Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Lord of Light	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3320 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Lord of Light
- 1
Title:Lord of Light

Rating: PG

Warnings: Profanity, AU, angst.

Disclaimer: These characters belong to J. K. Rowling and her associates. No disrespect is intended.

Beta(s): L. and K.

Pairings: Harry/Draco, former Draco/OFC, background Sirius/Remus

Wordcount: 19,500

Author’s Notes:Written for the hd_parallel alternate universe fest on LJ, for khasael. This story’s AU aspects hopefully make sense! khasael, I’ve tried to include your requests for Harry to have a fun job, for Draco to be oblivious to Harry’s feelings for him, and for an in-character Luna. Thanks to my betas.

Summary: Harry has a gift--a gift that let him defeat Voldemort and has made his career since. He’s used to surprises. But when Draco Malfoy summons him to help his daughter five years after Harry last saw him, Harry learns that he might not be used to this kind.

Lord of Light

            Harry blinked and looked around, disoriented. He usually didn’t feel that way after an Apparition, but he’d never been here before.

            "Here" was a long, sweeping path of white stones with small purple flowers growing between them. Harry had no doubt the effect was deliberate, probably meant to contrast with the pair of stern iron gates to which the path led.

            He had no idea whether the house-elf bowing and wringing its hands between those gates was part of the effect.

            "Master Harry Potter has come," it said, in a voice so high and squeaky Harry winced. "Master Harry Potter must be following me now."

            "Of course," Harry said, with a smile. He had learned in the past several years that most house-elves weren’t like Dobby; they were happy in their positions and didn’t know what to do when someone thanked them, let alone when Hermione talked to them about freedom. "Lead the way."

            The elf gave him a grave, considering look, a bow, and then a nod, which seemed to be separate gestures and mean separate things. It turned away, and Harry saw that it wore a belt of what looked like braided napkins around its waist.

            The path curved on and on and on beyond the gates, but the flowers were gone now, leaving behind pure blocks of snowy marble set into the ground with no break between them. Harry rolled his eyes. Should I be cowering?

            Probably. But he had lost all inclination to cower after defeating Voldemort when he was fourteen. That was the kind of thing you only did once, and Harry thought it had used up all the fear he’d ever feel in his lifetime.

            No mere manor can compare to having unknown magic bleed out of your body and knock your enemy off his feet, after all.

            The manor house itself was so white it was hard to look at with the sunlight directly on it, and Harry knew where the inspiration for the marble path had come from. Luckily, trees grew beside the house, their soft, green-gold shadows shading the door and the mighty pillars that lined the immediate walkway up to it, which let Harry avoid having to squint. The elf took him directly to the doors and pushed them open.

            Beyond was a blaze of gold and silver and crystal and something dark purple that Harry suspected was amethyst. He pursed his lips in a low whistle. He wasn’t impressed by the wealth, no, but he enjoyed colors, and he would have liked to wander past the treasures collected there to absorb the way the light shone on them.

            He got no more than a glimpse, though, because his client stepped forwards immediately and filled the doors with his shoulders, his white robes, and his desperate stare.

            "Potter?"

            Harry blinked, and extended a hand. "Malfoy," he said. There was no doubt that was who it was, despite the whiteness of the hair and the blaze of the grey eyes. Malfoy had looked considerably more ordinary in school, but if Harry didn’t stay the same throughout his life, he couldn’t expect Malfoy to. "Pleased to see you again."

            Malfoy sneered and made no move to take his hand. "Amazing that you would say that, Potter," he said, "after what you did to us."

            Harry sighed and spoke patiently. He kept his hand out, in case Malfoy changed his mind. "That wasn’t me. That was the Ministry going crazy in the wake of Voldemort’s defeat and deciding that this was a good time to rebuild society from the ground up. And some pure-bloods going crazy, too," he couldn’t help adding, despite what Malfoy’s family had been, and still was. No one had asked the pure-blood families to remove their children from Hogwarts and take refuge in hasty arranged marriages with the object of outbreeding the Muggleborns.

            Malfoy straightened, his arms folding across his chest as though he were shutting a door. Harry, accepting the signal, lowered his hand and waited.

            He couldn’t quite stop staring at Malfoy. Sure, the git had grown up, just like Ron and Harry and Hermione and everyone who had lived through the last five crazy years since Voldemort perished in the Little Hangleton graveyard. But Malfoy had changed in different ways than simply growing taller and broader.

            His face, for one. There were lines of suffering there that Harry hadn’t seen on any of the other pure-bloods he worked for. Mostly, they looked sulky if anything. And there was the brightness of pain in his eyes--that was one reason they looked so light--as if whatever had happened to him was still happening.

            Harry’s thoughts skipped suddenly to Malfoy’s little girl, the one he had been called here for, and he couldn’t help drawing in a short breath.

            Malfoy suddenly snorted and turned his head, eyes lowering as if he didn’t like Harry looking him in the face for too long. Maybe he knows how my gift works, Harry thought. It wasn’t exactly a secret anymore. "You’re here for Cassie," he said. "I don’t care what you believe, or think, or who you sleep with." Harry’s eyebrows climbed at that strange last addition, but Malfoy went on without pausing for breath. "If you can heal her--and you come highly recommended--then I’ll accept your presence in my home."

            "How gracious," Harry murmured, and gave Malfoy a sweet smile when he turned around to glare. He stepped over the threshold, though, since Malfoy was good enough to make a curt gesture of invitation. "Cassie," he added along the way, because he thought he should know something about his clients. "Short for Cassandra?"

            "Short for Cassiopeia, you uncultured idiot," Malfoy snapped, and then clenched his fists down as if he would suffocate the next words he wanted to speak and strode on in silence.

            Harry looked around at the corridors they were led through, admiring the chandeliers, the mirrors, the transparent, floating curtains of bright blue and green and red. The walls dazzled with silver filigree, golden frames around paintings, and the amethyst shades of lamps. Harry felt a soft smile stretch over his face. When he’d first received Malfoy’s summons, he hadn’t been sure of how well he could work here, but then he had pictured the Manor as dark and unrelentingly gloomy. If he had light, he could construct anything he needed to.

            "Do you always look as if you’re about to come from staring into a ray of sunlight?" Malfoy’s caustic voice interrupted his meditation.

            "Oh, no," Harry said, snapping his head back down and smiling at Malfoy. "I look like that from moonlight, too."

            Malfoy stared at him, and then turned away, obviously not sure what to do with that information. Harry hummed happily under his breath as he continued to follow. He had disarmed more than one prickly pure-blood with humor like that. He didn’t mind making fun of himself, and they always seemed to find it disconcerting.

            Then again, Harry didn’t know that he’d ever met a pure-blood who had a sense of humor about himself, his family, his heirlooms, or anything else associated with him.

            They halted outside a carved door with a silver sun on it. The sun had a melancholy face, and the rays were shaped like tears. Harry frowned and adjusted his expectations a little. A child who lived in a room like that would probably not be sulky.

            "Don’t you dare hurt her," Malfoy breathed as he laid one hand on the sun’s face. The sun gave a low moan like a sound of pain and retreated into the door, which clicked and slid open.

            Harry bowed his head. "I won’t," he said quietly.

            Malfoy gave him a harsh look, but his eyes couldn’t hold it, and he turned away. Harry hoped he had heard the same intensity and depth of feeling in Harry’s voice that Harry heard in his, and would respond with as much seriousness.

            The room beyond the door was enormous, with several enchanted windows to flood it with light and a bed along one wall that could have equaled two of the couches in Harry’s house easily. It was covered with dark blue sheets dotted with silver stars. More stars hung down from the ceiling, sprawled along the walls, and even covered the floor in softly twinkling patterns. Harry raised his eyebrows. If the girl’s not an expert in Astronomy by the time she goes to Hogwarts--if she goes--it won’t be her family’s fault.

            Along the back wall, halfway between the windows, stood a single chair, an honest-to-god marble throne with a silver back. And in the chair huddled a girl who looked about three years old, with blonde hair hanging in her face and her arms wrapped so tightly around her legs Harry could see her knuckles clenched.

            Harry stopped where he was and cleared his throat. The little girl flinched. Harry decided not to take notice of that. "Hullo, Cassie," he said.

            She said nothing.

            Harry nodded. He had been in situations like this before, and the most important thing was to avoid stressing a child who was already stressed enough. He sat down in the middle of the floor, took a moment to calm his mind and center the feelings that would break out of him if he thought too much about being among Malfoys--five years was enough time to drop most of his grudges, but Malfoy’s petty behavior was bringing the memories back--and then reached for the light.

            The sunbeams falling through the windows instantly bent towards him and formed into a soft golden fire above his head. Harry reached up and plunged his hands into it, chuckling softly in delight at the feeling; it was like touching essence of kitten. Warm, full, purring, it flowed through his fingers and down his arms, spinning out shining strands until Harry focused his will and called it back into his palms.

            He held out his hands, spreading them flat, and the sunlight began to vault and dance back and forth, like Muggle coil-toys that Harry had seen Luna’s children playing with. Leap, leap, leap, and Harry added color to it, calling on the sights that he had absorbed as he walked through the Manor. Intense purple replaced the bright yellow, followed by the paler blue-green of some of the curtains, and Harry glanced sideways and added the dark blue of Cassie’s blankets. The colors spread lazily around each other, eddying, more beautiful and more active than any rainbow.

            From beside him, Harry could hear Malfoy’s breathing, soft and confused. He ignored him. The important thing was Cassie, who had lifted her head enough that Harry could see one dark eye.

            She would duck back if she saw him looking, so Harry paid attention to the colors instead, spinning them faster and faster, in coils so brilliant that his own eyes watered and he had to blink. Then he tapped two fingers on each hand into the middle of the palm and breathed on the light.

            It sprang up above him, colors melting and changing as it moved, and formed into a perfect image of Hogwarts.

            Well, Harry amended, smiling to himself, as he always had to do when he created a vision out of his own memories. Hogwarts as I see it.

            That was the limitation and the grace of his gift, which came from the perceptions of a single mind. Harry could pull forth Hogwarts as he envisioned it, or as Cassie envisioned it, or as Malfoy envisioned it, but never Hogwarts exactly as it was. What he conjured was more like a perfect Pensieve memory than anything else.

            But it didn’t depend on a Pensieve, and things that a person had never actually experienced--the images of nightmare and dream, the perfection that they wanted to see captured in paint but never could--would emerge from Harry’s hands, from a mingling of light and thought.

            Hermione had told Harry once that the light was his raw material and the memories he sculpted his skill. Harry saw no reason to doubt her.

            He added more of the grounds about Hogwarts, the lake and the trees of the Forbidden Forest and the road leading towards Hogsmeade. None of them were perfect, of course. The Forbidden Forest loomed larger and more menacing than it actually was, the road stretched longer, and Harry had probably forgotten some of the distance that existed between the castle and the lake. But what he lacked in reality he made up for in truth. The image shimmered solidly now, so beautiful that one could step into it.

            "Where is that?"

            Cassie. Harry didn’t look at her, and kept his voice calm when he replied. "Hogwarts. A magical school. My first real home," he added, and spun out the Quidditch pitch from an undifferentiated mass of green and straight lines into rich detail.

            "How do you do that?"

