Chapter Two of 'Stepping Stones' (2/4)- The Second Step (1/2)

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Chapter Two—The Second Step

“I’m excited. Are you excited?” Ginny paused uncertainly in front of Harry and abruptly flushed. “Please tell me you are. I don’t want to be alone when I sound like an idiot.”

Harry laughed and kissed her. As it always did, that made Ginny melt against him with a little sigh. Her hands tightened on his arms, and she gave an unsubtle wriggle of her hips. Harry had to pull back, though. “I’m excited,” he said, angling his groin so that Ginny could feel the truth of that, “but they’re going to announce our new partners in five minutes.”

“I could be quicker than five minutes.” Ginny looked up at him, eyes blazing with challenge. Harry would probably have given in and taken her up on that if he’d been a different man.

But he wasn’t, and in fact it was sometimes hard to feign the passion needed to make sure Ginny didn’t get suspicious. He caressed her hair instead and murmured, “I think we need to wait and celebrate tonight.”

“If they let us.” Ginny abruptly stepped away from him and began to pace around the small, blank waiting room, staring at the walls in hostility. Harry looked with her, but didn’t see anything to worry about. The walls had no decorations and there were only hard benches, but that was the Ministry for you; they would try to bore you to death during your wait. “They have to partner us together, don’t they, Harry?”

Harry blinked at the sudden appeal. “Of course,” he said. He was the one who had doubted that during the process of their training, not Ginny. “They have no reason not to. We love each other, and they know how well we work together.”

“But that’s not always enough.” Ginny buried her head against his chest. “In fact, I heard the Aurors split up people who love each other, because they think that husbands and wives can’t be objective about each other’s safety.”

Harry privately thought that might be a good thing; Ginny needed to learn how to stand on her own two feet more. She was so dependent on him that it frightened him sometimes.

On the other hand, it did lead him to be extra careful of her heart, and now wasn’t the moment when she needed to hear criticism. He folded his arms around her shoulders and spoke gently. “We’ll do the best we can. And if the only qualification was that we were spouses, I’m sure they wouldn’t consider it. But we do fight well together. That has to count for a lot.”

Ginny stopped squirming around anxiously and relaxed, peering up at him. “You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right.”

She looked so bright-eyed and happy at the moment that Harry couldn’t resist. He bent down to kiss her.

“Mr. Potter. Mrs. Potter.”

Harry felt Ginny stiffen guiltily in his arms. She always seemed to assume that someone would blame her for kissing and touching her own husband, and would have beaten a hasty retreat if Harry let her. But Harry kept his arms in place, and looked up with a leisurely air, as if his heart hadn’t suddenly started to pound.

The Auror who waited for them at the door was a tall man with a narrow face, dark eyes, and pierced ears in which silver hoops hung. He surveyed them with resigned distaste before he gestured. “You are to come.”

Harry squeezed Ginny’s hand, smiled at her reassuringly, and followed Auror Hitchens. He could disapprove all he liked, but then, he disapproved of teenagers kissing, too. Just because he didn’t have a life didn’t mean other people had to avoid having one in front of him.

They filed down a dim corridor and into a sudden blaze of brightness. Harry blinked, tilting his head back to study the ceiling. An enchanted illusion hung there that mimicked the one in Hogwarts’ Great Hall, and right now it glared with sunlight.

The room itself had white stone walls, Harry saw when he looked about him, like a slightly more interesting and considerably larger version of their waiting rooms. Auror Hitchens waved his hand, and Harry and Ginny hurried to join the nearest forming line in the middle of the wooden floor. Trainees rustled their robes all around them, coughed nervously, and dragged at their sleeves or scratched random itches as if that could somehow lessen their nervousness.

Harry saw Ron at the end of the first row, eyes wide, and nodded to him with a smile. If he wasn’t assigned to Ginny, Harry knew where he would be going.

They faced the front as more and more trainees hurried in to join them. Harry shook his head at the number, but then remembered something his trainers had told him yesterday. The Auror program was only formally three years; in practice, the Aurors put some trainees through a longer period of lessons and some through a shorter. They would wait to assign partners and end the training until a sufficiently large number were considered to be ready. If that meant some people got extra education, well, that did no harm as far as the Aurors were concerned.

