Title: At Childhood's End
Author: 
mahoganyhandle
Team: Fanon
Prompt: The Magician
Wordcount: ~38k
Rating: PG
Warnings:
Summary: When Harry comes across a fallen branch of an elder tree and accidentally bonds with it, his life changes beyond his wildest imaginings.
Author's Note Magician: Immanent, spiritual, and Mercurial transmutation from potential to kinetic, focusing on maturation, (limitless) power, self-confidence, initiative, determination, communication, new beginnings; coming of age. Link.
Betas: A, L
A fool journeys out into the world alone, having blind faith in himself. He looks with wonder upon all sights, having seen none previously. When fresh waters cross his path, he drinks. When fruited trees lay alongside his roads, he eats. All other times, he walks, seeing all and nothing at once. Were a cliff's edge before him, he would continue onward. He is a fool. He has faith, but no power.
~
Harry was allowing the slight rocking of the boat to lull him through sleep-fog when a horn blared and startled him alert. He jolted to the left and flailed helplessly as he fell head first out of bed, smacking his forehead on the bedside table. Pain erupted in his scar, and for a few moments, he couldn't even bring himself to move. Unfortunately, the horn kept blaring, making the pain worse.
It took a bit of careful, worm-like manoeuvres to get out of the tangle of sheets about his legs, and when he finally did, he pushed himself up and raced to the bedroom window.
A stubby wizard in brown plaid robes with a green oak leaf emblem on the chest pocket stood at the gate, honking exuberantly. Harry groaned and worked his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair. He had expected the shipment of wood to come in this afternoon, but Barley always arrived at the wrong time. Usually he was late, but not today. This just went to show that nobody could have a decent lie-in when they wanted.
Heaving a sigh, Harry slid the window open and called out that he would be there in a moment. Barley glanced his way and frowned. When he shifted a clipboard under his arm, the short sleeves of his robes cut into his bulging biceps Harry's heart gave a fluttering leap, and he swallowed hard, turning away from the sight so as not to flush.
He grabbed a pair of sleep pants from the clothes piled on the cushy armchair across the room and hopped into them on his way down the hall. The gate creaked open and Barley's footsteps thundered up the riser as Harry jogged up the steps to meet him on the deck.
It was a lovely day. Orange sunlight burnt across the dark wood of the deck and made the windows on the narrow boat glint. A cool breeze ruffled through Harry's hair as he stepped out and smiled.
"Bit early for you, is it?" he said, taking the proffered clipboard. He scratched his name out sloppily and then handed it back.
"Three cancelled shipments," Barley groused. "Thought I'd get around here before you backed out on me, too."
"Not a chance. I couldn't drag myself out of the lab last week. I'm flat out." Harry grinned and Barley's frown slowly worked itself into a sly smile. "What have you got for me today? Anything neat?"
"We've got a few rare specimens in," Barley said. "I set several logs aside for you. The lumberyard's usually quite busy this time of year. If you've not slapped an address label on it, chances are it'll be gone in a crack."
Laughing, they stepped onto the dock where Barley's cart sat, loaded down with crates. Harry's order was beneath the three cancelled ones, and, instead of levitating the hefty crates like any other wizard, Barley pulled them down manually. His muscles flexed and strained and a flush crept up the back of his neck. Harry shifted uncomfortably when his penis took interest in the proceedings. Still, he couldn't bear to tear his gaze away from Barley's strong back and the way his muscles moved under his thin, cotton uniform. It was such a glorious sight, after all.
Once his order was down, Harry pried open the top crate and rifled through. There were plenty of the usual variety of woods for everyday usage—oak, holly, hawthorn, yew, and more—but there were some others that were more powerful and less stable, too. Harry delighted to see them, caressed the barks and the smooth, golden xylems of the logs.
Picking up a piece of ebony that positively vibrated with energy, Harry hummed to himself and turned it over and over again, just admiring it. It would make beautiful wands—three of them, he thought; the black sisters. He chuckled to himself and then startled when Barley slapped a hand on his shoulder and playfully shook him a little.
"You look like a boy who's had his first peek up a froufy skirt."
Ducking his head in embarrassment, Harry said, "Er, yeah," and set the piece of wood back down on the top. "There are some fantastic pieces in there... Thanks!"
"Not a problem," Barley said, moving behind his cart. He flipped a page of parchment over the clipboard to double check the next address on his route, and then slid it underneath his arm. "See you in three weeks?"
When Harry nodded, Barley Disapparated with a stentorian crack. A few paces over, at Dean and Luna's hand-painted narrow boat, Dean poked his head out of window framed with a shocking pink and sunflower yellow gerbera. Dean glanced at Harry curiously and waved hello.
"So you're off to play then?" he called.
"Looks like," Harry answered. "And you?"
"I'll be in the gallery all day. Dinner's still at seven? That'll be a right blast—if Ron and Corner get into again, I'm skipping out."
"Yeah, me too," Harry laughed. Dean's head retreated back into his house, and Harry turned to levitate his delivery inside to the controlled environment storage facility in his office. The wood needed to be sorted before it began to rot.
~
Every Friday night Harry and his friends got together for dinner. Unfortunately, tonight was his night to play host. Adulthood was a busy undertaking on the best of days and a whiny and demanding cunt on the worst. He saw Dean and Luna most often, but were it not for the weekly dinners, Harry thought, he might not see the others for long stretches at a time.
Since the prospect of sleep was out, Harry put on a pot of coffee and gathered eggs, cheese and onion from the refrigerator. He made himself an omelette and sat down to eat and flip through the Daily Prophet—not that it was trustworthy, but it was an all right source of curiosities.
According to the paper, a Fiendfyre in Hogsmeade had displaced three families, Aurors were investigating a string of unexplained deaths, and Gringotts Bank had announced the implementation of magical signature screening, a new security measure to root out trickery and theft; they already had two break-ins on record and their reputation was suffering for it. Harry always felt a bit sheepish whenever he went to make a transaction, but with all the goblins giving him foreboding looks and several security guards trailing after him, it was hard not to feel that way.
Following breakfast, Harry returned to his office to shelve cases of wood in the storeroom. Logs came packaged in latched metal cases with their type stamped on the top, so it was easy enough to keep like with like; it was always a good idea to keep woods of different magical make-up separated so their integrity was not compromised. Ollivander always had been a little lax on that rule, because he believed in the power of the magical continuum, but Harry was a stickler.
Harry took a quick shower after stocking the shipment, and then went out to put his sign up so potential customers would know he was open. He'd only latched one silver chain to the hook before a dizzy-looking witch with green hair charged out of the café across the street and made a beeline for him. Even from afar, she looked like a furious woman on a mission, and Harry considered taking his sign down and fleeing back inside. For the most part, dealing with customers was tolerable, if not outright pleasurable, but then there was...
"You sold me a dud!"
"I highly doubt that," Harry replied, making an effort to keep his voice even.
Upon closer inspection, the woman's hair looked like leaves of spinach moulded to her head. That, in addition to the plush silvery grey robes she was wearing made her look like a beech. Harry tried not to laugh, but he wasn't successful altogether in suppressing his amusement, if the flare of her nostrils and flash of her eyes was anything to go by.
"Er, how about we go inside to talk?"
The woman followed him to his office, a cosy den just off the kitchen. Order forms, invoices and inventory spreadsheets cluttered his desk, and he had to fumble around for a standard defect sheet. He seldom had complaints, except from the oddball customer who hadn't heeded his advice during the design process and ended up with a wand that was unsuitable for his magic type or daily usage. Harry doubted his confused fumblings for the form instilled any confidence in his angry customer, even though it meant he rarely needed to use them.
Finally he found what he was looking for and sat with the customer by the cold hearth, pen and notepad in his lap. He asked to see the wand, and she jutted it under his nose so fast she nearly poked his eye out. Jerking back, he grabbed the wand before she made another anxious jab at him.
Tickling wisps of magic swept out of the wand and twined about his wrist when he first touched it, and he smiled fondly. Now he knew what Ollivander had meant all those years ago when he said a wandmaker never forgot the wands he made; their magic called out to him, were a part of him, like children.
Now, he remembered this customer, a bubbly witch who wanted "a wand with a sense of humour." It was no wonder she looked like a tree now. Harry had told her that she didn't know what she was getting into with a request like that, but she hadn't believed him. Well the joke was on her, wasn't it?
He gave the wand an experimental flick, and a sprig of the white Nilly flowers on the sill animated and danced a little ditty as it floated across the room and slipped itself into his shirt pocket. Harry examined the spells on the sprig for a few moments, and then turned the wand over several times, mapping out the energies it emitted at rest and again at peak.
"Seems fine to me," he said.
"Oh, it seems fine to you, does it?" she snapped. "Are you blind as well as daft? Look at me!"
"Yes," Harry replied. "I think it likes you."
Veins on the woman's neck and forehead bulged as her whole face turned red, and Harry hoped she wouldn't give herself an aneurysm.
"It's a menace, is what it is! I want you to get rid of it so I can have a proper wand."
"You're barking up the wrong tree, Maxie." Oh Merlin, thought Harry as soon as the words came out. Why'd he have to go and say that? She looked like he'd just slapped her in the face. "I mean the issue here isn't that it's a dud."
"Why don't you tell me what the issue is, then, since you think you know better than me?"
"Look, you wanted a wand that liked having a laugh. Did you think it would make an exception when it came to laughing at you? It's just being friendly. Maybe if you had a sense of humour this wouldn't be a problem."
"Wouldn't be a problem? Maybe it was cute for the first ten minutes or so, but I've looked like this for three days!"
Harry rubbed his forehead. Maxie was standing up, frothing with rage, spittle showering the coffee table while she ranted. As she yelled, the wand in his hand trembled fitfully, and the spells over her gradually melted off. Her leafy head withered into dark brown curls and her plush grey robes cracked on the seams and flaked off, revealing Muggle Bermuda shorts and a blue polo shirt. Maxie was so busy raving that she hadn't even realized that she'd terrified her wand into submission.
She finished off screeching, "I want you to destroy it!" and the wand vibrated with fear.
"I'm not going to destroy it," Harry said once she'd had a few deep breaths. Maxie sneered at him, but the wand didn't seem so frightened anymore, and that was more important to him. "Listen, the spell is broken, so why don't you just sit down and relax. I can draw up a list of spells for you to try out to bond with your wand and get to know each other's boundaries. It's just a matter of taste level, here. But you wanted a funny wand so much you didn't want to hear when I told you it wasn't the best idea, so now you've got to live with it."
Maxie checked herself over before she would believe she'd turned back to normal, but when she saw how she looked, she did take his advice. He spent over two hours teaching her how to communicate with the thing, and by the time he managed to get her out of his office, he felt exhausted. Luckily enough, he didn't have many other customers that day, and of those, none were complainers.
~
After work, he took down his sign and went to the neighbourhood grocer to shop for dinner. It was a small organic foods market and, for some reason that Harry did not want to contemplate, it always smelled like brine and butter. The friendly couple that ran the place were in their seventies but still quite active in the artsy community in which they lived.
He picked up some ground beef, cheeses, and tomatoes for his lasagne, took the ingredients home to keep them fresh, and then headed to Diagon Alley to pick up a bottle of wine to complement the meal.
As he passed the threshold behind the Leaky Cauldron, an explosion of sound assaulted his ears. He cringed back a few steps in surprise and bumped into a full-bellied witch in buttercup yellow maternity robes.
"Sorry!" he said, steadying her as she wobbled side-to-side from his momentum.
"Quite all right, lad," she replied, patting her stomach. "It's just awful, isn't it? Wouldn't be here myself if I didn't have an appointment at the holistic healer's!" Harry stepped out onto the street, feeling dumbfounded and a bit claustrophobic. Aurors were swarmed the alley and vibrant ropes of magic cordoned off large sections of the thoroughfare, creating several bottlenecks. To make matters worse, hoards of gossiping busybodies and clamouring paparazzi loitered behind the magical ropes, trying to hear snatches of conversation as the Aurors passed by.
Harry squeezed through the thick of the crowd and stopped at a kiosk to buy a copy of Flick and Swish magazine and a tin of mints. A young Auror stumbled out of Dame Dora's Divinatory and vomited all over the cobbles and Rita Skeeter's lime green shoes. Another Auror swiftly joined him and rubbed his back to lend support, and they whispered about the eerie way Dame Dora had been murdered.
Harry frowned and tossed handed the kiosk owner a few Sickles. He was eager to get away from the Divinatory and the Aurors' whispers of murder. When the Death Eaters were still at large, the wizarding world had had a ridiculously high murder rate, but this was out of the ordinary. Coupled with the Fiendfyre in Hogsmeade, Harry began to wonder if these events might be connected to them again. He sorely hoped not. He'd had enough of Death Eaters by the time he'd duelled Voldemort, but going through Auror training and chasing down the ones who'd got away had been positively tortuous. He hadn't even lasted six months at that, and could barely stomach listening to Ron's Dark Wizard stories.
Quickly, he manoeuvred away from the bottleneck and slipped into his former master's store to say hello. They talked of wands and the plans Harry had for some of his custom creations, and Ollivander walked through some of his ideas with him.
