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Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 1869 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day
- 1
Title: Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day

Pairing/Threesome: Gen, with Harry, Snape, and Draco

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Mind control, mental torture, some angst

Word count: 30,500

Summary: Finding out what Snape and Malfoy wanted to do wasn't really a problem. But why doesn't make any sense--and Harry is going to go on a journey into darkness before he finds the truth.

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.

Author's Notes: Written for the 2011 hds_beltane fest. The title comes from William Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence." Thanks to my beta, Linda.

Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day

            Malfoy still wasn't any good at sneaking around.

            Harry spotted him first lurking outside the Whiffledown Library, the large one in Knowledge Alley where most of the Aurors went for their research needs. He was trying to act casual, but the upturned robe collar, darting eyes, and constant checking of his watch rather undermined the effort.

            Harry paused in the shadow of the library's impressive portico and watched him. Malfoy tried to straighten up and whistle as a witch with several children in tow passed him, but the witch gave him a suspicious glance anyway. Malfoy's eyes hardened, and he said something that made her jump, clutch her bags, and scurry away. Then he looked at his watch again, and shook it as if he thought the magic had stopped functioning.

            There's nothing inherently wrong with waiting for someone who stood up in the middle of the day, in magical London, where anybody could see you, Harry tried to reassure himself. The alarm that sounded in the back of his brain every time he saw Malfoy didn't stop sounding, but it dimmed a bit. Besides, he has Aurors following him most of the time, still. He wouldn't do something that could get him sent to Azkaban.

            Then Harry was forced to reconsider his opinion of Malfoy's intelligence, because a tall, cloaked figure slipped out of one of the library's side doors and fell into step beside Malfoy. Malfoy's face lit up, before he scowled again and tapped his watch. The man shrugged, a flowing motion that wouldn't have revealed him to someone who didn't already know him; he kept the hood pulled low over his face, touching his shoulders.

            But Harry would recognize the arrogant angle of that head anywhere. Snape.

            Not many people even knew Snape had survived Nagini's bite thanks to some unholy concoction of potions floating in his bloodstream and his paranoid foresight. Among the ones who knew, most of them would have thought he'd stay away from Malfoy. Snape had his Auror complement, too, though they were more discreet and of higher ranks than Harry had attained. He only knew about them in the first place because he'd seen Snape one afternoon and had to be brought into the secret.

            Now here they were, together, two of the most notorious former Death Eaters walking swiftly away from the library, conversing in voices that teased the edges of Harry's attention.

            Harry stepped into the shadows and cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself, then followed.

            It was automatic. He saw none of their Auror guards, and at least one would have been in evidence to watch over even a sanctioned meeting. That meant Malfoy and Snape had probably met on their own, on the sly, which meant nothing good. Not when Malfoy jerked his head around like that, looking for followers, and not when Snape bowed his head to the extent that he looked hunchbacked, even though he must be wearing a glamour.

            Someone had to keep them from making stupid mistakes that could land them right back in front of the Wizengamot barely four years after the end of the war.

            It was a gloomy day, spitting light rain and streaks of sunshine with equal intermittence. A good day for following someone, Harry thought, because the shadows aided the Disillusionment Charm, and most people in the streets moved swiftly, trying to duck out of the storm as soon as possible. That didn't prevent Malfoy from keeping a careful watch over his shoulder, but Harry was more careful, and they led him from Knowledge Alley into Diagon Alley, and then into the Leaky Cauldron, where they took a table in a back corner. They could see the door from there, but Harry slipped up behind them, so close that he was almost treading on Snape's robes, and managed to avoid having to catch the door and let it swing suspiciously open on its "own."

            Malfoy cast glamours that shrouded the table with more shadows than it possessed naturally, enough so that the server who started over to them shook her head, looked puzzled, and went back to the bar. Harry raised his eyebrows, reluctantly impressed. Malfoy knew the spells in a way that would have done credit to an Auror.

            Except that he had no business doing spells like that, when he was under watch and still, essentially, under suspicion. Harry crouched beside the table, within the ring of the glamours, and calmed his breathing. The last thing he wanted to do now was let some involuntary noise give him away. This looked serious. They would probably Obliviate him rather than let him get away with important information.

            "What do you have for me?" Malfoy tried to keep his hands folded on the table in front of him as he spoke, but no luck. He was toying with the saltcellar and a quill he'd taken out of his pocket and his wand in under a minute, and his eyes wouldn't stay away from Snape's face no matter what he did.

            Snape pulled back the hood enough to talk. Yes, he was wearing a glamour, that of a man with blue eyes and a faded scar down the side of his face, but Harry could see it wearing thin at the edges; something else had taken his concentration away from it. "The spell you want to use exists."

            Malfoy let out a shaky breath and shut his eyes. Harry thought he would let his head fall forwards to rest on the table for a second, but he was either not that weak or committed to not looking that weak. He lifted his head higher and nodded a bit. "Fine. What are the costs?"

            "To you, or to others?" Snape's mouth turned downwards. "You know there is a reason this spell is not often performed."

            "Spells like this in general," Malfoy corrected, voice harsh as a grinding gear. "I didn't know that this specific one existed until you informed me."

            "This is too much for you." Snape leaned in and reached out to splay slender, pale fingers over Malfoy's wrist. Harry gaped under his charm. He had never thought he would see the day that Snape was concerned for someone else's well-being.

            And then he thought of the way he'd overheard Snape talking to Malfoy during their sixth year at Hogwarts, and how he'd sung the spell to cure the Sectumsempra, and hesitated. Well, if Snape could care for anyone living with that withered stone of a heart of his, it would be Malfoy.

            "Let us do something else," Snape continued. "There are letters we can write. People we can approach. Contacts that are as yet unexploited. We can--"

            "I've tried all those routes," Malfoy said, and his voice bottomed out into flatness. "For four years. It's not going to work. They're all stubborn and convinced that what they learned in the war, or since, is right. And I want this more than anything else in the world, Severus. Enough to take all kinds of risks."

            Snape closed his eyes. Harry could see the exact moment he gave up on convincing Malfoy. His brow furrowed with extra lines, and his voice was thin when he spoke again. "Very well. Then you might as well know that we still cannot perform the spell."

            "What?" Harry winced from Malfoy's sharp bark and the way he started to rise from the chair, but more from surprise than anything else. Well, that and the fact that Malfoy's leg would brush Harry's cloak if he moved a step closer. That would be enough to make him notice something was wrong. "Then why spend time telling me that you found the spell I needed, when--"

            "Because it is the right one." Snape hadn't moved from his chair, and in the sharp turn of his head Harry saw something that might have been exasperation. "What I mean is that we need three people to perform it. You are one. I am one. Who is the third?"

            "Why three?" Malfoy still bristled and refused to sit back down. "It is the mystical significance of the number, the three voices chanting, the angles the light needs to come from, what?"

            Light, Harry told himself. Angles. He would remember that if he didn't get any more clues about the spell than he had so far; they might be enough for Hermione to figure out what it was.

            "It is because of the power that pours into the spell," Snape said. "Three wizards is the minimum that is needed, and even then, no random stranger will do. Two of the wizards must have a bond of trust between them, and the third needs to trust them both, whether or not they trust him. You see why we may have some difficulty in convincing others to participate."

            Malfoy clenched his left hand into a fist and sat down. "Mother still doesn't trust you," he whispered.

            "Exactly. And as you will not involve any of your friends..."

            Malfoy glanced up, eyes hot. "All of them would demand something in return. We could exchange favors, but from what you're saying, that wouldn't be enough for the spell. It has to be something genuine, doesn't it? Deep emotion and deep bonds?"

            "Yes."

            Malfoy stared at the table. "Fucking Gryffindors, always wanting to be so generous," he muttered.

            Harry didn't see what Gryffindors had to do with it, but filed that note away as well. Maybe a Gryffindor had invented the spell, though he didn't think Snape would touch it if that was the case.

            "Yes." Snape folded his hands in front of him again and stared at Malfoy levelly. "As matters stand, we could ask your mother, but she is the only one I think we can ask. And if she trusts you only, and cannot be persuaded to give that much to me, then the spell will fail."

            "We have a month," Malfoy muttered. "That might be enough time to show her how much this means to you."

            "How much it means to you," Snape countered, his voice sinking a little. "Draco. I am doing this because it matters to you in a way that nothing else has since the war. I will give you all the aid I can. But I do not think it will accomplish what you wish, even if we succeed, and that doubt will certainly be visible to someone as perceptive as your mother."

            Harry clenched his hands together, then wiped off the sweat on his trousers. He was starting to tremble from anxiety and eagerness. What was the big secret? Why would neither Snape nor Malfoy mention what the spell did, as if they knew that someone was hiding in the same small spot with them?

            Because they both knew what Snape had gone to search for, of course. Harry knew his question had a simple answer. But it didn't make him feel better. He bit his lip and kept listening.

            "Believe," Malfoy said simply, staring up into Snape's face. He reached out as if he would take his hand, then pulled it back and drummed a fist into the surface of the table instead. "Try. You know that I wouldn't ask you to stop the sunrise for any lesser purpose. Holding the sun in place for me will take a lot of faith. Try."

            Harry felt his breath catch.

            Yes, there were spells that could stop the sun. The Muggles had legends about them. Harry had heard the legends during his Auror training, though admittedly only as part of the same lesson that discussed traveling in time without Time-Turners. The advice was simple: don't.

            No wonder Snape thought it couldn't work. The amount of power needed to make the sun halt in place for a moment, much less stay beneath the horizon for a last hour of darkness, as it sounded like Malfoy was asking for, was enormous. Harry had looked up more information after that lesson in a few idle hours, and discovered tales of wizards burned out, becoming Squibs, going mad, combusting from the inside, from the sheer strain of trying to alter time for even a moment.

            Still, satisfaction seared him. He knew what Snape and Malfoy were up to now, and he could use that information to decide whether he should turn them in to their absent-minded watchdogs, or help them, or...

            And then his brain stuttered to a halt.

            The time he had spent looking up those spells also said that there was no real use for them, except to impress one's enemies. And Malfoy had enemies in the Ministry who wouldn't be impressed. They would simply accuse him of Dark magic and arrest him. That didn't make sense for a driving purpose that had occupied him for four years, the way Snape had said. Harry knew Malfoy could hold a grudge with the best of them and had some insane pride issues, but he didn't think he was literally insane.

            Frowning, he looked back at the table in time to see Snape nod deeply. It looked more like a bow of his head, actually. "All right. Then we will try to convince your mother to enter the spell and the bonds of trust with us at the same time, and hope that the power of Beltane will aid us."

            Beltane, right, Harry thought, after some confused searching around in his memory after the word. Today was the first of April. A month from now was the festival of Beltane, the beginning of summer in the old Celtic calendar. Some people, some wizards, still thought it was a day of power, and it made sense that Malfoy would want to tap it. Anything that aided his crazy plan would be a help.

            "Thank you." Malfoy leaned forwards and rested his forehead on his and Snape's clasped hands. Harry watched in wonder as relief seemed to melt the burdens on his shoulders and clothe him in dripping water. "Thank you. I promise, you won't regret it. If we can't persuade Mother to trust you, we'll find someone else. There has to be someone else."

            Harry shook his head. It still sounded crazy, and he could tell from the reluctant twitch at the corner of Snape's mouth that it probably didn't sound much better to him. But he nodded and tightened his hold on Malfoy's wrists. "I promise," he whispered. "I am with you."

            For the first time, Harry felt the tight little squirm of guilt in his stomach. This sounded...really private, like the swearing of an Unbreakable Vow. He had the feeling that he shouldn't have seen it. He wanted to break out through the glamours and run away. He cast a longing glance over his shoulder, but the dim, shimmering wall cast by Malfoy's magic remained up, and they would notice if he left now.

            Not that he had any idea where he would go. What should he tell the Ministry? That Malfoy and Snape were planning to do something impossible for no clear motive, something that at least one of them didn't think they would be able to achieve?

            Not that he knew if he wanted to betray them at all.

            Harry hissed hard between his teeth. The problem was that he didn't know enough, even the name of the specific spell Snape had found and wanted Malfoy to use, let alone what they wanted it for. He could see now why Hermione found so much comfort in books. If it was written down and the answer stared at you in plain black and white, then the world didn't feel so overwhelming.

            "What was that?"

            Harry turned back to see that Snape had pivoted his chair away from the table and had his hand on his wand, his head turning slowly back and forth. Harry blinked before he realized that Snape spent more time looking at the side of the table where he crouched than anywhere else.

            Shit. He'd heard Harry's little hiss and noticed it, like the paranoid bastard he was. Harry could imagine what Snape would do to him now if he found him here, especially since he would probably guess that Harry had seen him showing actual emotion. Harry curled his legs under him and braced a hand on the edge of the table, ready to run.

            "Nothing," Malfoy said impatiently. "It's nothing. Please, Severus, we need to think about this. We need to choose the place. We need to make sure that we're of one mind. And we need to talk to my mother." He bounced to his feet. Sweat was already starting on his forehead, his hands. "Come on. Please? I need to move."

            "Yes, you do," Snape said, after studying Malfoy's face for a moment. He put his wand away and stood up, and Harry made sure not to sigh in relief, although he thought the scrape of the chair pushing back would probably cover it. "Come, then." He put out a hand and caught Malfoy's elbow, towing him away.

            Harry counted twelve before he glanced up. Malfoy was out of the pub, and Snape's robes swishing through the door.

            But Snape leaned back before Harry could do more than start to rise, and his eyes focused directly on Harry.

            Harry couldn't breathe. He just stared back numbly, not sure what he should do.

            Snape inclined his head, eyes glinting, and then his lips formed a single word before he went outside to follow Malfoy.

            Harry leaned back on the table and shook his head, concentrating on the sensations of hard wood and his hair moving against it to soothe his confusion. Snape's word had been Perhaps.

*

            "You're right, Harry. It doesn't make any sense."

            Harry had heard the second sentence a lot, but each time he heard the first one was a new memory to treasure. He blinked and leaned back in his seat at Hermione's kitchen table, sucking at the ice in the bottom of his glass absently through the straw. "Oh, really? I thought the spells to stop the sun had to have some purpose beyond what they told us in Auror training."

            "Why would you think that?" Hermione looked at him through her fringe. The edges were singed, and she still had the faint smell of smoke around her hair as a whole. Harry hid his smile in the drink. Hermione worked for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, and she probably hadn't expected the job to contain house-elves who threw flaming coals when interrupted at their duties and asked to read documents.

            "Because why else would someone have invented them?" Harry shrugged. "Because an impossible spell that can't impress anyone because you can't do it is useless?"

            "That doesn't prevent some people from trying to do them," Hermione said sourly, and cast another charm that Harry knew was meant to dissipate the smell of smoke. It hadn't yet worked, maybe because the smoke had been reinforced with house-elf magic. "As you see with Snape and Malfoy."

            Harry nodded. "Any ideas as to how it could be related to this goal that Malfoy's spent the last four years of his life pursuing?"

            "Well, it doesn't seem to involve his mother, since she's supposed to be one of the participants in the spell." Hermione sat up straighter and started counting down numbers on her fingers. "He already has his freedom, and he has enough money to live on. I reckon he could be trying to get more money, but he should be grateful for what he has, and I don't think that he would want to attract the Ministry's attention."

            Harry just grunted. He didn't really like the way that Hermione and Ron and everyone else he knew assumed Malfoy was a rotten apple waiting to go worse, but on the other hand, all the evidence he had on the opposite side consisted of things like Malfoy's desperate looks and quietness in the years since the trial. Not enough to make an argument.

            "That leaves only one thing I can think of." Hermione spread her hands. "His father."

            Harry blinked. Lucius Malfoy was still in Azkaban, and likely to remain there until he died. His crimes had been too obvious for even a bribed Wizengamot to ignore. "Say you're right. How does this spell help him?"

            "I don't know," Hermione said with a sigh. "Knowing Malfoy, it could be something as ridiculous as hoping the frozen sunrise stuns the Azkaban guards so they don't stand up to a raid. And yet..." She tapped her lips with her fingertips this time. "I can't see Snape agreeing to help with something like that, something that wouldn't stand a chance of succeeding. He has to know, if Malfoy doesn't, that the Ministry would fetch Lucius back again and put him under tighter protections than ever."

            "So we have a probable motive for them casting the spell," Harry said, tilting the chair back on its hind legs, "and it still doesn't make sense."

            "Don't do that," Hermione said, and waved her wand. The chair crashed down, almost fast enough for Harry to ram his knees into the table. He coiled them back against his chest and yelped at Hermione, who simply raised an eyebrow and reached again for the piled notes in front of her. "That can scuff the floor," Hermione went on, as if she hadn't nearly rendered him a centaur's front half. "And hurt you. Anyway, no. It doesn't make sense. Perhaps you should tell the Ministry, let them handle it."

            "No!"

            Hermione looked up, blinking, and pushed her fringe out of her eyes once again. "No need to shout, Harry. It was a suggestion. I don't think they'll succeed, so I don't need to report it myself."