            "With light," Harry said, and raised an eyebrow as he turned to face the girl for the first time. She had let a leg slump and was staring at him with big eyes that looked dark grey or green in color. "Like this." He grabbed a fresh beam of sunlight and used it to surround the image of Hogwarts with an outrageous golden glow, as if the sun was just rising.

            "Yes, but how?" Cassie insisted. She leaned forwards and frowned at him, as if he had done something horrible to her personally by taking in that sunlight. Malfoy gasped, but when she glanced at him uncertainly, he must have had a reassuring expression, because she turned back to Harry. In fact, she stood up, planting tiny fists on tiny hips. She wore a short white robe that dangled around her ankles. "You don’t have a wand."

            "Sure I do," Harry said, and conjured an image of his wand in front of him. It was less detailed than his picture of Hogwarts, because he actually didn’t look at his wand all that often. Most of what he knew about it was the thickness of the grip, the solidity of the magic in it, and the weight of the wood, which were all hard to put into a visual image.

            "That’s a trick," Cassie said, and folded her arms to glare. "Not your real wand."

            Harry smiled. "Smart girl."

            "Are you here to trick me?" Cassie asked. "Because it’s not going to work." Her diction was sharp and clear, and she radiated enough indignation to warm a dozen yetis. Harry wanted to laugh, but she wouldn’t have understood that he was laughing with and not at her, so he kept his face grave.

            He shook his head. "I was here to show you what I could do, and to offer to do the same thing for you. But you don’t want it, so I’ll be going." He mustered a deep sigh from the center of his chest and rose to his feet. The images of Hogwarts and his wand began to fade now that he was no longer concentrating on them.

            A series of emotions crossed Cassie’s face, and Harry held back more laughter. God, she’s expressive. I wonder how in the world she’s managed that, growing up with Malfoy for a parent?

            Then Harry remembered that he had seen suffering on Malfoy’s face when he opened the door, not just cold restraint or spite, and corrected himself with a wince. I think he’s capable of that--more capable than I ever knew him to be. Knowing someone from the time they’re eleven until they’re fourteen doesn’t mean that you’ve seen all they’re capable of.

            "I never said I didn’t want it," said Cassie.

            "But you said I was tricking you." Harry frowned at her and turned away, folding his own arms. "So I’ll leave."

            "Wait!" Cassie stepped forwards far enough that he could see her out of the corner of his eye, hand uplifted like a small queen. "I might like it. Even if it’s tricking. Show me."

            Harry shrugged and dropped back into a crouch so that he was at her eye level, but said in a doubtful voice, "It means that you have to look at me. I don’t think you’d like that, since you didn’t look up when I came in."

            "I didn’t know you then," Cassie said. Apparentlytwenty minutes in the same room is all it takes her to become acquainted, Harry thought with some amusement. "Now you can look in my eyes and pull something out."

            "All right," Harry said, peering earnestly into her eyes. They were dark green, he decided absently, and wondered what Mrs. Malfoy had looked like. Malfoy had married a pure-blood from one of the Scandinavian countries, and that was all he knew. "But I have to pull out two things. One of them can be your best memory. The other will be a bad memory."

            Cassie swallowed and shivered. "Really bad?" she whispered.

            Harry nodded. "Really bad."

            Malfoy shifted his weight behind him, and Harry gritted his teeth, hoping the small sound would mean nothing to Cassie. Don’t interfere now, you moron. I’ve dealt with more traumatized children than you have, and I know she’ll come around if you just don’t say anything.

            Cassie worried her lip between her teeth for endless moments before she nodded. "Do I have to look at the bad memory?" she whispered, as if she thought there was a chance it might hear her.

            "No," Harry said. This would have been the time when he would have reached out and touched the hand or the head of some of the children he’d worked with, but Cassie was too proud for that, too distant. "Your daddy and I will look at it."

            Cassie gave him a look. "You mean my father?" she said, stressing the word as if Harry was mentally deficient because he couldn’t pronounce it.

            Harry bit his lip so he wouldn’t laugh hysterically and said, "Yes."

            Cassie nodded again and started to duck her head, but then seemed to remember and leaned forwards, eyes so wide her eyelashes trembled. Harry gazed into them.

            It wasn’t Legilimency; Snape had used Legilimency on Harry after his battle with Voldemort to make sure he really was who he claimed to be, and it had felt like someone tearing and sifting through his mind. Harry couldn’t see any other memories than the one he sought. A tunnel of white light opened up in front of him, and he walked straight to the images he needed. From what people had told him, it didn’t hurt.

            Harry was glad of that. The world had gone mad after he survived Voldemort’s attempt to kidnap him from the Triwizard Tournament, and he’d been too young to ameliorate most of the consequences. He never wanted to cause any pain that could be helped.

            He saw the images he needed and brought them forth, one blazing like the sun, one writhing like a handful of maggots. Harry winced and took a deep breath when he saw that one, but he pulled it out and began to spin light around it anyway. He had promised Malfoy that he would find out what was bothering his daughter, making her quiet during the day and unable to wake from sleep without screaming, and the simplest way was to show him.

            Besides, Malfoy probably wouldn’t trust me if I just described it to him, Harry thought, before he drowned himself fully in the process of creating images.

            It was different from the process of embodying his own memories--for one thing, much harder. The images were contained half in his mind and half in some strange part of him that seemed to hover behind and before and to the side of his head as he needed it, maybe a place created by his magic or spirit. He couldn’t let his hold on them go while he wove the light that made them visible, because then they would flicker and fade and he would have to look back into Cassie’s mind to retrieve them.

            And at the same time, he had to think enough about the light to sheathe the pure thought. It was maddening.

            But he had done it for almost three years now, since he first decided he wanted to earn his living this way, and with slow jerks and shudders he fought the images into the light and the light around the images. And then they snapped free of him and hung in the air, and Harry sat back with a gasp, shaking his head.

            The image on the left was one of the loveliest things he had ever seen, a child’s impression of a unicorn, blazing white and silver and aspen-pale, horn colliding with neck and with deep, large, sea-green eyes. Harry had never seen a unicorn that color, but he accepted that Cassie might have--in a picture or a dream if nothing else.

            The image on the right was of a woman with long, sharp nails, gaping lips from between which blood dripped, and a wailing voice that screamed endlessly, over and over, "Cassie! Cassie, you did this! Bad girl!"

            Cassie screamed and ducked, and then ran crying to her father’s side. Malfoy put his arms around her. He was shaking, and by the way that his eyes locked in repelled fascination on the image of the woman, Harry knew that he recognized her.

            Harry stood up and raised his voice to be hard above the image’s shrieking. "Cassie! Watch this!"

            He closed one hand into a fist and withdrew his will from the image that contained the woman, giving his arm a fancy shake that it didn’t need so the child would have a visible motion to cling to.

            The woman’s face warped like a Muggle telly being turned off. Her voice rose into an annoyed cry, as if she was battling to survive, and her hands struck out, left and right, claws flying as if that could make a difference. Harry clenched his fist again, and she exploded into a shower of black sparks that faded completely before they touched the floor.

            Harry turned around in the sudden silence and bowed to Cassie. Then he waved his hand, and the shimmering unicorn image came forwards and danced around her. "That’s yours to keep," he said. "It’ll stay as long as you want." He was weaving his will as he spoke, small gestures of his hands, although, as Hermione had scolded him, he really didn’t need those gestures to do what he wanted. It took an enormous effort, but the image stepped free of his control and into an existence of its own, a toy that Cassie could play with. "And that nightmare is gone forever."

            It was. Embodying the image like that and then destroying it would take care of Cassie’s nightmares, and hopefully the depression that had plagued her during the day as well. She would remember it, in the same way you could remember the feeling of terror from a bad dream, but it would never again have the intensity it had had before.

            Cassie giggled--a much freer sound than Harry had heard her make so far--and reached up to play with the unicorn, running her fingers through the edges of its mane.

            Harry smiled at her. Then Malfoy shifted his weight a little, and Harry looked up and at him.

            Malfoy’s face had gone slack, as though some of the suffering that had scarred it had been healed at last. He shook his head and stared at Harry, eyes so wide that Harry was afraid he was about to faint for a minute and started to step forwards to offer his arm.

            But Malfoy remained on his feet, hands tightening on Cassie’s shoulders. Then he smiled helplessly and whispered, "Thank you."

            Both the smile and the gentleness of the words--the rarity of them, too, since Harry already knew Malfoy didn’t speak them often--went straight to Harry’s soul.

            And a spark of interest caught there and began to burn, warm and soft as the sunlight he had called down to hold the images.

*

            He was tied to the stone, and Voldemort loomed above him, laughing silently, swinging his wand back and forth and shouting words that didn’t make any noise to his Death Eaters. He was always silent like this in Harry’s dreams, as if Harry’s brain wanted to deny him an extra level of reality as petty vengeance.

            Harry was on the stone, and he couldn’t rise, and his wand was gone, and there was nothing he could do.

            There was nothing he could do.

            But the desperation ran up and down his body like a rush of fire, demanding an outlet, and Harry found his gaze straying upwards, as if there would be an answer somewhere in the sky. He didn’t think anybody was coming on a broom to rescue him, but--

            There was an answer.

            For some reason, the stars drew his eyes, the stars and the remnants of sunset on the horizon. Harry looked at them for what seemed like a long time, but couldn’t be more than a few minutes, since Voldemort was plotting so busily to kill him. His hands twitched; he would have reached out if he could, but they were bound.

            The light.There was some answer in the light, if he could only find it.

            "I have gained in wisdom since then," Voldemort said, drawing Harry’s attention back to him. "I will not risk myself or make bad choices the way that I would have thirteen years ago, my loyal Death Eaters. I will kill Harry Potter here and now, as he is bound to this rock, and then I will kill his friends and Dumbledore, all those who might be outraged enough by his death to manage vengeance upon me."

            Harry’s body froze. Ice clogged his throat. He wanted to cough and clear it out, but he didn’t think he could. The horror was too great.

            Voldemort was going to kill his friends.

            Ron and Hermione were going to die.

            It was the most terrible thing he had ever heard, and that was strange, because he had pictured this possibility to himself many times since he first understood how deadly Voldemort was. But to hear it said like that, and casually, to know that Voldemort would kill them even after Harry was dead and so his death couldn’t save them, the way he had sometimes half-dreamed it might--

            There were dreams and dreams. The second kind came to aid him as he lay bound to the stone, rigid, disbelieving, and watched Voldemort turn towards him, wand lifted.

            "Time to die, Harry Potter," Voldemort said, his mouth full of the same clashing chill that seemed to have invaded Harry.

            No!

            The simple word of negation became a chant that swept through him, stirred his blood and surrounded his limbs with iron chains heavier than the ropes that bound them. The dreams in his head bounded up and down in answer, and Harry felt a warmth in the center of his chest, the way he had last year before he blew up Aunt Marge.

            The light ripped from the sky and sailed down, and Harry grabbed it in his hands and shaped it, not knowing what he was doing. The warmth from his chest rose along his arms, and the dream was there, slipping through his thoughts into his fingers. All three of them joined, and Harry knew he was doing something new, fueled by nothing but his intense desire.

            Voldemort paused, his red eyes narrowing in confusion. Then suddenly he cried aloud and lifted one arm as if he could shield himself from what was coming.

            But he had moved too slowly. Harry had looked into his eyes.