Somehow the conversation returned to the state of the alley, and Ollivander's concerns that the shopping centre was unsafe. At first the Aurors had presumed that the cases were merely mysterious deaths, but new evidence indicated otherwise. Somebody had drained the victims of life—stripping the years right out of them, making them age and die within a matter of moments.
As yet, no one knew what connected the victims, and the public was hysterical. It seemed like anyone could be next on the list, and reporters already were proclaiming Diagon Alley the most dangerous place to be.
Harry offered his second bedroom and office to Ollivander, and Ollivander agreed to stay over, starting tomorrow afternoon. Harry understood why Ollivander was eager to get away, given what had happened when Yaxley had dragged him off to Malfoy Manor. Fear and worry shone through his usually tranquil and piercing eyes, and Harry was glad to offer his former master a place where he could feel secure.
Once Harry and Ollivander said their goodbyes, Harry Apparated from the back room straight to the sitting room of his house. A painting of a Professor Snape startled and railed at him for disturbing the peace. Harry simply smiled and waved on his way to the kitchen to start cooking.
Dinner went off well. Harry made salad and lasagne, and a treacle tart for dessert. They'd also had a flaky, crusty Italian bread from a nearby bakery and the signature coffee blend he bought from the café across the street. After dinner, they retired to the sitting room to talk over cordials.
Neville had brought another plant with him which Harry planned to put in the office with the rest of the unique plants Neville had devised. Sometimes the plants turned out to be so magically strong that Harry used them in his wands, which delighted Neville to no end. Last year, Harry had made a wand with fibres from Neville's white Nilly flower woven through it.
Neville talked a lot about his greenhouses, and then about Hannah Abbott with as much fervour and awe. They had been dating for a few months, but it looked like the relationship was finally getting serious despite Neville's demanding new job as substitute professor at Hogwarts, replacing Professor Sprout. Ginny listened to Neville's besotted mooning and cast furtive glances at Michael Corner, her obnoxious boyfriend, who was only tolerated in their circle because Ginny cast a mean Bat Bogey hex.
As the hour grew late, the group began to break up to return to their own homes. Harry closed the grate of the Floo after them and then stumbled into his bedroom. He stripped down to his boxer shorts, brushed his teeth, and then fell into bed.
The next day, he woke at ten and hurried through his morning ablutions. After a brief breakfast of eggs on toast, he holed himself up in his workroom, which he'd converted from a guest bedroom when he bought his narrow boat. He was eager to get out some of the more powerful wood specimens and see what he could do with them.
Yesterday, it had surprised him to see a case of elder in the shipment, so he selected that first. Elder wood made for terribly powerful wands, like the Deathstick, but usually no one dared to cut it. Legends told of spirits who lived in elder trees, and who would curse or kill anyone that dared to bring harm to the tree. Ollivander often had told him such tales; one of the worst was about a sickly witch who had cut an elder for firewood in mid-winter and was immediately turned to stone as punishment.
Harry didn't believe such old wives' tales, of course, but, as far as legends went, Merlin himself was said to have been imprisoned in a tree, so the rumour wasn't so far afield. As such, the only way to make an elder wand was to collect samples that had fallen on their own.
Magic tingled in Harry's fingertips as he opened the case. There was only one log inside, a slender, crooked branch with a gnarled tip. He could make just one wand out of it, albeit a long one, if he didn't make a mistake in construction; he'd have to carefully plan this one out before starting on it.
Harry picked the branch up. Magic shot through his arm and down his spine, making his whole body hum with power.
Yelping in surprise, he tried to drop the wood. To his dismay, however, whenever he started to uncurl his fingers, they would clamp back down even tighter as if by some magical compulsion.
Harry flailed furiously, trying to fling the branch away, but to no avail. More and more power gathered in the stick and pulsed through his entire body in nerve-wracking jolts that left him breathless and stupefied. With each increasing increment of magic from the elder branch, the steady outflow from his beloved holly-and-phoenix feather wand sheathed at his hip gradually faded away. The holly wand twitched twice, and then fell still, its magic emptied out completely.
Harry dropped the elder branch on his workbench and swore.
As a wandmaker, he knew the signs of severance and bonding. And he knew this elder... stick had chosen him to wield it.
It was infuriating. He'd managed to repair his old wand when everyone else had proclaimed it a lost cause, dead forever. Now this branch had forced their bond to break. A branch! Not even a proper wand.
Slapping a hand against the wall, Harry swore again. Then he kicked his chair over for good measure. A steamy rage swelled within him, and he yanked on thick clumps of his hair, trying to keep his cool. It hurt plenty, but it didn't work to stem his ire. He raved, loudly and colourfully. This situation was unacceptable. Everything he'd been through, every moment he'd felt worthless without his holly wand at hand, and all the power it had taken to repair it once broken would not be for naught. It would not. It was his wand, and he refused to trade it in for a mere branch.
~
Harry spent the rest of the morning vainly trying out spells with his wands and sulking at the results. The old holly was dead and the elder stick obstinately chose him to master it again and again. To make matters worse, when Ollivander arrived later that day, all he said was, "Hmm... Well, my boy, it looks like you've a new wand."
Harry was so angry he could have spat. As it was, he barely managed to maintain his dignity, gritting out, "It's not a wand," before locking himself in his room for the rest of the day.
It was late night when he finally emerged again, at the rumbling urges of his stomach, and headed to the kitchen to make sandwiches. The moon shone through the kitchen window like a great ghastly eye, and his knife flashed in its light as he spread mayonnaise.
He'd left his wardrobe door open when he changed into his pyjamas, and when he returned to his bedroom, his eyes immediately fell on his reflection. Only... it wasn't his reflection. It was Draco Malfoy's. Pale, smarmy and calculating as ever.
"Oh great," Harry muttered, massaging his forehead with his free hand. "I'm being haunted! Could this day get any weirder?"
"Is that an 'N' for nimrod on your forehead, Potter? I am not a ghost!" Malfoy's ghostly image said, flushing with indignation. It was a queer sight, rosy cheeks on a shimmering silver complexion, and Harry wasn't certain if the faint glow of light from the pale expanse of skin simply was reflected off the mirror after all. He couldn't help but gawk.
"What are you, then?" Harry demanded. "And why are you hiding in my closet?"
"Your mirror to be precise—any reflective surface, really... If you want to get technical—"
"I don't."
Malfoy huffed. "Anyway, I am a doppelgänger. Obviously. I always knew your head was full of fluff, Potter; you don't have to make a point of proving it to me."
Harry decided it would be best to simply ignore the insult. He refused to get into a screaming row with his reflection. Refused. This day was odd enough already.
"Aren't doppelgängers usually of dead people, though?"
"Usually—of people who have died or will die shortly," Malfoy conceded, "but I am made of awesome, so I am the exception to the rule."
"Go haunt a dead planet, Malfoy. They're reflective, aren't they?"
"So you'd like to see my face whenever you look up at the moon? How romantic!"
"Get lost!"
"By the way," Malfoy continued with a saccharine smile, "you can't use my surname. I have no familial association in this form. Largely, I am a wisp of magic, with other odds and ends accumulated here and there. It's quite interesting, actually—"
"No, it's not, Malfoy."
"Potter, using that name is a curse; you lose one year off your life each time you say it. I told you it's under a very strong Taboo, designed to suck the life out of you one year at a time."
"Mal—Draco," Harry said, growling the name. Draco cast him a winning grin. "What are you doing here?"
"Existing, I should imagine," was the flippant reply. "Oh, and I'm meant to say, if you spirit that new wand of yours about, you'll likely end up in jail."
"Wha—how—what?"
"Night!"
Draco's expression was far too glib when he winked out of the mirror for him to have been telling a lie. Groaning, Harry sat heavily on his bed and turned his gaze upon the two crossed wands sitting on his bedside table. This was just perfect. As if he needed another dangerous mystery to make his life complete.
~
Bright and early the next morning, an owl tapped on his window, delivering a letter from the Ministry of Magic, Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. It read:
Dear Mr. Harry J. Potter,
Our records indicate that you have been chosen as the mate of a magical being. Congratulations on your most esteemed magical bond! Please, at your earliest convenience today, come down to our offices to register your union and fill out the form to claim spousal rights.
Sincerely,
Terrance L. Boot
Registrar
Harry frowned, crumpled the paper in his fist, and tossed it in the bin. Then he penned a brief response to Boot, informing him that he'd made some sort of mistake. Once that annoying little task was completed, Harry focused his attention elsewhere—breaking the inconvenient wand-bond with the elder branch.
No matter how he tried, though, the branch would not relinquish its claim. He tried snapping it over his leg, but he only ended up with a black and blue bar over his thigh. He tried severance spells, usually reserved for people who were forbidden to carry a wand, but the branch merely vibrated with powerful magic as if to mock him. He even tried raving, hoping to betray his wand with his all-consuming wrath as Maxie had frightened hers into submission days ago, but his branch was not to be trifled with. He had to leap out of the way of a severing hex as it backfired at him and only ended up ducking into the stinging hex it spat out next.
Seething boils erupted all over his face. As he howled in pain and surprise, the branch floated up from the floor where he'd dropped it and smugly sheathed itself in the holster he wore on his left thigh.
Ollivander wandered into the room, trailed by a chary-looking witch and her toddling son, hugging her chartreuse robes. The boy peeked out on Harry's lumpy face, and his blue eyes widened and turned glassy. Whimpering, he ducked back behind his mother, who absentmindedly patted his head.
Ollivander's only response to Harry's spluttering outrage was to suggest that the branch might subject itself to being "spruced up a bit." However, Harry wasn't yet desperate enough to whittle the stick into something attractive to carry around with him. He still held out hope of actually breaking the wand-bond and fixing his beloved holly.
Wincing around the words—he had an awful boil on his lower lip—Harry asked Ollivander to patch him up. However, Ollivander tried the spell a few times before proclaiming that a vain exercise, and suggested that Harry make up with his wand. Instead of taking him up on his advice, Harry Flooed in to St. Mungo's for emergency treatment.
The hospital screamed with activity when he came in, and he had to stand in a dizzyingly long line before he could even check in. Then the welcome witch gave him a confusing scroll to fill out. It stretched across six feet when unrolled, and asked the most ridiculous of questions. He skipped over three-quarters of the questions, signed his name with a flourish and shoved the form back underneath the welcome witch's nose. She smiled up at his pocked, pus-drenched face and directed him to Artefact Accidents department on the Ground Floor.
Harry turned to go. He bumped right into a passing Auror ushering a patient in through the store-front window, and cringed as one of his boils burst open and rained pus down the front of his robes. Sparks of pain-induced stars danced before his eyes, blinding him to all else. When his vision cleared, he saw the apologetically smiling face of Susan Bones as she used one hand to steady him on.
"Sorry, 'bout that, Harry."
"S'okay," Harry muttered. Then she moved on.
As she jostled her companion past him toward reception, Harry gawked. The man in her arms was jittery and grey, and as each second passed, he seemed to wither away a little bit more. His vibrant red hair thinned and turned white, his hands contorted into useless rheumatic appendages, and his skin paled, sagged and wrinkled right before Harry's eyes.
The welcome witch exclaimed upon seeing him, and then called out for help. Several Healers in uniform lime green robes rushed out with a stretcher, and Susan helped to lay the man on it. One of them asked what had happened to him, and Susan said, rushing alongside the stretcher, "Same as the others... This one staggered out onto the Alley, else we mightn't have found him 'til..." A door down the hallway slammed behind them and Harry could hear no more.
He startled and jerked himself forward, toward the lifts. For a few seconds, his own agony had faded into the white noise as he had stared at the withered man on the stretcher; he'd seemed to grow older and older with every rattling breath. It was surreal, but also terrifying and repulsive. What could make a man age and die like that? What could suck years right out of him in a matter of moments?
He pondered this on the brief walk down the corridor, past the lifts and an alcove of vending machines, to the triage for Artefact Accidents. The welcome witch here was considerably grumpier, but Harry couldn't blame her. Fang-toothed triplets with batwings flapped through the waiting room, giggling with glee, and their mother made no effort to control them; she tearfully shrank away from her vampire brats and sobbed into a handkerchief.
Harry's head began to pound along with his face. By the grace of Merlin, the Healers were efficient and surprisingly quick, and he was ushered back into a private examination room sooner than he'd anticipated.
While prodding at his face, the Healer asked a number of questions, trying to figure out how the accident had happened. Sheepish, Harry explained with short, swift sentences, and the Healer clucked when he admitted to trying to break a wand-bond and having the tables turned on him.
According to the Healer, that was a "foolish and dangerous ambition" which he should "cease immediately," but Harry would not be deterred. The Healer managed to patch his face up where Ollivander had failed, although it was a struggle, and in the end Harry had to apologize to the wand first. Even though he bit the words out disingenuously, Harry came away without the slightest pockmark as a reminder of his accident.
After that venture, however, he sorely needed a pick-me-up, and headed to his favourite supplier on Knockturn Alley, where he usually found intriguing bits and bobs to put in his experimental wands.
