FIC: The Lazarus Curse IIIb

[gaiaanarchy]

PART IIIa

Draco Malfoy stalked through the empty halls of the castle, feeling righteous and yet out of place. From day one, Hogwarts had been both his legacy and his bane. Under Albus Dumbledore, it was an honor twisted into a curse - filled with mudbloods and teaching methods that shunned the old ways and the ways of his family. And yet, among the Slytherins, Draco had felt at home. Slytherin was ripe with both ambition and eager followers and in that deep dungeon, Draco had flourished. But his house was a temple of defeat these days, and he himself was an untouchable - hated by those who still supported the cause for his betrayal and feared by all the others for his deep involvement with the dark arts and the mark of guilt by association.

Used to the empty echoing corridors of Malfoy Manor and the poised isolation that had earned him leadership in those early days, Draco did not mind the solitude. It was only that now, the regal history of the common room seemed dreary and dull - all tradition and rules and power structures left forever unchanging. Draco wasn’t a brave (and idiotic) Gryffindor or a bookworm in search of knowledge without power, and he wasn’t loyal if it didn’t suit him, but he’d seen what came of the old ways - his parents had died for greed for power and fear of an ally they could neither trust nor love. He’d tasted freedom, if only because he had nothing left to lose, and change seemed inevitable.

If anything, he had outgrown the common room, and Slytherin itself. The only time he felt a part of anything was high on his broom, the crowd cheering in the background as he searched for the snitch. And yet, the job of the Seeker was still a solitary one.

Draco sighed, ducking away from the library, where Granger was most likely be lying in wait to ambush him with more questions about the Dark Mark. Just because he’d ended up fighting on their side, it by no means meant that they were friends, or even well acquainted enough for the mudblood to assume that he was a walking Dark-Arts dictionary. The truth was, when Draco received his Dark Mark, he’d had little choice in the matter. He rubbed it absently, remembering the searing pain of it burning its way into his flesh. The Dark Lord could have made the process painless, Draco was sure - it was a mark of the things wrong with their movement that he did not bother to.

Draco found himself wandering up into the towers, always to the corridor he knew led up the stairs to the Gryffindor common room - high amid sunshine and clouds. Potter was most likely there. Even though Draco was largely outcast, even he had heard the rumors of a mysterious man who had been seen with Potter all around the grounds - one who looked disturbingly similar.

Draco could care less about the melodrama that was Potter’s celebrity life, but he had to admit that even he was curious about this man, and what was so special about him that had caused the headmistress to bend her own goody-goody rules.

Passing the corridor yet again, Draco made his way towards the large painting of the bowl of fruit and the room of requirement. He no longer spent his days and nights there, experimenting with magical cabinets and fretting over what would happen if he did not fulfill the task set to him by the Dark Lord. Instead, he would spend the days requiring any number of things - a room of baths, golden scented pools even better than the prefect’s bathroom, or a room of windows where he could look out over the grounds, without burning his pale skin. Sometimes the room was filled with books - embarrassingly, he had become fond of muggle literature, with its many vicarious adventures - anything to take him away from Hogwarts, this useless year and all of the thing he’d become.

What would he wish for today? Not the library. Perhaps he would wish for a room full of spyglasses, so that he might find out more about the mysterious man and what he was doing with Potter. Draco was busy contemplating it, when he rounded the corner to find someone already there. It was a man, the age of a teacher (though Draco had never seen him before). He was slightly overweight, but in a broad and solid sort of way that reminded Draco of Goyle. But, even though the man seemed to be yelling at some figure in one of the paintings (something about gossiping and how rude it was to watch people having sex), Draco recognized a spark of intelligence in the man’s intensely blue eyes. Had Draco still been in the position to command obedience, this man might make a fine minion.

“You, kid! Come over here.” The stranger snapped his fingers. Not such a fine minion, then.

Draco leveled his most haughty, commanding glare. Walking past the man and wishing for a place to hide and make it all go away.

“Wait!” the man shouted. “What’d you do?”

Draco ignored him.

“You walked past and there was an energy spike in the room behind this wall. How did you do that? Do you know how to get in there? It’s not one of those fireplace things, is it? Because that’s even worse than a wormhole.”

Draco slowed his pace. The man knew about the room, but he hadn’t accessed it. How did he do that? Not even Dumbledore had known about the room.

“See, now when I walk past it,” the man paced, idly, “nothing happens. But you . . . what are you waiting for, an embossed invitation?”