            "I know," Harry said, a little shaken by his own outburst. He had only known that it was deeply important that he investigate this mystery himself, not allowing the Ministry to horn in and--and make decisions they had no right to make, he thought. He knew they would decide that Snape and Malfoy were dangerous. They might decide to lock them in holding cells for the duration of the month, until Beltane was safely past. They might decide to put a watch on Narcissa Malfoy, who had earned her freedom with the way she lied to Voldemort during the war.

            Harry didn't want any of those things to happen.

            "Let me watch them," he told Hermione. "I think I can recognize when they're doing something dangerous--something that would be dangerous to other people, I mean." He had read some of the notes Hermione had scribbled, and he knew Snape and Malfoy would most likely burn themselves out on this spell. "I want to know."

            Hermione looked closely, critically, at him. "Just because Snape turned out to be a hero in the war," she whispered, "doesn't mean that he'll never do anything wrong. What he did to you and Neville, especially, during school was still wrong. And Malfoy was a kid during the war. He isn't anymore. You shouldn't put yourself into danger because you want to prove their innocence, Harry."

            Harry shrugged awkwardly. He loved his friends' loyalty to him, but sometimes it was a bloody inconvenience. "I know. The only thing I can do is ask that you--trust me, Hermione. Please. I'll let you know if I figure out the motivation for the spell and it's evil, all right?"

            Hermione relented with a nod. "All right. Just let Ron know where you are when you can, and stay in touch with me."

            Harry shot her a smile. "Thanks," he said, and stood up to circle around the table and kiss her on the forehead. He waited until he was by the door to add, "And I think you should try a few more cleaning charms on your hair."

            He was out the door before she could fire off a Stinging Hex in retaliation.

*

            The next place Snape and Malfoy met was in the Hog's Head. Harry woke from a sound sleep with his locator charms--a special variety that would only go off when Snape and Malfoy were together--singing at him, and he stood up, blurrily pulled his cloak over his head, and dropped his wards so he could Apparate, following the tug of the charms.

            Harry kept his head down as he came into the Hog's Head, hoping that neither Snape nor Malfoy was watching the door. It would be hard to explain it swinging open by itself when there wasn't much wind tonight. He saw with a stab of relief that they were facing the other way, their heads once more bent over the table, their voices hissing around each other. He could only hear the hiss through the dimming wards they'd put up.

            But that didn't matter a great deal, since he'd made a special trip to Weasley's Wizard Wheezes for just this purpose the other day. Harry sat down beneath an empty table, pulled out George's newly-modified Extended Ear, and sent it snaking across the ground between them with a soft command.

            The Ear changed colors like a chameleon as it moved. In a few seconds, it was the beer-stained, dark brown hue of the floorboards, which meant someone would have had to stare hard to spot it. Then it reached the glamours that surrounded Snape and Malfoy and snapped open and shut once.

            The glamours acquired a small hole, through which the Ear sneaked. Harry smiled silent praise of George's inventiveness and leaned his head on his hand, waiting for the conversation to appear.

            It did, in the middle of a sentence. "...mother is not a good candidate," Snape said, his voice soft and insistent. "Three days of meetings, three days of testifying under Veritaserum, and she still mistrusts me."

            Harry blinked at nothing. From what he knew, Snape had agreed to swear the Unbreakable Vow that Narcissa Malfoy wanted him to swear, to take over the task of killing Dumbledore for Draco. It seemed odd that she would trust him for that and not for this.

            "I know, Severus, I know." Malfoy pushed his hands through his hair as Harry watched and left most of it sticking straight up. His eyes had an aching emptiness that said he'd spent too many nights awake. Harry swallowed. He knew that feeling. "But we have to have a third. I'm not going to fail, not when we'd have to wait until Beltane next year to try again, and his mind will probably be gone then."

            Harry nodded. So Hermione was right, and they were trying to help Lucius in some way by stopping the sunrise.

            Of course, it still made no sense how they could do so.

            "We could try at Midsummer," Snape pointed out, his voice so gentle that Harry relaxed a few tense muscles before he thought about it. "Beltane is not the only day of power in the year."

            "But it's the most significant," Malfoy said, voice taut. "You know that. From Mabon on to Yule, the holidays are too devoted to darkness. The winter sun isn't powerful enough at Imbolc, and too perfectly balanced between day and night at Ostara. At Midsummer and Lammas, the emphasis is on the length of the light, the sunset, not the dawn. At Beltane, the sun is rising after a night of black magic, and it's the beginning of the old season of light. It's perfect. We have to do it then. It's already going to be difficult enough without lacking that."

            Snape waited a long moment, then slowly inclined his head. "Very well. Then allow me to make the suggestion that you shot down the other day, when you were still obsessed with using your mother as our third."

            Harry tried his best to keep his hand still, because he thought the Extendable Ear would have trembled with his excitement otherwise. Were they going to bring someone else into this, then? He wondered if there was a variety of locator charm that would track meetings between three people. It sounded like he had more studying to do if there was.

            He wondered for a moment what Hermione would say about his obsession with this, his determination to give Snape and Malfoy third or fourth or fifth chances, but brushed the thought away and leaned forwards when he saw Malfoy's mouth open.

            "I think I know who you were talking about," Malfoy grumbled. "And I told you, none of my friends have that kind of bond of trust with me--"

            "I was talking about Potter."

            Harry actually thought There's someone else named Potter I never met? before he realized what Snape meant. His lungs seemed to stop working. Malfoy's eyes widened and stayed there, and the air in that small circle around the table froze. Harry swallowed when he could, and waited for the explosion.

            "He would never--he doesn't trust us," Malfoy said, without the table-throwing and slamming-back of his chair that Harry would have expected. His voice was quiet, tentative. His fingers played with each other on the table before he seemed to realize what he was doing and braided them into stillness. His eyes never left Snape's. "That's more ridiculous than suggesting my mother."

            "You forget the requirements of the spell," Snape said. "One of them is that two of the wizards trust each other. I trust you, and I think that you trust me, despite our failure with Narcissa."

            "Of course," Malfoy said. His voice was simple, quiet, and Harry had heard the emotion in it before. He had said the same thing to Ron when Ron asked whether Harry trusted him after he'd destroyed the locket Horcrux.

            Snape nodded. "The second requirement is that the third wizard trust both the other two. Not that they trust him. And I think Potter does. He has defended us from those Wizengamot members and members of the public who thought that we both belonged in Azkaban."

            Harry rubbed his blazing cheek against his shoulder. How did Snape find out about that? The Minister had promised Harry those conversations would remain private!

            Anyway, Snape would probably not say that Harry trusted them if he knew that Harry was huddled under his Invisibility Cloak four feet away from them right now, spying.

            "Really?" Malfoy let his mouth fall open, his eyes brighten. "I didn't know that."

            At least one person didn't, Harry thought in some irritation.

            "Yes." Snape linked his fingers together in front of him and frowned at them in what seemed to be intense thought. Harry didn't think it really was, though. Snape would have already decided on all the arguments he could use to convince Malfoy. He wouldn't have brought up Harry's name in the first place if he wasn't sure of winning. "He conversed with those who wanted to prosecute me for war crimes when they learned I was alive. He interfered with an attempt to create 'evidence' that you had been more involved in your father's crimes than you really were, five months after the trials. He spoke up for your mother more than once, in private meetings as well as public ones. That bespeaks a certain level of trust in our motivations."

            Fucker, Harry thought blankly. How did you figure that out? But Snape was a spy, so he reckoned that winkling hidden information out of Ministry sources probably came as second nature to him. And this was a world where he didn't have Dumbledore's protection anymore, so he had to defend himself.

            But something else Snape had said was bothering Harry, and after a bit of thinking, he figured it out. "Your father's crimes," Snape said. That seemed to indicate he didn't believe Lucius was innocent.

            Why was he helping Malfoy, then? How in the world did he think that stopping the sunrise would help?

            "All right," Malfoy whispered, his voice shaking. "If you think that he'll listen--if you think that he'll support us instead of running away from you the first chance he can--then I'm willing. I acknowledge that it would be rather comforting to have all that incredible magical power working for us, rather than turned against us."

            Harry blinked and shook his head again. Malfoy would have to lose some of the misconceptions before Harry could help. He wasn't that powerful. He had defeated Voldemort because he'd died, not because he'd lived and kicked his arse in some magical battle.

            And what's that bit about running away? I always stood up to Snape!

            "Yes," Snape said, his eyes half-closed and his voice rough with satisfaction. "Yes, I think I can make him listen." He reached out and put one of his hands over Malfoy's, squeezing down hard for a moment. "We will do this, Draco. On Beltane morning, we will stop the sun."

            "Yes," Malfoy whispered, and then hesitated. "What do you think Potter will say when he learns what we want to do? The reason? That could break him of any notion of support even if he trusts us."

            If you would tell me the bloody reason, then I could decide! Harry thought, straining forwards to see if they would mention it in the next moment.

            "We will see," Snape said, and stood with a fluid shrug of his shoulders. The glamours broke with a pop, and Harry resisted the temptation to pull back the Extendable Ear right away. They were more likely to see it if it moved fast. "In the meantime, go to your mother and tell her that we may have discovered a third. I will find Potter and speak with him about supporting us."

            Malfoy sighed and closed his eyes, letting his head droop a little. "Thank you, sir. I know I couldn't have done this without your help."

            Snape said nothing, but squeezed his shoulder. A moment later, Malfoy pulled his hood tightly over his head and left the pub. Snape took some seconds to adjust his glamour, dropped Galleons on the table with the warning shimmer of a charm around them to fend off anyone other than Aberforth who tried to touch them, and then followed him to the door. Harry was fairly sure that he would take off in the opposite direction, though.

            Well, shit. I reckon I'll get to find out what they're up to from the inside.

            Harry counted out two hundred before he stood and followed Snape and Malfoy to the door. He was already planning what he would say when Snape approached him as he absently dodged bodies.

            Should he tell them the whole truth? Or just let Snape explain it and ask the questions that they would expect of him?

            He'd been good at several things in Auror training: sneaking around, casting defensive spells, assessing a situation in a glance and deciding where his help was most needed. He liked to think that he'd built up those skills over time.

            He'd never been that good at figuring out when someone else was following his target, or when someone was following him.

            As hands closed on his shoulders and someone whispered a Stunner into his ear, Harry wished that he'd got better.

*

            He woke slowly. His mouth tasted of dust and grime, and he had to roll his tongue several times across his teeth before he could work up enough saliva to speak. When he tried to part his jaws, though, he discovered that he was gagged, and that the inside of the cloth tasted awful.

            He tried to open his eyes, only to find that they, too, were held shut with cloth, but pieces of cloth that felt smaller and secured with magic rather than rope, since he couldn't feel any bonds on his face. His eyes felt normal otherwise. The thought made him calm down a little. If they were holding him like this, maybe these captors didn't mean to hurt him that badly.

            Of course, that still left uncertain the thought of what they really wanted from him. Harry began to test his arms and the ropes he could feel curled around those, wondering if he was alone and could break free. He hadn't heard anyone speaking or shifting around so far.

            He had time enough to notice that he was on a bed and that these ropes were tied with skillful knots that said they hadn't just trusted to Incarcerous before someone stepped towards him and pressed a heavy hand down on his skull, holding him in place. Harry swallowed, feeling his heart begin to pound. The strength said that whoever was holding him wasn't human. Werewolf, perhaps? He tried to remember how close the full moon was, and couldn't.

            "He's awake."

            The voice had a sharp hiss to it, like someone breathing through a punctured lung. Harry was sure he'd never heard it before. He tried to turn his head against the grip, and it tightened enough to hurt. He braced his muscles and fought against the ropes for a minute, but that didn't help, either.

            "Awake and struggling." The hissing voice came towards him, and Harry felt the man bend down to snuffle his neck. He jerked away; the breath smelled like grave dirt, and the lips that touched his skin a moment later felt like worms, thick and rubbery and cool. That matched up with the strength to tell him who this was. Vampire.

            He might be able to manage enough wandless magic to fight the thing off, at least if his wand was nearby and he could get to it soon. Vampires were strong, but their weaknesses meant that one could use a few simple incantations against them, too. He started to speak one nonverbally.

            "None of that."

            This voice was human, and it startled Harry enough that he let go of the incantation. He'd heard it before. A wand touched his face, and he held still, thinking of his training and all the places he had learned a wand could sink into a human body, and the havoc it could cause there.

            This one, though, only moved back and forth with light taps like a pecking bird, and then the cloth fell from his eyelids.

            Harry forced them up and open, hard, blinking, and the face he had known would be there swam into view. He scowled and tried to say the name behind the gag, but it came out muffled as, "Hrrmph."

            "Yes, rather," said Unspeakable Jacob Rumber, sitting down in a chair that stood next to the bed. Harry flicked his eyes past him, studying the walls of the room, and saw nothing except blank grey stone. It could have been anywhere, including underground, and he doubted he would know it if he saw it from the outside. "Such fascinating allies you have, Potter."

            Harry turned back to Rumber and decided to test what the effects of his stare would be. Not much, it seemed. The Unspeakable sat there, perfectly calm and placid, his hands folded on his belly and an earnest expression on his face as he watched Harry. He had the smooth, unlined face of a man who didn't have much to worry him, although his grey hair and the short grey beard he sported proclaimed a wizard at least in his fifties. Harry had seen him around the Ministry all the years he worked there, a fixture of the Department of Mysteries, and still didn't know much more about him than he had when he started his training.

            "Tell me about your allies," Rumber said, in the gentle voice that had once encouraged Harry to trust him before several pieces of evidence from one of their cases vanished and he learned better.

            "What do you mean?" Harry looked to the side, trying not to make it obvious that he was doing so, and saw the vampire standing nearby. He was perfectly still, hands folded in front of him as if in imitation of Rumber. His eyes were scarlet, and burned. Harry shuddered away from memories of Voldemort and the vampire both, returning his attention to the Unspeakable. "My allies are the same as they've always been, my friends and the Weasleys and the other Aurors."

            Rumber sighed as though he was confronted with a child who refused to eat its vegetables. "We mean Snape and Malfoy, Auror Potter. You've been seen associating with them of late. At first, we simply believed that you were spying on them and would report their activities to the Ministry, but several days have passed and you never took the chance." He glanced at Harry, and without altering a line of his face was suddenly dangerous. "That's treason, considering what they're trying to do."

            Harry glared at him mulishly, hands still working back and forth in the ropes. He could feel the vampire looking at him, but it would never have occurred to him to simply give up, not when he knew that he might have a chance of breaking free. "If you know what they're trying to do, why do you care if I reported it or not?"

            "Because," Rumber said, "it is an indication of where your loyalties lie."

            Harry stared at him. "What?" he managed to ask at last. "What the fuck are you talking about? Of course I'm loyal to the Ministry. And Snape and Malfoy were cleared of all the charges brought against them!" This was starting to sound like the same bollocks he still heard from some of the Aurors, as though a Dark Mark on a person's arm tainted their soul forever. Harry's favorite tactic, confronted with that, was to touch his scar and ask if that meant he was always connected to Voldemort. Too bad he couldn't get his hands free to do that now.

            Rumber sighed again. He was starting to get Harry angry enough to risk another bit of wandless magic. But his next words scattered the incantation that was forming in Harry's thoughts. "You could not know that they did not intend harm. The spell they wish to do has failed in the past, and it has hurt other people in the past." His voice was acquiring more emphasis now, and Harry hoped that meant he was losing his temper, because, in turn, that meant he might make a mistake.

            "What do you mean?" Harry countered instantly. "I did some research on the spell, and it didn't say that it ever hurt anyone but those involved."

            Rumber shook his head. "You read the wrong books. This particular spell cannot be done without adverse effects on the people who might be nearby, as the three wizards involved reach desperately for the magic to sustain it. They will drain others. They will not be able to help it," he added simply, as if he thought that would convince Harry. "And we do not know what would happen with a successful performance of this spell, which has never occurred before. Time itself might stop. The world might burn up from its nearness to the sun."

            Harry snorted. "It sounds like you're reaching for ideas that will let you justify caging Snape and Malfoy."

            Rumber frowned at him, and the vampire hissed off to the side. Harry snapped his head around and stared at it. Another idea bloomed in his mind.

            "Or is that you're allies with the vampires, and you're afraid of what a prolonged sunrise would do to them?" he asked, turning back. "I mean, that's a legitimate concern." He hadn't thought the Ministry actually used vampires as allies, just made them register like they did with werewolves and provided them with blood, but it made sense that they would worry about any who did work for them. "Still not enough to make you kidnap me, though. You could explain, and then I could explain to Snape and Malfoy."

            Rumber smiled then. "You admit you were working with them? That is a more serious offense, by far, than simply knowing what they were doing but not reporting it."