Summer was getting on now, and the Alley was quite crowded; the humidity and the body heat made staying outdoors in public for long periods of time simply unbearable. Harry sweltered in his summer robes, and frowned every time he moved his arm and became aware of the growing patch of moisture underneath. He was tempted to try a drying charm, but when his hand moved to his wand and found the stick instead, he remembered the doppelgänger's warning not to show it in public.
He wondered what that was all about. Perhaps he might have to peek in windows and mirrors to try to catch Doppel-Draco's reflection, and see if he could wrangle some sort of explanation out of it. The pasty git's admonishment that he shouldn't use his wand when others were around to notice had put Harry a bit on edge.
Kentigern Breckenridge was busy with a whiny customer when Harry came in, so Harry turned his attention to the row of poisonous utensils at the back, feigning fascination with a fork. The witch at the counter droned on and on about the cursed cane Kent had sold to her, which hadn't made her stingy old husband trip on the stairs and break his neck as Breckenridge had promised, and Harry grew impatient for him to just hex her already and send her off.
Another fifteen minutes of pointless drivel passed with Harry contemplating assault. He hated when other customers were around when he showed up; he'd already signed a non-disclosure agreement, and didn't want to know the nasty things they were planning to get up to upon leaving the store—like Mrs. Zabini over there. It was said that she was intelligent and powerful in her own right, but that her most treacherous gift was her looks.
Finally, the door closed behind Mrs. Zabini and the sign on the door flipped into the closed position. Harry turned and asked to see Kent's merchandise. Kent led Harry over to the centre of the room, idly mentioning how he'd wondered when Harry would return, as he had acquired some interesting pieces. Harry craned his neck when Kent raised his wand to the chandelier, which slowly extended downward from the ceiling.
The entrance to the back room changed once a week. Last time, Kent had pulled him through to the Unplottable restricted zone through a bejewelled scarab beetle in the glass display case. Today, all the candles on the chandelier winked out and Kent grabbed the black, twisted wick on the third candle on one of the arms, not waiting for the smoke to die away. Harry felt a hook behind his navel and a yank. The items in the room washed into one colourful swirl as the view spun away and settled into something else.
They emerged in a stylish drawing room painted sunshine yellow, and Kent beckoned for Harry to sit on a bone silk settee. A silver platter of tea and biscuits appeared on a low coffee table before them, and Harry accepted the drink gratefully. The tea would help to settle his stomach after his dizzying trip.
Kent left to gather his private collection, and Harry sat back, fingering the seam where the silk tucked into the fancifully carved wood. Then Kent returned, carrying a small mahogany case, and a three-tiered covered cart rolled in behind him.
First, he set the wooden case aside and flung back the cover on the cart. The first tier was filled with pristine feathers in clear plastic sheaves to protect them, the second, with bits of sinew in dishes of preservatives, and the third, odds and ends like scales, hairs, bones, and dust in crystal vials and test tubes.
"Anything you like?" Kent murmured, taking a seat on the matching settee on the opposite side of the coffee table. He leaned forward, bracing his elbow on his knee, and his eyes twinkled.
"What's in the other?" Harry said, glancing at the mahogany box.
Kent grinned and said, "I thought you might... These are some rarer pieces still than those on the cart. Very dear to me." Harry snorted, waving him on. "What would you pay for immortality, I wonder? I can give you that."
"I'm not interested in living forever."
Kent's grin widened into something smug and secretive. An inadvertent shudder traversed Harry's spine and, despite himself, he leaned closer. Kent drawled, "Who said anything about extending your life?"
~
Harry had never been this distracted in his life—not when he'd been out-voted on a trip to Godric's Hallow, not even when he'd had to choose Horcruxes over the Deathly Hallows. This was another sort of obsession altogether, reminiscent of his sixth year at Hogwarts, haunting Draco Malfoy's every step.
Kent Breckenridge had sold him a very intriguing artefact indeed, one that Harry hadn't been able to pass up. It was a single strand of hair, so pale as to be colourless, and silky soft. It bore more than a passing resemblance to Veela hair, but Harry was a wandmaker and quite familiar with that type of hair and the magic it generated. This was not a Veela hair. In fact, Harry had never felt a magic so strong, so base and unchecked as the magic emitted from that thin, silvery hair.
The hair was bound in the centre of a golden pentacle, so as to keep it from expelling a vast amount of magic all at once and causing a disturbance the likes of which the Auror Corps would frown upon. Harry kept it on a thick cord of leather around his neck, tucked into his shirt. He liked the feel of the magic pulsing into his chest, although he knew it probably wasn't the best idea to expose himself to it so fully before he had carried out his research.
Unfortunately, useful information about this hair was few and far between. He'd gone to the wizarding section of The British Library, but that had been an exercise in futility. Even the Hogwarts library restricted section turned up nothing. Rather, he'd found more information on Horcruxes than he did about this hair. Or, to be more precise, the creature that had shed it.
A Green Man...
This was something that Harry knew nothing about. He'd never even heard of the creature, although Hagrid's ideas about what constituted a good magical creatures lesson were very much lacking, anyway. But for the constant and immense flow of power from the hair in the pentacle, Harry might have presumed himself duped. However, he knew better—this Green Man was very, very real; it just happened to be something that someone didn't want anyone else to know about.
Sighing, Harry picked up the pentacle lying on the bedspread and turned it in the pale streak of moonlight slanting in through the blinds. He was tempted to ask Hermione, but that didn't seem like a good idea. She would get hung up on where he'd got the hair and have a fit. Probably, she wouldn't even look into it, but would notify the proper authorities. Whoever they were—Harry wasn't certain. His first thought had been the officials in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Then he'd thought better of it. Would they have the knowledge or means to control a creature so rare and powerful? It was doubtful.
"Damn him; I have to go back," Harry swore, dropping the pentacle on the bed. It bounced a moment, and then settled.
"Perhaps you're looking in the wrong places?"
Harry startled, his heart jumping into his throat, and grabbed his elder stick from where it rested against the bed. His gaze fell upon Doppel-Draco's wry smirk, and a flush crept up the back of his neck as he put his stick back down.
"What do you know?" he said, sitting up onto his elbows. "You're just a reflection."
"Rather, not a reflection at all—what am I reflecting? You? Don't make me sick, Potter."
"Oh, ha, that's a good one, Draco. Beg pardon while I forget to laugh." Doppel-Draco pursed his lips and turned his head, his eyes flashing an eerie blue-grey in the darkness. There was no light shining down on the mirror, so Harry supposed that bright flash had come from within. It made him feel anxious, and he sat upright and let his hand fall down to finger his stick. "What are you, then?"
"We went over this before, yes?" came the impatient reply. "I am a messenger. I offer you guidance."
"So your shape—is that all a figment of my imagination?"
"If you expect messages to come out of your imagination, you should be locked away in St. Mungo's, Potter."
"You know what I meant!"
"Well..."
"So, if you've got a message for me, let's hear it."
Doppel-Draco shrugged and said, awkwardly, "I can't just...It's not... like that."
"What is it like then, if not like that?"
"Don't mock me!"
The insistent screech of Doppel-Draco's voice took Harry aback. He opened his mouth to respond, but the image winked away and suddenly was much, much closer and much, much more frightening. Doppel-Draco hovered before him, his eyes flashing that terrible blue-grey again, with electric bolts of magic crackling all around his ephemeral form. The intense heat radiating off him made sweat break out on Harry's brow. Harry grabbed his elder stick and scrambled back.
"Don't you dare mock me, Potter! I'll—I'll kill you!" Doppel-Draco shouted, raising both hands as clotted knots of white-hot power writhed around them. His silvery complexion took on a flush of colour, making him seem more real and more dangerous. "Do you understand me? I'll kill you!"
Harry nodded, but despite that, he advanced again. Then, the bedroom door slammed open and a purple-robed Auror flew into the room, hexes flying. Great clanking chains and manacles flew out of the tip of the Auror's wand, shooting towards Doppel-Draco, who winked out of existence just as easily as he winked in it. The chains dropped uselessly to the floor. The air sizzled with power in Doppel-Draco's wake.
Scrambling, Harry tossed his elder stick behind his bed and kicked the pentacle under the bunched up covers at the end of the bed. Only then did he turn his attention to the Auror in his bedroom door—Susan Bones—and Ollivander, who hovered behind her, looking frazzled with fear.
Susan came into the room and glanced about herself in confusion. Susan shook her head and inched forward into the steamy, static hot-zone Doppel-Draco had left behind. Her long, straight red hair stood on end. She touched it, her apprehension showing ever more on her face and in her jerky movements. "I was sure I... But there's nobody here!"
Harry glanced at his wardrobe mirror, where Doppel-Draco sat crossed-legged, gripping his ankles in white-knuckled fists, his eyes averted. Susan followed Harry's gaze and started.
At first, Harry wondered if she could see Draco, too, but then she started patting the crow's feet at her eyes. She rushed over to the wardrobe for a better look, her expression first frantic, then fearful, then resigned. She turned back, her mouth set in a resolute frown and gestured to Harry and Ollivander, telling them both to leave the premises immediately. Then she whipped out her wand and shot off a dove Patronus, which fled through the bedroom window.
Harry quietly asked if he could change into a robe before vacating the room, and she urged him on. He grabbed the pentacle under the pretence of searching for the socks he'd kicked off, and then grabbed jeans, a shirt, and trainers from the closet. Doppel-Draco had the good grace to look abashed when Harry shot him a baleful glower.
Several other Aurors arrived and commandeered Harry's narrow boat. Harry and Ollivander went next door to Dean and Luna's, and they all sat over coffee and avoided the topic of the Auror invasion of Harry's bedroom. Then an Auror with a notepad arrived and asked for a moment alone with Harry to take his statement. Harry was certain that his complete inability to answer a single question or describe what happened or what it had felt like didn't impress the Auror in the slightest; probably, it only made him suspicious.
Finally, after several hours, the Aurors retreated and Harry and Ollivander were allowed back in the house. Harry rubbed at the tension in his trapezius and shuffled into his bedroom without a word to Ollivander. Once inside, he locked the door and threw himself on his bed. Doppel-Draco still sat in the same position as before, his eyes bright as they looked out over the room.
"Sorry, Potter," he mumbled, fidgeting with his bell sleeves. "I shouldn't have threatened you. I just... I don't like to be mocked."
"I wasn't mocking you," Harry replied. "You're very immature, you know? Your little temper tantrum could've got me into a lot of trouble."
"I made certain they didn't find your wand," Doppel-Draco insisted. "That redhead—Bones, I think—she was about to find it, but I bewitched her so she'd turn away. Only a very powerful Familiar could do that for you. You're very lucky to have me."
"You're my Familiar, are you?" Harry grumbled, burying his face in a pillow. "Merlin, help me! I think I'd rather quit while I'm ahead."
Doppel-Draco huffed until Harry would look at him again, and even then he pouted so much that Harry had to stroke his ego until he preened. He was a very needy little bugger, apparently.
"I'm something like a Familiar, but not exactly. What I am... well, it's hard to say. How do you talk about something when the words have been erased? Like that..."
Harry frowned, the furrows of his brow deepening as he peered over to Doppel-Draco. He was kneeling now, the fabric of his shimmering white robes billowing out behind him like a wind-blown cloak, his soft, pale hair whipped about his head. Harry could feel power pulsating from him again, but this was a subdued power, as if someone had taken it and bound it with adamantine chains. Doppel-Draco's magic called out to Harry, and mingled with Harry's own, until he felt light-headed and confused. It felt like there was somewhere else he ought to be, something urgent he needed to do. "I... have things to tell you," Doppel-Draco whispered. "So many things, but I can't... can't say. I can feel the words in my mouth, but they won't come out. I try to force them until my head hurts so much I can barely remember what I'm fighting it for. Then the words dry up and crumple like spent leaves, so I just... swallow them instead."
"Draco, that's not natural."
"No, it's not," he sighed.
"I mean, it almost sounds like you're—but you aren't, are you? Cursed?"
Doppel-Draco made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat and shook his head. His eyes flashed again, but then they widened in fear and he stood up stiffly. His robes tore into long, fringy strips and twined around him and hardened, like a grooved tree trunk. He held his hands straight overhead as his fingers elongated and twisted out, and his hair stood on end. He whispered, "I have to go," before winking out of existence.
Harry stared for a long moment after he was gone, feeling the strange, familiar magic recede. It left him feeling empty, drained.
Yet, more than that, he was worried. Doppel-Draco had looked absolutely terrified, but of what, Harry could not fathom. He remembered that moment when Doppel-Draco had flown out of his mirror, ripping magic from the very air itself. This form of Draco seemed so powerful, so dangerous that it was hard to imagine there was something even scarier than that. Whatever it was, though, Harry hoped he could help Doppel-Draco escape it. Nobody should live their life in fear.
~
Ron came by the next morning, determined to hear about what had happened the night before and check that Harry was all right. He kept insisting that Harry go to St. Mungo's for a check-up, but Harry refused, claiming that he'd never felt better. The queer part was that, despite his fear for Doppel-Draco and confusion over what had happened in his bedroom, he did feel quite all right.