He was waving some sort of flat translucent tile now, motioning for Draco to continue. Maybe it was a form of crystal ball. Though divination seemed as reliable as a bag full of leprechauns, the prophecy the Dark Lord had become so obsessed with did turn out to be true.

“And if I help you, what’s in it for me?”

The man appeared baffled by the response. “The thrill of discovery? The honor of having contributed, even in a minor lab-rat kind of way, to the research that will someday win me a Nobel Prize? I don’t know. Just shut up like a good little boy and walk in front of the wall.”

Draco frowned. “What’s a Nobel Prize?”

The man through his hands up in the air. “What are they teaching you here? I thought England was supposed to have an excellent educational system. Grodin, that filthy liar.”

When Draco passed, he again wished for a room to hide from this horrible man.

“There!” the man exclaimed. “It happened again! More intense this time.”

And, despite himself, Draco found that he was interested - more interested than he had been in any of his useless subjects. He moved over to stand behind the man and look at what he was seeing in the crystal tile. And sure enough, there was a map, like some of the ones he had seen drawn on parchment. Only on this one, the room of requirement showed up. Not even the map he and Potter had used to break into Hogwarts for the final battle showed the room.

“Well don’t just stand there,” the man barked. “Do whatever it is you just did again!”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” Draco replied, crossing his arms across his chest primly. “I’ve killed, you know,” he preened, even though it made him sick to his stomach just thinking about it. “I could kill you too.”

The man just snapped his fingers some more and said, “Yeah, yeah, and I blew up five sixths of a solar system. Now will you stop being such a spoiled brat and walk in front of the wall?”

Draco rolled his eyes, though something told him that the man wasn’t joking about the solar system. “If I do this, you’ll tell me where you got that crystal ball and show me how it works.”

“Crystal ball?” the man squawked. “Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me that you people believe in astrology too.”

“Do we have a deal?”

The man huffed, looking put upon. “Yes, fine, we have a deal. Now, please, my time is very valuable. I don’t know long I’m going to be able to spend here before Radek blows up the city or Caldwell starts another war or something happens and I need to find out as much as possible before I go back.”

The man’s voice was loud and grating, and Draco hated being ordered around, so it was easy to think about wanting to get away a third time, getting the room to appear. The man seemed incredibly impressed by that, eyes sparkling and hands flying as he rambled on about energy and Zed-someone and an ATA something and several other things that Draco couldn’t possibly hope to follow as he threw open the door and looked around at a quiet room, filled with pillows and a small fountain, shelves of relaxing books and a hammock or two hanging from the ceiling.

“So, who the bloody hell are you, anyway?” Draco asked, upset that the room seemed to have no problem letting in the man that Draco wanted to be hiding from.

“Rodney McKay. Doctor Rodney McKay.” The man didn’t stick out his hand for Draco to shake, instead focusing on the crystal tile and what it seemed to tell him about the room.

“I’m Draco Malfoy.” Draco was surprised when his surname gained no special attention from McKay. Then again, America was a long way off.

McKay stared down at his tile in astonishment. “Now the energy has dissipated. Almost as if it was potential energy, discharged when we opened the door.”

“Well, it’s the Room of Requirement. It’s already manifested itself. Why would it need more energy after that?”

“Manifest?”

For a man who seemed to know so much, Rodney sure was slow on the uptake. “Look, it’s simple. You walk in front of it three times wishing for something and it becomes what you require.” He took the man by the arm and dragged him back outside, watching the door seal up before walking back and forth, thinking about wanting to work on his magical cabinet, like he had for nearly a year. “Last time, I wished for a place to hide. Now, I’m looking for a place to hide something.”

Rodney looked skeptical, but followed, keeping his eyes on the crystal. This time, when Draco opened the door, he gaped. “But it’s bigger.”

“A lot of Hogwarts students have needed a place to hide things.” Draco declined to go into what he’d used the room for.

“It’s a replicator . . . the Star Trek kind, not the evil machines trying to kill us kind.”

“Whatever you say,” Draco replied. “So, does it look bigger on your map?”

“Of course it does. I just don’t see how it can do that without some kind of power source.”

Draco bit his lip, not sure what to tell this man. Hogwarts and its teachers were all about methods, understanding how to make a potion or perform a spell. Even subjects like numerology or ancient runes dealt only with component elements - assembling more basic things. But nobody here seemed concerned with why. Students weren’t taught how to come up with something new, and the only way to go further with one’s education was an apprenticeship with a great wizard, who most likely just made you mash up his roots and roast his eye of newt while telling you that you could just feel your way into a new spell by some invisible path etched into the fabric of the world, like a channel.