            The tunnel of light opened in front of him, in a way that would become familiar later, and he shaped the light with fierce pats, and yanked and tugged at the image he wanted, the image that, out of all the ones in Voldemort’s head, would defeat him.

            Blackness flooded the light. That first time, Harry had no idea what he was doing, and let the image control what it became. He learned later not to do that, because it could create something so terrifying that no one could look at it and stay sane.

            But in Voldemort’s case, that was an advantage.

            The image rose up in front of Harry, a black beast that walked like a man, clad in tattered black robes spotted with white. It moved forwards one lurching step at a time towards Voldemort. Harry stared at its back and wondered what in the world it was.

            Voldemort seemed to know. He stumbled back in front of it, aiming his wand and yelling a curse. The curse blasted straight through the image and luckily went above Harry’s ducking head.

Harry felt like laughing. One of the first things Professor Flitwick had taught them was that no ordinary spell could harm an illusion. That was why, Flitwick had said, they weren’t very powerful, and you shouldn’t try to use one in battle, because one missed spell would tell your enemy what they were.

Harry knew Professor Flitwick was the Charms professor, and smart. But that only proved that he didn’t know everything about battle, because if someone couldn’t harm an illusion, that might be an advantage, not the opposite.

"No," Voldemort whispered. "I defeated you. Even if I chose not to split my soul, I defeated you." His voice rose. "I am immortal!"

Harry understood what Voldemort was seeing then, though the staring Death Eaters still looked confused. Death. Himself dead. Of course that would be what Voldemort feared most.

            Harry didn’t know what Voldemort meant about splitting his soul, so there he was as confused as any of them. But he knew what he saw when the black figure reached out and laid a single hand in the middle of Voldemort’s chest.

            Voldemort screamed and jerked, his whole body flailing as though the illusion’s hand was a fishing wire from which he hung. And then he collapsed to the ground and lay there, gaping at the sky. Harry craned his neck from where he lay on the stone and could make out that he was pale and not breathing.

            If one of the Death Eaters had been braver then, Harry might have died in the graveyard, and no one would ever have known what happened to Lord Voldemort.

            But Harry was still totally focused on the image, and so it still had reality. It turned around and faced the Death Eaters, taking one lurching step. The robes gathered around it started to fall off in rotting strips.

            The Death Eaters, who, after all, were mostly cowards, fled.

            The image turned, bowed its head to Harry, and faded.

            With it went the dream--the memory--that Harry relived on most nights when he was not reliving another intense time in his life. It was part of the price he paid for his gift.

*

            Harry opened his eyes with a gasp and lay still for a moment, one hand poised on top of his head, fingers curved as if he was going to rake through his hair. Then he shook his head and stood up, throwing back the curtains.

            He had chosen his house because it was the one he had seen with the most places for light to enter. The windows in his bedroom were enormous, nearly as large as the ones in Cassie Malfoy’s room, and sunlight burst exuberantly past the curtains the moment he drew them away. Harry laughed and whirled around, feeling as if the light fed him, strengthened him, made him a better person, just from falling on his skin.

            The room was blue-green, decorated with pale enough versions of the shades that it looked as if Harry stood in a forest with the leaves staining the light rather than drowning underwater. The bed was a four-poster, since Harry had never lost the tastes he’d picked up at Hogwarts, and carved of cherry wood; the sun picked out the red tint in the wood. The carpet was white, and Harry rejoiced in the sight of even the pale yellow patches on it.

            He had changed so much in the last five years, he thought, as he strode into his bathroom and touched his wand to the windows. The enchantment there would let him see out without anyone being able to see in, and a good thing, that, when the Prophet’s photographers still sometimes tried to capture an exclusive story.

            The windows were crystalline, or turned that way when he tapped them, and the bathroom filled with dazzling color. The tiled walls were covered with pictures of shells, sirens, and flying dragons. The man who sold Harry the house had offered to have someone come in and enchant the pictures so that they would move and talk like the mermaid in the Prefects’ bathroom at Hogwarts, but Harry had politely refused.

            A shrug and a shake, and the robe he wore when he was sleeping fell off and pooled on the floor. Harry leaped into the shower and turned his head so that the warm spray could strike him across the side of the neck, barely remembering to yank the curtain across in time.

            As he splashed and turned back and forth and occasionally tilted his head back so that he could appreciate the way the light sparked off the water, Harry’s mind went back to the tatters of his dream. He had managed to work his hands free of the ropes eventually, and had fetched his wand from Voldemort’s pocket. It still ranked as the scariest single thing he’d ever done, since facing the world after Voldemort’s defeat was a series of things. Harry had gulped and looked away from the terror-stricken red eyes.

            He’d tried to look away from the other obvious truth as he located Cedric’s body and dragged it back towards the Portkey, too. Harry was the one who had frightened Voldemort to death. He could do things like that.

            Harry rolled his eyes now and bent down so that he could work the water into the hollows of his back. He was much more experienced with his gift at this point, and he found his child self’s guilt a bit--well, childish. Certainly over-the-top. It was more guilt than Harry would feel now. He had meant it when he told Malfoy that he wouldn’t accept responsibility for things that weren’t his fault.

            Yes, he could frighten people to death, but someone could pick up a wand and cast the Killing Curse, too. If they wanted to. It all came down to will, not just ability, and Harry should have remembered that.

            But the gift had been new then, and he had been carrying the corpse of a friend as he stumbled back through the darkness, so Harry reckoned he could forgive himself for being fourteen and frightened.

            Everything after that...

            Harry sighed. The memory of how he had gasped out Voldemort’s death and then fallen over Cedric’s body wasn’t as intense as the memory of Voldemort’s demise, but then, there was no reason it should be. His gift, connected with memories as well as with light, still only made him relive in exquisite detail the times that he had used it.

            The world had gone mad after that. Moody had showed up and tried to kill Harry, and they had discovered that he wasn’t Moody. The pure-bloods had pulled their children out of school the next year and set about those obsessive early marriages, which in the end had resulted in a lot of young parents and broken families. The Ministry had shattered into a dozen different arguing factions--more people had followed Voldemort there than Harry had ever dreamed--and some of them had tried to arrest Harry. He’d spent the summer hiding with Sirius and Remus until things somewhat calmed down and let him return to school in the autumn.

            And even then, the situation had been so bad, so full of whispers and stares and people trying to question him about his gift or duplicate it or lure him out of the school and use him as a secret weapon, that Harry had ended up not going back to sit his NEWTs. His gift could provide him all the employment that he was likely to need. Life was a scattered, unsettled thing, but there was still a need for someone who could soothe bad memories and nightmares, or create lovely, glittering pictures that people would pay for, or bring to life the images that had always haunted someone’s dreams and which they would give any price to see standing "real" before them.

            Harry wasn’t a hero, but he liked it that way.

            He wondered if Malfoy knew that he wasn’t a hero anymore. Malfoy’s parents were dead, and his marriage had ended--somehow. He might not have looked outside the walls of his house since his parents took him from Hogwarts just after he turned fifteen. Maybe he didn’t know anything about Harry. Maybe there was no reason he should.

            But I have to know something about him if I’m going to pursue him, Harry thought, ducking his head under the water a final time and then watching the halo of shine that he created about him simply by shaking his hair. AndI should go to my most trusted sources first.

*

            "Malfoy? Malfoy, of all people?"

            Harry kept back a laugh as he picked up the glass of firewine in front of him. No sense wasting it by spluttering all over the table, as Ron had done when Harry asked him his question. "You should see your face, mate."

            Ron pushed his own glass of firewine back and sat there, glaring at Harry with folded arms. "It’s not every day that my best friend comes to me and tells me that he wants to date one of the biggest gits on the face of the planet," he huffed.

            Harry looked around the restaurant for a moment before he replied. He had only been to the Clock of Heaven twice, and it was still overwhelming. The walls were wooden, but seemed to be made of metal, they were decorated with so many gears and springs and swaying pendulums. Brass, silver, gold, bronze, the clockwork at least made the place interesting to look at.

            The center of the restaurant’s largest room, where Harry and Ron sat, was a table shaped like a sundial, with a chair at each carefully carved number. Around the table shone the wards that most places with something valuable to store found necessary in the wake of the Ministry falling apart.

            Really, though, Harry thought as he took another drink of firewine, there were never that many raids. Each village had become independent instead, or allied with each other, or focused on the centralizing potential of Hogwarts, where Dumbledore still reigned--at least if they believed in education for their children that would mingle different kinds of people, pure-bloods with Muggleborns. The Ministry had vanished into a vacuum, but it hadn’t provided that many essential services, having become more bureaucracy than anything else.

            The thoughts curved back around to what Ron couldn’t believe. Harry saw again that lonely stone house glittering in the sunlight, the hard marble it was made of, the refusal to yield except where the light-touched shadows of the trees passed over it. How much courage had it taken Malfoy to reach out of it, to send him the owl that had told Harry about Cassie’s problems and that Malfoy wanted to see him?

            Harry certainly had enough courage to turn back to Ron, shrug, and ask, "Why not Malfoy?"

            "He’s a git," was Ron’s unanswerable argument, augmented by folded arms and a stare so direct that Harry nodded to him in respect.

            Harry spread his hands. "How much do we know about him anymore? About any of the pure-bloods who left Hogwarts? I think he’s only a git in our minds. He sneered at me a few times when I went there, but he let me work, and he obviously cares about his daughter. And he thanked me, Ron. Would you expect a git to do that?"

            "It may be a trick." Ron swirled the wine in his glass and glared at nothing.

            "Sorry I’m late."

            Harry leaned back in his chair and smiled at Hermione as she swished up to them, bending over to kiss Ron’s cheek and then clasping and shaking Harry’s hand. As she sat down between them, she seemed to pick up on the tension and arched an eyebrow. "What’s the topic of discussion this time?" she asked, as she put down a huge folder of files next to her.

            Harry shook his head. Hermione was involved in the wizarding world’s fledgling legal system, which had started as agreements among villages and was now becoming something weird and wild and wonderful. She apparently liked the paperwork, though Harry would have thought its absence was the biggest advantage to the end of the Ministry.

            "Harry wants to date Malfoy," Ron said, as blunt as ever. "Tell him that isn’t a good idea, Hermione."

            "It depends on why he wants to and what Malfoy is like now," Hermione said, practical as always. She braced the files that were about to slide to the floor with one hand and turned to Harry. "What brought this on?"

            "Helping his daughter overcome a nightmare," Harry said. "I know that he’s changed. I’ve probably seen him more recently than either of you." He looked at Hermione, who nodded, and at Ron, who sighed before he nodded. "The problem is, I don’t know a lot about what he went through as far as his marriage, and I’d like to find out instead of asking him. He might think that was prying."

            "And looking through newspapers is too much work," Hermione said, though she smiled at him to take the sting out of her words.

            Harry rolled his eyes. "I would find reading the papers a lot easier if I didn’t have to deal with my own face staring at me from the front page."

            "There is that," Hermione murmured, and leaned back in her seat, out of the way, as the waiter brought their food. Ron had got an open sandwich shaped like a clock face, and Harry a piece of fish cut up and arranged the same way. Hermione gave her order to the waiter, but Harry had no fear that she’d forgotten his question. She had an ability that still seemed rare in the wizarding world to Harry, the ability to think of more than one thing at once.

            "All right," Hermione said abruptly when the waiter had gone, leaning forwards and bracing her hands on the table. "He married a woman named Agnes Larsen. I think she came from Denmark, but I’m not sure."