Lingering shocks of Doppel-Draco's magic—the good, subdued kind, that is—pulsed through him still, rejuvenating him. His muscles didn't ache, his head seemed clear of cluttered thoughts, and his elder stick worked better than ever before. Whatever it was about Doppel-Draco's magic that appealed to his own, it was like a concentrated Invigoration Draught without the overwhelming crash a few hours later. Certainly, that was not something that called for a trip to see the Healers, was it?
Ron was adamant, however. He wouldn't hear reason, and, finally, Harry pressed him for an explanation. What came rushing out of his mouth, however, was not at all what Harry had expected to hear, and it took the winds out of Harry's sails.
Susan Bones was the lead Auror investigating the string of mysterious deaths that were rocking the wizarding world. She'd answered a call about a disturbance at Alastor Gumboil's house. He had been head of the Hit Wizardry division of Magical Law Enforcement, and quite adept with his wand to boot. Yet Susan had found him withered into nothing on his couch, sitting in a tranquil position that indicated his death had been swift and unexpected.
In the succeeding days, more calls of magical disturbances came in, and all turned up queer, unexplainable deaths. At first, there was no indication of foul play, so they presumed it was the result of a freak magical phenomena. Then an unusual magical signature was picked up at one of the crime scenes. After they back-tracked and found it at every other place of death, all the cases were ruled as homicides. As Susan told Harry, whatever had left behind the magical signature at the other crime scenes had left small traces of it on Harry's bed.
Shocked and horrified, Harry's hand fluttered up to his chest to grab the pentacle he wore beneath his shirt. Of a sudden, Harry couldn't breathe. He bent double and held his head between his legs, gasping for air. His chest burned with a slow-moving fire that crept through his torso, over his spine, out to his limbs and head. His cheeks seared him, and his jaw ached from clenching his teeth so he wouldn't scream.
Misreading his reaction, Ron ushered Harry to a chair and tried to reassure him that everything was all right, that nobody believed he was the murderer. In fact, Harry's magical signature was all over his narrow boat, and it didn't match the small sample they'd collected from his bedclothes in the slightest.
Eventually, Harry pulled himself together again, thanked Ron for his concern, and insisted that he had an appointment to make. Ron watched him warily as he left, and Harry could feel Ron's gaze trained on his back. He ignored it.
Once out on the dock by his gate, Harry gripped his elder stick, sheathed on his lower leg, where it fit in his jeans, and Apparated to Knockturn Alley.
Kent didn't have any customers this time, and he took Harry to the back room through a Portkey disguised as a tassel on the drapes framing a portrait of a busty, tow-headed witch. Harry pressed him for information about Green Men and the hair he'd bought, and Kent smiled smugly and told him what little he knew.
It was only once Harry was out in the heat of the summer sun again that he remembered the non-disclosure agreement, and how he'd need to find information from a secondary source to be able to discuss it.
Still, he supposed, it was a start. Otherwise he'd never have turned his attention to Hogwarts' History.
~
Harry sagged in relief when Doppel-Draco returned, looking none the worse for the wear. Harry didn't even care that he was stuck in the library again. All the researchers sitting nearby his table met his quiet exclamation of joy with disdain, and he scowled at them until they turned back to their own books. Doppel-Draco, distorted in the gleam of the waxy tabletop, smirked at him in amusement and then gestured imperiously to the table.
Obliging the unspoken request, Harry transfigured the table to a high-finish polished metal and Doppel-Draco's image cleared. Directly across the room at a chestnut desk, the librarian glowered at him, but he waved her off. It wasn't like he didn't plan to remove the charm before leaving.
Moving his stacks of books to block the view to his table, Harry bent his head and whispered, "Are you okay? What was it that drove you off like that? I kept looking for you...I was worried."
Doppel-Draco batted his lashes, and said, "How sweet."
His tone lacked mirth, however, and Harry could see that he was still frightened. He had a habit of fidgeting with his clothes when he was anxious, and the brooding look hadn't yet left his eyes.
Heaving a sigh, Doppel-Draco settled himself into a more comfortable position and pushed back the sleeves on his overlarge robes. The robes shifted around, and dipped over his collarbone. A dark mark, puffy and runny, marred his sternum, and Harry clenched his hands into fists and bit his lip so as not to scream.
"Someone branded you?" he hissed.
Doppel-Draco jolted in surprise and shifted his robes back to cover the mark. His eyes shone with dismay and fear, and he shook his head fiercely.
"It didn't hurt," he rushed out. "I didn't even feel it, really. It just looks bad, but... it's not so bad. Well—it could've been a lot worse, anyway. They could've felled—" He cut himself off and his face scrunched up and turned dark red, and he seemed to struggle with some unseen force. Finally, he deflated and his shoulders sagged a bit. "I shouldn't..." he whispered, ducking his head forward so that his long fringe hid his eyes.
Harry asked Doppel-Draco where he was and who had branded him, but again the doppelgänger couldn't speak. His eyes flashed and he shook his head, twisting his fingers in his pale robes.
"It's okay... This is much better than the alternative, anyway. Please don't be angry," he said, unable to look Harry in the eyes.
"There is no way in the world it's acceptable for someone to brand you!"
"I didn't say it was acceptable," Doppel-Draco said. "I only said it could've been worse—a lot worse. And that's still true. I... What I did..." He trailed off and sank back, looking defeated.
An unexpected emotion kindled awake inside of Harry at the pitiful sight of him. The Draco he knew never was so meek, never accepted defeated. And the few times Harry actually had seen him look vulnerable... well, Harry didn't really want to think about that, but suffice to say that he'd been in a terrible position, then. If his circumstances now were anything like the ones that had humbled him before, Harry knew he'd have to help Doppel-Draco out of that awful situation. Somehow. It was a little difficult when Doppel-Draco was too frightened to talk about it, or had been rendered incapable of divulging secrets. What had he said about words being erased?
Harry was reminded of the Green Man hair again. And wasn't that a whole other trunk full of troubles? He couldn't handle it all at once. He just would have to prioritize.
Doppel-Draco first, he decided. He seemed to be in more imminent danger than thousands of nameless faces. Besides, the Aurors already were investigating those strange deaths. Hermione might have something about letting the authorities do their jobs. They were trained; he was not, and Draco needed him much more.
"Listen," Harry said, peering down at the tabletop. "I'm going to ask you a very important question, and I need you to answer to the best of your ability, understand?" Shifting to his knees to draw closer, Doppel-Draco nodded. "Good. First things first—are you the real Draco, and not just a doppelgänger or Familiar?"
No response was forthcoming for a long time, although Doppel-Draco's face contorted as if he were in tremendous pain. His eyes welled up with tears and he trembled violently. When he reached out, Harry didn't need to think before pressing his hand against Doppel-Draco's reflection and opening himself up to the force of the subdued power from before.
This time, it roared through him, seeming almost unchecked despite the heavier binds encasing it. Harry gasped at the feel of it, feeling his cheeks heat. Every nerve-ending in his body felt alight. It was an overwhelming, jittery feeling, but he did not pull back.
Rather, he held on for all he was worth. Their connection seemed to bring Doppel-Draco to life as well as Harry's nerves. Whereas before he had seemed a faint, ghostly image, now he was infused with colour and vitality. His silver eyes glowed bright green.
Then he forced out, "Yes," in a raspy, disused voice. "I am Draco."
"Are you trapped somewhere?"
"Trapped—have to go—"
"Not yet!" Harry yelled. Draco started, glanced beyond Harry as if there were something looming right behind him, and then gave a fitful nod. Harry wasted no more time, and said, all in one breath. "Is someone holding you against your will? Do you know where you are? Do you have—"
"They lock me up—make me sleep—it's always dark—please, have to go!"
"No!" Despite Harry's insistence, Draco tried pulling out of the magical link between them. Frantic at the thought of losing him too soon, Harry clamped down and refused to let him go. "Where are you? Do you know?"
"Lonely place—dark and wet—old place—please, go?"
Draco was begging, and Harry's heart hammered in his chest. Lonely place? What did that mean? He wanted to help but he needed more information.
"I'm going to find you, but you have to tell me something. Where are you? Who's keeping you there? How? Anything!"
Draco twitched about, seeming to battle with some magical Goliath. His magic curled fully around Harry's own in an excruciating embrace that had Harry gnawing through his lower lip. Droplets of blood pooled on Draco's reflection. But the touch of his magic seemed to lend Draco strength. He drew on another wellspring of power, making the bonds holding it in burst open entirely.
"It's the elder coven—the Whyggis!" he said; and then he was shrieking in pain and curling in on himself in a protective huddle. Whips of fire cracked down all around him, writhed over every inch of him as he screeched for mercy from his attackers. The last fragile tendril of Draco's magic clinging to Harry's own slipped away; and then Draco was gone.
Leaping up, Harry stumbled a few feet away from the table and heaved. Yellow streams of bile burned his throat, leaving an awful taste in his mouth on their way to splatter across the floor. When he was through convulsing, he stood hunched over, trying to breathe. He rubbed idly at the hollow ache stemming deep in his gut. He remembered Draco, so small and vulnerable and hurting, and had to squeeze his eyes shut so he didn't cry.
~
When he returned home, an owl was sitting on the rail, a letter on the deck beneath it. Harry picked up the letter and trudged inside. He glanced at his wardrobe mirror as he set his library books aside, but Draco was not there.
Sighing, he curled up on his bed and went to sleep, hoping Draco would be back in the morning. He wasn't. Anxiety worked through Harry. And the guilt was immense. He had pushed Draco to that point by trying to pump him for information. And a fat lot of good it did, too! He still didn't know where to go, how to help...
With few other alternatives, Harry bunkered down to read. That's the path Hermione had always taken and she'd turned out lucky more often than not.
He spent the morning in his room, casting occasional glances at his mirror. By the time his stomach started to growl, he tossed his useless books aside, however, and went to get some lunch. He stepped on an envelope on his way out of the room and remembered the owl from the night before. The envelope bore the Ministry seal. He tore into it, frowning irritably. It read.
Dear Mr. Potter,
At your urging, I have reviewed your magical bond and have concluded that no mistake was made. Once again, I offer my congratulations. Please note that your presence is now required at the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures tomorrow at your earliest convenience. I look forward to seeing you here. Non-compliance with the summons may result in fines.
Sincerely,
Terrance L. Boot
Registrar
Grumbling about idiotic bureaucrats, Harry tossed the letter and proceeded to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich and soup. He could hear Ollivander murmuring with a client in the nearby office, so tried to keep his movements quiet.
After awhile, the office door opened and Ollivander stepped out, showing a portly, greying wizard to the door. Soon, Ollivander returned and sat with him.
"Have you had any luck breaking your wand?"
"Hmm?"
Ollivander's eyes glimmered with mirth and he tilted his head to have a better look at Harry—or, perhaps, Harry's magic. Ollivander's fingers twitched in that telltale way that Harry was familiar with; he was playing the waves of magic like the taut strings of a harp.
Shrugging, Harry said, "Given that up. My priorities have changed."
"Yes, I can see that."
"Outside of a consult, it's terribly rude to engage someone's magic uninvited," Harry drawled as he withdrew his magic into himself. He still could feel the last touches of Draco's magic and he didn't want anything erasing them. If he were going to save Draco, he'd need all of his wits about him, and a wandmaker's skill for playing, manipulating, and engaging people's innate magic without their noticing was a powerful weapon to have—one he couldn't afford to lose.
"Beg pardon," Ollivander said, his insincerity blatant. "I sometimes forget how snippy you can be when it comes to affairs of the heart. But have you considered that this old hat might yet know a few helpful tricks?" Ollivander then smiled, showing uneven yellow and missing teeth. "I know what you're hiding."
"Then you know how much it means to me."
"I might, at that," Ollivander mused. "Tell me, boy, when have I ever been a stickler for the rules?"
"Not since I've known you, I'd say," Harry answered.
"Old families," Ollivander laughed as he rose, "tell intriguing tales. The older the family, the more intriguing the tales. And my family is one of the oldest. Right next to the Malfoys and the Sangsters, almost."
"Sangsters," Harry repeated. "Never heard of 'em."
"No, you wouldn't have... Some take care their names are never erased from history; some take care their names are." Then Ollivander went to the counter where the foodstuffs still were laid out, and began making a gargantuan sandwich. "I think tomorrow I'll tour my family estate and conduct my yearly inventory. I could use a good pair of legs and a strong back, lad."
"All right, then," Harry said absentmindedly. "I have a few errands until then."
"Go on, I won't hold you."
Harry headed into the office. He penned another letter to Boot. This was longer than the last, explaining in embarrassing detail that his only new bond was with an unwanted elder stick that fancied itself a wand, not a magical creature, and that whatever equipment used to monitor new bonds was defective. He sealed it and then sent it off with his owl.
When he returned to his room to continue studying, he received a pleasant shock. Doppel-Draco sat in the mirror, hugging his legs to his chest.