It was Dark wizards that wanted to know why. They wanted to take the world apart and put it back together newer and better. They wanted to cheat death and know all the secrets of life, if only for their own gain. And historically, they were the only ones who bothered with the origins of magic - why the majority of humankind didn’t have it and what it was exactly. But Draco knew some of the secrets (what his father had told him before his death). The question remained - was this man worthy of knowing them?

“You know something, don’t you,” McKay accused, poking Draco in the chest with an insistent finger. “Not that I can’t probably get John to tell me.”

“John?”

“Oh, sorry, James to you people. You know, Harry’s . . . father.”

Father? “Harry’s father is dead,” Draco replied. For as long as he’d known him, everyone was feeling sorry for Harry Potter, the poor little orphan boy who grew up among muggles (well, Draco felt a little bad about that part) and always sacrificing, never expecting anything from anybody in return. Well, at least Harry had some family, despite the fact that they were muggles. At least he had someone to care for him . . . and now his father, apparently. Draco had no one.

“Yes, well . . . dead is sometimes a less than permanent condition in our line of work. There’s this guy, Jackson, who practically dies or disappears every time he sneezes.” This was dangerous talk, so soon after everything that happened with the Dark Lord. But Draco found himself drawn to McKay and his almost casual mention of the things that had nearly torn the wizarding world apart.

“You work for the Department of Mysteries then . . . or the American equivalent.”

“Something like that,” Rodney replied. “Though for the record, I’m Canadian.”

“It’s that easy to just come back?’

“Well, not easy. Lots of meditation, clear blue skies. Helps if you have a friend up there, if you know what I mean. But, hey, I almost did it. Had my numbers in the zone. To Ascend, I mean. Coming back down is more of a mystery.”

Draco was leaning forward eagerly now, biting his lip. This man understood everything that the Dark Lord had spent a lifetime searching for, and he was going to reveal it, as casual as if they were discussing Quidditch over a round of butterbeer. “But if you were there, why didn’t you?”

Rodney shrugged. “It wasn’t for me. I mean all the mediating and the non-interference and the sound of one hand clapping. There’s so much to do here, I don’t know if I could sit around with those naval-gazers and miss out on living. That’s the catch-22 - you can have infinite power, but you can’t use it. And really, what’s the point in that?”

Draco frowned. He didn’t know. He’d was as afraid of death as the next man, probably more than a Gryffindor, but he’d become a Death Eater because that’s what his father was - and unlike the other bright-eyed students, he was fixed under the watchful eye of the Dark Lord. If he had any doubts or dared disobey, then his death was certain. And even that, in the end, hadn’t stopped him.

“Well, that’s enough of that,” Rodney remarked, looking back down at his tile. “Interesting . . . the room still exists even in a state of potential, it just closes down the frequency that serves as a query . . . now if I can force it to . . .” he tapped at the crystal with his fingers. “There. Ask for something else. No . . . wait . . .” A chocolate cake appeared on a nearby table. “And this place is too cluttered, require something else.”

Draco thought about a place to practice his Quidditch and the room opened up, bigger than even the vast storage space.

“You just pulled us into a pocket of subspace . . .” Cake was spilling down Rodney’s robes now in an utterly unpolished way. “Just like . . . oh my god, a ZedPM.”

The room transformed around them yet again, walls full of transparent parchments with scrolling numbers, terraces and platforms filled with crystal keyboards and long wires like roots of a plant system. Rodney was pulling out another tile from the bag on his shoulder and attaching it to one of the wires. “So I could wish for anything, then?” Rodney asked. “Because I could sure use . . .”

Draco shook his head. “You can’t remove anything from the room that you didn’t bring in with you. The cake came from your own energy stores. It won’t sustain you.”

Rodney seemed to deflate, even as he was tapping away at the tile. Draco looked over his shoulder to find a vast display of words and numbers and ruins, Rodney entering them in even faster than a quick-quotes quill.

“Of course, the space is contained. It’s like being insidea ZedPM . . . except in our own universe, the energy is theoretically contained, we just can’t tap into it because it’s impossible to create a barrier that will turn background energy into potential energy.”

That was the most concise explanation of deep magical theory that Draco had ever heard. But then again, the books in the restricted section were all incredibly dense. “But aren’t we tapping into the background energy all the time? I mean everything in the universe is made up of energy . . . like floating in a sea, and objects and solid things are like the waves floating on top. We can change the shape of the waves, and we can draw up water from the sea, but we can’t actually create energy.”