            "That part isn’t important," Harry said. "I just want to know--I want to understand what happened to him. Was it like the other pure-blood marriages where they split apart under the pressure?"

            "I think so," Hermione said quietly. She shook her head, her face turning a dark red, and Harry knew she was probably thinking about the extent pure-bloods had gone to to keep their children from contact with people like her. "It’s stupid and wrong, what they did. Forcing their own children into marriages! Most of them were fifteen and sixteen years old!"

            "Malfoy must have been about sixteen when Cassie was born," Harry said thoughtfully, thinking of the girl’s apparent age.

            "You call Malfoy’s daughter by name?" Ron asked in an appalled voice, cheese falling out of his mouth as he did so.

            "Ron," Hermione said, pressing her hand against his arm as though he would find it harder to speak that way, "shut up."

            Ron shrugged and delved back into his sandwich, muttering something Harry couldn’t hear. Hermione gave Harry an apologetic look. Harry shook his head to indicate it was fine. Ron worked in his brothers’ joke shop--one of the businesses that had survived the collapse of the Ministry and become part of the Diagon Alley Shops Coalition--and had no reason to think kindly of Malfoy. The last time Ron had seen him, Malfoy was wearing a POTTER STINKS badge and jeering at Harry when he entered the maze for the Third Task.

            Ron’s a good sort, Harry thought. But in his own way, he’s been as isolated as Malfoy or any of the other pure-bloods since the collapse of the Ministry.

            "Anyway," Hermione said, "the article I read after the divorce said that the Malfoy family had made promises of some sort to the Larsen family and hadn’t kept them. Maybe because the Gringotts goblins froze them out of their accounts," she added. Harry nodded. The goblins were still trustworthy guardians of gold, but couldn’t always be counted on to give it back again. "So this Larsen woman left soon after she gave birth to Malfoy’s daughter, and the divorce made a scandal."

            "I wonder why Malfoy kept Cassie and not her?" Harry murmured, sipping at his firewine again and taking a bite of his fish. It was cod, and good.

            Hermione gave him a look of pity. "The whole point of those marriages was to try and outbreed Muggleborns, Harry. Do you think for one second that the Malfoy family was going to give up their heir?"

            Harry nodded. "Point. But I don’t think she’s just his heir to Malfoy. You should have seen his face when she was screaming."

            Ron looked sharply up from his plate, where he seemed to be arranging the ingredients of his sandwich in order by size. "She was screaming?"

            Harry nodded. "The vision that I summoned out of her head--which might have been her mother, now that I think of it, or some distorted version of her--was bad enough to make me feel queasy."

            Ron thought a minute, said, "Poor thing," and then went back to his sandwich with his face a little more relaxed than it had been.

            "That’s all I know," Hermione said, holding her hands out. "It wasn’t long after that that Malfoy’s parents were killed, you know, and most of the papers switched to reporting on that rather than reporting about the divorce."

            "I never knew the exact circumstances of that, either," Harry said quietly.

            Hermione sighed. "There were some people who knew Lucius Malfoy had been a Death Eater and wanted to blame him for what Voldemort did. They caught Lucius and Narcissa outside a shop in Diagon Alley and attacked them. A mob. Cursed them to death."

            Harry shut his eyes and tried to imagine what that would have been like, to lose your parents and your wife all at once, and then the chance of getting out of the house. Some pure-blood homes had essentially become guarded fortresses, the way that Hogwarts would have had to if not for the strength of Dumbledore protecting it, and the way St. Mungo’s and Diagon Ally had. And Malfoy wouldn’t have been able to move far or fast, or do a lot to better his own position, with Cassie to take care of.

            Sure, he might have entrusted her to the house-elves, but from what Harry had seen the other day, he didn’t think Malfoy was the kind of father who would do that.

            "Still thinking about dating him, mate?" Ron sounded resigned to it by now.

            "I feel like I need to know more," Harry said, shaking his head a little. "I don’t want to do something that causes him pain."

            The waiter brought the sandwich Hermione had ordered, and she nodded her thanks to him even as she took a crisp, compact bite. "There’s no reason that you can’t ask Luna," she said.

            "Luna?" Harry frowned. Luna, whom he had met through Ginny, had become one of his best friends since the war, but he hadn’t known she was friends with Malfoy. "Why would she know?"

            "Her children play with his daughter," Hermione said, and then rolled her eyes when Harry gave her a look he knew was baffled. "Honestly, did you think that either of them just stayed inside their houses all the time?"

*

            "Harry. The Wrackspurts told me you were coming. Have some tea."

            Harry shook his head as he stepped through the front door of Luna’s house and bent down to kiss her cheek. Luna had her fancies. She talked to imaginary creatures and foretold the future from creases in dresses and the smell of salt. But she was also one of the nicest people Harry knew, and sane in unexpected ways.

            For example, she handed him a cup of steaming tea now, and whether that was the Wrackspurts or just common sense, it was nice after a day of untangling particularly persistent nightmares. Adults were always harder to work with than children. Harry blew on his tea and sipped at it a moment later. It tasted of peppermint and something heavier that it probably wasn’t wise to ask about. Luna flavored her teas with whatever came to hand. Harry only knew that none of them had harmed him so far. "How are Laurel and Phoenix?"

            "Laurel is learning to talk to unicorns," Luna said. "I’m afraid that she won’t be able to for a few months." She leaned towards Harry and lowered her voice. "The unicorns dislike her father, you see."

            Harry nodded solemnly back. Luna’s father hadn’t tried to arrange a marriage for her with anyone else, even though they were pure-blooded. Luna had simply disappeared three years back and then returned, pregnant with twins and without the father. She would talk about the twins’ father to anyone who asked, but since she never said the same thing twice, it was hard to be certain who, or what, he had been.

            Laurel and Phoenix were happy and obviously intelligent and had never had a bad dream. They also got more than enough to eat. As far as Harry was concerned, that was a brilliant way to raise a child.

            "And Phoenix has spent the day playing the piano," Luna continued.

            "He can do that?" Harry asked involuntarily. Despite the fact that the twins might be part magical creature, they were only two. He hadn’t thought they were quite that precocious.

            "He doesn’t make music yet," Luna said. "He makes joy."

            Harry thought about that, and then decided that he had better not try to answer. He was out of his depth with Luna, because everyone was out of their depth with Luna.

            "Why did you want to see me?" Luna asked, in the exact same tone that she would use to talk about her twins. She never sounded less than calm and gentle. Harry had come over once to help when she’d taken a nasty bite on her leg from a Kneazle she’d rescued, and still she hadn’t raised her voice or expressed pain. She had, in fact, talked to her leg as if it were a badly-behaved animal and promised to "discipline" it when she was on her feet again.

            "I have some questions about Draco Malfoy," Harry said. "And Hermione told me that you knew him. What do you think of him?" There was no point hinting around with Luna. She would either not understand or tell him something so candid that he would feel silly for not having asked directly in the first place.

            Luna smiled. Harry smiled back. Luna was always calm, yes, but she still didn’t look this dreamily happy about just anyone.

"Yes, I know him well," Luna said, leaning back in the rocking chair she hadn’t risen to welcome Harry from. Harry sat down in the rocking chair across from her and looked around the huge wooden room, whose walls were carved with so many figures and letters that he would never finish studying them all. The dancing fox above his head, its body studded with tears, was new, though. "His daughter Cassie takes lessons with Laurel when she wishes to, and Phoenix teaches her how to walk in the forest."

Harry wondered what shy little Cassie Malfoy made of Luna’s children, and then decided that wasn’t something he could ask yet. "What is he like?"

"A good father," Luna said. "You should see the way he watches her when she’s here, as if she’s more precious than a whole bar of gold."

"And what else?" Harry asked. One had to be patient with Luna. She would deal out answers as they came to her, rather like a fortune-teller with her cards. Harry had been wild with curiosity the first few times he spoke to her, and hadn’t really learned anything, because Luna would go off into reveries from which nothing could hurry her. She had survived the collapse of the Ministry and hadn’t retreated like so many other pure-bloods, Harry thought, because so much of what happened in the world didn’t matter to her. While other people complained about having to watch out for Muggles and regulate their Quidditch games--though the existing Quidditch teams had taken over a lot of that--Luna smiled at it and let it slide past.

She reminded Harry a lot of himself, though their calmness didn’t come from the same source. Harry could never be that relaxed or detached, but as far as he was concerned, he had done his duty by the wizarding world and didn’t need to continue driving himself mad with it.

            "Oh, he touches his hair with one hand when he’s distracted or considering something," Luna said simply. "And there’s a rumor that he would have liked to date men, but his family didn’t consult him when they married him to that Agnes woman."

            Harry smiled. That last bit sounded hopeful, at least. "Has he ever dated anyone since then? I couldn’t really tell when I went to help his daughter, but it looked as though he didn’t often leave the house."

            "No," Luna said. "He comes here, and he sometimes goes to Hogsmeade. I don’t know why. Perhaps simply to look at Hogwarts. But his parents’ death left him too afraid to venture far or for long."

            "A lot of people feel that way," Harry said softly. He had magic enough, and powerful enough wards, to ignore a lot of the chaos that sometimes broke out--and there was less chaos now than there had been a few years ago, as alliances settled and more wizards cared about defending their own than attacking those they might be able to conquer. "Does he seem friendly?"

            "I wouldn’t call him friendly," Luna said. Then she was silent, sipping her tea, and giving no indication of what adjectives she would apply to Malfoy.

            Harry waited. He could wait hours if necessary. The impact of Malfoy’s smile, of his whisper of, "Thank you," was that powerful. And there was Cassie. Harry had liked her better than some of the other children he dealt with, who did need his help but sometimes turned into brats once they were back to normal.

            "He told me once that he thought of being pure-blood as a duty," Luna said. "Something you did, like continuing to breathe."

            "Continuing to breathe is a duty?" Harry asked involuntarily. He had fought so hard to keep alive when Voldemort was after him that life had felt like something precious. And since then, he had decided that he liked his life just the way it was. Hermione had watched him closely after Voldemort died, apparently because one of her books said that "heroes" were more likely to give up on their lives once they had nothing more to fight for, but Harry had never considered apathy or suicide. There was too much light.

            Luna simply looked at him. "Sometimes dragons think it is," she said seriously. "When they’re lonely. When they’ve lost clutch after clutch of eggs. That’s the real reason wizards can’t domesticate them, you know. Not because they’re so wild, but because dragons who give up hope enough to start becoming tame lose the will to live."

            Harry nearly opened his mouth to protest, but then reminded himself that he knew Luna’s methods. He would have to shut up and reason his way through this, but he could do that. So he leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes, and reasoned.

            He understood in a moment. Draco meant "dragon" in Latin, after all. And though Harry wasn’t sure who would have captured Malfoy and tried to tame him, he could make a guess.

            His parents. He had been dragged away from Hogwarts, from his education, from his friends and his freedom, and made to marry a stranger. And then his parents died, and he couldn’t make the marriage last.

            He would have turned in on himself, clung to his duty and his daughter as the sole things he had left.

            A lonely life. It was no wonder that he had snapped and bristled when Harry came to his door, even though Malfoy had asked Harry there himself because of his reputation for helping children with nightmares and trauma. Anything outside his walls probably promised more danger than it did salvation.