Harry had heard that the selection process was somewhat mystical, but he didn’t think so, particularly when Aurors in scarlet robes—some of them people he recognized, some those he didn’t—entered the room through wide wooden doors without any kind of magical artifact like the Goblet of Fire or the Sorting Hat. They stood in front of the trainees, hands folded behind their backs, and studied them with hard faces.

Ginny gulped audibly. Harry squeezed her hand again and wished he could whisper a reassurance without looking unprofessional. If they had come this far, they wouldn’t be cast out of the program. The Aurors also saw no use in wasting time on someone who would never be what they were looking for.

Gradually, the trainees stopped filing in, the doors shut, and silence settled over the room. Auror Hitchens broke it, stepping forwards. His earrings swung as he jerked his head back and forth.

“Auror Ron Weasley.” He infused distaste into his words, Harry thought, as if there were two trainees born Weasley just to spite him. “Auror Donald Greyborn. Come forwards.”

Harry applauded as Ron and Greyborn made their way up to the front, partially because they would be a good match—Greyborn was calm and steady and would balance Ron’s temper—and partially because now he knew who his partner would be.

Sure enough, there was nothing mystical. The full Aurors simply gave Ron and Greyborn their new robes and made them swear an oath on their wands to uphold the laws of the wizarding world and hunt Dark wizards and witches.

Ginny leaned against him. Harry stroked her hair and listened as more names were called and more people went through the minor ritual. Neither his nor Ginny’s names had come up yet, but he was resigned. It was a huge group, much larger than he had thought, and included plenty of people he hadn’t trained with or even seen during his years in the program.

“Auror Harry Potter.”

Harry straightened, a sharp tingle making its way through his chest. The right to that name was something he had fought for for three years. Ginny giggled next to him, probably out of nervousness or amusement at the expression on his face, and then hushed.

“Auror Draco Malfoy.”

The bottom fell out of the world.

Harry turned his head, feeling as though it moved by slow ticks, like the hand on a watch. Ginny was gasping silently beside him, so wounded that she hadn’t even made a sound yet. Harry stroked her back automatically, but for the first time since their marriage, his priority wasn’t her. He needed to find—he needed to see—

And yes. There he was, looming up above the crowd, taller than Harry remembered, turning his head in a crown of pale light and staring at Harry in defiance, in contempt, in disbelief.

Draco Malfoy.

Harry knew his life had changed. He simply refused to accept it.

*

“There must be something you can do.”

Miriam Wellington, the Auror who had recruited Harry for the program and the one who he suspected of being in charge of choosing most of the partner teams, only smiled serenely and folded her hands on her desk. “I’m sorry, Auror Potter,” she said, emphasizing his title a little. “There’s nothing. The partnership decisions that we have made are final, at least until the time that a year has passed and we’ve been able to see that our choices definitely will not work.”

“But of course it won’t work,” Harry snapped, and then shut his mouth. He had intended to be as calm as Wellington always was and impress her with his rationality.

What had happened to that plan? Most of the time, he had no trouble in being as calm as he pleased. Ron and Hermione and Ginny had all complained in the last year that he was too unemotional if he was anything.

“Why not?” Wellington leaned forwards, frosty blue eyes bright for once, as if she was actually interested in his answer.

Harry reminded himself of what mattered here—which wasn’t his stupid curiosity—and forged ahead. “Auror Malfoy and I had a rivalry at school.” He was proud of himself for remembering that he had to give Malfoy a title too, now. “He personally injured or tried to injure several of my friends, and he disliked me for refusing his hand in friendship. I know that he won’t have forgiven that.”

“Have you asked him that?” Wellington asked levelly.

“What?” Harry stared at her. “Of course not! I’m working off common fucking sense, here.”

“Auror Potter.” Wellington looked more shocked and stern than angry. “You will not use such language to me.”

Harry lowered his head, feeling his cheeks burn. He was glad that no one besides Wellington was in the room. He hadn’t lost his temper like that in a long time.

Since the war, in fact.

What was it about Malfoy that could destabilize him like this?

Harry took a deep breath and lifted his gaze. If he was smart, if he was canny, he could use his outburst for the greater good, the way that he had used his own inability to feel passion for it. “I am sorry, Auror Wellington,” he said, with his best attempt at humility. “I didn’t mean to do that. But you can see why we can’t work together as partners. Even if Auror Malfoy has forgiven me, I’m not myself around him. I’m a bit childish, in fact.”