Rodney looked at Draco, gaping, before vaulting to his feet. “So there is no power source. The things in the castle and in the alleyway, that’s why the energy signatures were all over the place, you’re actively using zero point energy . . . but what about exotic particles? Or maybe you’re using those too . . . considering.”

“Well, you know that not all magic does use the energy around us . . . well, only to kick start it. That’s why we can transform a human into a animal and an animal into a teacup, but not the other way around, because it takes too much energy, and a wand is only like a bucket, not a bay - we can’t take up that much energy from the ocean.”

“Yes, yes,” the man snapped his fingers. “If you must put it in the most unscientific terms as possible. E=mc2, yes, yes I know . . . matter is energy and energy is matter, but when you break the bonds and reform them, you don’t get a nuclear reaction . . . you contain it somehow . . .”

Draco sighed, exasperated and not even sure why he wanted this man to understand so desperately, but things were coming together, even now, because despite all these wishy-washy wizards and their belief that progress is infinite and anyone is capable of anything and magic is simply a skill to be mastered, he knew that there were laws to the universe and the universe itself was built block by block like this great castle and if he just knew the rules . . . maybe then he’d know where he stood in all of it. This man, McKay, was one of the rare people in Draco’s experience who understood. Hell, the only other one that dared even dream of it was the Dark Lord himself.

“Isn’t that what a wand does?” Draco asked.

“You mean it’s not just a stick?” McKay frowned.

Draco felt his draw drop, completely outside of his control. “Wait, you’re a muggle.” There was no way a man who understood so much . . . who could manipulate the Room of Requirement with just a crystal tile, could possibly be no more than an ignorant muggle.

“You say that as though it’s a bad thing.”

“That’s because it is!” Draco exclaimed. How could this man not understand that? Not having magic . . . Draco almost felt sorry for him.

“Yes, it’s so terrible to have science and rationality, and physics and actually understand what we’re doing instead of just waving our sticks and making it so. I mean, how are you ever supposed to improve upon anything if you don’t even know how to make it in the first place, eh? Given a significant level of technological progress, we can achieve all that you have and more, but actually understand how we got there.”

Draco frowned, suddenly unsure of himself. McKay’s offers of explanations and improvements were tempting, and he had demonstrated his skill with the Room and everything, but he was still only a muggle how much could he really know?

“Besides, I’ve had the gene therapy, so I can do all the same things as all of you. I even levitated a leaf today.”

“That’s first-year stuff. That means even an eleven-year-old could do it.”

“Yes, well, considering I didn’t even know magic existed until a few days ago, I’d say that’s pretty good,” Rodney huffed.

“So, somebody messed up and you never received your letter?” Draco asked. He supposed it was okay, if the man was really a wizard subject to a bureaucratic mix-up. He’d still be muggle-born, but now that Draco submitted to speaking to Granger, he supposed that he could talk to McKay without feeling any more tainted than he already did.

“No, no, I received the gene therapy.”

At Draco’s blank look, McKay threw his hands up in the air. “Well, if they’re teaching you astrology, than I guess there’s not enough time for actually useful information like genetics. Why would there be? Look, who you are . . . or, rather your physical characteristics, are determined by your genes. It’s largely voodoo, but you can think of genes as sort of a map for how your body develops. To grossly simplify for your clearly deprived educational state . . . basically, your parents each contribute half of the instructions needed to build you. Seeing as how your one of these ‘pure-bloods’ or some nonsense like that, you received the ‘wizarding’ gene from both sides of the family, like John.” Draco felt vindicated. So there was an objective reason why pure-bloods were better.

But then McKay continued. “Now, that doesn’t guarantee that you have a strong expression of it. It’s recessive and you’re all are pretty inbred, so there’s a slight chance that someone in the general populous could receive two copies and express the gene as strongly, even stronger if they also inherit the string of secondary genes that help control the ATA protein markers. Now, unlike you, I wasn’t born with the gene, but had some of the secondary markers that allowed the gene therapy to work on me.”

Wait, that couldn’t be. McKay was made a wizard. “And how’d you get the therapy? Did someone give you their magic?”

“No! What kind of simplistic . . . . No. You yourself said that people don’t have magic, they just have the ability to influence energy. It’s not zero sum. I received a copy of John’s gene, through one of our lesser muggle therapies. Other people too. So being a wizard is nothing other than drawing the right cards out of the genetic grab bag. In theory, we could make every baby born from now on a wizard, if we altered the secondary markers before they had a chance to develop. While you wizards have absolutely no idea what makes you what you are.” He grinned smugly.

Draco had no idea muggles could be so arrogant. But then again, he’d never really met any before.