            "No, you idiot," Harry said loudly, and ignored the way the vampire hissed. He hated the Unspeakables for this reason among others. They always twisted people's words around and made it sound like they were saying something else. Harry reckoned they couldn't help it, that it was what happened when you spent all day in the cellars of the Ministry and thought that the secrets you were guarding were more important than the people you were guarding from them. "I mean that they'd be more likely to take the word from someone they know has defended them in the past. Tell them directly, and they'll believe that you're lying."

            "Hardly the actions of innocent men."

            Harry twitched his hands in the ropes again, enough that Rumber looked at them.

"Neither is this, if you look at it one way. I'm only trying to describe what this might look like to them. And that's the entire reason they've kept it secret from the Ministry, I think: not because they want to commit treason, but because they know what it could look like. You ought to lay everything on the table. Be honest with them, and they'll be honest with you."

            Rumber gave another of those weary little sighs. "You know very little of the world, even for someone so experienced with war. That would not work. We have only your word that they are innocent."

            "Mine, and the Wizengamot's."

            Rumber shook his head, eyes shadowed. "It would not be the first time criminals have escaped justice."

            "Look," Harry said. "I know that you're not going to believe me no matter what I say. But you should believe that I'd want to preserve my own skin, and I've proven my loyalty to the Ministry over and over. Trust your experience with me. Why would I lie about this? I only just found out what Snape and Malfoy are doing. I think it's innocent. I volunteered to be your messenger to them. I'll explain about the vampires, and I think neither Snape nor Malfoy would want to destroy a whole species. Or risk destroying a whole species," he had to add, because he didn't see how Rumber could know that the vampires would be destroyed if no one had succeeded in performing that spell before. "It's simple. You don't have to kidnap me."

            Rumber turned to the vampire instead of answering. "What could you smell on him, Cruore?"

            The vampire gave another rattling hiss before it replied. "I could smell disease and death. The magic that he uses. The thrill of sneaking about instead of reporting what he felt and found. He smells like a criminal, Master."

            Master? Harry thought, and started to rethink the conclusions he'd come to. There was something else going on here than just the Department of Mysteries working with the vampires, if Cruore talked like that.

            "I suspected so," Rumber said sadly, and stood, moving forwards to the bed. He had his wand in his hand again.

            "What you are going to do?" Harry was afraid that his voice was climbing up into hysteria, but he defied anyone else to be in this position and not get hysterical. He swallowed and tried his best to speak calmly. It was for himself, though, not for Rumber, because he doubted that he would recover or be able to fight if he started having a meltdown. "What the fuck are you going to do to me? I told you, I'm loyal to the Ministry."

            "Your loyalty has always been in question," Rumber said. "You are simply too potent a force to be trusted without controls, which you have refused, and you spoke for the Death Eaters during their trials."

            "You think that you're as moral as all that, being master of a vampire?" Harry jerked his head at Cruore. He thought he saw the creature bare its fangs, but it didn't move, so he focused on Rumber.

            "I regret what I have to do," Rumber said. "But I do it for a higher ideal, in pursuit of a greater good--"

            Harry snorted. He was never able to take that phrase seriously after hearing it so many times in so many false contexts.

            Rumber paused as if Harry's snorting was a physical problem that he needed to let subside, and then continued. "I would have preferred some different means of settling this problem. But as it is, you are the only one who could be a plausible third to Snape and Malfoy. You are powerful, and you have defended them enough for them to trust you. I must stop them. And you."

            "Arsehole," Harry said, wriggling in his bonds again. The bloody ropes would not give, no matter what he did. "You could try speaking diplomatically? Asking? Trying to explain your point-of-view to me?" He kept a sharp eye on Rumber's wand, which was moving nearer to him as Rumber came nearer.

            "I've done that already," Rumber said. "If you had agreed with me, things might have been different. We could send in a spy instead of a slave. But as it is, this is the only thing to do." He pressed the wand to Harry's forehead and said, "Imperio."

            Harry felt a wash of cool relief pour over him. He opened his mouth to tell Rumber that that kind of shit didn't work on him, that he could resist the Imperius Curse even when he was in fourth year and that--

            But instead, his mind turned and poured smoothly into a black abyss, as if it had melted and followed the relief. Harry opened his mouth to cry out, to protest, and found himself gone.

            All that remained was the magic working through him, tensing some muscles and relaxing others, and the voice that whispered in the back of his head, telling him, calmly, in no uncertain terms, what to do.

*

            "Potter. This is an unexpected surprise."

            Harry looked at Snape and smiled. The expression felt as thin as paper on his face, and for a moment he wondered why he was smiling at Snape. But he knew the answer in an instant, the same way he knew the answer to everything now. He had to do this so that Snape would trust him and bring him into the circle of the spell. "Why? This is my house, and you're the one who showed up here."

            Snape folded his arms and looked down his long nose at Harry. He had always wanted to laugh at that nose, Harry thought dreamily, and never quite dared.

            Something in the back of his head screamed and pounded on cage bars. Harry wondered what that was all about. Perhaps it was related to the nightmares he'd been having for the past few days while he waited for Snape to pluck up his courage and approach him--or, more likely, for Malfoy to give up on the mad notion of involving his mother in the spell. He should go to a Mind-Healer when this was done. Or at least put the nightmares in a Pensieve. They could be too easily distracting.

            "I have a question to ask you," Snape said.

            Harry turned away and waved a hand. His fingers cleaved the air more delicately than normal, he thought. He suddenly seemed to have acquired a great more control over his body in the last few days. Or lost some--but the thought didn't form before he dashed it to pieces on the wall of things he wasn't supposed to think about. "Or help to beg. You'd never have come to me otherwise."

            "You know what Draco and I are doing."

            A direct reference. He hadn't expected that, not this early in the conversation, when Snape was as paranoid as a deer in hunting season. Harry turned around and focused on him, and Snape tilted his head. Harry could read the fragility in his posture. He wondered why, how, and then decided it didn't matter.

            "You saw me under the Cloak?"

            "Please try to keep your terms more precise," Snape murmured, offense bristling out of him like quills out of a hedgehog. "One cannot see another person under that Invisibility Cloak. But I did sense you, yes, and thought that your curiosity would prove our salvation, as it often has before."

            Harry laughed. It was a fast sound, and Snape frowned as he listened to it. Not good. Harry had to distract him. "I thought that you didn't buy in to that Savior bollocks."

            "One need hardly think of you as the Chosen One to acknowledge that you saved us from the Dark Lord," Snape said, arching an eyebrow.

            "Unless they're you," Harry said. That was good. He was easing Snape past the moment of his suspicions, into a gentler realm, where he would be more tempted to relax and trust him. "You still don't. So, what changed?"

            "The need that we have," Snape said, and put his fingers together, staring intently at Harry. "You know what the plan is. You overheard enough to know that. What do you think of it?"

            Harry shrugged with one shoulder. "I don't know what you want me to say, Snape. That you're mad to try to use magic like this that destroys everyone who does try to use it? That no purpose could possibly be important enough to try this? You know all that, and it hasn't stopped you from going along with him." He paused, and wondered if he could ask yet what Malfoy thought the spell would accomplish.

            Possibly not. Hold steady. Remember that you are to get him to trust you before you do anything else.

            The words were in an alien voice, but one wiser than the voices that Harry usually used with himself. Harry had to listen to that voice. He had to obey it. He knew what would happen if he didn't.

            Again there came the faint sensation of screaming in the back of his head. Harry shrugged. He would have to take Dreamless Sleep to get rid of some of the nightmares again, that was clear.

            "I care for Draco," Snape said, and Harry nearly jumped before he realized that Snape was the ultimate pragmatist, and he probably knew that speaking of his own emotions was the best way to manipulate a Gryffindor. "I am trying to keep him as safe as possible while allowing him the option to continue. And if that means that I must veto certain decisions--like involving his mother--while accepting the larger and more dangerous one, then I will."

            Harry studied Snape. He had the impression that he should have been feeling something different at that moment than calm, ruthless calculation about whether Snape would recognize manipulation. But he couldn't remember what the other thing he should be feeling was.

            "Then it seems that you have a problem," Harry said. "You might trust me enough to bring me in on this, but he never will."

            Snape let his lip curl and his eyes go distant. Harry wondered when he had begun to notice such things, to see the manipulation instead of letting it wash over him and responding to it.

            There was some other manipulation that he should be thinking about, he decided as the faint voice screamed again. But what was it? Had Snape done something to him during those meetings with Malfoy that Harry had forgotten? Had he used a Memory Charm on him? Harry knew that Snape would do far worse things in pursuit of his goals.

            "What makes you think that he has more reason to distrust you?" Snape whispered. "When I am the one with the history of hatred for your parents, when I am the one you did less to save during the war?'

            "Because you're still an adult," Harry said, repeating the words that the voice had told him to say when he got to this point, "even though you don't always act like it. Malfoy started hating me when we were kids. It's not the sort of thing that you get past without a lot of motivation. And he'll be certain that you can still find someone, somewhere else, within the month, who would do the same thing I would do with less trust on his part."

            "You have not listened to the terms of the spell," Snape said softly. "He need not trust you. He need only trust me. In the meantime, if you trust us both, that will be enough. That is the way the spell works." He was watching Harry with sharp eyes, and Harry wondered if he had done or said something that gave him away.

            Gave me away? But I want to help him.

            The words slammed into a wall inside of him, and for a moment Harry feared that he would be consumed by the storm of his swirling emotions. Emotions that he had no reason to feel, and didn't have time for while Snape was sitting beside him, prone to notice every tiny flicker in his face.

            "Oh," Harry said. "I did forget. But--is he going to want me to have anything to do with his father? I thought that was the reason he turned to his mother first, because he didn't want someone who might be hostile to Lucius involved."

            Snape relaxed minutely, unfolding his arms and shrugging. "I do not know," he said. "I have not yet proposed the solution to him. I thought it would be for nothing if I did and you did not agree."

            "Yeah, you wouldn't want to waste your breath," Harry muttered.Liar. You did tell him.

            Snape only smiled as if Harry's defiant attitude pleased him, which would be a first. "I also did not want to raise his hopes, only to have to dash them down," Snape said pleasantly. "You are the only wizard I can think of who might give us a chance of making the spell work. You are strong, you trust both of us, and you have the dogged determination to see the endeavors you are involved in succeed that can match Draco's determination to see his father free."

            "No, it can't," Harry said, "because I don't know what you want, or what you mean by freeing Lucius. I'm not going to break him out of Azkaban. He did all the things the Wizengamot accused him of."

            Snape snapped his head around and looked at him in wonder again. That was bad. Harry didn't remember why, but it was. He sat still and kept his face looking the exact same way it had, telling himself that Snape was unlikely to hear his heartbeat.

            "I did not expect to hear you talk like that," Snape murmured, "when you know how many of the accusations against the Death Eaters were false, a means of imprisoning them and nothing else."

            Someone hissed in alarm in the back of Harry's skull. He blinked and reached out to catch his balance, but then remembered that he had no balance to lose, that Snape would interpret the gesture as indicating something wrong, and that nothing was wrong. He managed to turn the gesture into a shrug. "There's a difference between people like Malfoy, who helped me during the war, and you, who were a hero, and Narcissa Malfoy, who did the best she could in limited circumstances. Lucius was a willing Death Eater for a long time. Excuse me for not wanting to release him when he should pay some price for his actions."

            Snape leaned forwards, his hands resting on his knees. "If you say such a thing to Draco, then yes, you may put any chance that he will accept you out of your mind."

            And that was unacceptable. Harry didn't remember quite why it was unacceptable, but it was. He sighed. "All right. I reckon I can argue that four years in Azkaban is enough of a price to pay. But that still doesn't tell me how the spell is supposed to help him."

            Snape continued studying him for a few minutes, as though he wondered whether Harry understood how serious this was. Then he relaxed and gave Harry a dark, amused glance. "Surely you have heard that fire purifies."

            Harry nodded. He'd learned that in Auror training, but he thought he'd always known it. "Except Fiendfyre."

            "Yes." Snape ran a hand thoughtfully down his leg. "And other extreme fire spells, of course. But they have variants that concern purification and ways to get rid of sins. Draco considered them for a time. Yet even he could not deny that his father's crimes were real, and the fire rituals that he discovered demanded either sins that were not large or repentance. We cannot be sure that Lucius would have that." His eyes flashed for a moment, and Harry saw the dangerous man he tried to go around and pretend that he wasn't during the daytime. "We cannot even be sure that he is sane enough to repent, not after four years in Azkaban."

            "Fine," Harry said. "Why is this spell different?"

            "We are calling on the most powerful fire in the natural world," Snape said, as if he savored just saying the words. "And light that a wizard does not create, so that our motives cannot come into it. Hold the sunrise in place for long enough--fifteen minutes, according to the books that I have found--and it will literally burn sins away. It will make it as if Lucius's crimes had never been committed."

            The snarl in the back of Harry's head was unexpected. He reached up and touched his temples before he thought better of it. As though it had been waiting for that, a headache pounced on him and held him down with sharp claws. He slumped in his chair, groaning.

            "Potter!"

            Snape was leaning forwards, his fingers hovering near Harry's ears, and he couldn't touch. If he did, it would be disastrous. It was the hardest thing Harry had done--harder than walking into the Forest to face Voldemort, which had been his standard of difficulty since the war--but he managed to sit up and smile into Snape's face, turning his concern back against him. Snape wouldn't want to admit that he'd expressed it, which was the best guarantee of silence Harry could think of.

            Snape stared at him, then took a step back, his hands dropping again, his face going unreadable.

            "I get headaches like that sometimes," Harry said. "Usually when I hear something impossible. You believe this will work? Spells can't change the past. Even when you use a Time-Turner, you have to work within the confines of what's already happened."

            "But this is a spell that affects time," Snape said. "Hold the sun still, and what do you think will happen to time?"

            Harry shrugged. "I also heard you mention that we need to do this for about fifteen minutes. If time stops, how are we going to keep track of those, or even have them pass so that they can affect the spell?"

            Snape smiled, showing his teeth. Perhaps it had been the way Harry said we. He had the hazy feeling that he didn't object to saying it, but that he would have objected to it under different circumstances.

            Of course, these circumstances were already pretty bloody unusual.

            "There are ways of doing that," Snape said softly. "We will set up a Tempus Charm in tandem with the sunrise spell, so that we can know when fifteen minutes have passed." He leaned forwards and focused his eyes on Harry's again. Harry wished he would stop. He had once wondered how he'd feel if Snape decided to treat him like his favorite student, and now he knew, and it wasn't pleasant.

            So that's how they're planning to do it, said a satisfied voice in his ear. Harry gritted his teeth to keep from crying out in surprise. Yes, he had to keep the source of these headaches and voices from Snape if he could. Then Snape might not think that Harry was strong enough to help with the spell. Harry knew that he was plenty strong enough, and that he had to.

            "This will be difficult," Snape said. "Complicated. I came to you because of your power, because of your trust, but also because I have seen you do the hardest thing that a wizard can, and come out alive."

            Harry felt his heart bound hard when he realized Snape was talking about walking into the Forest. He ducked his head and shrugged. This reaction felt more genuine than some he'd had during the conversation, but he didn't know why. It was nerves from talking with Snape, he reckoned. "That was partially coincidence. And I don't think that it means I'll be able to do lots of complicated magic at once."

            Snape reached out and caught his shoulder. Harry started. Snape had reached towards him, sure, but not actually touched him so far. He leaned forwards and met Snape's eyes before he thought better of it.

            He can use Legilimency!

            Harry didn't have any conscious choice about looking aside. It was just the way his eyes leaped.

            "Your modesty does not blind me to your virtues," Snape said. "Not now. Nor does your resemblance to your father. You can do this, you may be the only one who can, and I want you with us."



            There was no way past that statement but to agree, of course. Harry knew that it needed to happen. He knew it had to happen. He let his eyes rest on the floor and murmured his acceptance. He could feel Snape studying him, as though he knew that his acceptance was conditional.

            But conditional on what? Harry couldn't remember.

            And how was he ever going to fool Snape if he couldn't keep something like that at the forefront of his mind?

            But why should he want to fool Snape?

            The questions bounced off each other like balls running in some Muggle machine and rebounded, falling down a smooth hole into the center of Harry's being with tiny clicks. He shuddered and fought the temptation to bury his head in his hands. A fat lot of good that would do, and Snape was sure to suspect something when he saw it.

            Snape spoke for a few minutes after that, assuring Harry that he would tell Malfoy and get him to agree to this, and making plans for the time that Harry would join them. Harry barely listened. He was consumed with what was happening inside his head, and besides, he knew that part of him would listen and recall the information without effort when he needed it.

            Then Snape shut the door, and Harry was free to bury his head in his hands, since he knew that no one was watching him.

*

            No one cares. No one can see any difference in you, except that you are more polite and productive than usual. No one is going to come to your rescue.

            The voice was right. Harry knew it was. Because when he could wake up behind his eyes, which was only at night, and sort through his memories of the day, he knew that no one had seen anything wrong.