Wellington was silent, studying him so long that Harry expected questions. But she only asked him one, and then only after long minutes of a scrutiny so intense it hurt his face. “Do you know how we placed you together as partners?”

“No, Auror,” Harry said. He hesitated, then took a risk. “I had assumed I would be partners with my wife, since we worked so well together.”

“Skill is not the only measurement we use, though it is an important one.” Wellington placed her fingers together. “We study the ways that Aurors interact, fight, argue, and investigate in the challenges placed before you during your training. And we also look for your weaknesses.” She gave Harry a wry look. “I’m sure that you remember the interviews over the years.”

Harry nodded. He had been interviewed when he first entered the program, of course, but also many other times over the three years he’d been here. They had asked him searching questions and shallow ones, personal ones and irrelevant ones. Each interview had been different, never repeating the same pattern of questions, so he’d never been quite sure what they were looking for.

“The interviews help us determine your weaknesses,” Wellington said. “What you need, who you are dependent on, what would cause you to lose your temper.” She studied him again. “Until today, I’d never seen you lose yours.”

Harry shrugged. “Fighting a war reminds you what’s really important and what’s not,” he said simply.

“It doesn’t seem to have done much for your friend Weasley’s temper.”

“Ron’s different,” said Harry. He was tempted to ask why they hadn’t chosen Ron for him, if Ginny was impossible, but he had the feeling that Wellington was getting around to an answer, so he sat silent.

“Yes.” Wellington tapped her fingers together. “And the biggest weakness we have spotted in you, the biggest hole in your defenses and your personality, is that you lack passion.”

Harry froze. “Pardon?” he asked when he could speak. He hoped he would sound offended, not panicked.

Oh, God, someone noticed. What happens if they tell Ginny? What happens if she asks? What will I tell her when—

Harry fought the questions away. That hadn’t happened yet, and probably wouldn’t ever. He said evenly, “I would have thought the solution was to partner me with my wife, Auror.”

“Oh, no one questions your passion for her.” Wellington waved her hand, leaving Harry to breathe easily once again. “But in day-to-day life, one can’t miss it. You don’t pay as much attention as you should. You do certain things flawlessly, but like an automaton. Meanwhile, Malfoy is bored by the competition that we hand him. We think that you would be stirred by being partnered with him, driven, and he would find a person who would not bore him.”

Harry could see the logic. But he still thought it was faulty.

“That also sounds as if we could destroy each other, Auror, with all due respect,” he said firmly.

“I know,” Wellington said. “But we have chosen to take the risk. As I said, at the end of a year, if the partnership isn’t working, then we can make another choice and transfer you.”

Harry relaxed. He thought he could survive a year. Although, he did have to ask…

“What happens if Auror Malfoy tries to kill me before then?” he asked.

Wellington gave him a small smile. “If you have proof, then Auror Malfoy would be arrested, and of course the partnership would be dissolved,” she said. “We do not tolerate our Aurors attacking each other, no matter the personal dispute or insult.”

The warning in her eyes made Harry nod. He was protected against the worst Malfoy could do to him, and in the meanwhile, he would have to trust to the armor of his indifference to protect him from smaller dangers.

He was worried when he went home, though, for two reasons. First, an anxious Ginny would be waiting for him, and he didn’t think she would be satisfied by Wellington’s explanation.

Second, he still had no idea why the mere mention of working with Malfoy had infuriated him so much.

*

“But there must be something you can do.”

Harry put his arms around Ginny and held her close, murmuring into her hair. They were in the big drawing room that had been the main attraction for Harry when they bought this house. He liked the motion of a chamber as big as the Gryffindor common room, with places for lots of chairs and tables and couches and a huge fireplace that made them feel warm just coming in.

He knew he was thinking about the room to avoid thinking about Ginny. He would have to stop that.

“I’ve tried,” he said, while he thought about the fact that she had said “something you can do” and not “something we can do.” “I went to talk to Wellington. She said that they chose Malfoy for my partner because they think we complement each other.”

“What?” Ginny stepped away from him, the flush in her cheeks sudden and high. “That’s ridiculous. We complement each other.”

No, we don’t. I’m there, and you lean on me, and I let you.

It wasn’t a new thought, but it was shocking, when Ginny was so upset. Harry bit hard at his lips, shook his head at himself, and firmed his embrace. “I know. I told her Malfoy and I would probably kill each other.”