“In fact, we can probably figure out exactly what it is that allows you to do magic. Do you have a wand?” McKay said it as though it gave him a bad taste in his mouth.

Draco shook his head. That was what stung most of all. If it had been up to Draco, he would have retired to the Manor, away from the glares and the whispers behind his back and the useless teachings. But one of the conditions of him not ending up in Azkaban was a trial period, with wand use permitted only under supervision (and wasn’t it a bitter satisfaction knowing that the Wizengamot hadn’t trusted Potter’s word enough to grant Draco a full pardon).

“Oh . . . well, that’s okay,” McKay pulled one out of his pocket, holding it upside-down. “John thought I’d break his or something and had one sent by owl. What a ridiculously inefficient (and unsanitary) system, by the way. If you guys can just pop around from place to place or hop across oceans using fireplaces, then why bother with disease-carrying birds?”

“Oh, and I suppose the muggle system is better.”

“It’s certainly more organized. And an email will beat an owl any day. Now just go ahead and do a . . . operate that, and I’ll just be over here, taking readings,” he pointed to one of the crystal instruments he’d ‘required.’

Draco smiled. He could stun McKay, then grab his wand and escape. But escape where? They’d look for him back at the manor, or anywhere really. He could brew some polyjuice potion and go into hiding, he supposed, but the difficult ingredients were monitored now - a lesson learned from the war. He could escape abroad, but in the end, any escape from his past would also be an escape from magic, and feeling the power of the wand singing in his hand, every fiber aligned to his will, Draco knew that magic was the one thing in his life that he could never leave behind.

“What spell shall I do?” he asked, because all of his life there had been distinctions between charms and spell and transfigurations, light magic and dark magic and love magic.

“It doesn’t matter. Something that uses zero point energy.”

Draco grinned; something Dark, then. He’d missed the secret thrill of something forbidden. “Legilimens!”

He’d expected Rodney’s thoughts to be open and unguarded, unfamiliar with the concept of occulmency entirely. But though the thoughts were an open book, they were a kaleidoscope of scattered musings and numbers, foreign terms and images flashing by so fast that Draco couldn’t possibly understand them. Even the Dark Lord would not have been able to penetrate the mysteries found here.

He was still reeling from the brief contact when Rodney declared, “Hmm . . . well there was an interesting spike when you . . . er . . . swished and flicked. But I didn’t see anything happen. The creation of matter . . . or maybe you could blow something up. Something over there.” Rodney pointed to a corner where several porcelain busts of very scary-looking long-haired, cat-eyed monsters appeared. Clearly, the man had issues.

Dazed, Draco complied.

“That’s it!” Rodney exclaimed, a second later. “Something in the device is actually cutting through a part of the background energy, storing it up and releasing it - like a dam, building up water pressure. But I don’t know how it can do that without creating an energy field itself, which it can’t without a power source.”

Draco frowned. “You do know what wands are made out of, right?”

“Wood?”

Draco sighed in exasperation. Talking to Rodney was simultaneously like talking to an encyclopedia and a toddler. “No. The wood helps mediate the interaction with between the wizard and the wand’s core, but the thing that does the magic is the core itself - made out of some part of a magical creature; unicorn hair or phoenix tail feather or dragon’s heartstring.”

Rodney gulped. “You mean there are actually dragons.”

Draco shrugged. “Department of Magical Creatures keeps them under control. I suppose the reason why we use them to make wands is because they can naturally manipulate your so-called zero point energy - unicorns especially. My father used to say that for a unicorn, moving through life was like swimming through a sea of infinite potential - that’s why unicorn’s blood can bring you back from the brink of death.”

“Hmmm . . . are there any other objects that can draw energy like this?”

Draco thought about it. “There are other things that are like wands, but . . . other than objects that store magical energy, everything else will lose its magic if used enough, without taking energy from the user.”

Rodney appeared excited then. “Can you take me to some of the devices that store energy?”

Draco nodded slowly, fiddling in his pocket to figure out if he still had the key.

Minutes later, in the musty dark of the Potion’s store-room, Rodney dryly noted, “I’m going to have to teach you the definition of the word device aren’t I?”

<<<>>>

Harry found himself grinning and laughing for the countless time that day, which was strange, because not so long ago, he was positive that he’d never smile again. But here he was, sailing through the clouds on his new Firedragon broom, his father beside him, laughing as he used some downright dirty tactics to sneak ahead of Harry and grab the practice snitch. Harry was so busy smiling that he could almost forget that he was supposed to be angry at his father for never giving him this as a kid.