He looked peaked and pale and his eyes were the awful blue-grey as they were when he was angry. His skin shimmered as if someone had rubbed him down with fairy dust, but no scars were visible; even the brand-mark from before was gone. And he was naked. Silver cuffs locked around his wrists and ankles and he wore a heavy torque around his neck. He long hair billowed back, seeming caught on a non-existent breeze.
At the sight of him, Harry exclaimed in joy and rushed over. Kneeling in front of the mirror, Harry raised a hand to the cool surface. Doppel-Draco struggled as if caught in a vise, but then mimicked the gesture. Their magic caressed, but Draco's was a low hum, barely a fraction of what it once had been, even subdued. Harry frowned.
"What happened?"
"They stripped me—tore me down," Draco said, his face flushing with shame. His voice was thick. "I'm so tired, Harry. I think of all the things I've yet to do, and I wonder... Would it be better to sleep? If they put me to sleep, what would it hurt?"
"Don't talk like that! It's okay—everything will be fine. I'm going to find you and take good care of you, okay? And make those bastards pay for what they did to you!"
"Find me?" said Doppel-Draco. His eyes went wide and he shook his head. "You can't—they'll hurt you. You can't get into trouble with these people, Harry. They're dangerous! They've been at this for generations already. Do you think it means anything to kidnap people and lock us away like animals? Do you think it bothers them to kill whoever gets in their way? They cast Fiendfyre about like Lumos, Harry; and when it's all done they patch me up and tell me to be a good boy next time. That's the kind of people you'd be going up against. I can't let you do that."
"I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about you. What they're doing to you is wrong. And it's not your choice whether I help you. It's mine. And I've chosen."
Doppel-Draco glanced away raised his shoulder in an awkward, pained shrug. "I did this to myself, you know. I was... I was foolish. I thought I could do anything I wanted, and it came back to bite me... You shouldn't risk your life for me. It's not worth it."
"You don't really believe that. Whatever happened to I am made of awesome?"
"Well, I am made of awesome, obviously," said Doppel-Draco, flushing scarlet. Harry's gaze caught the colour as it the colour spread down his neck and pale, toned chest. Doppel-Draco was more fit than Harry had expected—he was quite skinny and angular, still, but there were hard, flat planes to him as well.
His cheeks hot, Harry jerked his head up to look Doppel-Draco in the eye. But Doppel-Draco's head was back and his eyes were closed. He was brooding. Harry had never seen such a sharp, calculating expression on his face, even in sixth year. It made Harry wonder what he was thinking.
"I'll help you as best as I can," Draco said. "They fear me. That's why they're so eager to keep me contained. I've got more burn scars than anybody else here." His brow furrowed and he opened his eyes again, staring at the pendant around Harry's neck. "As long as you have your wand and... and that... You'll be well protected, I guess. Then you can play the hero all you like."
Clutching the pendant through the fabric of his shirt, Harry said, "You mean that they're afraid of Green Men?" Draco smirked. "Really?"
"Deathly afraid, in fact—as they should be!" Harry's heart fluttered. "Do you know what a Green Man is, Harry?" When Harry shook his head, Draco continued, "It's a spirit that dwells in the forest."
"Something about immortality?" Harry asked, trying to weasel around the magic of the non-disclosure agreement that kept him from revealing too much.
Doppel-Draco's eyes narrowed. He shifted closer and, again struggling with some unseen vise, gritted out, "It is primordial magic. It is dark and heavy and inescapable. It has no light of its own, but can suck in and steal the light of others. It is the lemniscate and the ouroboros, and the coil of the continuum. It is... limitless—purpose and power." His eyes darted, and then his hand pushed through the mirror and placed a filmy, misty hand over Harry's, still gripping the pendant. A sudden rush of power pulled through Harry's hand, shot straight through it as if it weren't there to connect with Draco, who smiled fondly, although it was strained around the eyes. "They didn't expect me to have friends," Doppel-Draco said. "They moved me next to one of their oldest prisoners and tied our magic together. They're always pitting us against each other like that, hoping we'll drag each other down. I'm going to make certain they rue the day they ever set that Green Man after me. They thought they had beaten me, finally. But I am a Malfoy. No one beats a Malfoy. "
"I thought you had no familial association," said Harry, furrowing his brow in confusion.
"Oh." Draco withdrew into his mirror and hugged his legs. "They stole it from me, erased the name from use," he murmured. "They put the Taboo on it. Only a proper healer can restore it to me. I miss it so much. I was always so proud of being a Malfoy."
"I know. But won't you lose a year on your life?"
"Ha! That shouldn't bother me, yeah?" Doppel-Draco fell into a laughing fit. Harry watched him, confused by his change in demeanour. It was unfathomable that someone could laugh about something like that. "I mean... you have worked out, right, the things I can't say?"
Harry tilted his face away, toward the ghastly owlish moon gleaming in through the window, reflected over Doppel-Draco's head. He took a moment to think about what Doppel-Draco had said and work out what his response should be. Unfortunately, in that moment, Doppel-Draco startled, cocked his head as if he could hear something that Harry could not, and stood up.
Flushing at Doppel-Draco's nudity, no longer mostly hidden behind the fold of his long legs, Harry kept his face averted.
"I have to go again," Doppel-Draco whispered.
"I know," Harry replied. "I gathered."
"I'll see you again—soon, probably. Unless they figure out what I'm up to. Then I may have to... hide for awhile... so they don't put me to sleep." He laughed again, but it was bitter. "I've grown so good at hiding, I can hardly figure when to stop. But hiding is better than... sleeping."
The word sounded like a malevolent hiss. Jerking back toward the mirror, Harry took a stumbling step forward and stilled with his hand against the cool surface, right over Doppel-Draco's chest. Doppel-Draco looked him in the eye, and Harry stared back, mesmerized.
"You mean they'll kill you?"
Doppel-Draco smirked, his eyes twinkling with mirth. "Oh, no. They've no idea how, really. I like to mock them and trip them over roots, watch them shuffle like foals newly born... Have you ever seen a Centaur foal, Potter?" Harry shook his head, feeling bemused. "It's like running through surf on jelly-legs...I'm sure you're familiar with that jinx?"
"Too familiar," he admitted.
"Well, it's been an interesting night. I almost thought..." Doppel-Draco ducked his head so his long fringe fell in his eyes and shrugged. "Watch that trunk's edge, why don't you, before you poke your eye out the back of your skull? There's only so much the Healers can patch you up before you start looking and acting like Old Mad-Eye. So, then!"
He winked away, leaving Harry mystified as to what he meant by that last. Trunk's edge? he wondered. Doppel-Draco had stared into Harry's eyes as if he could see through them, beyond them, to all the sights yet unseen, words yet unsaid, deeds yet undone...
Sighing, Harry turned away and flopped on the person-shaped spot on his bed of books. He swiftly steadied a few piles that threatened to topple over and returned to his reading to see if he could puzzle something out about the Green Man or the lonely place that Doppel-Draco had mentioned before.
~
Yawning himself awake, Harry rolled over and planted his face firmly in an open book. It was stifling and the text was a bit dusty, so he jerked back, nose twitching, and sneezed himself fully alert. Sniffling from the excess, he blinked down at the book, groaned, and shoved it over the side of the bed, idly palming his face and wondering if he had ink smudges.
It had been a long night and looked to be an even longer day rifling through Ollivander's heirlooms. He'd thumbed through book after book about Hogwarts' history and magical creatures last night, and for the most part he'd had no luck.
However, there had been one text that seemed promising. It was Runic, and Harry had spent hours translating a small passage properly. Magical runes were curious things—each new word changed the meaning of the last. People usually read them backwards to get a vague idea of the text before going forwards again—or so Hermione claimed. She was the one with the real runes experience, after all; it came from working as a Reviser for the Invisibility Squad at the Ministry. He only bothered with runes because he needed them to decipher some of the older wandlore. Finally, he had succeeded—although he was iffy about a word here and there—and clonked out.
Fishing for his glasses, Harry gathered his wits and then glanced at his wardrobe mirror to see if Doppel-Draco was there. Upon finding himself alone, he got up and went to use the loo. Only once his bladder was lighter and his breath fresher did he pick up the parchment of translations to peruse. It was always a good idea to sleep on something and then return to it for closer consideration.
The paper in his hand was crumpled and smudged, and his handwriting grew sloppier by the line, tapering down on a significant curve—evidence of his grogginess. Still, it was legible enough. It read:
The siege is upon us and our walls weaken. The Lady, ever wise and tempered, was the one to suggest at last what we all had long avoided, myself especially. I am not eager to see the mystes roll out of the forest, even for the survival of this academy and all who dwell in within the fortress. I wonder, what shall come once our deed is done? And I tremble in despair. I have heard tales—and they are terrible.
In the Darkness, a garden flourished, thick and lovely and sweet. The men who dwelt in trees therein knew neither sorrow nor shame, neither hunger nor hurt, neither weariness nor want, neither despair nor death. Milk and honey sustained them. Gods whispered truths in the winds that rocked them. Magic loved them and obeyed their whims. And they were at ease. This was the first world of man.
The dawn of Light destroyed their world, yet they flourished on, dwelling among others unlike them—men as we, who have lost the capacity of the elders and so now know vice, suffering and death—and learnt their names and truths, which gave them power. But the men envied and hated these strange, immortal beings, and sought to exploit them to their own ends, but this only led to ruin and death. So the elder ones retreated to their forests to dwell in trees and sleep, and there they remained and were forgotten.
I cannot help but think that is where they belong. They were not made for our world. I shudder to think of them unleashed on us again. Should we make tools of them to defeat our enemies, what will they do to us in turn when our enemies are gone? Their powers are fearsome—they are creatures of darkness; they have no light of their own, so steal the light of others. They do not know death intimately, but may deal it out with a single touch. They do not suffer, yet at a glance understand and exploit the suffering of others. They labour for nothing, but leech gain of another's pains. There is no place for such creatures in our world. They would drive us all to despair and destruction.
There was potential in that excerpt. This was the first text he'd come across that spoke of the Green Men openly. All others seemed unaware of their very existence, let alone of the characteristics that defined them. However, if what was contained in this excerpt was true, Harry could fully understand why Draco's captors feared Green Men—he feared them, too. They sounded like awful, parasitic things.
A knock came at his bedroom door, drawing Harry out of his musings. He called out to Ollivander that he would be ready to go in another twenty minutes, and rushed into the bathroom to have a quick shower. Once done, he hurriedly towelled off and donned an old pair of jeans and a t-shirt he didn't care about ruining. He wasn't certain what state Ollivander's old relics would be in, but he doubted finding answers would be easy if the ramshackle disorder of Ollivander's store was anything to go by. Harry had spent hours organizing wands and sweeping out dust and cobwebs once a fortnight during his apprenticeship, but Ollivander never bothered to put anything where it was meant to go, so the mess encroached again and again. That was one of the things Harry had hated about studying under such an absentminded wand-making genius. Harry wasn't even a neat freak himself, so it was rather telling that Ollivander's simply was too messy for him. He didn't even want to think about peeking in his guestroom while the old man was inhabiting it.
When he went out into the common quarters, he saw that Ollivander had made a quick breakfast of sausage and peppers with toast. They ate in silence, and Harry kept returning to his translation about Green Men and what little Doppel-Draco could reveal about the matter. As they ate and Harry thought, Ollivander kept staring at him with those shrewd moonlike eyes. It made Harry a bit uncomfortable, to be honest. He swallowed his last bite of sausage like a lump in his throat and stood, pulling a tight smile. Ollivander stood with him, fingers twitching.
Then Ollivander took his arm and pulled him into the office, to the large, person-sized fireplace, which he'd had built in specifically to give Floo access. Ollivander turned his wand on the logs lying in the grate and cast a fierce Incendio. Lively flames licked at the top and back of the hearth. A light sweat broke out on Harry's brow as he leaned in to fetch the clay jar of Floo Powder from the mantle.
Tossing in a pinch of grainy powder, Harry stepped back to let Ollivander sweep through. He called out the address, The Crossed Wands, and was gone in a flash of green light.
Harry followed suit, watching the different grates swirl around him. Then, the fire spat Harry out like a spark cracking in the air, and he stumbled into a cobwebby room with a wooden chandelier that dangled precariously from a frayed cord. A fat ghost in long, austere robes floated in circles around the chandelier. Harry grew dizzy just watching him.
Chuckling in amusement, Ollivander stepped out from the shadow of the hearth and greeted his ghostly ancestor. The ghost didn't even pause in his rotation around the chandelier as he lifted a hand and huffed out, "Password?"
"Here is childhood's end."
As if a brick wall rose up before him, the ghost stopped suddenly. Then he made a slow turn and peered at Ollivander, his eyes shining with fear. He asked to hear the password again, and when Ollivander repeated it, the ghost actually shook. Whatever those words meant to him had to be simply awful if they could frighten a ghost.
Ollivander's deceased ancestor turned back to the chandelier and darted up through the ceiling. After a few seconds, the chandelier began to swing on its frayed rope. Harry glanced sideways to see Ollivander. Ollivander's face was upturned to the chandelier, but he didn't seem concerned about the way it rocked. In fact, he wore a secretive smile. When Harry started to ask what was going on, Ollivander merely held up a hand to silence him. Uncertain, Harry kept quiet and turned back to the chandelier.