            Harry thought he knew how to approach Malfoy, now.

            "Have the unicorns spoken to you yet, Laurel?"

            Harry opened his eyes. Luna’s daughter stood in the doorway, staring at him the way she always did. Harry grinned and held up his fringe so that she could see the scar.

            Laurel nodded and walked over to her mother’s chair to lean against her. She always needed to see the scar, she had explained to him, because something that looked like Harry but really wasn’t might come to the door one day. So it was her duty to memorize the scar and then defend her family.

            Harry still didn’t know who the father of Luna’s children was, but he saw why they were so easy to love.

            Laurel had brilliant golden hair--not blonde, golden. It hung past her pointed ears almost to her shoulders; Harry had never figured out if they were beyond the normal human range of "pointed" or not. She had large, silvery eyes, like Luna’s, and she regarded the world with just as much seriousness, if less dreaminess.

            "They haven’t talked yet," Laurel said. "They have to talk."

            "They will, when you learn more." Luna stroked her daughter’s shoulder. "Do you remember Cassie Malfoy?"

            Laurel smiled, the first time Harry had ever seen her do that. "Is Cassie here?" she asked, and stood on her tiptoes to look around the room.

            "Not today," Luna said. "But Mr. Potter knows her."

            "Tell her that I’ll give her my best secrets," Laurel said, turning to Harry and speaking so intently that Harry thought he would go to sleep tonight hearing those words in his dreams. "She can have any she likes. But she needs to come back, and she needs to forgive me for what I said to her last time." She paused and tilted her head to the side, her expression suddenly remote. "Can you remember all that?"

            "I’ll remember it," Harry said, and fought to conceal a grin. Now he had what he had thought would be impossible to come up with on his own: another excuse to visit Malfoy. He could have asked to come just so he could see how Cassie was doing, but this was a better reason.

            "Good," Laurel said, and then she turned and trotted from the room.

            Luna watched her go, and then faced Harry and peered at him as deeply as Laurel had a moment before. "You need a child," she said. "Your face is full of tears that you haven’t cried, and you could cry them more easily if you had a child."

            Harry nodded. "I know. But I mostly like men, Luna. It would have to be a woman I liked a lot before I would be willing to have children, and she would have to be all right with my magic." The few women he had tried to date before he started dating men had reacted negatively to his gift, finding it frightening because he had killed Voldemort with it. The men were afraid, too, for the most part, but they would try to control and conceal their fear, which the women usually didn’t.

            "Then you need a man with a child," Luna said, and her smile grew brighter and more mysterious. "One stands on your path."

            Harry resisted the shiver, of both disquiet and hope, that tried to creep down his spine.

*

            "Potter?"

            Malfoy sounded half-bewildered to see him, although once again he had issued the invitation. This time in response to Harry’s begging, of course, but still.

            Harry didn’t let it bother him. This would be new for Malfoy. If he ever saw anyone besides Luna in a friendly manner, neither Hermione nor Luna had known about it. And Harry imagined that treating your home as a fortress left you nervous when someone else walked through the door as if they owned the place.

            Harry tried not to swagger, though lots of people had told him that he did that anyway, no matter how much he tried not to. He tilted his head at Malfoy with a friendly smile. "How are you? How’s Cassie?"

            Malfoy smiled back, and a hint of the gentleness that he had showed the other day returned to his grey eyes. Harry tried not to drool. That was the way he wanted to make Malfoy look all the time, though he didn’t know it was possible yet.

            "She’s sleeping much better than she was," Malfoy said. "Thanks to you. We discussed the woman that she was dreaming of. Some nightmare version of her mother, but Agnes has said that she’s never coming back. Once Cassie knew that, she was able to forget about it for the most part." He turned away. "Come on, I’ll take you to her."

            "And what about you?" Harry asked, falling into step beside him. They were going a different way than before, through twisting corridors that didn’t have nearly as many pretty curtains or lighted windows. Harry noted that thoughtfully, wondering if Malfoy had thought about his need to absorb as much light and color as he could last time. Not that this latest corridor was absolutely dull and blank, but it had the opulence of bronze and silver instead of jewels.

            Malfoy gave him a glance that looked honestly baffled. "What about me?"

            "I have an interest in your health, too." Harry leaned a little closer and lowered his voice into what he knew was a seductive tone.

            Malfoy didn’t blush, or stammer, or yell at him. He just continued looking baffled. "Yes, all right," he said.

            And then he didn’t answer the question.

            Harry stared. It had been years since he had met someone so oblivious. Even drunks responded to his tone when he spoke like that. Not that Harry made a habit of sleeping with drunks, but it could be useful to make them move when he needed a place to sit down.

            Of course, a moment’s thought told him the likely reason that Malfoy probably wasn’t thinking of himself and Harry in the same bed.

            He’s spent how long alone? And he’s been how free to express his desires? And he’s had how many people who would have honestly wanted him for reasons that had nothing to do with his wealth, or his parents’ past, or his little girl?

            Harry didn’t want to pity Malfoy, but it still took a long moment for him to swallow that emotion and try a different approach instead.

            "Does Cassie still have the image I made for her?" he asked. "I hoped that she would enjoy playing with it, but sometimes I make toys like that and then I don’t know if it was a wise choice."

            "Oh, yes, in this case it was," Malfoy said, voice a little quick, as if he imagined that he had to defend Cassie from every possible accusation of bad behavior. "Cassie’s very gentle with her toys. I could get her more easily, of course, but she loves them as if they were real people, and she doesn’t want to hurt them. She’s at that age."

            And that’s what makes her different, and you different in the way you raise her, Harry thought. He knew for a fact that his cousin Dudley "at that age" had broken toys all over the place, in the sure and certain knowledge that his parents would buy him more, whatever he did to the ones in his bedroom.

            Malfoy, of all people, had a daughter that gentle. Harry wouldn’t have believed it three days ago, but he had believed a lot of nonsense about Malfoy three days ago. And he had another chance to correct it now.

            "She’s a credit to her father," he said. He didn’t use his seductive tone of voice, but a simple one. He thought he would build up subtly in the compliments until Malfoy couldn’t fail to take notice.

            But Malfoy whirled around in the middle of the corridor and glared at him, eyes narrowed. "Are you making fun of me?"

            Harry stared. "What? Of course not!"

            Something of his genuine bewilderment seemed to get through. Malfoy relaxed with a snort and shook his head. "I hoped not," he said. "I would hate to have to send you away. Cassie keeps asking after you."

            "Does she?" Harry asked, while he figured out another of the barriers separating him from Malfoy. He doesn’t think that he’s worthy of being desired, or perhaps he just thinks too much of the past when he thinks of me.

            I’ll teach him to think of the future.

            "Why would you think that I was making fun of you by praising your parenting skills?" Harry added quietly. "I’ve talked to Luna, and she says that you’re a good father. I’ve seen Cassie, and I know that you are. There’s no reason for you to doubt me and think that I’m making fun."

            Malfoy walked in silence for a long time without answering. Harry was starting to think that Malfoy Manor must have miles of metal and stone in its bowels for the purpose of bewildering people who attacked, but then they turned a corner and he saw a bronze door carved with dolphins ahead of them. Malfoy quickened his pace, and Harry assumed it was their destination.

            He had also assumed that Malfoy wouldn’t answer his question, but Malfoy responded very quietly. "I remember Hogwarts. I remember what happened before the war, which is more than most people will admit to these days. I know that you never liked me, and you have no reason to like my daughter. That you seem to is--unusual. I don’t know that I like it."

            Malfoy pushed open the door in, and Harry sighed and followed. Well, he had the answer, and if he didn’t like it, that was his own fault. No one had told him to pursue Malfoy.

            Cassie was inside, sitting on a cushioned chair and facing the unicorn image, which sat on another one that was shaped like a throne. "What does Your Majesty say?" Cassie asked, cupping her hand around her ear. "You have to speak up. I can’t hear you."

            Harry’s lips twitched. From the way Malfoy’s face had relaxed when he heard her, this was probably something he had said to his daughter in the past when he was teaching her manners.

            "Cassie, I’ve brought you a visitor," Malfoy said gravely. Harry had noticed that he treated her much like an adult the first time he was here. Well, she was an only child and Malfoy’s only regular human contact. He probably had to do that so he wouldn’t go crazy or have his brain turn to mush, the way Harry knew it sometimes could when adults were alone with young children.

            Cassie spun around and stared. Then she leaped off her chair and dashed forwards with her hand out. "Mr. Potter!"

            Malfoy cleared his throat, and Cassie stopped in place and gathered her skirts around her so that she could bow. "I mean, how are you, Mr. Potter? I hope you’re well. I’m fine."

            Harry knew better than to break the game. He knelt down, the way he had when he was trying to figure out Cassie’s nightmare, and bowed back to her. "I’m fine," he said. "And I have a message for you from Laurel Lovegood."

            Cassie promptly stood up straight, her eyes so bright they seemed to burn. "What is it?"

            "She said," Harry said, making sure that he put all the precision and intonation he had picked up over the years into the words, "that she’ll give you her best secrets. You can have any you like. But you need to come back and forgive her for what she said last time."

            Cassie stared, then looked up at her father. "Do I have to?" she asked. "I want the secrets, but I don’t want to forgive her."

            "What is polite, Cassie?" Malfoy gave her an encouraging glance that was nevertheless so stern Harry wasn’t surprised Cassie looked at the ground and played with her pale blue skirts a bit.

            "To always do what is right," Cassie said.

            "And is it right to forgive Laurel for what she said to you?" Malfoy put out one hand as if the answer was in his palm and Cassie had to pick it up.

            "Yes," Cassie said with a sigh. She put her hand in her father’s and swung it back and forth, looking at Harry with a sad expression. "She said sorry."

            "Good," Malfoy murmured, and looked at Harry sidelong. "Mr. Potter would make another image for you, I think, if you told him more about the game that you and Laurel are playing."

            "It’s not a game!" Cassie said, her blonde hair bouncing around her face as she raised shocked eyes. "It’s important."

            "Games can be important," Harry said. "There are some people who say that my gift is a game, but I make money from it, and I make images, and some of them are beautiful." He nodded to the unicorn image in the chair, and smiled when he noticed that it sparkled more than he remembered. Yes, that was one he was proud of, especially since the nightmare had been so powerful and he’d been weaving them at the same time.

            "Really?" Cassie asked.

            "Yes," Harry said. "And I will make you another image, if you can think of something that you want as much."

            Cassie gnawed her lip for a moment. Then she said, "It’s the Queen Game. You have to tell secrets and take over the world. Laurel’s father taught her to play."

            Harry gave Malfoy a questioning glance in spite of himself, but Malfoy shook his head. He apparently didn’t know who the twins’ father was any more than Harry did.

            Not that it mattered. Cassie had done as she promised, and Harry would gladly take another message to Laurel as an excuse to come back.

            "Good," he said. "Now, think very hard of the image that you want to leave your head and become real, all right?"

            Cassie squeezed her eyes shut.

            "Sorry, not like that," Harry said. "Your eyes have to be open, or I can’t reach into your head and see the image."

            Malfoy shifted uneasily, as if he hadn’t realized before now that Harry was reaching into Cassie’s mind. Harry ignored him. He had explained everything to Malfoy when he first contacted Harry and said that Cassie was suffering from nightmares. It was Malfoy’s fault if he hadn’t listened.