“I haven’t done this in years,” Dad remarked, slowing and flying backwards so they could talk, the snitch held firmly in one hand.

“Yeah, go ahead, rub it in,” Harry teased, though in a way it was a relief to have someone who could really challenge him as a seeker. The Boy Who Lived, the Youngest Seeker in a Century . . . it was nice to just be a kid playing a pick-up game with his dad.

“Hey, flying airplanes is a lot more complicated than this . . . plus I’m used to combat situations. Hey . . . maybe when you’re done with school, I can take you up sometime. It’s not like a broom, or that flying car I heard you crashed into a tree.” Harry knew what James and Professor McGonagall had talked about then. “But there’s something thrilling about knowing that you’re being held in the air by nothing more than muggle ingenuity.” Dad extended the invitation in that aw-shucks almost shy way that had surprised Harry so much at first but was now becoming just another part of dad.

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Harry replied, while desperately trying not to get his hopes up. This felt like that one glorious moment when Sirius had asked him to come live with him, before Wormtail escaped and ruined everything. But with his father right there,his smile as wide as Harry’s, it was hard to remember that everyone who Harry had ever grown to think of as family was taken away from him. Even the most heartfelt promise might not work out in the end.

“And the puddlejumpers too. They respond to your mind just like a broom, but they can go underwater and into space - inertial dampeners so you can fly at speeds you wouldn’t believe, plus weapons and room for passengers. I bet you’d be a natural.”

“But I thought you said the puddlejumpers were on . . . Atlantis.” It was still hard to believe - it sounded like a muggle action movie: a military base in another galaxy.

“Well, I was thinking . . . I know it’ll be hard to convince the IOA, but I think that General O’Neill will pull some strings for me and I um . . . I thought that maybe . . . after you graduate . . . maybe you’d like to come stay with me for a while, on Atlantis.”

Harry almost lost control of his broom, wanting to reach out and hug his father. He had to settle for squeezing his hand instead. “You’d really want that?”

“Well, it’d be dangerous, even if you stayed in the city, but I . . . you’re the only real family I have and Atlantis is . . . it’s better than magic. And I want to share that with you.”

“Then, I would love to come.”

“Yeah?” Dad grinned almost stupidly.

“Yeah,” Harry replied, taking a moment to absorb the bright blue sky and the smile on his father’s face and the fact that he was going to travel with him across the universe to a flying city floating on the sea.

“Hey,” Dad whispered, after a while, “wanna see something cool?”

Harry nodded, and his father pulled out the snitch, letting it float a little ways away from him before reaching out and snatching it again and again. And just like that, Harry’s smile faded into a frown, remembering Snape’s memory from the pensieve and how this same man had played with the snitch so arrogantly, taunting at the same time he tried to impress Harry’s mother. “You did that to try to impress mom,” Harry accused.

His father stopped, not fully catching the change in mood and smiling wistfully. “I did a lot of stupid things to try to impress your mother. I broke half the bones in my body trying to use an angelicus potion to sprout wings and serenade her at her window. Sirius suggested the idea, the bastard.”

“It’s a wonder she fell for it,” Harry spat out, curious as ever about how he’d ever won her over after he’d behaved like such an arrogant prick in Snape’s memory.

“You know, I always wondered the same thing. I can tell you when she did, though.”

“When did she?” Harry was curious, despite himself.

“It was near the end of our sixth year and I’d pretty much given up on her. I was even dating another girl, a Ravenclaw whose name I don’t even remember. Moony was convinced that Lily was jealous, of course, but I didn’t listen. She was still always angry at me for acting as though the rules didn’t apply to me and I’d stopped caring, so when Hagrid asked . . . wait, I’m surprised Hagrid never told you this story.”

“You were friends with Hagrid?” Harry asked, mesmerized, even though he’d known that it was Hagrid who delivered him to the Dursley’s on Sirius’ flying motorbike.

“He was young then, only a few years older than me, but already groundskeeper. Most of the kids our age didn’t want anything do with him, but I liked him. Fifth year, he caught me running through the forest in my deer form and he understood that sometimes I just wanted to be a deer, so he negotiated with some of the other forest creatures and kept an eye out for me. So, you know Hagrid, if it’s ugly and untamable and just plain nasty, he thinks it’s a poor misunderstood creature that should be kept as a family pet.”

Harry nodded. “Tell me about it. He went though a dragon, a giant spider, a hippogriff, a load of blast-ended skrewts, and a giant while I was here.”

