[one-shots]: Lord of Light, 1/2, PG, for hd_parallel

[lomonaaeren]

Title: Lord of Light
Rating: PG
Warnings: Profanity, AU, angst.
Disclaimer: These characters belong to J. K. Rowling and her associates. No disrespect is intended.
Beta(s): L. and K.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, former Draco/OFC, background Sirius/Remus
Wordcount: 19,500
Author’s Notes: Written for the hd_parallel AU fest, for khasael This story’s AU aspects hopefully make sense! khasael, I’ve tried to include your requests for Harry to have a fun job, for Draco to be oblivious to Harry’s feelings for him, and for an in-character Luna. Thanks to my betas.
Summary: Harry has a gift--a gift that let him defeat Voldemort and has made his career since. He’s used to surprises. But when Draco Malfoy summons him to help his daughter five years after Harry last saw him, Harry learns that he might not be used to this kind.



Lord of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Potter?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where is that?"

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

"How do you do that?"

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

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

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

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

Harry smiled. "Smart girl."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry nodded. "Really bad."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

There was nothing he could do.

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

There was an answer.

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

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

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

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

Voldemort was going to kill his friends.

Ron and Hermione were going to die.

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

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

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

No!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything after that...

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

"Malfoy? Malfoy, of all people?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sorry I’m late."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry thought he knew how to approach Malfoy, now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Two.