It was going faster now. The frayed rope split fibres and creaked. The ceiling dipped under its weight.
Harry wasn't in the least surprised when it snapped altogether and chandelier crashed to the floor. Faint curls of smoke from the extinguished candles rose up to the gaping hole in the ceiling. Harry had expected to peer up into the framework of the ceiling, or even beyond into the room above. Instead, however, a white light shone down through the hole. It grew more brilliant every second.
Clapping a hand on Harry's shoulder, Ollivander urged him forward, into the ray of light. Surprisingly, the touch of the light on his skin felt cool rather than warm, and he pressed his fingers against the curve of his biceps, marvelling at the chill. He could feel magic in the light—it was a strange, abrasive magic that made him feel as if his skin were being chafed away.
"Close your eyes," Ollivander said.
"What?"
"Close your eyes against the light or it'll blind you as it passes into the darkness."
Harry did so. It kept growing brighter anyway, and had begun to make his eyes ache, even through his eyelids. He had to throw a hand over his eyes to keep them from throbbing with pain.
The magic of the light grew more abrasive. He felt spread thin, shredded. It became almost painful. He squirmed, and started to move away, but Ollivander yanked him back. Harry cringed and bit his tongue.
Then, before he even realized what was happening, the magic receded. Harry dropped his hand from his face to see if the light still burned through his eyelids. It didn't, so he opened his eyes and checked out his surroundings, idly rubbing at the raw feeling of his arms.
It was dark now, damp and chill. Running water sounded nearby, and, when Harry stepped toward the sound, a thick brush crunched underfoot. He rocked back on his heels and turned to Ollivander curiously. Though Ollivander stood close by, Harry could barely make him out in the pressing darkness. He frowned.
"I told you once before that my family always has kept a tree farm," he said.
"Yes," Harry replied slowly. He took a few blind steps to his left, arms outstretched, and came into contact with the rough bark of a tree. "But you never collected your own wood. You're the one who put me onto the lumber yard. So I thought..."
"Hmm." Ollivander drew closer and put a hand on Harry's shoulder. "I never told you that the trees were meant to be cut. We provide for them—and they reward our tender care."
"How do they... reward you?"
Harry turned and started. Ollivander's eyes illumined the darkness. It was unsettling. Harry was reminded of Doppel-Draco's blue-grey eyes, flashing like strobes, and he withdrew from the kindly old man who'd taught him everything he knew about wands. Harry had always known that Ollivander was fascinated with magic best left alone—dark magic, blood magic, ancient magic—the secrets and lies and gilded frames that came with raw power. But the war had been hard on him, and Ollivander was weak of body, if not frail of heart or mind, and Harry had thought he settled down into a respectable life.
Perhaps not. Ollivander and Dumbledore were much alike. Harry never had known what the older man was thinking—scheming, more like; he was full of schemes and plots—and that should have bothered him. It turned out, Harry hadn't quite learnt his lesson after all.
"They lend me power."
Wind whipped through the wood and the trees rocked and groaned. Rustles whispered through the canopy. Ollivander's gaze followed something in the dark.
Harry spun about to have a better look and saw a flicker of light in the distance, down a long aisle over which hung the scraping, skeletal branches of sad-looking trees. Ollivander put a firm hand on Harry's back and gave him an insistent push forward.
"Let's go. I will show you how to draw them out. They may have answers for you, about your queer little friend."
Ollivander's eyes darted this way and that, and Harry realized that he was watching a ghastly pale mist roll over the horizon, winding along between the thick trunks.
Leaning close, Ollivander whispered, "They speak amongst themselves and share the dreams of those who sleep. They dwell within the continuum. They are collective."
"Who are they?" Harry asked, just as quietly.
Ollivander squeezed Harry's side, his fingers twitching. "Tree spirits... They are the elders."
"You are lying to me," Harry murmured, allowing Ollivander to push him down the path.
"Well," Ollivander laughed, "only in part."
~
Elder trees towered overhead, their white blossoms dotting the darkness of the canopy. Harry craned his head back to study the trees. Several of them were gathered in a clump here, at the end of the narrow aisle; the grooves and knots, lines and curves of the bark gave the impression of seven frowning faces glowering down at him. Harry fidgeted.
The chill of the light burned colder now, with the misty air creeping over his lower arms like ants creeping over his hands. Harry regretted his choice of clothing. The morning mist was thick and gelatinous, rolling over him like slime; whispering winds cut right through him as he huddled beneath a stooped elder tree. Like a mouse, Ollivander scurried through the brush, drawing flaming runes on the trunks of the trees, and Harry shook himself, bouncing on his heels to keep warm. Twiggy debris crunched underfoot, and he realized that he'd heard no animal sounds since he stepped into the forest. It was a disturbing thought. The air thrummed like a taut string, and in the distance, the brooks gurgled, but no birds chirruped, no canines prowled. This misty wood had smothered the life right out of itself.
A resonant hum swelled in the silence. It grew so loud it blared. And, far off, Harry thought he heard laughter—no, pealing bells.
His mouth dropped open and the musk of the air burned his tongue. Turning in a tight, slow circle, he took a moment to better examine his surroundings. It almost reminded him of the Forbidden Forest. Yet, however Forbidden and Dark that place was, it seemed positively lively and welcoming compared to this.
The mists rolled and their current shifted. A blurry blackness burned through them. Even from afar, Harry could taste the thick, medicinal smoke as it wafted through the trees toward him. He cast a quick glance in Ollivander's direction to see that he was still drawing runes and muttering to himself, and then hedged closer to the source of the smoke.
Furry vines snapped out from the canopy to bar his way. They made a web of vibrating energy that pulsed and thrummed with black magic, making it quite clear that he was not welcomed there. He stumbled back.
"Harry," Ollivander said, his voice tense.
"Sorry, I—"
As he turned, the words clumped in his throat and lodged there. The stooped elder tree that Ollivander had been working on now looked as if globules moved beneath the bark. It looked a bit like a man who'd taken Polyjuice Potion and was in the midst of transforming.
The grooves in the tree cracked and split open. Roots burrowed up through the ground and snapped together, twining about one another to make massive lower limbs. The overhead branches creaked as they bent this way and that. Leaves rained down from the canopy into Harry's hair.
Harry stared up in awe. The knots and bumps that had given the impression of a face now twitched into one, and the tree rocked forward, lurching a few steps before coming to a stop before Harry.
Gasping, Harry took a hesitant step back, but he knew there was nowhere to go. The pulsating vines still blocked his way, and he didn't doubt that should he try to flee another barrier would appear.
But he was not the type to flee from things anyway. He opened his mouth to address the stunned, sleepy looking tree, but then clapped it shut again. He didn't know what to say. He glanced to Ollivander for help, but Ollivander only held up a hand, indicating he should wait. He did.
The tree shook itself, branches tangling and canopy hissing. Then, as the tree stretched and opened its mouth—its mouth, Harry thought, bewildered—and yawned, a thin silvery vapour drifted out.
It settled before Harry, shaped like a broad-shouldered man. Steadily, it grew firmer, more colourful, until it looked just like any other person he might see walking through London. Except this person was naked and still had flaming runes glowing on his chest.
"Hello," Harry said, waving lamely. The man cocked his head. His eyes were golden and piercing, and as his long grey hair blew back on a breeze, they seemed to peer right through him. Harry's stomach flopped. He shouldn't have said anything.
"Harry has befriended an elder tree," Ollivander said, moving to stand by Harry's side. Harry was grateful for his presence there. It made him feel a little less transparent to the spirit before him.
"The sapling is rather resilient, after all," the man said. He turned to gaze through the mists and said, absentmindedly, "It is green, too, like a little garden snake, and just as cunning."
"You know of him, then?" said Ollivander.
"I've seen through your minds."
That was less than comforting for Harry. He shifted back on his heels again, as if to put more room between them, though it wouldn't have helped anyway. This place was disquieting. He wished he were home. But for Doppel-Draco, he thought, he could endure this queer encounter. The tree spirit didn't seem the type to mince words, after all.
"Um," Harry said. "I wondered if you could... help me somehow? Tell me something about what's happening to him?"
"You wish me to contact him?"
"If you can," Harry said. "He's trapped somewhere, and the people who are holding him there... They—they torture him."
"I see."
Admittedly, the man was a tree, but Harry had expected a different reaction than the bland and dismissive one he'd received. He wondered if the spirit even cared what had happened to Draco, and why Ollivander would bring him here if not. He clenched his jaw, his hands at his sides. As he moved, he felt the elder stick, sheathed on his thigh; it leant him strength.
"Could you tell me... anything?" he insisted.
"It is called the Forlorn Garden, this place where your sapling is trapped and tortured. He is imprisoned in a tree."
"Like you?" Harry asked, glancing over the man's shoulder to the stooped elder from which he'd come. It lumbered there, seeming...plant-like. That was even more queer than when it had grown limbs and distinguished a face.
"I am not imprisoned. I chose to dwell within the tree. He would rather dwell among your kind... The ones who have taken him are cruel. They believe it is best to lock him away like this." Harry frowned. He remembered Dumbledore's talk of the greater good, and felt his stomach roil with nausea. "Long ago, we who dwelt in trees went out into the world. Long ago, we dwelt among your kind. But there we were misunderstood and maltreated, so we chose to leave." Smiling sadly, the spirit shook his head and looked Harry full in the eye again. "Well, most of us chose to leave... Some of us chose to hide."
"Hide?"
"Among your kind, boy. They pretended to be like you. Then one day they were... Your sapling's family was borne of one of our kind who chose to pass as a man. You will have to ask your sapling how he came to awaken his magic one day. He is hiding this much from me."
"I didn't think you could hide within a collective," Harry murmured.
"It is difficult but doable. There are so many of us, you need only shield yourself behind the others... But, even were that not so, your sapling is not a part of the collective yet. They have stolen his family from him and put him in thrall of the Taboo. That is how they managed to trap him at all. As I said, he is resilient and cunning. He will do what it takes to free himself from that lonely place." The spirit bowed his head. "To enter the land of the forsaken, one must die; likewise, to leave the land of the forsaken, one must be reborn anew. Only the waters of life can accomplish such a powerful transformation and elevate the soul beyond that hellish threshold. Because you have come here to aid one of our own, we will allow you to pass and take a chalice. But beware the curse of greed."
"I am not greedy," Harry said. "I don't want to live forever. I only want to bring him back safely."
"We will hold you to that. The sapling knows your name, and so I do. That gives me power over you. I will suffer neither lie nor betrayal."
"I've already sworn myself to the one person that matters," Harry said, grinding his teeth.
The tree spirit looked at him for a moment, and then nodded. He raised his hand. "The waters are there."
Harry turned to look behind himself, where the tree spirit had pointed. An orange fire burned through the furry vines that had sprung out to block his path earlier. Even the mists receded through the wood. Harry could see a light beyond there, flickering and golden. When he turned back to thank the spirit, the man was gone, and the stooped elder settled back into its place, knotted, bumpy face still and silence once again.
~
Harry stumbled into his bathroom, stripping off layers of dust and clothes. His muscles ached and his head was pounding. After collecting water from the brook in a goblet, Ollivander had ushered him into the house again where they dug through some of the family's archives, searching out artefacts or books that might be helpful on Harry's unanticipated quest.
The bathroom filled up with steam and Harry stepped under the hot spray. He lingered in the shower awhile, allowing the hot water to soothe the soreness from his body. When he finally emerged, an hour later, in a white mist, Doppel-Draco glanced up from the wardrobe mirror and cocked his head. His stare was curious and calculating, slowly creeping over every inch of Harry's wet body. Harry was distinctly aware that he was clad only in a loosely fixed towel. He felt glad of the flush from the shower, else Doppel-Draco might have noticed the heat of embarrassment as it spread over his upper body.
Fidgeting with the towel to keep it from falling, Harry hurried over to his wardrobe and swiftly donned pyjamas, uncaring how it stuck to his damp skin and patches of moisture spread over the soft cotton. Once clothed, he felt more comfortable. He threw a few pillows and blankets on the floor in front of the wardrobe mirror to lounge on.
Doppel-Draco was better dressed this time. He wore a thin shroud, and, despite being mostly sheer white cloth, it allowed for the illusion of modesty. He laid on his stomach and propped himself up on an elbow.
"I nearly broke my neck, you know," Harry said conversationally, "tripping over a trunk in Ollivander's attic. How'd you know?"
"I know you," Doppel-Draco hummed, his lips curving into a secretive smile. He looked better than the last time Harry had seen him, healthy and well-rested and vibrant. Even the Mona Lisa smile was a welcome sight. "More than you realize—I know you...Klutz."
"Hmm." Doppel-Draco's gaze slithered over toward the bedside table where the goblet of water sat, then drew back to Harry. "Were they unkind to you?"
"They think I've given up," He said, shrugging. "My friend helps me to keep unnoticed. He's very good to me. Without him..."
"I see...That's good news, you know, someone is looking out for you until I find you."
"Do you worry for me?"