            Cassie nodded, waited, and then said, "I’m thinking of it."

            Harry leaned closer and cast his mind out.

            The tunnel was even larger and clearer this time, since he had been inside Cassie’s mind once before, and Harry smiled when he saw what waited at the end. He came back into his own head, closed his eyes, and waited for the colors to burn behind them before he began to spin.

            This day wasn’t as sunny, but Cassie had a fire in her chambers, and it was particularly important for this image. Harry fixed his gaze on the flames as the orange and red crept over his knuckles and the yellow licked shyly at the backs of his hands. Then he mixed it with the memories of sunlight that had flooded his bedroom the other morning and the grey-green of the sea where he’d gone the other day after a job.

            Cassie gave a gasp and then stood there, silent with delight, eyes fixed on his hands. Harry didn’t dare to glance aside to see what Malfoy was doing, not when he was approaching the most delicate part of the weaving, but he thought the silence from that side of the room was stunned and admiring. It was what he would like to believe, anyway.

            The grey-green climbed into the air in a wavering stream and then coalesced at the bottom of the image into eggs. Harry raised his right hand, and orange danced around the eggs, limned them, and then became an outline of raised wings. Red and gold followed, and then shifting blue that he’d pulled from the outer edges of sunlight or the heart of fire; he couldn’t always name the origins of his colors. Harry dug his fingers together, clenched them, and pulled them apart.

            A firebird hovered in the air, turning its head slowly back and forth, feathers gleaming gold, tail scarlet, feet jeweled with exotic tones. The crest on its head quivered and flickered like flames, and sometimes it was blue. It saw Cassie and opened its beak in a soft cry before flying down to her. It brought the eggs that crouched beneath it, attached to its tail fathers, along.

            Cassie reached up and held out her hands to the bird, which nuzzled them with gentle warmth. Harry focused his concentration and snapped the bird free of him so it could survive when he left the room, then sagged back on his heels. He was dizzy with exhaustion, but he would have done it all over again, twice, for the sake of the joy in Cassie’s eyes.

            And then he stood up and turned around, and he realized that he had another reward waiting for him.

            Malfoy watched him as if he was the center of the universe, and his eyes were dazed, apparently with the force of his own emotion. He shook his head, once, twice, but still didn’t break eye contact with Harry. He reached out one hand, seeming not aware that he was doing it.

            Harry didn’t hesitate. Yes, it was a risk, but he had been taking risks all his life, and more of them since that night in the graveyard when he had trusted to the unknown magic breaking through him--had trusted it would destroy Voldemort instead of him. He caught Malfoy’s hand, turned it over, and caressed the palm with his fingers.

            Malfoy stood still for a moment, his eyes widening, his body shuddering as though a charge of lightning had rushed through him. Harry waited for him to say or do something, keeping his gaze steady.

            But Malfoy didn’t do anything. Cassie played with her bird, squealing, and still he remained motionless. Harry thought he was trying to make a decision, but didn’t entirely know what about.

            So he took another risk. He bowed his head and let his own emotions appear: the curiosity he felt about Malfoy, the way he had been affected when Malfoy thanked him, and his consciousness of the difference between the way Malfoy had used to be and the way he was now. He didn’t know if Malfoy would be able to understand all of them, but Harry was bloody well going to try. The way Malfoy looked at him now was like an invitation into a new world.

            The tableau lasted a moment longer. Malfoy appeared as frozen as Harry had been when he looked up into Voldemort’s eyes, and Harry wondered if he needed to touch him again to get the message across.

            But then Malfoy yanked his hand away and shook his head. "I don’t know what you mean," he said hoarsely, as though Harry had spoken aloud. "You can’t--you can’t look at me and hand me that huge a riddle."

            "A riddle?" Harry asked. He hoped he had his voice under control.

            "A riddle," Malfoy said. "Because you have no reason to look at me like that."

            "Haven’t you thought of the reason?’ Harry whispered. He had hoped he would have the chance to talk to Malfoy alone, rather than in front of Cassie, but she was too enthralled with her new toy to pay attention. "What reason would someone naturally have to look at you like that? It isn’t a riddle. It doesn’t have to be."

            Malfoy smiled a little, his face going cool, as if he had thought of another way to insulate himself from Harry. "Other people would have a reason to look at me like that," he explained, apparently to a slow child. "Not you."

            Harry didn’t turn around and bang his head on the wall in disgust, but it was a near thing.

*

            "Ah, Harry. I have been wanting to talk to you."

            Harry turned around with a smile. "Headmaster Dumbledore, sir," he said. "How nice to see you."

            Dumbledore bowed to him with a little flourish, eyes twinkling so madly that Harry would have thought they were on fire if he hadn’t been used to the way that Dumbledore behaved by now. The Headmaster didn’t look like a wizard who had kept Hogwarts functioning and free in a chaotic world, but then, he never did.

            For a moment, Dumbledore stood looking at the people celebrating near them, calling excitedly to each other and waving food in the air and playing tag around the tents. Harry looked with him. This was the annual celebration of the end of the war, held on the anniversary of the day that Voldemort had died. Harry thought that was morbid, since it was also the day Cedric had died, but he wasn’t the one who had chosen the day or the way to celebrate it. He was just here as a performer, thank Merlin.

            The tents were as large as some of the ones that Harry had seen at the Quidditch World Cup before his last halfway normal year at Hogwarts, but they housed games, food, mazes, and other attractions instead of people--except the ones towards the very edge of the Hogwarts grounds, which held some travelers who had decided to trust to the Headmaster’s protection. They flew flags of bright red and yellow and purple, and they themselves were colored with stars, moons, and prancing animals like the ones that Dumbledore regularly wore on his robes. The nearest tent was an enormous blue thing out of which crashes and thumps and squeaks regularly came. Harry didn’t think that he wanted to know what went on there, especially since so many children came out in tears.

            Between the tents, jugglers, dancers, Muggle impersonators, and singers were putting on their performances, each trying to attract the most notice. Harry smiled as he caught one particular unfriendly look from a dancer known as Mystic Maggie, who wore only purple silk veils. She maintained that she had been the biggest attraction at all the shows in Britain until Harry started showing his gift off. Harry knew that wasn’t true, and had no reason to continue the dispute when she was entertaining enough about it on her own.

            Schoolchildren from Hogwarts dashed through the fair, or walked if they were seventh-years or wore Prefect badges, but even then, they couldn’t hide their grins. Harry wished them well. This was certainly different from the first celebrations that had been held here when he was still a student.

            "I wanted to know if you would return and take your NEWTs," Dumbledore said suddenly.

            Harry turned back to him and raised his eyebrows. The Headmaster was dressed in mauve robes covered with flashing blue pixies that made it hard to look at him. "You decided to try the direct approach this time, sir?"

            Dumbledore only gazed at him earnestly and stroked his silver beard. "I know that you think this request is a joke, Harry, but it’s actually quite important," he said. "You don’t know how it looks, to have you out there, without a single NEWT, and leading a career that puts you constantly in the public eye. I have students each year who continually say that they want to abandon their education as you have done. It is quite embarrassing, and could be detrimental to their futures."

            "I’m not constantly in the public eye because of my career, sir," Harry said patiently, though he had come to the conclusion that Dumbledore would never believe in or acknowledge this. He still seemed to take it as a personal affront that he hadn’t predicted Harry’s gift or how Voldemort would die. "I’m in the public eye because there are too many people who still think that killing someone makes you a hero."

            "Never question your own heroism, Harry." The twinkles in Dumbledore’s eyes were gone.

            Harry leaned an elbow on the wooden stage beside him, which he was going to stand on when he performed, and grinned. "Why? Because it makes you uncomfortable?"

            Dumbledore sighed and touched his beard as though he was using it for comfort. "Because it is not fitting for you to do so, Harry. We must remember the heroes of the war, such as your parents, who died for the sake of defeating Voldemort. To devalue your own sacrifice devalues theirs."

            Harry shook his head and decided to adopt a serious tone for a moment, since it seemed that Dumbledore wasn’t going to let him go until he did. "I think of it, sir. But I prefer to think of the living over the dead."

            "Harry!"

            Dumbledore had started to reply, but he shut his mouth now and moved aside as Sirius came barreling up to both of them, his arms spread and his eyes rolling in exaggerated gladness. Behind him came Remus, his smile amused. He bent down for a moment to listen to a child who pulled on his robe, and so Sirius reached Harry first and grabbed him in a hug, spinning him around.

            "How are you?" Sirius roared into his ear, and then went on without waiting for an answer. "You should have seen the way Remus insulted Snivellus a minute ago! Oh, it was great! I thought Snivellus was going to cut off Remus’s head and start stuffing his brains in vials, he was so angry!"

            "It wasn’t an insult, Sirius," Remus said, coming up as Harry got his breath back and nodding to him. He held out his hand, which Harry gladly shook. Remus looked as content as ever, and much healthier than he had when he was teaching Harry in third year, his eyes bright and a small smile gracing his face when he looked at Sirius. "I simply told him that I wasn’t going to put up with him, next year, trying to insinuate that werewolves could change at times other than the full moon. I know what I am, and I won’t try to hide it as long as I’m at Hogwarts. But he has no right to frighten the students that way. Hullo, Harry," he went on, more warmly. "How have you been?"

            "Great!" was all Harry got to say before Sirius was objecting.

            "But it was the way you said it, Moony! The way you leaned forwards and lowered your voice and stared at him with predator’s eyes!" Sirius apparently tried to imitate it, but he got it laughably wrong. Harry snorted. The days when Sirius could convincingly play Azkaban inmate were long gone.

            Remus chuckled. "I sincerely doubt he noticed that. You’re the only one who notices things like that about me."

            In a quicksilver change of mood, Sirius grabbed Remus’s hand and squeezed it tight. "Yes, and thank Merlin," he said in a low voice. "Otherwise I’d have a lot more cause for jealousy than I like."

            Remus stared at him with a besotted smile, and Dumbledore’s eyes were twinkling so fast that Harry was surprised they didn’t hurt. Harry just shook his head. Remus and Sirius had been together since his fourth year--something Harry had figured out easily, although they had only thought it was "appropriate" to tell him when he came of age--and they acted like teenagers on their first date still.

            Of course, their example was one of the reasons that Harry would have liked to date Malfoy. He thought he could feel about him the same way Sirius felt about Remus.

            But of course that’s not going to happen, Harry thought, rolling his eyes when he thought of the idiot’s response to his advances.

            "Mr. Potter!"

            Harry turned in surprise. Cassie Malfoy was sprinting through the crowd towards him, waving her arms as if she hadn’t seen him in a month. Behind her were Phoenix and Laurel Lovegood, with Luna and Malfoy a long way off. Luna was in an intense conversation with a sword-swallower, but Malfoy was anxiously walking in, eyes fastened to his daughter as if he assumed that someone would snatch her.

            Harry felt his face soften. Considering the way his parents had died and the threats that Harry knew other people had made against them, Malfoy had some reason to feel that way.

            But right now he had to deal with Cassie, who was leaning against his knee and looking up at him in rapt attention. Phoenix and Laurel stopped a short distance away, apparently conscious that they’d seen him not that long ago. But Cassie didn’t care, and Harry smiled at her, the warmest smile he thought he’d given in months. Few of the children he helped would trust him this much. Of course, he didn’t have to spend as much time coaxing most of them as he did with Cassie, and they rarely saw him again.