“And that didn’t convince her?” Ginny frowned and plucked at his robe. “I don’t understand. You’re important.”

And so are you, and so’s Malfoy, and all the other Aurors, Harry thought, but he knew Ginny wouldn’t see it that way.

“I tried,” he repeated. “Wellington said that they’ll make another decision in a year, but not before then, unless something drastic happens. If she won’t change her mind because of a direct appeal, I’m not sure what will make her change it.”

“Something has to.”

Harry looked at her uneasily. Ginny’s eyes were glittering and her mouth was clamped shut. The only time he’d seen her look like that, one of their trainers had accused her of cheating on the exams.

“We’ll keep asking,” he said, “but we may not break their deadlock.” He had to prepare Ginny for failure, he knew, since she often didn’t prepare herself. “How are you doing with Anna?”

Ginny shrugged without interest. “She’ll do all right, I reckon.” She’d been partnered with Anna Lebeck, a young, enthusiastic woman who Harry thought would make a good Auror. “But what are we going to do about their insanity? When do you have to meet him?”

“Tomorrow.” Harry turned to hang his cloak up on its peg, wishing they really could talk about something else. Ginny’s voice was like a needle prodding him in the back.

“Then it’ll be up to you,” Ginny said decisively. “Malfoy probably wants the chance to be an Auror, and he’ll be too scared to rebel. But if you do something disruptive enough, they’ll break up your partnership.”

Harry turned to stare at her. “What?”

“I want you away from him.” Ginny folded her arms as if she was cold. Harry thought she looked as though she was huddled against a fall of freezing rain. “Please, Harry. Anything you can do, anything it takes.”

Harry’s heart melted at the expression in her eyes, the way it always had. If Ginny was dependent on him, he thought, surely a large part of that was his own fault. And that meant it was his duty to tend to her, too, and make sure that she had what she needed to keep functioning.

Besides, it wasn’t as though he wanted to be partnered to Malfoy.

“I don’t want to do something that will get me thrown out of the Department,” he said. “And even if I tried something bad enough to make them break up the partnership, that doesn’t mean they would break up yours.” Ginny opened her mouth, but Harry held up his hand and then continued. “But I don’t think he’ll want to stay with me, either. I’ll try to talk to him, get him to agree to something. If we work informally with other people, and show that we’re better that way than if we worked apart, I think the Aurors will let us switch partners.”

Ginny smiled in a moment. “If you’re sure that will work,” she said.

“I’m not, but we’ll try it,” Harry said. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. He didn’t want to lie to her.

There was one great lie at the heart of his marriage: Ginny thought he felt the same overwhelming passion for her, the same crushing love, that she did for him. He didn’t, but he had promised that she would always be happy and want for nothing. It was time to keep that promise, no matter how difficult it was.

*

“Malfoy.”

The git was already in the office when Harry entered. He didn’t pretend not to hear Harry, but did hold up a hand so that he could finish reading the report he was looking at. Harry stood still, studying him, and wondered if Ginny would say that he was already giving in too easily.

Malfoy had indeed grown taller than Harry remembered; it wasn’t all shock from seeing him for the first time in years yesterday. But yes, his face was pointy, and his hair was still pale, if softer than before, so it looked like dandelion fluff. Harry was glad. It would make him easier to struggle with.

When Malfoy looked up at him, though, a shock passed through him. The eyes were different. Malfoy had a cold, pale clarity behind them, as though he knew exactly what he was capable of and no longer intended to take nonsense from anyone. Harry reckoned Auror training would make him that way.

“What did you want, Potter?” Malfoy’s voice was like his eyes. “We should get moving soon. We’ve been assigned a case already, and you haven’t read the report yet.”

“Listen, Malfoy,” Harry said, feeling awkward by comparison with the elegant, composed bastard, and clinging gladly to the sensation. It would make it easier for him to obey Ginny’s instructions. “I wanted to strike a bargain with you.”

Malfoy laughed, a sound like a shard of ice stabbing someone in the face. “What could you possibly have to offer me that I would want?”

Harry ground his teeth at the irritation that sound provoked, but told himself to play it calmly. “Freedom from me,” he said. “I suggest we work together just shoddily enough that they assign us new partners.”