            He chatted with his friends as though everything was normal, laughing at Hermione's ink-stained fingers and telling Ron jokes about the cases they'd been forced to work separately on. He received a coded message from Snape that burnt itself the instant he finished reading it, and he sent one back with the same charms on it. He thought about the sunrise spell sometimes, but his mind turned the facts over with calm, clear, cold calculation.

            That part wasn't much like him, but on the other hand, as long as he couldn't speak his thoughts, no one had any reason to know about it.

            They don't know about it. You've never been able to share enough of yourself with them for them to realize that anything's wrong. Maybe this is what you deserve, for holding back from them. A thoughtful pause. Or perhaps even your friends see you as a hero before anything else, a symbol who is perfectly capable of behaving in any way that's good.

            Harry tried to flee from the voice into the depths of his mind, but it didn't matter. The voice was everywhere, echoing from around him, showing how well it could control him and telling him that it might be like that for the rest of his life.

            You don't know that, Harry finally snapped in desperation. If you get me arrested for my participation in this spell, then I'll go to Azkaban, and no one will care what I say or do. Then you'll be bored.

            The voice gave a sound that somehow combined a sigh and a chuckle. You can't actually think that will matter to me. Not when I'll have what I want. Snape and Malfoy stopped, and you loyal to the Ministry. A pause, and Harry felt a fluttering caress against his mind, as though someone was stroking the center of his brain. He flinched away from it, but that hardly changed things. Besides, the great Harry Potter would never go to Azkaban for stopping something illegal.

            Harry turned around and ran away again. Perhaps, if he could get far enough from the voice--Rumber's voice--then he could come up with some way to maintain his sanity, and the separation between his own desires and Rumber's, when he woke again.

            The laughter curled around him, soft and indulgent. I love it when you think things like that.

            Harry dived further, and hoped that at least the thought he was having then made sense and stayed private:

            How did Rumber manage to come up with an Imperius Curse that I would actually fall prey to?

*



            "I don't trust you."

            It was the first thing Malfoy said when Harry walked into the restaurant where they had agreed to meet, some fancy place that looked like a shop and smelled like a paradise. Harry didn't show that he was impressed, because he wasn't. Of course Malfoy would only agree to meet in surroundings like this, where they were more likely to be recognized. That suited his sense of what was due to him.

            Someone in the back of Harry's head said that Malfoy was less arrogant than that now, and Harry had good reasons to trust him compared to someone else. But both the voice and the "someone else" were too vague, and Harry had to remain focused on the meeting so that Snape and Malfoy, good body-readers both, wouldn't figure out what he was really doing. He hooked the leg of the chair with his foot, pulled it out, and sat down, folding his arms over the back.

            Malfoy tried to exchange a look of disgust with Snape--tried, because it wasn't working. Snape remained calm, his eyes fixed on Harry's face, an untouched glass of some shining wine near his fingers. Malfoy huffed and refocused on Harry, too, folding his own arms. Harry grinned. They didn't look so different, when they did that. Malfoy should glance into one of the mirrors he undoubtedly owned.

            For some reason, a spike of anger grew up through the center of his mind just then, arguing that he and Malfoy were different and anyone with half a brain could see it. Harry shook his head, and the feeling passed. He didn't want to snap at Malfoy or conciliate him too much, really. That last would only make them think that he was suspiciously eager to work with them.

            "As Snape tells me, that's not necessary for the spell," he replied, and then turned to address the waiter who'd come up to the side of him. Ordering the least expensive drink he could took up some time, since he mispronounced the French name. When he turned around, Malfoy's eyes were rolling back in his skull to contemplate the ceiling. Harry sighed. "I do trust you, but you make it hard sometimes."

            Snape and Malfoy exchanged an actual glance this time, and whatever Malfoy saw in Snape's eyes prompted him to swallow hard and push ahead with what he should say instead of what he'd wanted to say. "You realize how difficult the spell will be to perform?"

            Harry nodded. "I haven't seen the incantation yet, but Snape described it to me, and it does sound hard."

            "Very hard." Malfoy tapped his fingers on the table until Snape kicked him in the shin, and then settled for a serious frown. "I'll be honest, the main reason I want you with us is that you're powerful, and less likely to burn out in the middle of trying to hold the sun still."

            It was good that Malfoy was considering him for his power alone, rather than believing that Harry actually wanted to do the spell. Harry shouldn't feel kicked in the stomach. He nodded, letting nothing of what he felt show on his face. "Fine. You trust my power. We'll build from that."

            Malfoy blinked as if he hadn't expected Harry to say something so smart, and glanced once at Snape. Whatever Snape communicated with his slow, solemn blink, it made Malfoy relax and turn back. "Fine," he said. "Then I'll show you the incantation, and the positioning that we need for the spell."

            Harry blinked. "Positioning?" That was the first he had heard about that being important. Positioning was for sex-based magic most of the time, and he really hoped that Malfoy wasn't talking about that.

            Someone in his head snickered and agreed. Harry gripped his glass of wine, which the server had brought him with noiseless efficiency, and tried not to think about the sensation of ice melting into water and sliding through his fingers, which felt like it was happening all over his body right about then.

            "Yes." Snape reached into his sleeve and pulled out a roll of parchment that was tied with a silver ribbon, making Harry wonder where he had stolen it from. He couldn't see Snape caring about the look of things himself. Snape flattened the parchment out on the table, tapping it with his wand and casting some nonverbal incantation to make sure it stayed in place. That was one Harry would like to learn.

            He paused before he bent over it. There hadn't been any strange sensations or odd shifts in his head in the last minute, and instead of being relieved, he thought it was strange. But he shook his head and paid attention, because Snape was starting to give him an odd look, and Harry really didn't want to give the bastard an excuse to try Legilimency.

            Even though he did, at the same time. Harry thought it best to ignore the melting contents of his head for right now.

            The map was interesting. Someone had sketched in what looked like the slope of a hill, and then circles on top of that, so Harry felt as though he was looking at a map full of lakes. Three human figures, much more crudely-drawn, were positioned between the circles. Harry smirked, wondering if Snape had done the background and Malfoy the humans. He'd like that, on one level.

            "You are smiling, Mr. Potter," Snape said smoothly. "Could it be that you see what we do not, a way to do this and not get hurt doing it?"

            "Um," Harry said. He felt someone muttering at him and shifting things in the back of his head, and he had to wait until the contents of his brain adjusted. "Not really. I was thinking of something else." He reached out and touched a half-circle behind the hill before Snape could question him about that. "This is the sun coming up?"

            "Correct, Mr. Potter." Snape reached down and touched the same circle, so that his finger rested less than half an inch away from Harry's. Harry pulled his hand back, unable to resist. It would be bad if Snape touched him. He didn't know why, but it would. "It is only an approximation, of course. The incantation tells us that we may begin at sunrise, but it does not say that that must be the moment when the sun shows this much of itself above the horizon. Every attempt to perform this incantation has taken place under different--and deeply difficult--circumstances."

            Harry snorted. "Then why did you think that I would have anything to say about the positioning?"

            "Because we'll need to know which position you prefer." Malfoy's eyes glinted at him, as if he enjoyed the almost-innuendo of the sentence more than Harry did. "Guard, point, or center."

            "Explain to me what the difference is." Harry's head felt as if it were trying to split apart suddenly. He leaned back in his chair and took a few deep breaths so that he wouldn't vomit. He could feel Snape's eyes fastened on him, but keeping him ignorant of what was going on in general was less important than keeping him ignorant of what was specifically happening.

            Not that Harry himself knew what was specifically happening. Not that he wouldn't have been overjoyed to have a chance to find out.

            "The point is the one who manages the flow of power," Malfoy said, and his finger traced over to the stick figure who stood near one of the circles on the hill. "He holds it and braids it together and keeps it from falling too much on any one person. If that happens, that person would die. Imagine having the power to hold back the sun itself, foisted on you all in a second. It would wipe out your mind and your magical core, and you'd burn to death."

            Harry demanded, "And guard?"

            "The one who watches for danger, trouble, interference from outside the spell," Snape murmured. He tapped the stick-figure that stood furthest down the hill. "His awareness must be split. He cannot let the spell consume all his attention."

            "The center?" There was sweat beading at the corners of Harry's temples, but he was determined not to acknowledge it if they wouldn't.

            "Ah," Snape said softly. "Through him, the power flows."

            "I thought that was the point." Harry wanted to simply take his head off his shoulders at that moment, it hurt so bad. And there were voices screaming around him, distant, tattered things that sounded like the cries of crows and nevertheless almost overruled Snape's words. He had to concentrate hard to hear what was actually there.

            What's happening to me?

            "I misspoke if I gave you that impression." Once more, Snape's eyes were fixed on him. "The point is the one who handles the power, yes. The center is the one from whom the power comes." He looked at the third stick figure, standing halfway between the other two. "The source. The wellspring."

            Harry felt an intense calm settle over him like a fog, blanking out the headache and slowing the wild pounding of his heart. He knew what decision he had to make without thinking about it, which was a boon right now, considering that he didn't know if he could have thought. "I'll be the center, then."

            "Are you sure?" Snape had one eye on him and one eye on Malfoy. Harry wondered if he thought they would explode across the table and hurt each other now that something had been settled. He didn't want to. His headache was gone, and he was reveling in the bliss of that. "You could be the point. The one who controls the power, the one who makes sure that others are not hurt. We rather thought it would appeal to your Gryffindor instincts."

            Harry snorted. "I know almost nothing about this spell. You still haven't given me the incantation. I think I'd rather be the river that flows, and leave turning the waterwheel up to you."

            That got him a longer and still more thoughtful stare from Snape, but he didn't say anything, so Harry felt it could pass him by for the moment. Besides, Malfoy and Snape started arguing about who was going to be guard and who point. It fell out as Harry had thought it would, with Snape the guard to watch for danger and Malfoy the one who would handle all the power. It seemed passion mattered in the decision, too, because Malfoy was the one most invested in freeing his father and therefore the one most determined to attend to the tricky business of keeping all those threads of magic in motion.

            If passion mattered, though, why had they left the free choice of his positioning up to him? Harry didn't understand. He would have thought it was necessary for him to choose what he did, but they couldn't have known he would. What if he had said that he wanted to be point?

            It doesn't matter, said the one, snarling voice in the back of his head. What matters is that you can feed them tainted power, and they'll never know where it's coming from. Count your blessings.

            The headache had descended again by the time Harry took his leave of Snape and Malfoy, and he let a bit of the discomfort show in his face and voice when he mentioned needing to get away. Malfoy waved him off, already bent over the parchment and making new additions to the figures there with a quill. Snape was the one who watched Harry leave, his black eyes glittering with malevolent intelligence.

            Again, Harry barely remembered to look away in time so that Snape couldn't read his mind. The snarling voice berated him for that as he stumbled down the steps to the Apparition point, but Harry was already feeling so bad that he didn't care.

*

            What had Rumber used on him?

            Harry circled through his own mind while his body slept, trying to find the loose ends of the spell, trying to find places he could rip holes in it and break the web of control and pain that kept him from rising to smash the Imperius Curse. He tried to remember how it had felt when he beat the Imperius Curse in his fourth year. Perhaps Voldemort just wasn't as strong as Rumber, or the fake Moody wasn't--

            And then Harry paused in disgust, and shook his head. Rumber would have been the threat to the wizarding world, not Voldemort, if he had been that strong. No, there was something else going on here, something that Harry didn't see or know about yet.

            You can circle about and pretend that you're getting one over on me, if it really makes you feel better.

            Harry gritted his teeth and turned his head away, at least as much as he could when he was a mental projection of his body and the other was a voice, Rumber's voice, curling around him like barbed wire. He began to prowl the corners of his consciousness again without responding. There would be a loose coil here, a corner that wasn't guarded, some place that he could slip through.

            I can feel your every thought. If you did find a hole in my defenses, then I would know of it immediately, and how long do you think that you could maintain hope when I plugged the hole? Or perhaps I would leave it open, so you would stay preoccupied with that and leave me alone to do more important tasks.

            Harry snarled and flung himself at the power that ran through his mind again. Once more, it did no good. Rumber was as bodiless here as Harry himself was, but his presence was made of magic and pure strength. Harry's will was bent by the Imperius Curse, and he had no advantage at pushing someone out of his mind, the way he had when Snape was using Legilimency on him in Hogwarts, because he was detached from his body; it didn't feel as though it belonged to him anymore.

            That's because it doesn't.

            Harry cried out in challenge and tried again to hurt Rumber, but Rumber melted away and left him stumbling in darkness. He laughed from above him, Harry closed his eyes and tried to find or feel the bastard with meditation, and once again nothing happened. He sank down in exhaustion on a floor that didn't exist and fought his despair. Rumber would win if he gave in to that.

            You aren't going to succeed. Harry felt as though Rumber had patted him on the head. Now go away and occupy yourself with something else, while I attend to the important matters that require a body and a working brain.

            Even when he was gone, it took moment after sickening moment before Harry found the strength to rise to his feet.

*

            "How do you know that we'll keep from being disturbed while we prepare the spell?"

            Malfoy flicked a glance towards Harry, then looked away again with a sneer. "We're going to be doing this on Malfoy property, of course. The wards won't let anyone in who doesn't have a bloody right to be there, or our permission."

            That was bad, for some reason, but Harry didn't know why. He frowned as he looked again at the parchment Malfoy had given him, the one with his very long part of the incantation that he would need to recite as center. "Do we have to have your father physically present there? So the spell can burn away his guilt, I mean?"

            "We shouldn't have to," Malfoy said shortly, and paced towards the other end of the room. Harry made a face at him. He knew that Snape had left them together in the hope that they would get along and that Malfoy would start trusting Harry more. Harry fully intended to tell Snape when he came back what a bloody awful idea that had been.

            They were in a large room somewhere in Malfoy Manor. Harry hadn't wanted to look too closely when they brought him in. He had his memories from the war, and that was bad enough. But this room had large windows on one wall and a large fireplace on the other, which meant that Harry could stay warm and catch glimpses of the grounds every now and then, including a small hill that matched the one Snape and Malfoy had drawn on the parchment.

            He knew why the first thing was good, but why was the second thing? So they had shown him the parchment, and it had been crudely-drawn. That didn't mean he had to know what the real thing looked like. For all he knew, Snape and Malfoy could be paranoid enough to train him on one site and then switch him to another at the end, when they were ready to launch the spell.

            That must not happen.

            Harry shivered. That had been one of those thoughts that didn't come to him in his own voice, and he didn't know what to do when that happened. So far, he had ignored the thoughts for the most part and worked on what was in front of him. That seemed to please the other presence in his mind, who or whatever it was.

            There was something wrong with that solution, too. Harry vaguely thought that he should rage and spit and go to a Mind-Healer, but it never sounded like a good idea. He shrugged and went on studying the incantation. Snape had drawn small dashes and marks above the words to indicate where his voice should fall in the pronunciation.

            "Potter."

            Harry looked up with a blink. Malfoy had roamed back over to stand in front of him, his hands jammed deep in his robe pockets. His face was so pale that Harry wondered if he ought to go call someone, at least a house-elf. But Malfoy just shook his head and put his hand on Harry's shoulder when he started to rise from his seat.

            "Snape's given me all the excuses," Malfoy said. "All the pretty words. But I want to know. Why did you really agree to help us? Why did you decide that you trusted us and that we were worth helping in the first place?"

            Harry felt a rushing sensation in his head. For some reason, he had to brace himself with one hand on the table in front of him before he answered. "Because you got a bad deal in the war. Snape did the best he could to redeem himself, and he hadn't been loyal to Voldemort for a long time anyway."

            "But that didn't apply to me." Malfoy folded his arms as if he was cold and looked away. "For all you knew, I could be a loyal servant of the Dark Lord." His voice still sank when he spoke the name.

            Harry impulsively reached out and put his hand on Malfoy's shoulder. Malfoy's head whipped around to stare at him, and Harry wondered if he would reject the touch. But instead, he only stood there and then gave a slight nod, as if he had found that he should accept it for his own reasons.

            "You were more innocent, still," Harry told him quietly. "It was all too obvious, the times that I saw you during sixth year and seventh, that you didn't know what you had really sworn loyalty to. You were fighting for your family, and that's something I could understand. My memory of my parents' murder and the need to get revenge for it was behind a lot of what I did--behind a lot more than people ever knew," he added wryly, thinking of the way that newspaper editorials after the war had praised him for having compassion and love even for his enemies, and fighting the war for those reasons.

            Something in his head shrieked and rebounded, making Harry wince a bit. It felt as though someone was slamming a ball off the insides of his skull, not the best sensation he'd ever experienced. He took a step away from Malfoy and touched his temple. It felt a bit better when he had his hand off the git, but he still didn't know what had made him feel it in the first place.

            "I never knew that."

            Harry blinked and looked up. It took a few seconds to realize that Malfoy was referring to the fact that he hadn't known Harry felt that way, rather than his never having known about Harry's headaches. Harry forced his lips into a smile and shook his head a bit. "It's true. I saw the similarities between us, and it was impossible for me to ever ignore them again."