            "Will you make another toy for me?" Cassie demanded. "Will you if I ask you really nice?"

            "What happened to the ones you had?" Harry asked, struggling to hold his face in a stern expression.

            Cassie blinked, then ducked her head so that her blonde hair fell around her face. "I still have them," she murmured. "I just want a new one."

            "Who’s this, then?" Sirius said, and Harry started as he realized that he, Remus, and Dumbledore were still there, though Dumbledore had been content to watch Harry talk to Sirius and Remus without interfering. It was a bad sign for his sanity, Harry thought as he turned around, when he became so absorbed in the mere sight of Malfoy that he lost track of everything else.

            "Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, Headmaster Dumbledore, this is Cassiopeia Malfoy," Harry said, reckoning that the best way to introduce someone to a Malfoy child was formally. "Called Cassie. Cassie, these are the Headmaster of Hogwarts and two of the professors."

            Cassie promptly gave a very adult curtsey, though her gaze was locked on Sirius. "I know you," she said. "Grandmother was Black."

            Sirius had an odd expression on his face as he stared at her. Harry knew that he had never cared for any of his family except his cousin Andromeda, and he had contacted her as soon as he could after Pettigrew was captured and his name cleared, but on the other hand, this girl was young and innocent and he’d never seen her before.

            "Yes, she was," he said at last. "My cousin. It’s nice to meet you, Cassie." He held out his hand, and she took it.

            "Black," Malfoy said, appearing behind his daughter as silently as though someone had conjured him there. "Lupin. Dumbledore." He inclined his head to Dumbledore, but there was no shred of respect in it. Then he turned and looked at Harry, and his eyes were remote. "Potter."

            Oh, no, you don’t, Harry thought. Maybe Malfoy would never know what Harry really felt for him, or at least never return those feelings, but he wasn’t going to pretend that they hadn’t met since Hogwarts. Harry nodded back, smiled at him, and said in a soft voice that he knew would matter to Sirius and Remus if not Malfoy, "Hullo, Draco."

            Malfoy did check at the use of his first name, blinking and then peering at Harry as if he thought that he was someone else. Harry raised his eyebrows slightly and put the full force of his emotions in his gaze, looking up and down Malfoy’s body in a way that ought to be unmistakable.

            But Malfoy only turned away as if he had ceased to exist and said to the Headmaster, "You’ve never stopped celebrating something that destroyed so many people, have you?"

            "Ah, young Mister Malfoy," Dumbledore said, and his voice was so calm and placid that Harry truly couldn’t tell what he was feeling. On the other hand, he thought Dumbledore had probably heard worse accusations down the years. "You must remember that Voldemort would have destroyed many more lives if he wasn’t stopped. I was rather concerned about that."

            Malfoy flinched at the name and picked Cassie up, holding her close as he stroked her cheek. Harry thought he might let it go, but the passion in his voice when he spoke again said that he couldn’t. "But you did nothing for us after the war. You cared nothing about the pure-blood students who chose to leave Hogwarts. All that rot about ‘healing our community’ and ‘standing together in the wake of war’ really was so much rot, wasn’t it?"

            Dumbledore’s raised hand stopped the outburst Harry knew Sirius would have given, for which Harry was grateful. "I could not interfere when your parents were your legal guardians and believed they knew what was best for you," Dumbledore said gently. "And I suspect that you would not have thanked me, at that age, if I had."

            Malfoy closed his eyes and said nothing. The look of suffering was back in his face, stronger than Harry had seen it since the first day they met again. Then he shook his head, but turned away, still silent.

            Harry found that he would have given anything to know what Malfoy had intended to say.

*

            "Have everything you need, Harry?"

            Harry snorted softly to himself as he looked up at the sky, absorbing the sunlight, studying the way the rays gathered a white edge to them as they fell and the glowing blue of the heavens. It was always perfect weather on the day that Hogwarts celebrated the end of the war, and Harry suspected the Headmaster had something to do with that.

            Not that he was going to complain when it gave him so much light to work with.

            "Of course I’m all right, Sirius," he said, turning around and smiling at Sirius where he stood beside the stage. "Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve done this hundreds of times."

            "Not in front of other people, you haven’t," Sirius muttered, peering anxiously up at him and shifting from foot to foot. "Not above their heads where anyone who liked could take a shot at you."

            "I’ve done it two times before, though," Harry said sensibly. He would grant Sirius the right to worry. Sirius’s life had changed forever the day that Harry defeated Voldemort, though for different reasons and in different ways, and then he had had Harry living with him during the summers and holidays for three years. (Dumbledore had finally seen sense and admitted that Harry had no reason to live with the Dursleys now that Voldemort was gone and most of the Death Eaters terrified of him). Sirius always felt that he hadn’t had enough time with Harry, though, that he had to have raised him from babyhood to "matter" as a parent. So he insisted on acting concerned whenever he saw Harry now.

            As long as he didn’t actually try to prevent Harry from doing what he wanted, there was no reason to worry back.

            Harry faced the crowd, and smiled when he saw that it was already thick. Luna and her children were at the center. She was holding Laurel on one shoulder and Phoenix on the other. Harry thought she looked like she was about to topple over, but she was staring into the distance, her lips moving slightly. Probably in the middle of a row with a Wrackspurt.

            Ron waved madly from the edge of the crowd. He never missed the celebration at Hogwarts; Harry thought that sometimes he still wished he was in school. Hermione had been about earlier, but someone had owled her and she’d had to leave.

            Remus was in the middle, talking with Snape. Snape felt Harry’s eyes on him--not surprising, the paranoid bastard--and looked up with a scowl. Harry nodded back politely and then looked away. He wasn’t going to argue with the man, but he didn’t have to like him, either. Yes, he had spied for them during the first war, and the Headmaster had told Harry tale after tale about Snape’s bravery. But Harry had learned that Snape was also the reason he didn’t have parents and, well. It was hard to forgive something like that.

            Then he saw a flash of bright hair from the edge of the crowd, and suddenly Harry felt as alert as though someone had plugged lightning into his nerves.

            Calm down, he told himself sternly. There can be other people with hair that color, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have stuck around.

            Except that there weren’t that many people who had hair that platinum color, and Harry’s eyes wouldn’t move away, not even in other directions so that he could start storing up colors for his show. Instead, he watched hungrily until people parted in the right place and he could see Malfoy there, holding Cassie.

            Malfoy saw him watching and lifted his chin defiantly, as though he were challenging Harry to order him thrown out. Harry grinned at him instead and swept him a small bow. The crowd thought it was directed at them and cheered. Ron thought it was for him and waved again, the bottle of Firewhisky in his hand sloshing about.

            Malfoy knew who the bow was meant for, though. His lips parted in what looked like astonishment, while Cassie smiled and waved. Then he looked down at his daughter, though not before Harry saw a small frown on his face.

            Wonderful, Harry thought, rolling his eyes. Withthis rate of progress, we might get around to a kiss in a year’s time.

            The crowd gradually settled down, and Harry raised his hands and gathered a ball of colored light between them, a vague mix of shifting greys and yellows at first. The crowd cheered, and more people waved, and Harry bowed to them all in general this time and threw up his hands so that the colors rose into the air.

            He was once again using his own memories, and he had prepared himself mentally for an hour already, so the memory entwined with the light quickly. Harry glanced up, moving his fingers gently in weaving motions. He didn’t need to--the magic was mental and spiritual, it always had been since the first moment when the gift came to him--but it comforted him, so he might as well do it.

            The light snapped into two separate pieces, which danced around each other for several moments before settling. Harry breathed into his cupped hands, and white and black leaked around his fingers, filtering into the colored shapes in turn.

            The crowd started clapping, but then fell still when Harry held his palms up, fingers fully extended. They seemed to have realized that he hadn’t finished yet, that they were in the presence of magic that made his muscles tremble and strain.

            Or maybe they hadn’t. Harry didn’t see how he could expect his audiences to understand his magic when he didn’t even fully understand it himself.

            He faced the two pieces of light and bowed his head slightly, giving in to the stress that raced through him, letting it place a yoke around his shoulders that he could pull against, brace himself against, and rest on before he pulled again. His mind was relaxing and then gripping the memories, and he didn’t know if he would manage to do this even though the images were perfectly clear in his mind. It wasn’t something he had ever tried before.

            It also wasn’t the perfectly joyful demonstration that he had planned to create when Dumbledore again asked him to perform. He thought that a joyful one was appropriate for a celebration.

            But it had occurred to him that other things might be appropriate, too. And so he chose these memories and wove them.

            A third image was layered on top of the other two, and Harry ground a curse out from between clenched teeth. If someone interrupted him now--maybe by attacking him, the way Sirius had suggested--he wasn’t sure what would happen. He had never handled this much magic before. It was like standing in the middle of a roaring current of water that was passing straight through him.

            He groaned against it.

            And then he thought of Draco’s face.

            That was the breakthrough. Those lines of suffering echoed his, though Harry had mostly put his suffering behind him, and he had certainly defeated Voldemort more easily than he might have. Harry had been able to move past his grief. But Draco dwelt in the middle of his, and he was somehow managing to raise a child through it and have her turn out wonderfully, and Harry had no words for that kind of strength.

            He might have the magic, though. And the three images raced through him and into reality as he thought about that.

            Harry staggered back and stared at the display above him, panting. It was real. It looked solid. There was no doubt of that. And if no one was cheering and no one--not even Ron--was shouting congratulations, that didn’t matter, because that silence that came from behind him was its own tribute.

            The central, background image showed two graves, neat white headstones carved with names and dates standing in the midst of cool greenery. Harry had only seen them for the first time the summer after he defeated Voldemort, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t as though he was going to forget his first sight of his own parents’ graves.

            Over the grave on the left, rendered ghostly through Harry’s combination of what he knew personally with his memory of photographs, hovered the image of a woman with red hair and brilliant green eyes. She had a smile on her face, and she stood with her hand reaching out to the man who hovered above the grave on the right. Messy black hair, hazel eyes that had a gentle wisdom to them Harry thought he might have come to in his war, glasses--he was drawn entirely from photos, since Harry had no Dementor-rendered memory of him. But he looked as solid.

            And he reached towards the woman.

            Harry licked his lips and pulled once more on his memory, this time of letters that he had enchanted to gleam in the air before him yesterday. He could only combine the light with memories, or dreams, or imaginings, and memories were the easiest for him; a mere glamour would look out of place as part of the image. But a single snap of his fingers was all that was needed, luckily, for the glittering golden letters to swim into being and hang like an unfurled scroll beneath the image of Lily and James Potter and their graves.

            They were heroes. A hero is someone who does what they have to in the face of odds they don’t know if they can surmount.

            Another movement of his finger, and Harry added another scroll of letters above his parents’ heads.

            A hero is someone who lives with uncertainty.

            The applause did come, then, in waves. Harry nearly staggered as he turned around and bowed, and then he really did stagger, because he’d tried to move too far, too fast. But he had to look into the eyes of the person he wanted to see most, the person he had done this for.

            Draco stood motionless at the edge of the crowd. Cassie was cheering in his arms, but his eyes were very wide and his face very pale, and he looked as though he couldn’t have moved if someone had come after him with a knife.

            He would have moved if someone threatened Cassie, though. Harry was sure of it. Malfoy’s love for his daughter was not one of those uncertainties to be conquered.