Malfoy folded his hands behind his head and studied him instead of flying into a rage or agreeing immediately, the options Harry had thought most likely. Harry shuffled his feet under his gaze, and hated that, too.

“You dislike me that much?” Malfoy asked. “Even though we haven’t worked together yet?”

Harry shook his head. He had forgotten most of his griefs and grudges from Hogwarts, though he thought being around Malfoy would remedy that right quick. “I want to be partnered with my wife that much.”

Malfoy sneered at him. “I’ve watched you at practice,” he said. “She’s a substandard Auror. You, as much as it pains me to admit this, are not, or they would never have darted to partner you with me.” He made that sound like a statement of fact. “You don’t want to be with her. She’ll drag you down.”

“Don’t say that about Ginny!” Harry snapped, and suddenly it was as if no years had passed since he saw Malfoy. His blood was up and surging through his veins, and his hands curled themselves into fists without his permission.

Malfoy sat up in his chair, but didn’t reach for his wand, the way Harry thought he should. “Why not? It’s true.”

“She works just as hard as anyone else,” Harry said, and moved one sliding step closer to Malfoy. His wand was drawn. When had that happened? He shook his head sharply and reminded himself that he wanted to break apart from Malfoy, not be kicked out of the Aurors himself for attacking a partner. “She casts her spells with as great a force as anyone else.”

“True love is indeed blind,” Malfoy said with a mocking smile, and Harry was glad that he didn’t know the reason those words stopped Harry cold. “Open your eyes, Potter. She misses the target more often than not. She missed a lot of the classes, for that matter. She subdues suspects with too much eagerness. She’s the kind who could justify going rogue to herself and then be indignant when she got arrested for breaking the Auror Code of Conduct.”

Harry stared at Malfoy. He didn’t want to remember the way that Ginny had tackled one of the other trainees who was playing a criminal during their last exercise and broken her arm. “And you care about things like that?”

“Yes,” Malfoy said. “It was why I made up my mind to accept you as my partner. You’ll run within the law. You’ll obey the rules, at least as long as someone doesn’t hurt an innocent in front of you. And Aurors, lucky us, are empowered to run after and hurt people who hurt innocents.” He sneered, but Harry had the feeling it was an automatic expression, one that hid what he was really thinking.

“Obeying the rules is important to you,” Harry said, rapping his fingers against his hip and trying to ignore the fact that Ginny would be betrayed, if she knew about this conversation, because he was talking about this instead of trying to defend her. “Why?”

Malfoy looked at him steadily. “You know what happened to my family after the war?”

“Fines,” Harry said. “House arrest.”

The tone he said it in implied that it was less than they’d deserved, and Malfoy’s eyes flashed once. But unless it was his voice growing colder, he didn’t seem to show the effect on him. “Yes. But more than that, we were warned that this was our last chance. Our contacts in the Ministry are exhausted. My father’s reputation can’t protect us anymore. If we do something else that’s outside the law, we’re all going to Azkaban, and it’ll be for life.”

In spite of himself, Harry winced. He remembered the way Sirius had looked when he mentioned Azkaban. He remembered the way Dementors felt.

Malfoy seemed to see something of that in his face, because he relaxed. “Yes. Well, I wanted to show willing, and I want to do the best I can to get my family out from under that hanging sentence. So I became an Auror. And if I have to have a partner who breaks the rules, I want one with a reputation that means we won’t feel the consequences.”

Harry nodded. “That makes sense.”

Malfoy cocked his head. “You’re more intelligent away from your wife’s side that I’d realized. Of course, she probably keeps you there because she doesn’t want you to outshine her. Thinking with your dick means you won’t.”

Harry gritted his teeth, and wondered why he had bothered asking for Malfoy’s explanation and feeling sympathy. The bastard would never appreciate it.

“I could vouch for you to the Ministry,” he said. “I didn’t speak up enough during your family’s trial, and I owe your mother a lot. Then you could have a different partner but the Aurors would know it wasn’t your fault that our partnership didn’t work out.”

Malfoy abruptly surged to his feet. Harry, startled, tried to step back, but there wasn’t much room in the office, and Malfoy confronted him without effort.

He stared down his nose, Harry saw, staring up. It was unfair that Malfoy was still taller than him. Harry knew he couldn’t expect his starvation during childhood to have no consequences, but he’d got used to being taller than most people except Ron in his immediate circle. Malfoy loomed.