            Once again, his head throbbed, But the clear light in Malfoy's eyes and the way he examined Harry seemed to cut through the pain. Harry waited, glad he didn't have to move fast or far at the moment. He was sure he'd fall over.

            "I would have thought," Malfoy said at last, the emphasis in his voice falling in odd places, "that you'd do anything rather than admit that."

            "Admit to similarities?" Harry frowned and rubbed the back of his head. "But why? If they were there, if I really saw them, then I wouldn't be able to deny them."

            A wave of nausea rolled through him, but Harry had felt that before, especially during his first Auror case when he saw eviscerated and pickled bodies, and he held it back expertly, watching Malfoy struggle with words. He should have tried this years ago, he thought with some glee. Malfoy didn't know how to cope with people being nice to him, apparently, unless they wanted something from him.

            "It's just," Malfoy said, "that I would have thought you'd see the similarities and turn away from them. Or never see them at all. Because it has to hurt to know that I have some things in common with you, doesn't it?" His eyes were fastened intently on Harry's face, and his hands clenched down near his sides as if he would prefer wrestling Harry to discussing this with him.

            "Oh," Harry said. "It hurt at first. But I'm used to it by now." Although not to this, he admitted, as yet another wave of nausea swamped him.

            "But how did you see them in the first place?" Malfoy was stepping towards him, eyes huge, his hand out as though he was demanding an answer that Harry wasn't sure he had to give him. "That's what I want to know. Yes, all right, you could have seen that I was like you when you were more mature and had some emotional distance from the war, but you didn't. You did it then. I want to know why."

            Harry swallowed and tried to think about that. It was difficult with the pain and the sickness hitting him alternately, like someone swinging two baseball bats, but he went back to the time when he'd watched Malfoy standing in the courtroom, his head bowed and his arms folded in front of him. And before that, when he had handed his wand back to him in the Great Hall and Malfoy had shaken his head before looking up to catch his eyes. And when Harry had seen him weeping in that bathroom during sixth year, crumbling under the weight of a task that was too large for him.

            "I think it was the way I saw you almost break," Harry said slowly. "I wanted to do that, but I couldn't, because so many people were depending on me. I could be really selfish, sometimes, thinking I was the only one in the war with Voldemort who felt any pain."

            Malfoy snorted, as if to say that was an understatement. Harry glared at him, and continued. "There you were, breaking down, but still determined to keep going. Then I knew other people were paying the price, but that they could be courageous, too. I wasn't alone."

            "So it was based on the way that you felt about yourself, not the way you felt about me," Malfoy said, sounding almost relieved.

            Harry shrugged. "At first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what we had in common, not just the ways you were like me. Both fighting for family, or the memory of family. Both not choosing the world we lived in. Both caught up in a war that we didn't make. Both wishing for something different. Both going on because the alternative would have been so much worse."

            Malfoy stared at him, eyes huge. Harry inclined his head and shrugged a bit again. "Anyway. That's what I was thinking about."

            The pain and the nausea had both retreated, he noticed now, although he didn't know why. He felt better, even able to smile at Malfoy. Malfoy flinched away as though the smile had been a blow and turned back to his parchment.

            "We have to make sure that we choose the right positions for this spell," he said hoarsely. "I mean, physically. The light has to reflect at the right angles, and the power has to imitate the way the sun will come up at that particular point in space and time."

            But he spoke less harshly than he had before, and Harry knew that something had changed between them. He smiled at Malfoy and returned to his own work of memorizing the incantation.

            Malfoy sneaked little glances at him for the rest of the afternoon, until Snape came back, when he consumed Malfoy's attention. But Harry didn't resent that. Malfoy had known Snape a lot longer, after all, and trusted him considerably more.

            Those glances were the beginning of trust in him. Harry knew they were.

*

            That night, it was worse than it had ever been. Harry rolled over with his claws bared, and the pain hit him from every direction at once, hammering him down, pulping him until he lay on the floor of his mind and moaned, bleeding and broken and wishing that Ron and Hermione could see what it was really like.

            You are not to do that! You are to convince them that they can trust you, and then betray them when the moment comes!

            Harry lifted his head and took in a dazed gasp of pain. For a moment, he was almost grateful to the Dursleys, to Voldemort. They had taught him a lot about agony and putting up with it. This hurt more than a lot of things they'd ever done to him, but not as much as Cruciatus or the first realization that the Dursleys would never love him no matter what chores he did.

            "What are you talking about?" he asked the atmosphere around him. "I was making Malfoy trust me. He was a lot nicer to me after that, and he won't be expecting a betrayal from someone he trusts."

            It was a stupid, foolish question, one that would probably only get him beaten up more, but Harry needed to know why, and so he asked. Something told him it was important.

            The air around him darkened and grew hard to breathe. Harry fisted his hands by his sides and didn't choke because he was willing himself not to. Rumber couldn't kill him, he reminded himself. He needed Harry alive so that he could use Harry's body to do the dirty work.

            You must get them to trust you and remember what you are really doing, was the only answer that Rumber would whisper to him after long hours of pressure.

            Harry shook his head. That didn't make sense. But Rumber turned his back and flickered away, and Harry was left to the enjoyment of the small part of his mind that was still his, trying to work out what he had done that annoyed Rumber so much.

            He thought of the pain that Rumber had inflicted on him during his waking hours, the pain that he couldn't consciously remember when awake. It had stopped when he spoke to Malfoy, and he had been himself again for a few minutes.

            Why had it stopped? Why had the Imperius Curse stopped controlling every motion he made then? Was it something to do with the kind of Imperius Curse Rumber had used, the kind that had affected Harry even though none of them should so far as he knew?

            And Rumber's anger that Harry was getting Malfoy to trust him, which he needed for the betrayal anyway, made no sense. Unless…

            Harry sat up, and smiled. He thought the smile probably looked rather bloodthirsty outside his head, but he would take bloodthirsty over bloody right now, anyway.

            Unless the Imperius Curse was linked to his emotions somehow, and depended on the negative emotions that Rumber had thought he would have towards Snape and Malfoy, even after figuring out that Harry had no intention of turning them into the Ministry.

            It all made sense. Rumber literally couldn't imagine anyone else liking or trusting former Death Eaters enough to help them. He went mad at the thought of Harry trying, calling him a traitor and putting him under one of the Unforgivables rather than let him do it. And even after he had been the one to violate Harry's mind, he still seemed to think that Harry should be angry with Snape and Malfoy rather than with him.

            Harry stood a chance of beating Rumber if he could summon enough compassion, enough trust, enough positive emotions for Snape and Malfoy, and use that to snap the string of the Imperius Curse that tied him.

            He flickered away into the darkness, ignoring the threat of pain that still followed him, to try and find a way to do that. The reprieve from the curse and the moments of "consciousness" that came in his sleep wouldn't last forever.

*

            "I do not think that you are a good choice."

            Narcissa Malfoy gave Harry a freezing stare and crossed her legs the other way, turning her head away as if that settled matters and meant Harry couldn't participate in the sunrise spell. Harry gave her a patient smile. He knew that she had helped him in the Forbidden Forest, but that didn't mean he had to like her.

            His head pounded sickeningly for a second, as if the headache didn't know if it was coming or going. Malfoy, seated next to his mother in an overstuffed chair, looked as though he didn't know what to do. Snape was leaning back in his own seat, his fingertips together, and seemed to have no intention of interfering.

            "I'm sorry, Mrs. Malfoy," Harry said. "But I fulfill all the conditions of the spell. And both Severus and Draco have said that I'm the only one who has enough magic to do it." He could feel them gaping at him for using their first names, but he didn't care. It was all part of the plan. "Are you willing to let your husband rot in Azkaban and continue to suffer from guilt because of your distrust of me?'

            Narcissa hunched her shoulders and slid her clasped hands out of sight. Then she shook her head, but Harry didn't think it was an answer to his question, and he was proven right when she replied, "You are not the one I would have chosen for this, and my opinion must be important, too."

            "Mother."

            That was Malfoy, rising to his feet and taking a step over to kneel at his mother's. Harry felt his cheeks warm. For some reason, he had the feeling that he shouldn't be seeing this. He started to turn his head away, but then he would meet Snape's gaze, which was no better. He stayed where he was.

            Malfoy took his mother's hands between his. His eyes were bright and warm. "Please," he whispered. "Please, just think about what it means that he trusts me. He trusts me, and he trusts Severus. And he's agreed to help free Father despite all the things that Father did to him and his during the war."

            "Your father did nothing lasting or permanent to him," Narcissa said. Harry could feel her eyes on him even though he wasn't meeting them. "He was only opposing him as the rest of the Dark Lord's followers did, and he was threatening the Weasley girl before he threatened Potter."

            You see! snarled a voice in the back of Harry's head then, a voice that he didn't remember inviting inside. You see how evil he is. Why would you participate in the sunrise spell to burn free the guilt from such a man as that, or feel sorry for his son?

            Harry shook his head to clear the cobwebs that wanted to take over from his mind, irritated beyond belief. He didn't know why he should be plagued by private doubts when he had already committed to helping Snape and Malfoy, but then again, a lot about the actions of his conscious and subconscious didn't make sense lately.

            Narcissa glared at him as if she assumed that the headshake had something to do with her. Gently, Malfoy pressed his palms flat on her knees and drew her attention back to him.

            "Mother," he whispered. "Please. I don't need your permission to make Potter part of this spell, but I want it."

            Narcissa's burning cold eyes were focused on her son again, and while Harry winced for Malfoy's sake--and that made what felt like a third intruder in the back of his head growl--he was glad that she didn't consider him worth the force of her stare any longer. "You need my permission to use the Manor's grounds," she said. "To stand there and launch your spell in the right direction, the one that you have planned on."

            "Not even that," Malfoy said with a tilt of his head, although Harry thought he sounded regretful. "You're a Black by blood, Mother, not a Malfoy. And a Malfoy's permission is the only one we need to use the grounds for a spell like this, no matter how powerful."

            Narcissa leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. Malfoy lifted her hands again and smoothed them back and forth, his gaze never leaving her face. Harry wondered if he would have that much patience for someone who was opposing him for reasons that sounded frankly irrational.

            And then he thought about the things Narcissa Malfoy had lost, and how long her husband had been in prison, and how unlikely it was that he would ever be free again without this, and winced. Yeah, maybe he would.

            "Very well," Narcissa ground out at last. "But you shall do this without me, Draco, without my watching and my participation." She put aside his hands and stood, walking from the room with no more than a stiff little nod back at Snape. But then, she didn't trust him either, Harry remembered.

            "I expected that," Snape said.

            "Did you?" Malfoy sounded defeated as he climbed to his feet. "I hoped that she would understand. Oh, I knew it wasn't very likely," he added, as though he wanted to do something to forestall the expression of contempt Harry was sure was on Snape's face. "But I hoped for it."

            "Your mother has grown accustomed to loss," Snape said. "It is possible, when facing one you had thought could not be reversed, to be far more terrified by change than the grief you have learned to live with."

            Harry glanced at him in time to see his eyes focus on his hands, as if the answer to his question, to what loss he had feared to change, was engraved there. He wondered if Snape was thinking of his mother, or perhaps of the way that he had barely managed to avoid death at Nagini's fangs. Had he expected to die for so long that it was hard for him to live? How long had it taken him to get adjusted to life the way everyone around him expected him to live it?

            No!

            The blow struck Harry out of nowhere, in what felt like the back of the skull. He grunted, and knew that Snape and Malfoy were staring at him and that that was a bad thing, but he hadn't been able to hold back the sound. It was a swift and unexpected strike, and he knew it had come from the inside, not from any wards in the room or the back of the chair, which made it all the worse and harder to deal with.

            "Potter?" Snape was on his feet, wending his way across the room as delicately as though he was picking his footing through a dozen venomous snakes. "Are you well?"

            "That didn't sound as if he was well," Malfoy said. For someone who was trying to trust him, Harry thought wryly as he bent down and put his head between his knees, Malfoy was quick to suspect every possible sound and motion that Harry made as opposition to his plan.

            "I've had frequent headaches lately," Harry said. "I was on Dreamless Sleep for a time, and had to come off it before I got addicted. The headaches are probably a result of that."

            He knew the words for the lie they were as he spoke them, but he also knew that he had to lie. It was important. He had to trust Snape and Malfoy if the sunrise spell was going to work, but this was--this was something else. Something aside. Something that they didn't need to worry about, the same way that Harry didn't need to worry about Malfoy's relationship with his mother.

            "Hmm." Snape was beside him an instant later, making Harry wonder if he'd briefly blacked out and lost track of where the man was. Harry held back a groan as Snape's fingers fluttered around his skull, pressing here and there on the sides. "It doesn't feel as though you have the swelling behind the ears that is often a sign of addiction, or recovery from addiction."

            Harry shrugged and moved backwards in the chair, so that Snape had to move his hands or risk having them crushed behind Harry's head. "I didn't say that I was addicted. I think I managed to reach the edge of addiction and then back away." He smiled, but he didn't think the smile was convincing, at least not from the way Snape was staring at him, so he averted his eyes and added, "Hermione was fussing at me so much that I quit to oblige her more than anything else."

            Snape nodded a minute later, and seemed prepared to let the subject drop. Since Malfoy immediately started talking about the spell again and the places they would need to stand, Harry was glad. This was information he needed to have on hand, assuming that he was still going to betray them.

            Betray them? What am I thinking?

            Another burst of pain through his head scattered his thoughts like snowflakes and destroyed his consistency of mind. Harry listened to Malfoy for the next little while and tried not to think about anything.

            Snape studied him, but not an enormous amount, Harry thought. And he believed that he would have noticed the pain of someone pushing into his mind with Legilimency, even as messed-up as he was right now.

*

            Harry grasped one loose, hanging thread of compassion and pulled.

            The screech that filled his mind nearly made him drop it, but he maintained his hold, and then started floating backwards so that Rumber would have to come after him. Once again, this would have been so much easier if he had been able to plan consciously when he was awake instead of asleep. But he had started this plan the moment he came to life in his dreaming mind, so Rumber didn't have much time to read his thoughts and see what was coming next.

            The thoughts around him flashed and churned. Rumber was coming for him; Harry could feel the echoes of pain that hadn't reached him yet. This time, he thought, Rumber would crush him rather than risk him breaking the Imperius Curse's hold, even if that meant Harry would be a drooling idiot afterwards instead of someone who could plausibly have betrayed Snape and Malfoy because he was "loyal."

            Harry darted down, trailing the thread behind him. He pulled more and more, and the Imperius began to break apart like a giant spiderweb. Rumber snarled and stopped to repair it, throwing out strings of sticky binding that Harry could feel, although he couldn't identify them from this distance.

            He told himself to remember the snarl. Perhaps that would enable him to know what the hell was going on when he was awake again, instead of living in a haze of perpetual confusion.

            I want to live. I want to make sure that Snape and Malfoy get to do what they're trying to do. I don't want to betray them.

            Harry bared his teeth in a snarl of his own. He could remember being skeptical of the sunrise spell and the motivation behind it so short a time ago; he wondered if his desire to be part of the moment when Lucius became free was more because he wanted to spite Rumber than anything else.

            Well, there are worse motives in the world.

            Once again, he dived into the depths of his mind like a fish into the ocean, pulling the Imperius Curse with him and thinking as hard as he could about the memories that Snape had shown him when he thought he was dying, about the way Malfoy's eyes had flickered away from his face and then back to it when the Snatchers brought him to Malfoy Manor, about the clutch of Malfoy's arms around his waist as they soared on his broom above the roaring Fiendfyre. Those were his secret weapons against Rumber, the sources of his compassion and trust in Snape and Malfoy. They were the answer to the Imperius Curse, if Rumber had really managed to tap into a corner of his mind that still hated Death Eaters and Slytherins and put him under control that way.

            But Harry didn't know for certain that that was what he'd done. He only had his guess for company.

            That's all I have for company. I'm alone here, and no one else can help me, because everyone else thinks I'm fine.

            For a moment, he thought about Snape, about whether he had doubted Harry's story of the Dreamless Sleep, and whether that might mean he would doubt other things and look harder into Harry's headaches--

            And then Rumber struck him.

            Harry went down, spinning end over end, heading further and further into the dark areas of his mind where there was no conscious thought at all, no thought, no realization, no memory, nothing but sleep that sometimes produced intuitions and wild guesses. Rumber snarled in fury behind him.

            I do not need you after all, not if you are less than loyal to the Ministry. I will allow you to be arrested when the Aurors interrupt the spell, or I will write you off as a casualty. What other help can you be to us, if you are not the hero that you were born to be?

            And after that, there was darkness.

*

            "Are your friends getting suspicious, Potter?"

            Harry shrugged as he ducked into the seat at the table that Snape and Malfoy seemed to have saved for him. They were meeting in the Leaky Cauldron again, and Harry didn't see why, when Malfoy Manor would have been both more private and safer. But it was their choice. He only did what he was told.