Dad chuckled, bobbing up and down on his broom now, just floating high in the sky facing Harry. “Yes, well, this time he’d adopted a Chimera, a female one about to give birth, actually. It was out in the forest ‘all alone and terrified’ and he thought that as a deer I could find it and somehow convince it to come back to his cabin where he could tend to it. I didn’t want the thing to die, but I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of making it do anything it didn’t want to do either. But, of course when I did find it, it wasn’t distracted by giving birth, but on the prowl for a post-labor snack. I got a little torn up, but by the time I’d managed to subdue it, the snake-end had managed to bite the baby. It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s apparently what they do, and by ‘tend to’ Hagrid actually meant - keep from killing its own young. So, I brought the thing back to Hagrid’s cabin, and Lily was there - apparently she wanted to know where I went every time I sneaked out. She helped Hagrid with my wounds and she was really quiet. I thought I’d just lost any chance I had with her, but then on the way back, she kissed me. You know, I never asked her why?” He smiled sadly.

Harry was pretty sure that he knew why: it proved that his dad wasn’t the selfish showoff that he’d been every time he tried to impress her. He’d done something dangerous and brave just because a friend asked it of him. “Do you do stuff like that a lot?”

“What? Go chasing after Chimeras? Hell, no. While Hagrid was nursing that one, I avoided his cabin like the plague. He had to give it up, of course. I was there for that - I thought he was going to cry a literal ocean.”

“No, dad, do you put yourself at risk doing stuff for other people?” Because that’s what serving in the military of another muggle country sounded like to Harry - not the kind of thing a man with a family should be doing.

“Rodney certainly thinks so. And he doesn’t let me forget it. But I don’t think about it like that. Everything I do on Atlantis is because I want to keep the city safe.”

“So you’re never going to come back?” Harry gulped. Because he was sure that it would be fun to visit with his dad, but how much would they really see of each other if he stayed here and his father there?

“I’ll spend as much time here with you as I can, Harry. But Atlantis is my home now. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Harry thought about the day he found out that he was a wizard, trying to imagine ever going back to the muggle world for more than a quick visit, and he suddenly understood. “Yes, I can.”

“Good,” Dad said, before looking down, seeming to notice something interesting through the trees of the forbidden forest and dropping down to hover lowering. “Visuo,” he commanded, though there was something about the way Dad drew his wand that unsettled Harry - even for the smallest things, he drew it like a weapon. “I think I saw Rodney down there. He hates hiking, so I doubt it, but I’d feel better if I could check it out.” He darted down on his broom.

Harry followed, landing easily in a clearing beside his father, where a second later, his dad’s friend Rodney and none other than Draco Malfoy stumbled in, twig-covered and sweaty.

“Rodney, what the hell are you thinking, running around in the Forbidden Forest?” Dad exclaimed. “Do you have any idea why kinds of things live here.”

Rodney spluttered, “Yes . . . well, no . . . but he,” he pointed to Draco, “said that it wasn’t anything worse than he’d faced in some war and that he’d take care of it and I have my gun and he has my wand.”

“Rodney, there are giant man-eating spiders,” Dad said.

“What?!” Rodney rounded on Draco. “You are in sooo much trouble! You didn’t tell me that!”

Draco shrugged. “Nothing a good killing curse wouldn’t fix.”

Harry didn’t know quite why, but that comment made him angrier than he’d been in a long time. “What do you think you’re playing at, Malfoy? You’re not even allowed a wand and now you’re talking about using and Unforgivable Curse as though it were nothing?”

“Hey, if it’s man-eating spiders, I think he should be allowed to defend me with whatever force necessary,” Rodney remarked.

Harry ignored him, feeling anger well up, cold and cleansing. “And what could possibly convince you to grow enough of a spine to take someone into the Forbidden Forest, Malfoy? Looking to add another muggle killing to your collection?” And it stung, because for a moment when they were fighting side-by-side, Harry had believed that Draco truly had changed. He’d believed that people could change and be something other than what they’d been groomed to be.

“No, Potter, what, are you off your rocker? You think I liked killing those people?”

“Then what are you doing out here?” Dad asked, suspicious, wand at the ready.

“Um . . . looking for a unicorn?”

Harry was surprised that his father’s reaction to this was to stalk over to Rodney and slap him on the backside of the head. “Since when do you even believe in unicorns, McKay?”

“Since I did an analysis of the core of this wand and found out that it had some similar properties to a ZedPM.”

“And that’s an excuse to go traipsing around in the forest with only a muggle-hater for protection. I thought you were a genius.”

“I’m sorry,” McKay whined. “You were out bonding with your son that you never saw fit to tell me about and I didn’t want to disturb you. Besides, he can do magic, what’s there to be afraid of?”