“I want you as my partner,” Malfoy said, very softly, so that someone pausing right behind the door would have trouble hearing him. “You’re the one with the reputation and the skill at Defense Against the Dark Arts. You’re the one who’s mellowed in the last few years, they tell me, so that you no longer snap over every little thing the way you did in school. But you seem upset now. Were the rumors lies?”

“Rumor is always a lie,” Harry said, trying to recover himself. “And don’t you see? If I get angry at you so easily, then it’s all the more reason we shouldn’t be partners.”

Malfoy gave him a darting, lizard-like smile. “You don’t have to like me,” he said. “You only have to work with me. And I’ve put up with a lot during the past three years. You’ll have to make yourself intolerable before I give you up.”

He slipped back to his desk and tossed the report he’d been reading to Harry as if nothing had happened. “Finish reading this, and we can go out.”

Harry caught it with one hand—some reflexes were still alive in him although he hadn’t played Quidditch in a long time—and stared at Malfoy. He only waited in his chair with a faintly bored expression, one cheek propped on his hand. The intense man with the propensity for shoving himself in people’s faces from moments ago might never have existed.

Slowly, Harry opened the file. He would just have to find some way to mess up this case that they were working on, he told himself, some way that couldn’t be traced back to him but would get their partnership dissolved. That was all.

*

“How did it go?” Ginny was dancing up to him the moment he came through the door, her eyes so wide and bright that they reminded Harry of the candles he’d had burning the first night they slept together.

Stalling for time, Harry hung up his cloak and then turned around and took her in his arms. Breathing in the scent of her hair helped to steady him. This was his real world, the center and heart of his being.

“Harry?” Ginny wrenched herself backwards and stood with her hands on his forearms, looking at him impatiently. “Are you still partners with Malfoy, or did you manage to win free?”

Harry shook his head. “Malfoy refused,” he said. “He wants to stay in the Auror program and not break the rules because that would make people look at his family with more suspicion. If something happens between us, it will be all my fault.”

Those simple words hid so much.

On the other hand, Harry had no way to tell Ginny about the way he’d fallen into stride with Malfoy as they were leaving the Ministry, the perfect way their steps matched, without thought—at least on his part. From the amused, sidelong glance Malfoy gave him, he had probably noticed and thought Harry was doing it on purpose. But Harry didn’t figure that out until later.

How could he explain the way they questioned the witnesses to what looked like a simple jewelry robbery on the surface, but which hummed with darker magic underneath? Malfoy took the lead, while Harry loomed in the background and let the witnesses see his scar. And then he spoke to a few people who glared at Malfoy. Malfoy wasn’t upset about that. He lounged against the nearest building and gave a cool smirk that disconcerted them. One person let slip more than she intended, and they found themselves on the trail of the thief—sure enough, a Dark wizard, Malfoy said knowledgeably, when he tested the air with a certain spell and found a residue there that formed as silver dust on the tip of his wand.

Harry should have made a joke then about how and why Malfoy knew that. He would never have passed up the chance in school. He wanted to say that he hadn’t now because he was more mature than that, and he was caught up in the excitement of his first case.

Neither was true. Or not entirely true.

They’d cornered the Dark wizard in another jewelry shop, which he owned. And then, while Malfoy distracted him with “innocent” questions that the wizard thought were an offer of alliance, Harry crept in the back way and felled him with a Stunner.

All neat, all swift, all wrapped up within the first day. Harry ought not to feel so good about it, though, because this was a simple case and he knew that other Aurors solved cases faster than that all the time.

But how was he to tell Ginny about the silent moment in which he and Malfoy had stood over the limp thief and exchanged slow glances, or the smile that lingered at the corners of Malfoy’s lips, or the little nod that he gave Harry before he said, “You’ll do, Potter?”

“You’ll have to do something else, then.” Ginny’s mouth twisted. “We’ll think of something.”

Harry put thoughts of Malfoy out of his head, and sat down to have a nice dinner with his wife and listen to her plots and plans. Of course he wanted to partner with her. They had planned on it all through their training, and it was ridiculous for the Aurors to take away their chance to both live and work together.

How could he explain the way his heart had bounded from that simple nod of Malfoy’s, had given a knock against the inside of his chest that was like the proverbial knock of opportunity?