mint of it on his lips.

'Do not breathe that in, Potter.' Snape's silken whisper cut through the lab like a razor. 'Do you have not even the slightest sense in that swollen head of yours?'

'Voldemort dropped me on my face when I was a baby,' Harry said. 'It's his fault for being a bad babysitter.'

A soft chuckle escaped Daphne and the bottom dropped out of Harry's stomach. It was a very nice chuckle, he felt, not the high posh laugh he'd half-expected, or some careful, controlled, cultivated show of humour, but something gentle and genuine, and between that and the way her small smile lit up not just her bright blue eyes but the entire Potions lab, all sorts of things inside he had no name for suddenly started to squirm about in a strangely pleasant way.

'You are staring,' Daphne murmured.

Harry flushed. 'I've never heard you laugh before—' he scrambled around for something else to say '—also, you stare way more than I do, Greengrass.'

She turned away, lining up the empty vials on the desk.

'Tidy up carefully to make sure nothing happens to your equipment over our half-term break,' Snape instructed. 'Not, you, Potter. You leave whatever new concoction you've created there so I can dispose of it safely myself.'

'Do you think he's going to drink it?' Harry wondered.

'No, Harry.' Hermione sighed. 'It's a deadly poison.'

'Not if he really is a vampire it might not be.'

'Professor Snape is not a vampire,' Daphne murmured.

'Are you sure? He wears a lot of black.' Harry waved a hand around the room. 'And there are no mirrors in here, either. And the windows are too high so he doesn't have to walk through the sun. It all makes sense.'

'My sister knows everything there is to know about vampires,' she replied. 'She is terrified of them. Snape is not a vampire.'

'That's so disappointing,' Harry said. 'I've never met a vampire.'

'Maybe next year,' Hermione suggested.

Ron grunted. 'Maybe. No vampires in Britain, though. Not sure why. Think Percy once said the ICW expelled them from Britain ages ago for rebelling or something.'

'Sounds like a vampire sort of thing to do,' Harry said. 'Or a goblin thing.' He watched the two of them slowly gather their things together. 'I'm going to abandon you both now. Since Snape has decided I can't be trusted to do it myself. Come on, Greengrass, it's Umbridge after lunch.'

'I am not coming with you to lunch, Potter,' Daphne said, her blue eyes cool and sharp.

'Then I will abandon you as well.' Harry hoisted his bag out from under the lab bench and swung it over his shoulder, meandering through the chaos of the tidying class and out the door.

Malfoy leant against the wall there, one eye on where the Bloody Baron roamed the corridor at the bottom of the stairs.

'How did you even get out here so quickly?' Harry asked. 'Didn't you need to tidy things up?'

'I left Goyle to tidy up; it's really all he's good at,' Malfoy said. 'You know, Greengrass, you and your sister associating with this Blood-Traitor is not a good look. They have betrayed the Old Ways.'

Harry turned on his heel.

Daphne stood there just behind him, her arms folded over the front of her silver-and-green lined robes, her eyes as cool and clear as a cold spring sky, and the little golden sun swinging back and forth beneath the lobe of her ear on its crimson thread.

'I've not betrayed anybody, thanks,' Harry said.

'You have betrayed your own blood,' Daphne murmured. 'Your kin. You have abandoned everything that was dear to them in how you live your life; one day, you and all those who turned their back on the magical world, will answer for the crime of it.'

'Not this again.' He rolled his eyes. 'Look, if tormenting Muggles and generally being a dick to everyone else was so important to my family in the past, then I'm happy to betray them. I'm pretty sure that my family wasn't into that, though, or my dad and my mum wouldn't have gotten married and had me.

Malfoy made a disgusted noise and pushed himself off the wall, stalking away toward the stairs. The Bloody Baron looked up as he passed, staring back down the corridor with hollow empty silver eyes, then turned and vanished into the wall.

Daphne's blue eyes flashed. 'The Old Ways have nothing to do with tormenting Muggles, Potter. They are the reverence of true, high magic and its beauty.'

'Seems mostly like tormenting Muggles from what I've seen.'

'You have not seen.' A wild little gleam shone in the cool spring-blue of her eyes. 'High magic is not just some spell; it is not a tool or a toy. It is life.' She took a trembling breath, a little pink flush rising on her cheeks. 'It is pure life manifested as magic you cannot imagine.'

Harry raised his hands. 'Greengrass—'

Daphne curled her fingers into fists and bit her lip so hard Harry feared she would draw blood, then turned on her heel and stalked off in the other direction, disappearing around the corner.

'Well, that didn't go very well,' he said. 'Maybe she'll come back in a moment, though, you can't get to lunch in the Great Hall that way.'