            In more than one sense.

            Harry paused for a moment. He'd thought he'd got over his resentment towards the orders he had to take because he was an Auror. That was an emotion only a child would experience, his instructors had been quick to tell him, which meant he had to listen to them and do what he was told if he wanted to be an Auror. Harry had ground his teeth, and then buckled down and worked. He'd contented himself with thinking sarcastic responses at the people who gave orders that really didn't fit the situation or that endangered someone.

            But he hadn't had an outburst like this in a while. He wondered what it meant.

            "They're not more suspicious than normal," he said, when he saw Malfoy staring at him and realized that he had never answered the git's question. "They always want to know where I am and where I'm going. Of course I haven't told them what we're really doing. It would take ages to convince Ron that it was a good idea, even if it could be done, and of course his opinion doesn't much matter here."

            "Do they spy on you?" That was Snape, sipping from the cup of tea in front of him with a resigned expression, as though to say that he knew there was never good tea in the Cauldron and he wondered why he bothered ordering.

            A light jab of pain in the side of his head, and the hiss to worry about what they do, not what they're like, distracted Harry from the response he meant to give for a moment. But then he shook his head and reoriented on the conversation playing around him. "Not really. They're mostly concerned because of all those kidnapping attempts right after the war."

            "Kidnapping attempts," Snape said flatly, and set his teacup down in the middle of the table rather than bringing it to his mouth.

            "They've been resolved now," Harry reassured him. Snape might think that someone would try to interrupt their planning, and Harry wanted to show him that they wouldn't. Not like that, at least. He couldn't speak to all the other sorts of interruptions that there might be. "It was former Death Eaters, and the ones who thought they wanted to be. None of them are free or alive now."

            Snape continued to stare at him. "I did not know about them," he said, when Harry glared at him.

            Harry rolled his eyes. "And, of course, we all know that that which you do not know about can't possibly exist."

            "I never said that they did not exist," Snape said quietly. "I wondered if their existence might explain some of the things about you that have puzzled me."

            Harry opened his mouth to continue a portion of the conversation that was suddenly more interesting than it had been in a long time, but Malfoy interrupted with an open yawn. "This doesn't get us further into the spell. Potter, let's hear you pronounce the incantation and whether you're finally putting your stresses in the right places."

            Harry nodded and turned to face him. Something in the back of his head reminded him that he really needed to get this right the first time. Malfoy couldn't yet know that he was planning to change the spell, to get certain things wrong.

            What things? Why?

            The questions swished through his fingers like a greased Snitch and vanished. Harry began to recite the spell, and Malfoy listened all the way through, drumming the end of his quill against the table.

            "That'll do," he said grudgingly when he finished. "But we have to have a demonstration of the way that you can call and control power. Remember that you'll need to be reciting the incantation at the same time."

            "Here? In the middle of the Leaky?" Harry glanced around just to make sure that their surroundings hadn't changed in the last twenty minutes. No, they hadn't. He frowned at Malfoy. "You're crazy." Uneasiness stirred in the back of his mind, so near to something he wanted to remember that he closed his eyes so that he could concentrate for a moment.

            "Yes," Snape said, cutting across the response that Malfoy had started to give. Harry thought he heard Malfoy growl in frustration as he went silent, but he wasn't sure, and in any case, it wasn't worth making a big deal out of. He stared at Snape instead. Snape leaned back and studied the ceiling above them. Then he nodded and pointed up. Out of habit, Harry let his eyes follow the pointing finger, scolding himself all the while--Snape could fire off a spell while Harry wasn't looking that could cook his heart or roast his skin with him inside it--

            But you trust him--

            No, I don't--

            The thoughts disintegrated into the hum that seemed to fill his head so often lately, and then Harry saw where Snape was pointing. A nail stuck out of one of the rafters, large enough that it might once have held a picture. Harry blinked and turned to glance back at Snape. "What about it?" He wondered if people were watching and whether someone would stop them before he could do what he needed to do. Which must be something important; Snape would have used a Summoning Charm himself if he merely wanted to call the nail to hand.

            "I want you to melt the nail to slag," Snape said. "Without touching the rafter around it."

            Harry stared at him, then shook his head. "That won't prove anything to you," he said. "That requires finesse and pinpoint control. When I call the magic for the spell, it'll be a big--a big slagging flood of stuff. This won't prove anything."

            "I want to see you do it." Snape folded his arms, and his eyes glinted at Harry with something dark behind them. Harry would have been frightened, but he had seen that darkness many times at Hogwarts, and it had never managed to scare him away from a goal yet. "Unless, of course," Snape added, so delicately that Harry could read everything into the pause between his words, "you are unable."

No. Harry had to prove himself to them. He had to make sure that they didn't grasp at any excuse to leave him behind, the way that Malfoy sometimes seemed as if he would even at this late date, with Beltane less than a week away.

            He stood up and cast a minor ward so that other people who were sitting around them wouldn't see his wand drawn and immediately panic. It made the wand look like a quill or a shadow or whatever other innocuous explanation the spell could find in someone's mind. He noticed that Snape's eyes narrowed when he used it, but then, Snape's eyes narrowed about almost everything, and Harry didn't intend to jump whenever they did.

            He pointed his wand straight at the nail and imagined it melting, the rivulets of steel spreading out and all over everything. It was an intense picture, and he could feel the magic building behind his wand and his skin, waiting to be unleashed.

            Then he changed the picture, concentrating on the rafters around the nail remaining whole and unburnt. It was a struggle; both the picture he had already thought up and his knowledge of what fire did to wood fought against it. But he mastered himself with a slight bob of his head and snarled, "Incendio."

            He thought he saw Malfoy open his mouth from the corner of his eye, probably to say that no spell that weak stood a chance of slagging the nail in the way that Snape had requested. Harry ignored him, and kept his attention firmly on the nail. It existed at the moment. It would cease to exist, or at least in the same form.

            The tip of his wand glowed red, so intense that Harry had to avert his eyes for the moment. Then a thin, precise beam of fire rose from the redness and touched the nail, cutting in a circle that Harry hadn't intended. He thought the wand was moving without his consent for a moment, but when he looked at his hand, it was holding the wand in a steady grip he'd never managed before. There was always a bit of tremor or shake in his hand, or, as the Auror instructors had decided to call it because they didn't want to give it a humiliating nickname, "natural restlessness."

            The fire did as Snape had requested. It melted the nail, but the flame faded as it played over the beams, never touching them. Harry sat back down in his seat again, gaping upwards as though someone else had done it. He hadn't thought--he had never seen himself do it.

            That is because you did not do it. The magic in the signature is not yours.

            The voice in his mind was as wickedly pointed and precise as his spell. Harry shook his head back and forth, irritated. He had had enough of snarls and mysteries in his thoughts over these last few days.

            But the voice sounded different from before. If he was going to think about anything, then he might want to think about that.

            "Very impressive," Snape said, and touched his fingertips together in a parody of applause. Then he leaned across the table and caught Harry's wrist, turning it over in his hand so that he could examine it critically.

            "What," Harry began in outrage, and then looked down. There was a mark on his wrist he hadn't noticed before. He wrinkled his forehead. It looked as though someone had caught him there already and bruised him, but he didn't remember anything like that. Had he been drunk last night? He knew he hadn't been sleeping well ever since he agreed to help Snape and Malfoy with the sunrise spell. Perhaps a guilty conscience?

            "My apologies," Snape said smoothly. "I had a ward up in case your spell went wrong and reflected back on us. The ward sometimes causes injuries in those that it presses against, or whose magic it is meant to keep off."

            Harry rolled his eyes. "It's not an injury. It's a bruise. I've had much worse, and lived." He carefully tucked his wrist inside his sleeve and leaned back in his chair so that he could survey both of them at the same time. "What did you think? Do I have enough control to act as part of the spell?"

            "If you can do it faster than that," Malfoy muttered, behind his mug. "It took you an awful long time to build up to the moment when you actually called the fire." But his voice had a slight tremor in it, and Harry reckoned that could be his version of being impressed.

            Harry glanced at Snape with an eyebrow raised, but Snape had already given Harry all the compliments that he was going to for the day, apparently. He looked back without moving a muscle in his face, and nodded.

            "I have no objections to you being part of the spell," he said. "Provided that a few things change."

            Harry sighed. "Don't tell me, you want me not to be center after all."

            "No," Snape said. "That is the only position you can hold in this, on that we are agreed." He traded a flickering look with Malfoy, so fast that Harry didn't really have the chance to see the emotion behind it, and then inclined his head sharply to Harry. "But you should know that we will be taking precautions to assure that the energy of the spell does not cross the wards of the Manor. You will see the spells glowing when you begin to recite your incantation. You shouldn't let yourself be thrown off-stride by it."

            "Oh." Harry blinked. He wondered if he had expected a warning, if he had a right to expect a warning, and then shrugged. Malfoy and Snape both wanted the spell to succeed more than he did. He was just doing this to help them out, because he trusted them for some odd reason--

            He didn't trust them, he was going to show them how much he didn't trust them very soon--

            The thought blew away like ragged wind, and with some effort, Harry completed the first one. Snape and Malfoy wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize the spell. If that meant they had to explain things to Harry that they normally wouldn't explain, then they'd do it, no matter how pouty it might make them afterwards.

            Harry found that he was trying to picture Snape with a pout, and he had to stop, for fear of his sanity. He nodded. "Anything else?"

            "Stronger wards around the Manor grounds," Malfoy said. "And we begin no later than an hour before sunrise on Beltane."

            "Of course," Harry said. "I thought it would take at least that long to set the spell up."

            For some reason, that made Snape and Malfoy exchange glances again, and then Snape stood up and moved towards the door of the Leaky. "I have several things to attend to of my own," he said, voice slightly muffled as he drew his cloak over his face. "I will see you later, Draco." And he was gone.

            "No farewell to me, even now," Harry muttered.

            "There are reasons for that," Malfoy said, and rose to his feet. "I'm afraid I have to leave you, too, Potter." His eyes connected with Harry's, and for a moment, his manner was intense. "You really should study that spell," he said, and hurried off, his legs moving faster than Harry had seen them even when he crossed the room to kneel at his mother's feet.

            Harry frowned and mopped at the sweat that, for some reason, stood on his forehead. He wondered if he looked like he had a fever. It would explain Snape and Malfoy being all solicitous. They didn't want their power source to collapse in the middle of the complex spell they were trying to make work.

            They don't care that much.

            They do.

            He'd have to ask Hermione what it meant when you had two arguing voices in your head, Harry thought wryly as he stood up, tossed a few coins on the table, and made for the door himself, and you were fairly sure that one of them was alien. But you couldn't tell which.

*

            His head was full of darkness, full of fire, full of pain.

            Sometimes he thought he could break free and up to the surface, away from the darkness that held him down and the fire that followed him. But he couldn't. The hands would reach out and drag him down again, and sometimes he would scream and fight, and then there would be the pain again, hands on his wrists as they held him down, fangs on his throat as the vampire drank.

            Harry couldn't see what the people who insisted vampires drinking your blood was pleasant meant. This was nothing but piercing pain--of course--being followed by drawing that made Harry feel slow and sick. Part of him was leaving and going into the vampire, an exchange he hadn't consented to, one that made him want to tear away and run away and roll in the wet grass until he was clean again.

            Grass wet with dew, brightening with the advent of the sun.

            There was something important under that, something that he needed to remember. But when Harry reached out for it, the thought fluttered teasingly and then darted away. He reached for it with yet more determination, and met the darkness that sucked in his hand and held it.

            And there was more sucking, more drawing, and he fell and vanished, his thoughts tattering more and more, the Imperius Curse eating more of him.

            Two things only he held.

            First, compassion was important. Trust was important.

            Second, the sunrise.

*

            Harry Apparated onto the path that led up to the iron gates of Malfoy Manor and moved quickly forwards. It was two hours before sunrise, and he didn't think Malfoy would have set the wards up this early that would keep magic from flowing off the grounds, but he couldn't take the chance. He had to be in the gardens before that happened. He had some surprises of his own to set up, surprises that ought to counter the bad effects of the sunrise spell.

            Of course there were going to be bad effects. The Ministry wouldn't have tried to ban these spells and keep all knowledge of them from most people if they didn't cause more trouble than they were worth.

            Harry shook his head. It was hazy and full of light, and now and then he had to stop and put a hand over his eyes. Visions like afterimages burned there, as if he had already seen the sun rise. He wondered if he should tell Malfoy and Snape that he was too sick to do the spell after all.

            His neck throbbed, and he dropped his hand and moved forwards. Impossible to hold back now. Of course he wasn't going to do that. He bared his teeth, and he knew that it was in a smug smile and that the expression was making him scream, somewhere in the back of his mind.

            Part of him swayed and burned with hatred. He thought of the way that Snape had tormented him the first day of Potions class, when Harry had known nothing about anything and couldn't be expected to know what in the world his dad had done to Snape, especially. What kind of man took his revenge on a child? A twisted one, a diseased one. Not a hero, the way that the Ministry had tacitly accepted that he was since the war and the way Harry had tried to paint him. Except he couldn't remember why he had done that, and considering the question made his head hurt.

            Not the hero who had thrown his memories at Harry, including the private ones that explained his friendship with Harry's mother, and expected Harry to pick them up and cope. It was a level of madness and trust, but trust.

            He couldn't think of that. It hadn't happened. It wasn't true. His breath was thick in his throat and his head pounded.

            Or Malfoy. Because Harry had refused his hand in friendship, that was enough to make him chase Harry and report him for infractions of the rules when he could and try to duel him and trick him and try to kill him, to hand him over to the Dark Lord--

            That was the wrong name. Harry reached down into the slowly stirring soup of the thoughts and hauled the right one to the top, feeling part of him flinch and cower like a rat away from the light as he did. Voldemort.

            Malfoy had come after him in the Room of Requirement, saying that he wanted to hand Harry over to Voldemort. Harry remembered that clearly, a moment of shining intensity surrounded by the brilliance of heat and light.

            Like the light of desperation that shone in Malfoy's eyes when he reached out one hand to catch at Harry's hand, when he looked as though he would do anything to avoid burning to death…

            So would most people, Harry told himself, as another part of him began to burn in a different way. That doesn't mean that you help them. You can't help them simply because they want to survive. Or because they want their fathers out of prison and forgiven.

            He wondered for a moment how much time spent in Azkaban was payment for a crime. Most of what Lucius Malfoy had done had been during the first war.

            But he did give the diary to Ginny, and he did torture Muggles, and he did fight me in the Department of Mysteries.

            How much time spent staring at bare stone walls did that equal? Did Harry's satisfaction, and Ginny's, at having him behind bars equal Malfoy's desperation to have him free, or Narcissa's pain and despair that Harry had clearly seen etched on her face the day he visited the Manor?

            Chaos in his head. His emotions dancing back and forth, mercy and justice, light and darkness, him and an in--

            No. He couldn't think like that. He wouldn't think like that. He didn't have compassion for Snape and Malfoy, and if he did, it was misplaced. They hadn't done anything for most of the people who had suffered during the war. Harry was letting his own approval of them override the casualties they had caused, or helped, or been responsible for, or stood by and watched happen. That was the truth. That was the only truth, and Harry wielded it like a weapon to drive the shadows out of his head.

            His mind throbbed. His thoughts ached. He stumbled once and found himself falling with a hand on the damp grass and leaves of the Manor grounds. He knelt there for a while to steady himself, his head bowed, drawing in deep gusts of thick scent. Crushed grass, heavy earth, dew, lingering warmth as though the sun had already risen once that morning, seen what was waiting for it, and gone back down.

            Nothing is waiting for it, because I am going to disrupt the spell.

            This time, there was no argument from dissident factions in the back of his mind. Harry stood back up and strode more firmly into the grounds. His hand dipped into one of the pockets of his robe and pulled out a series of jagged shards of glass, set into iron hilts as if they were knives so that he could handle them safely.

            He reached up when he felt something move on one of his cheeks, thinking it might be a bug. He was astonished when he touched wetness.

*

            Harry stepped back and nodded. The last shard of glass was placed among the grass. When the sun began to rise, the glass would reflect it in small, dazzling bursts and disrupt the concentration that Malfoy needed to braid the spells together. It might or might not distract Snape. Harry had decided that he wasn't going to worry about that. The important thing was that Malfoy had the weaker powers and the less experience, and this way, Harry could counter what he might be able to do.

            Of course it would be child's play to disrupt the spell himself, since he was center and the source of all that twisted, warped power put to use for twisted, warped purposes, but he wanted something more than that. He wanted a guarantee.

            "Potter."

            Harry whirled around, aware that he had jumped into the air and landed in a slight crouch. Auror training. He hoped Malfoy wouldn't read too much into it. He straightened with a smile and opened his mouth to answer.

            Then he realized that it wasn't Malfoy facing him but Snape. He had somehow mistaken the voice. He shrank back, feeling his heart jolt to life. There was no way that Snape wouldn't notice his unusual reaction.