            Draco again lifted his head when he saw Harry watching him, but this time the motion was not defiant. Instead, his grey eyes were clear with questions, and he mouthed the words Whatdo you want of me?

            Only you, Harry mouthed back, staring as intently as he could, trying to make Malfoy believe him instead of look around his meaning because he had lived for so long in a world where people only existed to hurt him, not honor him.

            The gaze went deep, deep. The world turned transparent around Harry. He glided forwards and down, and--

            And Draco broke the gaze, his face white now, and turned and sprinted into the crowd, Cassie’s complaints trailing behind him.

            But Harry had gone deep enough before that happened. He had seen.

            Draco’s deepest memory.

*

            His parents’ bodies lay sprawled in the street. Their robes were torn, the rags scarcely clinging to their limbs. Stray clumps of his mother’s hair decorated her face. He didn’t know if it had actually been pulled loose from her head. He thought it would hurt too much to find out.

            His father didn’t look like he was made of gold and ivory anymore, the way he had for the entirety of Draco’s life. He looked like a shattered porcelain figurine. His hair was just dirty blond, the same color as anyone else’s.

            He wasn’t a Malfoy. Neither of them were. They were just--bodies. Corpses.

            He took a step forwards. Then another. Then he stopped and stood, shaking, in the middle of the street.

            And then he turned and fled.

            By the time he was done vomiting over his weakness and came back, his parents’ bodies had vanished. He never found out who had taken them and how. The Aurors were no help. He placed a reward in the papers, but all he got were Howlers and owls of people who hinted smugly that they had parts of the bodies but would rather go to Azkaban than give them back--and, once, a lock of his father’s hair.

            It was no wonder he remembered that place on the street. It was etched into his memory by the acid of guilt and grief.

*

            Harry opened his eyes and lay still in bed for a long moment, staring at the ceiling. It was a rainy day, but the clear, grey light that entered his bedroom would still provide a nice background for any images that he wanted to create.

            Well. That was a new one. He’d never dreamed anyone else’s memories before, and if someone asked, he would have said that he’d seen Draco’s memory far too briefly to have it impressed on his mind like that.

            Yet here I am, and here it is.

            Harry got slowly out from beneath the blankets and sat on the edge of the bed a bit, his hands dangling between his knees. He had to think. He had to think very carefully, and then turn the thoughts around and look at them from another angle. He would have liked to discuss them with Hermione, but that would have just led to her trying to dissuade him, and Harry already knew that he wouldn’t listen.

            He had to think about them carefully because this was the most dangerous thing he had ever contemplated in his life.

            And not to him. Oh, he might be hurt or embarrassed if it didn’t work, but he couldn’t possibly be traumatized the way Draco would.

            Harry hesitated at that. The last thing I want to do is hurt him. Do I really want to risk this?

            But of course he knew he would. The golden thrum in his gut, the same he had felt before he tackled the Snitch or before his gift broke free the first time, said he would. Because the dangers were great, but if it worked...

            If it worked, it just might mean more to Harry, and maybe to Draco, than a world without Voldemort. That world hadn’t worked out so well for Draco. Harry didn’t think that was his fault, and he didn’t accept the guilt, but without feeling guilt, one could still work to make someone’s life better.

            With a slight grin, Harry stood to go shower, already composing a careful owl in his head.

*

            "What’s the meaning of this, Potter?" Draco’s voice was small and bitter. "I came because you demanded it, and I reckon you think I owe you something for healing my daughter, but the money I paid you should have..."

            Draco’s voice trailed off. Harry turned and smiled at him. He wasn’t worried. Most people’s voices did that when they entered the meadow Harry had sent Draco the Apparition coordinates to.

            To all eyes from the outside, including Muggle ones, it was a wasteland, a stretch of desolate road with dusty trees on either side. But that was simply the enchantment Harry had worked to keep his private property truly private. A solidified memory of a dream he’d had more than once about Privet Drive, mysteriously abandoned and left to rot like the rubbish heap it was, made sure of that.

            Beyond the illusion, the meadow was wide and rippled, dipping into small hollows where stones or water gathered and then rising again into tall, feathery spikes of green grass that whipped back and forth in the wind. Small purple flowers and blue ones, almost invisible, competed with them for space, and two slender saplings grew in the middle, around the silvery creek that rose from a hidden source, wandered for a short space in the open air, and then vanished back underground. Harry didn’t know what they were for certain, but he thought willow trees. He would be more certain as he grew older with them.

            Draco looked around as though trying to find a house, but there was nothing more permanent in sight than a large boulder. Harry had left it that way on purpose. This was a place he came to think when he truly wanted to escape the pressure of the public, not a place to live at all times. His place was in the world, beside people.

            "Yes, it’s impressive," Draco said at last. "Even beautiful. And not one of your illusions." He focused on Harry, his eyes charged with intensity. "But I still have no idea why you brought me here."

            "Because," Harry said, "I saw one of your memories the other day when we locked eyes at the Hogwarts celebration. And it occurred to me that I could do something to help you cope with it, just as I helped Cassie cope with her nightmares." He paused, then went on, voice so soft Draco had no choice but to lean in and hear. "And maybe it’ll even be a gift. God knows that I like to give the people I like things they want."

            Draco froze in place, eyes locked on him. Then he looked away. He was panting lightly. "There’s nothing in your power to give me that I want," he said. "now that Cassie’s cured."

            "Are you sure?" Harry whispered, and then he stepped out of the way and revealed the solidified image he’d been guarding with his body from Draco’s sight.

            Two elaborate white headstones stood in the middle of the grass, carved in the shape of rearing dragons. It had taken Harry two full days of hunting through photographs and graveyards to locate something remotely suitable, and even then, he’d had to combine memories. The dragons had flaring wings, and their heads were tilted back, forked tongues emerging from their mouths. Veins of blue and gold glittered in the marble. Harry was proud of them. They were indescribably beautiful.

            At the foot of each headstone was an open grave, gathered easily enough from Harry’s memory of Cedric’s funeral and then duplicated, and beside each one of those rested a shut coffin. Harry had sculpted them of brown and golden light, trying to choose the best and richest hues he could without making them so rich that they seemed unrealistic or a mockery.

            When Harry looked back, Draco was standing so still that it transported Harry back in time to the Hogwarts celebration, and how Draco had looked after Harry’s little demonstration. Of course, Harry hadn’t known then how closely the image echoed one of Draco’s deepest, fondest desires.

            "What is this?" Draco whispered at last. His voice was papery.

            "I know that you were never able to give your parents a proper funeral," Harry said, matching Draco’s voice in tone if not volume. "I wanted to let you come close."

            Draco looked up then, and his eyes were so wild and desperate that Harry braced himself the way he had when weaving the images of his parents and their graves together. "This isn’t real," Draco said.

            "No," Harry said. Gentle, he had to be gentle. He would try. "But it’s what I can give you. Please let me."

            He looked at Draco with that emotion again, all the emotions he felt, the gratitude for seeing Draco’s gratitude, the warmth at his warmth, the admiration and the wonder that Draco had lived through such suffering for so long. He didn’t know if it would be enough, but on the other hand, if it wasn’t, there was nothing else he could offer.

            Just like there was nothing else he could offer Draco in the matter of laying his parents to rest if he refused this image. Harry’s gift was limited. He could conjure nightmares and dreams, but those didn’t always stand up well to the harsh, pure light of the waking world.

            Draco wound his hands together. Then he said, "You like me."

            Harry nodded. He might have rolled his eyes a few hours ago, but not now. Not now. "Yes," he said.

            Draco stared at him for some time longer. Then he turned back to the coffins, graves, and headstones, and his longing was palpable.

            Even so, Harry wasn’t sure what he would decide until he whispered, "I dreamed of inscriptions for their gravestones. Can you put them there?"

            Harry, his heart singing, nodded again. "Yes. But I’ll need to look into your mind to see them. Will you permit me to do that?"

            Draco nodded back, and stood still, with a different kind of stillness this time, as Harry walked up, slipped his hands into place around Draco’s cheeks, and leaned forwards until their eyelashes touched.

            The tunnel opened around him with a motion like the wings of a swan parting as it flew for the first time. And Harry found what he needed, and while he didn’t understand every word of the inscription, he knew enough to make his heart give a single heavy beat.

            "I promise," he said to Draco when he returned to his own body, although he didn’t know what he was promising, and then faced the headstones and layered Draco’s dream onto them.

            The inscriptions stretched from one dragon’s wing to another, and when he had done the first, the second was easy. He only had to reshape the veins of gold in the marble by thinking of the first sunrise he had seen after he defeated Voldemort, and the way it had spread across the sky while he sat by the window in Gryffindor Tower, and stared at it, and felt his soul breathe in his chest.

            The inscription on Narcissa’s grave read NARCISSA MALFOY. Elegantiavincit omnia.

            The inscription on Lucius’s grave read LUCIUS MALFOY. In potentia est pax.

            And then the moment came that the coffins would need to be moved into the graves. Harry watched Draco, without thought, step forwards and bend down to grasp the side of the coffin on the left.

            With an effort that almost broke the light flaring in his mind and in his chest in response to his commands, Harry concentrated, and flung it all--memory, radiance, dream--directly at the place in the illusion where Draco’s hand would touch.

            And it happened. Harry knew it from the expression on Draco’s face when his hand came to rest there. He felt real wood.

            Harry had never done that before, and elation dazzled him, almost swept him off his feet. But in the meantime, they had the dead to bury.

            Together, with Draco lifting one side of the coffin and Harry the other, they maneuvered it into the grave. And then came Lucius’s turn, and he settled out of sight, in a welter of wealth and grace that Harry knew Draco could not have afforded, and was staring at as if his soul would break out of him at the sight.

            "How do we cover them up?" he whispered.

            Harry lifted a hand.

            His gift broke from him like rays, and images of birds swooped from the sky--silver eagles, small and jeweled hummingbirds, elegant white herons, anything graceful that Harry could think of. Each carried a flower. They opened their beaks as they soared over the graves, and the flowers fell in a whirlwind of white and silver petals, and buried the coffins, and Harry solidified each image, knowing he would pay in weariness later, not caring right now, so great was this and so important.

            Draco shut his eyes.

            Harry waited in silence, while he did what he could to strengthen the headstones and the heap of flowers at their feet. The birds had vanished the moment Harry released his hold on their images, but that didn’t matter. It was the headstones and the graves that had to last, like Cassie’s toys, because they were what Draco would come here to visit.

            "How can I thank you?" Draco whispered. "I know what you want, but still, how can I?"

            "You don’t need to," Harry said. "This is beyond thanks." He reached out and cradled Draco’s chin, unable to help himself, despite his words.

            Draco turned his head towards Harry like a flower to the sun. He looked dazed, triumphant but stunned, as though he had been caught in a storm and stumbled out barely alive.

            But some of the lines of suffering had also vanished.

            Harry half-closed his eyes.

            And Draco gave him what he wanted, what they both wanted, leaning forwards slowly, tentatively, as tentatively as Harry had reached for the inscriptions in his mind when Draco granted him permission. Once again, they were so close their eyelashes touched, and then Draco’s lips were on Harry’s.

            And Harry knew, from that mere smooth brush of lips, nothing fancy, nothing deep, who had given the greater gift.

            The End.
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Lord of Light