"You know that."
Doppel-Draco lowered his gaze and drew his fingers across the surface of the mirror idly. He said, "Do you wonder about me?"
Rolling onto his side, Harry pushed himself up and scooted closer to the mirror, drawing a flannel blanket around his shoulders. He pressed his fingertips to the lush curve of Doppel-Draco's mouth, seeking to engage his magic.
It started as a trickle, a dribble of magic coursing down his own. Then there came a stronger rush of magic, streaming steadily into him. It was a cosy, familiar feeling, like two bodies cuddling together, guiding each other through a breathtaking haze of contentment.
Harry could feel Doppel-Draco's soft lips beneath his fingertips, full and pouted and moist. They curved in a slight, lopsided smile, and Harry closed his eyes against the sight which shook him. It was overwhelming even to feel the alternating moist heat and chill of Doppel-Draco's every breath against his fingers. But if he kept looking at that most unexpected smile, he thought he might crumble.
"I think about you all the time now," Harry said, his voice low and uneven.
"Do you want to save me?"
"Of course!"
"I see."
Doppel-Draco lowered his gaze and his smile fell. Harry pressed more insistently against him, but despite the plumpness of Doppel-Draco's mouth against his fingertips, the mirror remained cold and unyielding. Harry made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and Doppel-Draco glanced up, surprised. His eyes flew wide and flashed that queer blue-grey which Harry was gradually growing accustomed to; it seemed far less unnerving each time he saw it, and became something he fondly associated with his doppelgänger.
"You say you always think about me, that you want to save me. Sometimes you say you want to take care of me. But I am not a child, Potter, whatever my situation."
"I know you're not a child. Not everything is as cut-and-dry as you would like it to be. There are ways and ways to want to protect someone. I know they hurt you."
"So you think I will never come back from this?"
"Nobody deserves what they do to you, Draco. Nobody!"
"I've protected myself for so long."
Harry couldn't help but roll his eyes and laugh. "You've never done very well looking after yourself, and you know it!"
"No," Doppel-Draco admitted. Harry's eyes slanted over to the mirror, and he watched a flush creep up Doppel-Draco's cheeks. "Well, I suppose I can hardly fault you for wanting to protect me. It's never easy to... watch someone suffer, or to... cause suffering. I learnt that lesson well enough during the war."
"Draco—"
"The problem, Harry, is that I want to protect you far more than I want to protect myself. The last time I felt that way..."
"Hey," Harry said, sitting up again and staring Draco full in the eye. "Don't worry so much. We'll look out for each other. Now's my turn."
Harry's heart gave a little thrill when the smile returned, brightening Draco's face. His fingers began to itch with the desire to touch as it curved wider and Draco's eyes gleamed.
"Do you want me, Harry?"
"Yes!" The word gushed out of him, and he took in another deep breath before he could go on. "Yes, I do want... you."
Doppel-Draco's answering smile was absolutely brilliant, and Harry found himself momentarily breathless again as he stared. Then the magic between them cut itself off abruptly as Doppel-Draco withdrew to kneel upright, and Harry reluctantly let his hand fall away.
"I'm going to come through."
"You can do that without alerting the Aurors or your guards?"
"Of course! It's difficult, and I can't do it often, or they'll definitely notice, but... I never said I was a reflection of anything, you know. I'm not bound to the mirror. It just anchors me, helps me to deflect the power I have to use to visit you so they don't realize what I'm up to."
"Oh," Harry said. "Maybe you shouldn't," he started to say after a few seconds more. He didn't want Doppel-Draco to get into any more trouble with these people than he was already in. He didn't want Doppel-Draco to end up hurt again, like he had the last time.
Yet, when Doppel-Draco made an imperious gesture for him to move out of the way, Harry's protest died in his throat and he scooted back. The surface of the mirror rippled as Doppel-Draco stepped through it, and thick strands of molten metal and glass stuck to him and stretched after him. He plucked them off one by one, and they pinged back into the mirror and hardened as before. Harry watched them settle curiously.
Then Doppel-Draco cleared his throat, and Harry tore his gaze away from the mirror and looked up at the doppelgänger. He stood, pale and silvery as a ghost, except he didn't float midair as they did. Instead, his feet were planted firmly on the ground.
Only his eyes had any colour. They were the blue-grey as before, and they glowed like embers in ash. Harry's chest and throat constricted as Harry stared up at him, and he scrambled to his feet.
"It's better if I dim my appearance," Doppel-Draco said as he went to sit on the edge of Harry's bed. "Unless it disturbs you to see me like this? It's a very ghastly look, I'll admit."
"No," Harry croaked.
He joined Doppel-Draco on the edge of the bed and tentatively reached out to him. Harry had feared that Doppel-Draco might feel strange somehow, but his skin was soft, his flesh firm and warm, his muscles tight. His hand curled around Doppel-Draco's upper arm and gripped tight. Doppel-Draco smirked at him, a knowing look in his eyes.
"Do you want to kiss me, Harry?"
"Oh, shut up!" Harry groused, flopping back on the bed. He reached for a pillow to yank over his burning face, but when he realized they were all on the floor, he grumbled and reluctantly pulled out his elder stick to Accio them back. They sailed through the air and neatly piled themselves over his head. He felt Doppel-Draco's gaze trained on him, and the heat of his face redoubled so he very nearly sweltered beneath his fluffed-up mask.
"You can kiss me once I'm free," Doppel-Draco continued easily. "I should like it to be done properly, you know."
Biting down on the pillow directly over his face, Harry grunted his response.
"What?" Doppel-Draco demanded, batting the pillows away. He crawled up the bed and leaned over Harry, and Harry stared up into his eyes. They were like the oceans at the first sliver of dawn, when a tempest rose and kicked up the sludgy seafloor—they were murky slate, both frightening and beautiful in the most eerie of ways.
"I said when I kiss you good and proper, you had better swoon," Harry lied.
"I shall see about swooning," Draco laughed as he flopped onto his side and stretched out over the bed. "Although the thought of anyone swooning over the Golden Boy regularly makes me nauseous—well, that might do just as well, actually, to make me keel over in your arms when you pucker up."
"What was that? You've been daydreaming about kissing me? How long has this been going on?"
"You wish, Potter." Doppel-Draco said and thwacked him in the shoulder. Harry curled onto his side because he laughed so hard his stomach hurt. It was not long until he laughed himself breathless, and a comfortable silence spread between them, broken only when Doppel-Draco yawned. "It's been so long since I've slept in a bed, it seems. I'd forgotten how nice it is..."
"Yeah," Harry replied. Suddenly he felt queasy.
The reminder of Doppel-Draco's current situation made his stomach twist into anxious knots. How could he rest easily knowing that someone was making Draco suffer? How could he carry on a humdrum farce when Draco lived in fear?
"Would you like to stay here?" he asked. "Could you?"
"Hmm... I'll have to return to the mirror, soon. It's exhausting, trying to deflect the light on my own."
"Oh. Right. I don't know what I was thinking."
"I wasn't aware you made thinking a habit," drawled Doppel-Draco. Harry grunted. "Besides, if you leave it to me, Potter, you might find—"
"Are you a Green Man?" As he asked the question, Harry rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow to have a better look at Doppel-Draco. His eyes dipped away for a moment, and he pursed his lips, but he didn't seem to be struggling with any magical compulsion as he once had before. Harry wondered at the ease with which he nodded.
"Are you still going to help me now that you know?" Doppel-Draco wouldn't meet Harry's eyes, and Harry's heart seized. He hadn't intended to frighten Doppel-Draco, but he needed to know what he was really up against. Yet, Doppel-Draco's voice had sounded so small and wounded, and his question had completely thrown Harry off. "I'll understand if you don't want to... I—I can't really hurt you like this, you know. But if you—"
"You don't really believe I'd leave you there to suffer?" Doppel-Draco glanced up briefly, and a blush suffused his cheeks. It was queer to see the flush of colour upon his silvery complexion, and Harry couldn't help but draw his fingers down the heated curves of Doppel-Draco's cheek and neck. "At the very least, you should expect your proper kiss..."
"I couldn't tell you... But I also was afraid to tell you however much the spell would allow. I thought..."
"I know what you thought," Harry sighed. "I promise to draw you ought of the darkness."
"Even so, you could never draw the darkness out of me. I have become... a strange and powerful creature. I am not like the boy you knew. I can never be like that again."
"That doesn't concern me. I am not the boy you knew, either. I can never be like that again. That is the way of the world, Draco, to turn and grow and change." For a long time, Draco did not answer, but Harry watched him patient silence. "Why do they fear you so much? Are you allowed to say?"
"I wasn't born this way," Doppel-Draco replied. "I was made this way, through a ritual that activates latent magic. It makes me stronger than most. There were parts of the elders that were dormant, but these qualities are fully awakened in me... You have to understand that the elders are what wizards could have been, had they the power, just as wizards are what Muggles could have been if they had magic. Every part of my magic is active, but for the elders only about thirty percent of their magic is active, and for wizards, it's even less—fifteen percent, at a stretch, but most scholars agree that it's more like ten percent... That's why they're so afraid of me—they don't understand what I am."
"Who really understands what they are?"
Doppel-Draco looked up at him. "Well, I don't, anyway," he said, and laughed.
~
When Harry awoke the next morning, Doppel-Draco was back in his mirror. Harry yawned and sat up, peering blearily across the room. He was befuddled to see Doppel-Draco still here, and said, "Did you stay all night?"
"I left before they made rounds at dawn," he replied, shrugging. Then he pointed to the desk. "You've a message."
Harry glanced over to see an owl with a familiar-looking sealed envelope and tried not to groan. He flopped back and worked his hands through his hair. "I thought you were my messenger."
"Your messenger, your Familiar, your worst nightmare, yes... Are you in need of some guidance, Potter? I could call on the powers that be, but I doubt they'd cut the red tape for you."
As if in agreement, the owl squawked and fluttered over to sit on the bedpost. Harry tried to flag it off, but it remained resolute, and, finally, he grumbled and accepted the letter.
Dear Mr. Potter,
I have investigated the nature of your magical bond once more and again have concluded that no mistake was made. Please report to the Ministry of Magic, Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, at your earliest convenience today between 10:00am and 6:00pm. I will be expecting you, and we can discuss your magical bond in more depth. Non-compliance with the summons will result in fines. It would be conducive to clearing the confusion if you showed up this time.
Sincerely,
Terrance L. Boot
Registrar
Growling with annoyance, Harry crumpled the letter and tossed it aside. He spat invectives for idiotic bureaucrats and their ridiculous protocols. This was an unnecessary diversion from the urgent task at hand, and Harry felt like he could clock Boot in the face as soon as look at him.
"Bad news, I take it?" said Doppel-Draco.
Harry cast him a baleful glower before stomping into the bathroom and slamming the door. He yanked his pyjama top overhead and startled when he saw Doppel-Draco smiling cheekily at him from his medicine cabinet mirror.
"Locked doors can't keep me out, you realize," he drawled.
Harry scowled. "I'd like to shower in peace. So sod off."
His words were terse, bitten through clenched teeth. Doppel-Draco started at the harsh sound of his voice, and Harry realized that he was taking his frustrations and feelings of helplessness out on the wrong person—on the person who needed him to be understanding, strong and smart, at that.
Heaving a sigh, Harry added, "Look, the DRCC is breathing down my neck, claiming I've mated to some creature or other when I've only got a new wand. I shouldn't have snapped at you, though."
"The DRCC," Doppel-Draco murmured. His eyes flashed and he glanced away, staring off thoughtfully. Intrigued by his reaction, Harry leaned against the sink and asked what he was thinking. Doppel-Draco's mouth curved into a wry grin. "Nothing. I think I'll go with you, if you don't mind. I might be able to help you—if I can learn something new about Green Men."
"Oh!" Harry said, flushing.
He hadn't even looked at the situation like that. If anyone had access to classified information about Green Men, it would be someone in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
This could actually be a useful excursion. Most of the information about Green Men seemed to have been erased from history, which left Harry out in the cold as far as his research went. He was still despairingly ignorant about what Green Men were, what the Forlorn Garden was, and what this elder coven that Doppel-Draco mentioned was and why they hated Green Men so much to track, kidnap and imprison innocent people.
Now that he had an excuse to go to the Ministry, however, Doppel-Draco could slink from room to room and hunt down something useful. Whatever the elder coven was, they were powerful enough to keep the majority of the public in the dark, but the Ministry usually was very good at keeping ancient records.
"So, I'll leave you then," Doppel-Draco said. He stood and, with a flurry of his gossamer robes, winked out of the mirror.
Turning away, Harry reached over the claw-foot tub and started the shower. Once the water was steamy, he stepped in and began to soap up. Despite his initial irritability over the meeting, now Harry was rather eager to get to the Ministry of Magic. He couldn't wait to get Doppel-Draco back home, either, and pump him for information.
After a quick shower and change of clothes, and Harry stood before his wardrobe mirror and fixed the pentacle with the Green Man hair in it around his neck. He cast several glamour, notice-me-not, and dampening spells on it, to prevent anyone from taking an interest in it. He knew that it would be best to carry it on his person; he didn't want Ollivander to come across it. That man was sneaky on his best days and had always been fascinated with power in whatever form it took—white or black magic.