            "Hullo, Snape," he said, because there was nothing else he could have said at that moment that would have made sense. "Come to inspect the preparations? I've just been doing that. I don't think there's anything that you haven't thought of." He babbled, and hated to listen to himself doing it, but on the other hand, maybe the stream of nonsense words would convince Snape that Harry was being his usual mindless self and he should look elsewhere.

            Look elsewhere for what? What am I doing here? Why am I preparing to betray them when they trust me and I trust them?

            But a blinding pain struck through his lightning bolt scar when he thought about that last part, and he reminded himself again that he didn't actually trust them. It was just that he had to pretend he did, or they would never have chosen him for the spell. And he wanted them to choose him for the spell.

            Why? Betrayal isn't the kind of thing I do. Why would I want to deceive them like that? What's going on?

            His head ached. Harry gave an uncertain rub at his temple with one hand and watched Snape, who had stepped closer.

            Snape showed no sign of doing something that would make Harry uncomfortable, though. He studied Harry's face, his eyes and his scar, his glance flickering down to the bruise on Harry's wrist that still hadn't faded. In the end, he nodded and turned away. "I believe that we are ready, yes," he said. "Draco is a few minutes behind me."

            Harry nodded, not sure what other response he was supposed to make to that bit of news, and they stood in silence for some time. The dusk around them was lighter than it had been, but the sun hadn't risen yet. Of course not, Harry thought. They had to make it rise, or stop its rising and hold it in place. The whole spell and all the preparations would have been useless if they were late.

            "Do you believe in the power of Beltane, sir?" he asked, mostly to make conversation so that Snape wouldn't get suspicious of his silence. Harry Potter didn't normally stand in silence for that long, after all.

            "I believe that Draco needed it to believe in," Snape said calmly. "And we needed a date set for performing the spell, so that Draco would not put it off forever or, consequently, try it too soon. When it happens, and it has worked or not worked, then Draco will stop plaguing me about it."

            "But you don't really believe in it?" Harry asked tentatively. That surprised him. It seemed like the kind of thing Snape would believe in. Step into the fire of the sunlight, get your guilt burned off by the fire, and walk away free. Surely he had wanted neat, tidy solutions to his guilt after he had joined the Death Eaters and betrayed the woman he loved to her death.

            But he didn't look for solutions like that. He became Dumbledore's spy instead, and you could say that that's lot of things, but not easy.

            Harry touched his head again. He hoped that he would be able to concentrate on the incantation and his part in it through the pain.

            "Not in the same way as Draco," Snape said. "I believe that we could perform the spell on nearly any day, and it would work or not work. We have the power and we have the people we need." He glanced at Harry, the small pre-dawn breeze whipping his hair out of his eyes. "But Draco's faith is important."

            "Oh," Harry said, and then nothing more, as he watched Malfoy walking towards them. He was visible in the light of his wand, which he carried low at his side, as though he didn't want the Lumos charm too visible, in case it gave the sun ideas about rising too soon. He met Snape's gaze for longer than Harry's, but still looked at Harry in a way that satisfied him. Malfoy suspected nothing. Harry could wave a sign in front of him speaking about the betrayal he intended, and Malfoy still wouldn't get it.

            Not that I intend the betrayal.

            The voice in the back of his head smoothly corrected him. Not that the betrayal is not necessary, for the good of the world.

            Yes. Of course it was. Harry tried to hold that notion in his mind as he fell back at Snape's gesture and stood in what was more or less the exact middle of the hill. The lights from their wands glittered off one of the jagged shards of glass that Harry had dropped in the grass, and he held his breath. If Snape saw them before the spell began, it might lead him to suspect…

            But Snape didn't, and in fact had his back turned as he worked out his guard position, which meant Harry had the time to cast a quick glamour at the shard. He didn't think any of the others were as exposed, and Malfoy had his gaze pinned on the sky in a way that said he wouldn't notice if they were. Harry ran his fingers back and forth on the wand when he was finished, trying as best he could to keep calm. He could do this. He could do this, couldn't he? Of course he could.

            "Potter."

            Harry whipped around. Snape was standing in a position that Harry supposed roughly mimicked the drawing on the piece of parchment that they had studied for so long. Malfoy was to the side, down the hill, forming a rough triangle with Snape and Harry. The "center" position was somewhat misnamed, Harry thought, and wondered for one crazy moment what Snape and Malfoy would think if he demanded a renaming.

            "Stand ready," Snape said. "The sun will begin to rise soon, and when it reaches the point we discussed, we need you to begin drawing on your power."

            Harry nodded. Too bad that neither of them knew that the magic he would soon begin raising was nothing like the power that they both thought was going to come through him, and then to them.

            Yes, too bad.

            This time, the voice sounded more like his own, but Harry still bit his lip in vexation. He couldn't act too distracted, or Snape might delay the spell, ask him what was wrong, and rob him of his chance at revenge.

            Do you want that chance? Is what they've done to you bad enough to warrant taking away the hope that Malfoy's pinned most of his confidence on?

            Harry shrugged his shoulders, shivering as if he was cold. Neither Snape nor Malfoy so much as glanced at him. Their eyes were fastened on the eastern horizon, where the faint line of light was growing. Harry thought he could see the grey turning into gold moment by moment, as though someone was adding streaks of paint to a dark picture.

            He shivered again. Snape shifted forwards half a foot and then balanced there. Malfoy rocked from side to side. Harry looked down and traced the grass with his eyes, finding the faint shimmers of the glamours that guarded his glass shards.

            As he looked down, he saw something else.

            There was a large depression in the grass at his feet, crushed and broken blades, as though someone had lain down there and bent it beneath them. Or drawn a circle there, Harry decided, squinting. That was what it looked like more than anything else, as though someone had used a piece of invisible chalk and flattened the grass in a rough ring shape. When Harry turned his head, it changed his perception again, and now it seemed as though something was buried there, beneath the ring.

            Or causing the ring.

            A horrible dread began to rise in Harry, tightening his throat. He wondered if he could slip off to the side without awakening Snape's suspicions, but he found the man's eyes on him when he glanced up. He had to swallow and stop, standing stiffly in place as the gold in the east grew ever brighter.

            He hadn't planned for something like this, something that could potentially counter the glass shards he'd scattered in the grass.

            What am I worried about? he thought a moment later. Again a sick headache pounded through his temples, and he put his face in his hands. His skin felt too tight. The taste of a foul potion was in his mouth, and he wondered if Snape had managed to poison him, even though Harry didn't remember swallowing anything.

            He couldn't tell what he feared, the thing that might counter his glass shards, because something prevented the thought from rising fully to the surface of his mind.

            "Please," he whispered, and then realized that he didn't know what he was whispering to, or about.

            The gold grew brighter still. Snape moved a step forwards. Malfoy moved with him, as if perfectly in tune, and lifted his wand. Harry realized that he was stepping with them. No one had told him to do that, he wasn't in on whatever secret signal Snape and Malfoy had arranged between them, but he did it anyway.

            It was…

            His eyes smarted and his cheeks tingled as though someone had slapped him. He felt his mind writhe and explode in chaos. The words of the first incantation rose to his lips; his throat locked to prevent him from speaking it. Of course, he had never intended to actually speak it. No reason to make Snape and Malfoy think that he was going to help them past the moment that the sun actually rose and he could begin the betrayal.

            I don't want to betray them.

            Of course I don't.

            Malfoy turned and looked over his shoulder at Harry. Harry saw his grey eyes glinting, with shadows in the backs of them, and felt his head rock back from the sudden roaring storm of memories. That was the way his eyes had looked in the Room of Requirement, when Harry was lifting him out of the fire--

            He remembered. Rumber, the Imperius Curse, the way that it had been able to control him because it relied on his distrust of former Death Eaters and how his compassion for them had fought it, and he began the struggle over again.

            The sun rose.

            His throat struggled for a moment, muscles fighting against muscles, and then Harry unlocked them by sheer force and shouted the incantation. "Luce solis, luce aurorae, mane, oriens, salve!"

            The air thrummed around him, and boiled like the inside of his skull, but hotter. Harry took a step away, moving all the while as though he carried a stone on his back, and strengthened the glamour across the surface of the glass shards he'd dropped. What had been meant to keep them hidden was now functioning to keep the sun from shining on them at all. He wasn't going to distract Malfoy and Snape at the critical points in the spell when they would have to speak their own incantations.

            Malfoy's voice jerked into motion, repeating, "Luce solis, luce aurorae," as he lifted his wand.

            And Harry flung magic to him.

            Not the destructive blast the Rumber-controlled half of his mind had planned on, but magic that unrolled from him as neatly and smoothly as silk, flying through the air, winding around Malfoy's wand. Malfoy caught it and began to weave it into a visible pattern in front of him. The racing rays of the sun made his hawthorn wand glow a dull silver.

            The ring beneath the grass lit suddenly, and Harry blinked in a dazed fashion, throwing his head back from it as its purpose became clear.

            It was a mirror.

            Other mirrors glittered like pools of light from all over the hill, and for a moment Harry stood still with wonder, remembering the images like ponds that had been part of that original parchment Snape and Malfoy had shown him. Of course. He should have tried to find out what those were before now, and then perhaps he wouldn't have been taken so much by surprise.

            No. That was a Rumber-thought, the thought of the part of him that didn't trust Snape and Malfoy and wanted to be in absolute control of the situation, hammering on his will and trying to get him to change his mind about helping them. Harry gritted his teeth and moved a deliberate step back from the mirror, so that his twitching leg, still not completely under his control, wouldn't lash out and break the glass.

            Of course they didn't have to trust him fully, which meant they didn't have to tell him about every aspect of the plan. It was enough if he trusted them.

            Rumber's voice spread out through his mind, in a last-ditch defense, a wave that made Harry's head ache as though someone was hitting his skull with a hammer. Distrust them! I command you! Distrust them!

            That was always the last point, Harry thought, stumbling about, blinded with pain, but still sending magic springing out so that Snape and Malfoy could get hold of it. If Rumber lost control of the Imperius Curse and Harry's mind, then he could still try to order him to distrust Malfoy and Snape, and the spell would falter and stop because his trust was essential.

            The command made his mind rigid. For a moment, Harry wondered if the stated purpose of the spell was what he had always thought it was. Had Snape and Malfoy lied to him? They might easily have done that, if they didn't really trust him. The mirrors were one thing they hadn't told him about. What if there were others? Harry's head shook and quivered, and the moment stretched out between him and Malfoy, twanging like a guitar string at the beginning of a melody.

            Harry reached deep, down past the parts of his mind that were battered from the struggle with Rumber, and forced himself to consider what he really thought of Snape and Malfoy. Not simple hatred, nothing as uncomplicated as that anymore, considering the way he had defended them before the Wizengamot. But did he trust them enough to give them control of all his magic for an ancient and possibly destructive spell?

            Did he care enough for them to risk the destruction of all vampires and perhaps the destruction of the world for the sake of freeing Lucius Malfoy?

            But that was the wrong question to ask, or at least the wrong way to phrase that. It was a Rumber question. Harry flung his voice back in a snarl of his own, and answered.

            I defended them. I spied on them when I thought they were up to something, but I never once considered reporting them to the Ministry. I didn't let my friends talk me into reporting them, even before you took control of my mind.

            Yes, I trust them.

            Strength came rushing out of the depths of his mind, strength that snapped the rotted strings of the Imperius web like a carelessly wielded human foot going through a spider's home. Harry shouted. Rumber screamed, somewhere in the spinning chaos of his mind. Harry looked up, blinking, and saw the bruise fade from his wrist. It must have been some indication that his mind was being controlled, he thought in wonder, his mental conflict escaping into his body the only way it could.

            And Snape had seen it, and probably             known what it meant, being a Legilimens.

            He'd let Harry participate in the spell anyway.

            Harry didn't have the words for that. He tried to speak them, and the poisonous spit that Rumber had left in this throat burned the words away. He lunged against the remaining control over his body instead, and felt Rumber expelled from his mind in a sudden, fierce rush, like the sunlight that was coming down from the sky now.

            Only should it be coming down if they had really stopped the sun from moving?

            Harry flung his head back and looked around with the sense that he had lifted a mask from his face and could see and breathe clearly now. Light flashed from mirror to mirror along the grass, along the flanks of the hill, away towards the stone wall that encircled the Malfoy gardens. The light sang a high-pitched song like wildfire; Harry could hear it rubbing against the magic he had released and sent flowing to Malfoy, which Malfoy was sending spinning along to Snape. Snape's hands were surrounded by the slight sparking diamonds of the light, the color they had when they reflected off water. He spun them and hurled them back towards Malfoy, who caught them, Harry didn't understand how, and redirected them again. The world around them was growing piercingly brilliant, difficult to look at.

            But still not the way it should have been. Harry opened his mouth to speak to Snape. "Shouldn't we have stopped the sun?" he meant to say.

            Instead, his mouth took over and chanted strongly, confidently, as if he had meant to say it all along, "Luce solis, luce aurorae!"

            "Mane!" Malfoy called "Oriens!"

            "Salve!" Snape said, and his deep voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere.

            The mirrors around them took fire. Harry stood in the middle of it, sun-dazzled, sun-dazed, feeling as though he stood in a brilliant pool of melted ice. The sun was hovering above them now like some great dragon, staring at them. Harry blinked and had to avert his eyes.

            Hovering. Not moving.

            The fire poured down on them, heavy, glittering, hanging curtains of fire of a kind that Harry had never seen before; he hadn't realized how much subtle movement there was in sunlight until he saw this. The faint shadows that had begun to stretch from the horizon were frozen, too, and Harry felt the weight of the warmth on his neck. He knew that it might be partially his mind causing this, the impression that the spell and the moment should be significant altering the way he approached his perceptions, but he didn't care; it was still awe-inspiring. He shivered.

            And the magic kept pouring out of him, to Malfoy and from him to Snape and then back to Malfoy. Malfoy lifted his hands high. The glittering web strung between them flashed brightly enough that Harry couldn't look at it. He lifted a hand to his eyes to shield them from the afterimages and turned to the side. He half-expected Rumber to launch an attack across the stone walls of the Manor.

            Instead, he saw two figures walking towards them, incongruous in a world where everything else seemed to pause.

            And, indeed, they didn't move in the normal way. They flickered from moment to moment, leaping between strides, like jerky movie pictures. Harry wondered if it was something wrong with him, or with them. What did happen if you stopped time?

            Destruction, Rumber's voice whispered urgently in the back of his head. Chaos. Potter, help us! We can still stop them from destroying the world if you work with us, if you show your loyalty to the Ministry--

            Sod off, Harry answered, and turned away firmly from the voice in his mind to watch the figures.

            They were Narcissa Malfoy and her husband. Narcissa walked with firm, calm steps, more calm than Harry thought he could have managed if the sun had simply stopped overhead. Lucius hunched, his head bowed as though the light hurt his eyes. Well, welcome to the club, Harry thought.

            He wondered if it was his recent experience as a prisoner in his own mind that made him so sympathetic to Lucius, but he didn't think that he needed to find out. It was enough that they were here, and it was obvious why Narcissa couldn't have participated in the spell. She'd had to go to Azkaban and fetch her husband out somehow.

            Later, Harry thought, the "somehow" might be of greater concern. But not here, and not now, with the sun hanging still above them and the air heavy with light, with fire.

            Lucius came to a stop. His wife stood there for a moment, her hand trailing down his elbow in a caress, and then moved away. Malfoy was still chanting, Harry realized. His voice was loud in the silence. Well, it was silent except for the constant silken buzz of Harry’s magic whipping out of him and traveling towards Malfoy.

            They could drain your core. Did you know about that possibility? Rumber's voice taunted him.

            Harry ignored him in favor of listening to Snape, who nodded to Narcissa and said, "You know what he needs to do."

            "Talk to him," Narcissa said, and her voice was raw and urgent and angry. Maybe that was the reason she didn't trust Snape, Harry thought. She didn't trust him to do the right thing by Lucius. "He's the one who needs to hear it. Treat him like someone who actually has emerged into the world of the living again, not the one who is a mere victim in this."

            Snape paused a moment, then inclined his head in what might have been either a bow or a nod and turned to Lucius. Malfoy's father straightened up under his regard.

            "You must enter the fire of your own free will," Snape said. "No one can help you. No one can bear the pain for you. We can only show you the way." And he turned and threw his arm out towards what Harry could have sworn was an ordinary patch of grass only a moment before.

            The grass shone and steamed, and then burst into flames. The sun had a curtain of light hanging down from it, Harry noticed, one of those odd motionless weaves he had noticed before. It shivered and turned back and forth, and then it glowed with ordinary colors, red and orange and gold, instead of the jerky yellow-white static that had bothered Harry so far. Lucius opened his mouth slightly, but only stood there. Harry wondered if four years in Azkaban had left him sane enough to do this. From the frown on Snape's face, he was wondering the same thing.

            Narcissa reached out as if she would touch his back, but then Lucius straightened up and answered with a ghost of his old dignity clinging about him.