Lavender, Dean and Seamus drifted past, then Crabbe and Goyle.

Hermione came out next. 'Harry,' she said, hurrying over. 'I thought you'd be having lunch by now.' She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'Don't antagonise Umbridge later; I'm trying to organise something over half-term, but it needs to stay a secret from her.'

He shot her a broad grin. 'But if I stop now, it'll look even more suspicious.'

A long sigh escaped Hermione. 'You know, you might actually be right. I really hate that.'

'I know you hate it when anyone else is right—'

'Don't mention Muggle-borns,' she growled.

'Hermione, they have a right to be here in the magical world, we can't just pretend they don't exist because you hate them.'

Hermione dug her elbow into his ribs. 'Shut up. What if someone believes you?'

'Haven't you read the Prophet?' Harry chuckled to himself. 'Nobody believes me.' He paused, Daphne's words still bouncing around inside his head. 'Do you know anything about the Old Ways? Like, is there some hidden bit in Hogwarts: A History that mentions them?'

'Why?' Hermione pursed her lips. 'It's all just bigoted nonsense.'

'Greengrass said I was a Blood-Traitor.'

'Oh.' Hermione's lips twisted and she gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder. 'I'm sorry, Harry—'

'No, it's fine, she said it before as well; I was just curious about the things I'm meant to have betrayed.' He patted her hand as she patted his shoulder with a little laugh. 'But she said it was about revering true high magic and it was all beautiful, which, to be honest, didn't sound so bad.'

'Interesting.' Small creases furrowed Hermione's brow. 'I've not heard anything about high magic. Or true magic. It's not taught. Or mentioned in any of our books I've read so far.'

'Maybe it's just nonsense,' Harry said.

'It might just be superstition. Like religion. Back when wizards and witches couldn't properly explain what magic did, they probably invented things to explain it. Like people making up gods to explain why storms and floods or weird dreams happen before science explained them all properly.'

'Probably.' Harry thought of the strange dream he'd had, of that slim crack snaking across the thin ice and all the bubbling brimming darkness beneath, and of the shadow waiting beyond the stars, of his cloak melting through his fingers like water, and of her, of the dying light of the setting sun burning in her lone eye as she stared at him, and all the neat white little teeth in that smile that felt so much longer and sharper than they seemed. 'But there are things science can't explain, like magic.'

'But there are rules to magic; Muggles just don't know it exists yet,' Hermione said. 'It's still a proper explanation and not a fairytale story. You can check whether things work or not with magic too.'

Harry turned her words over in his head. 'I'll be back in a moment, I just want to check something I probably should have checked before, but just seemed too insane to actually check.'

He hurried along the corridor and up the steps, zig-zagging across the moving staircases and descending down to the Fat Lady. 'Courage.'

'It's a perfectly good password,' she said, swinging aside.

'Perfectly good for everyone to get in,' Harry replied, jogging through the passage and up the dorm stairs.

Seamus and Dean chatted over a stack of chocolate frog cards on Dean's bed, but Harry stepped past them and yanked open his trunk, throwing out books, robes, socks, jeans, his shoes, quidditch kit, and everything else.

'Where's my cloak?' he whispered. 'Where is it?'

'You alright, mate?' Dean asked.

'My cloak's gone.'

Seamus shrugged. 'Well, nobody's going to have nicked it. It's a cloak and we all got our own. And you just don't nick things from the dorms of your own house, do you?'

'Then where did it go?' Harry glanced up at the window beside his bed, remembering the shadow that had spilt across the glass there. 'It's not where I left it. I tucked it under all these books.'

'Maybe someone snuck in?' Dean suggested. 'Wasn't us, though. You know we wouldn't.'

Harry shoved everything back into his trunk and sat down on the edge of the bed. 'That was my dad's—' a strange, hollow feeling crept up on him, one filled with little sparks of anger '—the only thing of his I've ever had.'

'Shit,' Seamus muttered. 'Want us to ask if anyone's seen it?'

'Yeah,' Harry murmured. 'Cheers, Seamus. It can't have just vanished.'

But even as he said it, a small voice inside whispered of that strange dream and he wondered if somehow it might have done just that. Only, not vanished, not unmade or turned to magic, swallowed, swallowed up by all the endless, cold dark beyond the stars. And some part of him that might have screamed out in dread, smiled instead; he felt it spread across his face, growing wider, splitting open just like that slim crack in the ice had between his feet. Beneath it swelled all that bottomless black, and its terrible endless cold — colder than snow, than ice, than the bitterest winter or the pale and distant light of that full chill moon.

AN: Three more chapters via Discord, about twenty more for those who're supporting me and reading all my first drafts. Linktree below.

linktr . ee / mjbradley