"You'll follow me?" he asked, pressing a hand to the mirror. Doppel-Draco flagged him off, so Harry Apparated.
The atrium of the Ministry of Magic was light and airy, and a fairly large crowd bustled through. The marble gleamed in the sunlight slanting through the high, arched windows and a cloud of paper airplane inter-office memos fluttered overhead.
There was a long line at reception, and Harry got stuck behind a burly witch with hazel green eyes. She was quite chatty and annoying, and kept stepping back on his toes and jabbing her elbow into his chest, making Harry twist away so she didn't come into contact with his Green Man pentacle.
On her fourth jab, as she scurried back to let a school of wizards pass on their way toward the row of fireplaces against the far wall, she pressed bodily against him and stiffened. Harry cursed under his breath as he shoved her off in the pretence of steadying her, but not before the skin of her face drew tight and leathery, shining in the morning light, and crow's feet crinkled at the corners of her eyes.
"Ma'am?" Harry said, trying to keep his voice even.
She shook her head bemusedly and her double chin jiggled. Harry swallowed the knot that had worked its way into his throat and croaked out, "Are you all right?"
"Yes, just fine," she managed, sounding dazed.
The impatient line that stretched behind jostled them forward, and the witch bumped into the reception desk and gave her name. Harry stood a few steps behind, taking deep, even breaths. He glanced to the metal light fixture behind the welcome-witch's head and saw Doppel-Draco frowning down at the woman. Harry managed a weak smile.
He felt somewhat dizzy and jittery himself. Despite the charms he'd cast earlier, the pentacle at his chest pulsated with power. He engaged it with his own magic, so as not to let it escape into the hall at large, for fear of what it might do or the unwanted attention it might attract. The age that had crept into the hazel-eyed witch's face frightened him. He didn't know what kept the power of the Green Man's hair at bay when it concerned him, or why it so indiscriminately killed at a single touch. He couldn't even ask Doppel-Draco for the information, either; he doubted Doppel-Draco would know any more than he.
"Sir?"
Harry startled and glanced to the welcome witch, who was glowering at him impatiently. Belatedly, he realized he'd been holding up the line and smiled a sheepish smile.
"Sorry. I'm here to see Terrance Boot, Reg—"
"Yes, fourth floor."
"Er, thanks," Harry said, taken aback by the brusque disdain in the woman's voice. She pointed across the atrium to the lifts and hurriedly measured his wand—the old holly-and-phoenix feather, of course; he couldn't hand over his silly elder branch and expect not to get any strange looks, could he?
Harry shuffled away, trying to refrain from keeping a hand over his chest, where the pentacle rested heavily, steady streams of magic gushing through him.
Luckily, he didn't have any other encounters on the lift, though it was a little cramped, with seven wizards and their briefcases squeezed inside. He was glad when the golden doors slid open and he slipped out, alongside a pretty Asian woman with scales down the nape of her neck.
Another granite reception desk sat in the lobby of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, and a skinny, pallid man sat behind. His lank, black hair was greasy and his pale grey eyes were bloodshot and weary, quite unlike Doppel-Draco's lively, shining grey. The man cast Harry a bleary smile as he approached, and Harry bit back his surprised gasp as white fangs were revealed.
Desperately, he tried to rein in the urge to blurt out something ridiculously obvious, and gave his name to the vampire instead. The vampire nodded him back down the hall to the corner office on the left, and Harry purposefully gazed at his dirty shoelaces rather than the motley magical creatures sitting in waiting area behind the granite desk.
A brass plaque proclaiming Boot's name and title was screwed onto the mahogany door. Doppel-Draco's face was distorted in the curve of the capital R in Registrar, as he said, "I'm going to snoop. Play nice with the pencil-pusher, why don't you?" Harry glowered at him, and Doppel-Draco laughed joyfully and stuck out his tongue before winking away.
Harry knocked tentatively, and the door swung back.
"Ah, Harry Potter! I thought I'd never see you here," said Boot with a cheery smile as he slapped a hand on Harry's shoulder and gave him a light push into the room.
Boot had a nice office. It had a wall of windows, which, though they didn't look out onto the streets as most windows in the Ministry of Magic, were enchanted. This one displayed a beautiful forestry scene, complete with ancient, towering trees, budding canopies, and clopping Centaurs. Harry watched a foal skitter through the brush as he sat, and remembered laughing with Doppel-Draco about just that.
The thought of Doppel-Draco, however, was like a shot of cold water in the face, jolting him back to the matter at hand. The longer he kept Boot talking, the more time Doppel-Draco would have to sneak around and the more chances he would have to pick up useful information about Green Men. Otherwise...
Harry didn't want to think about the alternative. He trained his gaze on Terry Boot as he poured two cups of coffee from a conjured service and made small talk about the Creatures' Rights rally in London and the tragic Fiendfyre in Hogsmeade a few days ago, which had displaced far more magical creatures than those three families that had been written up in the Prophet. Harry murmured the appropriate platitudes and sipped at the coffee when Boot placed it before him and tried not to think about the whips of Fiendfyre that had cracked down around Doppel-Draco days ago as well.
"So, shall we get started?" Boot asked, pulling open a drawer on his desk. He pulled out a neat stack of manila folders and a golden phoenix feather quill. "I understand you feel there has been some sort of misunderstanding regarding the nature of your bond?"
"Yes," Harry said. The saucer clattered when Harry set his cup down a little harsher than necessary. "I must admit I'm not certain how this happened at all. Is your machine so sensitive that it recognizes wand-bonding, too? I've never heard of anything like that in all my studies."
Boot countered with a far too bright smile. "Yes, you are a wandmaker, aren't you? I've a nephew who recently went to Hogwarts with one of yours. He's overjoyed with his results."
"I only sell first wands to near Squibs," Harry said, bemused. Boot nodded once, his smile never wavering, and Harry's face flamed. "Sorry, I didn't think...How is the wand holding up for him? I said he should contact me if he needed some adjustments...There are ways to manipulate the wand-bond even after it's formed."
"You would know more about that than I."
"I would be happy to look at it."
"I'll pass that message along; my sister will be delighted... Actually, you mentioned a wand-bond might be the cause of this... mistake?"
Harry noted how he said the word mistake, as if he were placating Harry's temper with its use. Clearly, this was going to be a harder fight than Boot's letter had led him to believe. Harry gritted his teeth.
Apparently Boot had turned into quite the bureaucrat—one who believed so fully in the vapid red-taped system that he couldn't fathom a system error ever occurring.
"It was the only thing I could think of that might've triggered the register," Harry replied evenly. "You never said if your machine was sensitive enough to pick something like this up?"
Boot leaned forward in his seat and pierced Harry with an intent and calculating stare. He said, tentatively, "Here's the problem, Mr. Potter: we don't use a machine to register new magical bonds at all. You might be thinking about the book and quill that registers magical births at Hogwarts?"
"I thought it would be something similar."
"Magical bonds are far more subtle than magical births," Boot explained. "You've heard of the magical continuum?"
"What's that got to do with anything?" Harry said.
"We are, each of us, tapped into magic as a whole, but only very slightly, although some are more deeply entrenched than others. It's enough to allow us to utilize magic as we see fit—that's why Squibs are born, as well as Muggleborns, and why we see such a variance in the power levels of different people; we don't all relate to magic in the same way. A powerful wizard such as yourself would be more entwined in the continuum than most others. Do you follow still?"
Harry nodded for him to continue.
"Naturally, there are some who have stronger connections to the continuum than even you. These people are the ones with the ability to detect magical bonds as they form, by scouting out the distortion of the continuum as the magic of one person connects to the magic of another and flagging the magical signatures of each person for closer evaluation. So you see, we will need to have a closer look at your wand and determine why your bond is so strong, or if this is truly what our sensors detected."
~
"Surely you can tell me something else?" Harry clenched his elder stick in his fist. The bark flaked under his nails with such agonizing depth that blood rimmed each of his cuticles. Through the blur of tears welling in his eyes, the red stain looked like Hermione's chipped varnish when she came back from strengthening the invisibility wards around some of the wizarding world's oldest landmarks. "Maybe you looked in all the wrong places?"
"Maybe," Doppel-Draco drawled. "It's entirely feasible that I looked in all the wrong places. Then again, maybe I looked in the right ones, too. It's hard to see inside of closed filing cabinets."
Harry stared. Were his eyes glimmering, or was that just the sunlight streaming in through the office window and shining against the burnished pitcher of water that hosted his reflection?
"This isn't funny."
"I screamed my throat raw the last time they came at me with their wands blazing. Quite literally—" Doppel-Draco's eyes flashed and he hedged around the pitcher so that his face was distorted on the spout and Harry couldn't make out either of his eyes anymore. Harry gripped the branch tighter. He thought he had splinters, too. "—So much for all my training. The Tangle was nothing compared to that."
"What training are you talking about?" Harry asked, hissing as he uncurled his fingers from around the elder branch. Thin fibres stretched out from the branch, as ripe as any beet. "What's the Tangle?"
"Bit of trivia, Potter: how do you put out the Gumbraithian Fire?"
"Aguamenti," said Harry as he rummaged through his drawers for a pair of tweezers, sucking his teeth at each new jab and stub against notepads, measuring tapes and tubs of rabbit skin glue. He was fairly certain he had several in here, for the odd splinter while paring. "Tip you over and pour you out?"
Harry glanced up in time to see Doppel-Draco flip him the bird. Then he brushed against a little plastic case and Harry nearly whooped for joy as he curled his throbbing fingers around it and yanked back.
"Rather, you don't. You feed it away from you—little known fact... That's one of the tests."
"Haven't taken any tests since Hogwarts," Harry mumbled out of the left side of his mouth. He had to bite down hard on his lower lip on the right side to distract himself from the pain of tweezing beetle-sized javelins from his flesh. "Funny you should be."
"Yes, well, luxuriating in one's own perfection is only satisfactory for so long."
"Of course."
"And then one seeks a little more excitement. I... just found too much, is all."
"Trouble, thy name is Draco."
"But it used to be Harry, you know."
Harry glanced up. Doppel-Draco's image danced in the shards of glass in the refracted dream catcher Luna had given him last Christmas. Dean and Luna were fond of giving handmade gifts that Harry didn't know what to do with, but he could hardly complain—they always asked him to whittle something from the scraps of his logs.
"All I wanted..."
He made no effort to finish the statement. Harry's interest was piqued. Even the hot pain in his fingers dulled in the sudden absence of sound.
"What did you want?" Harry said.
"Nothing." Draco whispered.
"But you can trust me."
"I know..." Still, Doppel-Draco was shifty-eyed and restless, bouncing from window to mantle to pitcher and back to the dream catcher again. "Anyway, the DRCC knows what they're doing, although you might never believe it. I mean, they are quick-quillers, after all. But, if they had sense enough to get a Seer on their side... I'll reserve judgment."
Snorting, and ducking his head back over his bleeding fingers, Harry said, "Since when did you put so much stock in prophecy?"
"It's not the prophecy part of Divinations I care about. Some Seers have the ability to see magic—not just the continuum, you know, but individual magic. It was a Seer who explained what happened to my magic... what happened to me."
"And this Seer?" said Harry as he pulled the last splinter free and heaved a sigh of relief. The tweezers clattered across the desk and fell over the edge. "Dame Dora, by any chance?"
"Hardly a coincidence, I'd say... That's why I told you—it's not worth it, helping me. Everyone who's helped me so far ended up dead. Dame Dora, Althea Xylander—Merlin, even Gumboil!"
The name Gumboil sounded familiar to Harry, and it took him a few moments to remember where he'd heard it before— from Ron, when he'd showed up, demanding that Harry get himself checked out at the hospital after hearing about what happened Susan's call on Harry's narrow boat.
"So you knew Gumboil and Dame Dora?"
"They tried to get me to a safe place," Doppel-Draco murmured, glancing away from Harry. "They didn't deserve what happened to them, Harry. It was... gruesome."
"And Althea Xylander? Who was she? What happened to her?"
"They got to them all," Doppel-Draco sighed. "They killed them, everybody who dared to help me. She was a true healer, one of the few left in the world, and she promised to bind herself to me and restore my name from the Taboo they put on it... They—they wouldn't dare to cross me if I had a true healer on my side. But they got to her before we could finish the ritual."
~
Upon Doppel-Draco's urgings to keep up appearances, Harry opened for business the next day. Thursdays were usually slow days, especially in late June, which would allow him to catch up on his backlog of work. Another shipment of woods was due in next week and he'd barely touched this last supply—aside from the elder stick that had taken him on for a master, he hadn't cracked a single log.
Ollivander was surprised to see him in the office. Harry belatedly realized that he hadn't been to work since Ollivander showed up on the twelfth. He hadn't even bothered to treat his wood, and wouldn't be surprised to find that some, or even most, of it had started to rot out already. Hundreds of galleons wasted away, just like that.
Sighing, Harry hitched up his sign and then retr