            "I understand. I know that I have to take the future and hold onto it, no matter how much it may burn me."

            Snape nodded to him. Lucius nodded back, and then faced the fire again. He began to walk, step by stumbling step, watched by a hovering Narcissa and a breathless Harry and a chanting Malfoy and a still Snape.

            And the motionless sun, of course, insofar as it could be said to watch anything.

            Rumber snarled in the back of Harry's head, but said nothing. Harry thought he was gathering his strength for another kind of strike. He probably knew that there was nothing he could do to prevent Lucius from entering the fire, anyway.

            Lucius did it. Sometimes he looked as if he would fall over his feet, and Harry thought for sure he would need the help that Snape had said they couldn't give him, but he didn't. He kept on. He reached the edge of the fire and put out a hand as though he had to part literal curtains instead of flames. The flames broke apart for him, though, swaying back and forth.

            He vanished inside them.

            Harry became aware quite suddenly that he was sweating, standing there, and that it wasn't a result of the sunlight pouring down on him. He shut his eyes. The magic flowed through his hands, from his core, from his wand. It was automatic by now, and no one except Malfoy needed to chant to keep the spell going.

            But it would end if Harry faltered, if the magic he had to give proved too much for his strength. He knew that much.

            "Steady."

            That was Snape, his voice so low and cool that Harry didn't know if he would have heard him--except that, he saw when he opened his eyes again, Snape had come closer. He stood beside Harry now, three feet away, eyeing him as if to satisfy himself that Harry wouldn't fall over in the next few seconds. Narcissa was beyond him, but she didn't glance at Harry. Her eyes were on the fire instead, and she was wringing her hands in the moment before she clasped them tightly together and held them there.

            "You knew," Harry said.

            "I knew of the risk," Snape said. His eyes reflected sunlight like obsidian. Harry wondered how he did that.

            "You let me participate in the spell despite the fact that I might betray you?" Harry shook his head. "That makes no sense, not when so much was riding on this spell and what might happen if it got out of control."

            "It did make sense," Snape said. "I knew that someone would probably try to stop us. If I had let on that I knew you were under a curse, they would have tried some other way, some trick that we might not have sensed in time. This way, they believed themselves undetected and continued their useless effort."

            "Useless?" Harry snorted. He swayed, but Snape reached out and laid his hand on Harry's arm. It helped more than a wall to lean on, Harry thought. "I could have succumbed to them. But I reckon my pain didn't matter much."

            He hadn't meant it as a criticism, at least not more than he usually did, but Snape's eyes flashed. "I did not discount your suffering," he snapped. "I thought it useless because I had faith that you would break the curse at the right moment."

            Harry stared at Snape, because he had never thought to hear those words come out of his mouth, of all people's. Snape stared back, his mouth curving very slightly, as if he could hear Harry's thoughts and found them amusing.

            "All right," Harry said. He was swaying as he felt the magic continue to drain out of him, pouring steadily into Malfoy, into the spell, into the fire that held Lucius. "But you know that Rumber isn't going to let this go this easily, right? He must have backup plans in case his attempt to take over my mind didn't work."

            "Rumber?" Snape's frown slowly cleared. "Ah, the Unspeakable."

            Harry nodded. "Powerful Unspeakable. He managed to enslave me with an Imperius Curse that drew on my hatred for you, all those memories that I wanted to get rid of. He must--"

            Snape whirled around abruptly and lifted his wand. Narcissa Malfoy joined him. Harry looked over their shoulders and saw flickering shadows crossing the walls, scudding just above the ground like clouds. Magical shadows, he thought. They probably hid vampires, who must have some kind of built-in exception that got them past the wards forbidding entrance to strangers.

            And he didn't know how well he was going to be able to help the defense, with his magic constantly being drained for the spell. He clenched his fists around his wand and stared at Snape's back.

            As if he had heard the thought, Snape said, "This is what the guard is for." He arranged himself back-to-back with Narcissa--Harry thought there were probably vampires coming from the other side as well, though his position made it impossible to see through the light in that direction--and began to chant a spell. Harry listened, but it wasn't one he knew.

            A moment later, he saw what it did. The shadows went flying from the vampires running towards Snape as if they had been ripped away. The sunlight fell on them like a hammer--a hammer that smashed flames into the depths of their bodies. The vampires screamed and withered into ashes and cinders in seconds.

            Narcissa laughed, so she must have done the same thing, or at least something similar that would lower the dangers of disrupting the spell. Harry faced the fire again and squinted, wondering if he would be able to see Lucius in the middle of the column.

            It swayed as he looked at it, and the white edges gleamed like swords. Harry winced. He could make out Lucius's shape in the middle, and he was slumping as though he would fall over. Harry felt his guts clench nervously. What would happen if Rumber didn't succeed in disrupting the spell, but Lucius faltered? If someone wasn't allowed to help him up, what would happen?

            As he watched, Lucius dropped to one knee. Malfoy gave a small cry of pain, but continued to chant. Narcissa whirled around and took a step towards the fire. Snape stepped her with a hand on her arm.

            That seemed to leave only Harry as the candidate for going forwards and actually helping, and he took a single step.

            Snape's eyes snapped over to him. "Potter," he said between clenched teeth. "Do not."

            "What happens?" Harry asked. He was panting now. The sweat seemed to have turned his limbs to water. He had to clench his hands simply to stand upright. He wanted to lie down and close his eyes, but he had the feeling he wouldn't get back up again if he did that, and that would end the flow of his magic into the spell.

            "The spell fails," Snape said.

            "And it fails if he falls over," Narcissa said at once. Her wide gaze was fixed on Harry as if he were her last hope.

            "What, and waste all this effort? Bugger that," Harry snapped, and staggered forwards to the edge of the fire.

            Snape called out to him, and Harry heard quick steps as if he was coming after him. That would stop everything, he knew. Snape wasn't as exhausted as he was, and could move faster. And if the guard turned his back on the attack that Rumber was making, the vampires might make it through.

            Harry decided to do something that would take care of both problems at once, and flung himself forwards with his arms reaching out. His fingers crossed the edge of the curtain. He felt blazing heat on them for a moment. He wondered if they had ceased to exist, and how he was supposed to tell. His forehead tingled with sweat. His skin swam with it. His eyes swarmed with it.

            And then the curtains were open and swaying above him, and Harry understood that he had one chance. He crawled. His fingertips came back to life, stinging fiercely but not dead or burned to a crisp, and he rose to his feet beside Lucius in the world of the fire.

            Lucius Malfoy turned to face him, mouth open and distended in a way that made Harry flinch; he was thinking of Dementors. His hands reached out, faltering. Harry clasped them with his own and tugged.

            "You have to stand up," he said. "I can't really help you, but I can tell you that. What's so hard? It ought to feel good to have your guilt melt away and leave you with a clean life." He had no real idea what he was saying, and he could admit it. The babbled nonsense might keep Lucius from giving up, and that was his major hope right now. "Are your family really going to do all this to bring you back, and then you'll just give up on them?"

            "You have no idea what it's like," Lucius whispered. "To see those things as other people saw them. To face the darkness so that the sun can burn it away. The weight is--something I never bore. It's making it impossible for me to stand." He swayed towards Harry, leaning his head on Harry's shoulder for a second like Ron sometimes did when he'd had too much to drink.

            "I can stand with you," Harry said. "I can try to carry some of the weight for you." He knew it was a stupid thing to say, especially because he didn't have the least idea how the magic would transfer the burden from Lucius's shoulders to his, and he didn't know that he could bear it if that happened. But he wrapped his arms around Lucius anyway and turned to look up at the sun blazing beyond the edge of the curtain of fire, to show willing.

            The curtains swayed again and came down on him.

            Fire melted into Harry, consuming him, moving through his bones at the pace of a slow river. It found his joints and caressed them with hot fingers, melting them, reshaping them. Harry shuddered, feeling himself sag like glass at the heart of a forge. Lucius laughed, but it was a wild and despairing sound, and didn't sound as though he thought he had got one over on Harry, which was Harry's initial suspicion.

            That was the problem, Harry thought muzzily. It wasn't that Lucius didn't want to be free of the guilt, or back with his family. It was that he couldn't stand up to the pain seeping through the fire, the pain he had caused.

            To be free of guilt, one had to face the reasons for it.

            Harry stood up under the assault. If there was one thing he knew after the past month of living under Rumber's Imperius Curse, it was outfacing an enemy, a kind of pain that might seem to make even standing upright impossible. He gave the sun a hard smile and pressed down on Lucius's shoulder just as hard, sharing the pain, the burden.

            Lucius shivered against him, and Harry felt the basilisk's fang as if it had gone through his arm in the last moment. He thought of the way that Ginny had looked lying against the wall in the Chamber of Secrets, so still, so pale. She could have died there, and he still blamed Lucius for that, in a way.

            But she hadn't, and Harry had won against Lucius in the end. He'd destroyed the diary and freed Dobby so that Lucius couldn't torment him anymore. It was--this was the best outcome that anyone could have pictured. Harry could let the hatred that he still felt against Lucius go for that.

            The sunlight falling from above them turned more white than yellow. Harry took a step towards the edge of the curtains.

            Lucius stood in the graveyard, smiling behind his mask--well, Harry had always thought he did that, but it wasn't like he'd ever been able to tell--and watching in enjoyment as Voldemort tortured Harry. Or had it been enjoyment? When had he started suspecting that his Dark Lord had gone insane, and the glorious war he'd dreamed of was never going to exist? Harry didn't know, and he didn't know that he could waste that much compassion on Lucius, either.

            But the point was that it was in the past. Harry had escaped, and Voldemort had lost the war. Lucius had deserved some time in Azkaban for being part of his Death Eaters, but Harry thought four years was enough.

            Who are you to judge? That might have been Rumber's voice, if the sun hadn't burned him out by now, rolling around in Harry's head like the echo of his guilt.

            The one who agreed to the spell, and broke the Imperius Curse, and came into the fire to rescue Lucius, Harry retorted, and moved a step forwards.

            There was Lucius, chasing him through the Ministry. Harry felt the stone beneath his feet, the tight ache under his ribs from running, and knew he would turn around to find Lucius's drawn wand behind him. It was a hard thing to face, a fearsome thing, and he shuddered and tried to pretend that he wasn't clutching at Lucius as much to keep from falling as because he wanted to fend off the memory.

            But that, again, was his to forgive. Lucius hadn't been the one to kill Sirius; Harry didn't know if he could have let the guilt from that crime burn away. Bellatrix had, and she was dead and gone. Harry hadn't even been the one to kill her. The shadow of the Department of Mysteries had lain over him for a long time, but he could move out of it if he wanted to.

            It was all about choices.

            He tugged, and Lucius's arm slipped around his shoulders and his body walked beside Harry's. His footsteps fell more heavily now, Harry noticed, but his head was held straighter, and he didn't breathe so desperately. Harry hoped those were good signs. He didn't really know what Lucius was experiencing as they went through this. Perhaps something less painful than he had in the past.

            Harry made the choice, and forgave.

            The fire burning around them turned abruptly to ordinary sunlight, pale and pure and perfect. Harry staggered out of the edge of it and fell on the ground. Lucius fell into his wife's arms. Narcissa was crying quietly, Harry saw, without a sob to make her mouth move. She just stood there, holding Lucius, and rocked him back and forth, the tears sliding silently down her face.

            Malfoy's chant was the only sound in the world, and the next moment, even that fell silent.

            Harry turned and looked, and saw that the shadows had changed, the sun moving on. Snape was reaching down a hand to help him up, and pride shone in those dark eyes, as quiet as Narcissa's tears.

*

            "What are you going to do about Rumber?"

            Harry blinked and opened his eyes. He'd been sitting in a receiving room--that was what Narcissa had called it, not that Harry had much idea what she meant--in Malfoy Manor for the last hour. It had portraits on the walls that sneered at him and golden scrollwork around the windows that looked hideously expensive, but all Harry cared about was that it also had a soft couch that he could lean his head back on and pillows that he could burrow his way into. That meant he'd been able to lean back and let the rest of them make decisions about what should happen next.

            His part was over, anyway. Harry had the idea that it had been over the moment he staggered out of the fire with Lucius.

            But Snape had asked him a question that he could answer, so Harry yawned and sat up, sipping at the cool glass of lemonade the house-elves had brought him. "Report him to the Ministry. It'll take a while, since he's so important, but they'll convict him eventually. My memories ought to be enough to do the trick."

            Snape sat down on the couch beside him. Harry blinked. He had thought Snape would take a seat as far away as he could get. I mean, it's one thing to trust me during the spell, but that's over now.

            "Will you tell them about Lucius?" Snape asked quietly.

            Harry snorted. "Don't reckon I'll have to. They must know that he's escaped Azkaban by now."

            Snape shook his head slightly. "But will you tell them about the spell, and what it did for him? Will you tell them that you participated?"

            Harry nodded. "I'll have to tell them that part. There's no other explanation for why Rumber would be desperate enough to cast the Imperius Curse on me." He paused. "Come to think of it, the fuss over Rumber will make the fuss over Lucius considerably less."

            Snape sat stiffly on the couch for a moment, staring past Harry at the window. Harry resisted the urge to reach out to him. There were certain things that could only happen during the spell. He thought Snape would probably hit him with a Blasting Curse if he tried, anyway.

            "It'll be fine," Harry said. "I can use my influence to make them let you stay free, if necessary."

            Snape shook his head. "The illegality of that particular spell has always been in question," he murmured. "It is one of the reasons I chose it. And Draco's idea of performing it on Beltane morning is actually a good one. We can classify it as a religious ritual, and that will be enough to baffle the Ministry."

            "Then what are you worried about?" Harry scratched at his stubbly chin and yawned again. He'd had more than enough in the past few days to think about without remembering to shave, too. "It's over now, and you have what you wanted. And no one died, unless you count the vampires."

            Snape shook his head, but didn't say anything. Harry waited, since he thought Snape must want someone to talk to if he'd come over to him. Of course, the Malfoys might be too involved in their family reunion to pay attention to him.

            When Snape began speaking, it was softly enough that Harry almost didn't hear him.

            "Since the war," he said, "I have kept my head down. I never meant to survive, and I don't believe that Albus meant for me to survive, either. A sacrifice. That's what we thought I was, and that I would die in one way or another."

            Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Snape's voice went on flowing, clouding over his voice, robbing him of the ability to say what he wanted to say.

            "Then I lived. And it seemed wise not to call attention to myself. I felt as though the Ministry would punish me if they knew the full extent of what I had done." Snape grimaced. "And now I have written my name across the sky in letters of fire that cannot be ignored."

            "But no one knows the full extent of what you did," Harry pointed out. "So many people are dead, or not talking, and you know that I wouldn't try to betray you, not after I fought for you."

            "This feeling is in part irrational," Snape murmured. Harry wondered if his audience was Harry, or himself. Maybe this was just something he needed to say, and he would feel silly saying it if he was alone.

            Well. Fine. Considering what Snape asked him to do not even an hour ago, this was small in comparison.

            "I fear that the Ministry will notice me even when I know they have no reason to. I fear that lifting my head in any way, even by setting up a legal Potions business, will draw attention that I cannot afford." Snape clenched one hand into a loose fist. "I fear that I have not escaped Azkaban except in a dream, and the dream will break if I move too fast or too far."

            Harry did reach out then, though he only clapped Snape hard on the arm instead of taking his hand as his first impulse had been. There were limits. "I won't let that happen," he said. "And as for being a sacrifice that escaped the death you were meant to die--sir, what do you think I am?"

            Snape slowly turned his head and looked at him. Harry smiled back at him and clapped him again.

            "And Lucius is free," Harry said "No one ever thought that would happen, either. And no one thought we could pull the spell off--although Rumber was worried enough to try and prevent it anyway--and no one thought that I would trust you enough to make this real. But it did and we did and I did. We'll face the consequences as we have to, but I don't think anything is going to be as severe as what could have happened if something had gone wrong with the spell."

            Snape snorted, but his eyes had almost closed. Harry thought that was probably because his reputation would suffer if anyone saw that he was actually happy. "Trust you to see things in as twisted a manner as possible, Potter," he murmured.

            "No, that's your specialty," Harry said, and clapped him once more on the arm before pulling his hand back and picking up the lemonade again instead. "Don't borrow trouble, all right? We succeeded."

            Snape stood and turned to the door instead of answering. Harry leaned around him so that he could see.

            The Malfoy family was visible from here. Lucius sat in a chair, blinking at the sunlight on his face. Narcissa hovered at his side, one hand on his shoulder, while the house-elves offered silver plate after silver plate of snacks.

            And Malfoy--Draco--stood off to the side, his hands locked behind his back as if he would be waving them joyfully through the air otherwise, his eyes as brilliant as the fire he'd envisioned, and summoned, and controlled.

            "Yes," Snape said, slowly, thoughtfully, his voice rolling up from within the depths of his throat. "We did."

            The End.
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Those Who Dwell in Realms of Day