Harry’s father flicked his wand and McKay was suddenly hanging from one leg in the air, just like Snape had been all those years ago. “Other people who can do magic, for one,” James growled, and the sinking accusatory feeling in the pit of Harry’s stomach returned. As good as everyone always said James was, and as much as he’d sacrificed for Harry and others, he was still just a schoolyard bully at heart.

“Stop it! Put him down!” Harry yelled, tears forming at the corners of his eyes as he drew his wand on his father. “He’s just found out about magic. He didn’t know any better!”

With a wave of his wand, James had McKay back on the ground and grumbling. “I just wanted to make sure he knew how little magic can really protect him - especially if his enemy is equally armed.”

“No, you didn’t!” Harry was shouting now. “You’re no better than those muggle-haters . . . just a bully who likes to toy with people because they’re less powerful than you!”

His father just stood there, looking stricken, so Harry was completely taken aback when he felt a hand rough on his arm, yanking him around to face an irate Rodney McKay. “
“Look, you little hellion, John . . . your father is a good man. He’s done more good things and sacrificed more to save people he has no ties to than you could possibly ever know.”

“Harry’s sacrificed a lot too,” Draco brought up, seemingly out of nowhere. If Harry weren’t so angry, he might have stopped to marvel about Draco coming to his defense in any argument, let alone one about the very things Draco had always seemed to hate him for.

“You do not get to talk, Mr. Park Avenue ex-con,” McKay snapped, turning his fiery blue eyes back on Harry. “I know it might be hard to see it, in this self-centered tragic little emo world of yours, but he loves you and as much as it hurt you to be without a father, it hurt him just as much, if not more, to be way from you. And you’ve inherited all of his moronically bad habits - like holding people up to his own ridiculous standards of honor and chivalry and judging them for it without considering the circumstances. This . . .” McKay gestured between himself and Harry’s father, “we do because we care about each other and we’re not young and stupid and romantic enough to believe that promises of undying love will actually work better than threats and an armored tank division. And how dare you . . .”

“Rodney,” James was saying, tugging on the sleeve of Rodney’s robe. It’s okay, I deserved that.”

McKay turned around, getting right up in James’ face, like he wasn’t afraid in the slightest of the man who had just had him hanging upside down. “I know you’re having a field day martyring yourself over the emotional damage you’ve done to the kid by being dead for most of his childhood, but no matter how traumatized, he does not get to say those things to you!”

Not knowing what else to do, Harry looked to Draco, confused. Draco just shrugged in that ‘I’m too superior to care’ sort of way that he had about him.

James was soothing McKay now, a hand slung around his shoulder. “It’s okay. Just calm down.” He turned back to Harry. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, Harry. I . . . you have to understand, I’m not picking on Rodney, I . . . um . . . he’s kind of . . .”

“Jesus Christ, Sheppard, try to act like the information isn’t being tortured out of you.” McKay rolled his eyes. “What your idiot father is trying to say, Harry, is that I’m his boyfriend and this is just his emotionally-handicapped way of trying to protect me.”

Harry nodded, not sure what to say and reeling. His father was gay? And what about his mother? Yes, she’d been dead for seventeen years, and he didn’t expect his dad to be celibate. But was this like how it was with his mother? All fierce and confused? Or was it different? Was it better? And though the bitter memory of what his father had done to Snape was still reverberated strong in Harry’s mind, McKay did have a point. He was bloody short on context for it.

“Er . . . I hate to interrupt the touching ‘Pride and Polyjuice’ moment here, but um . . .” Draco pointed to the edge of the clearing, where a brilliantly white unicorn was standing, gazing idly at them while it shuffled its hooves.

“That?” McKay muttered, staring at it with real awe, all of the anger of a moment ago seemingly forgotten.

Draco nodded, approaching it. Harry was nothing less than astonished to note that Draco was getting close, despite how Draco Malfoy had succeeded in ruining every Care of Magical Creatures class, either frightening the animals with he and Crabbe and Goyle’s loud sniggering or not paying attention and therefore torturing them.

Unicorns supposedly didn’t like boys, but this one was lowering her head, wise angelic eyes staring at him balefully as he petted it. McKay stepped forward then, pulling out a muggle computer tablet and scanning the unicorn, which seemed unbothered by even that.

Harry stared on in amazement, paralyzed and certain that if he took even one step forward, the unicorn would see the darkness in him and run off. His father, too, stood back, though he was watching McKay with a fond smile that made Harry feel foolish for assuming the worst about him.

PART IIIc