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Harry could no longer feel his glasses on his face. The scarf pulled over his nose and mouth was rigid with snow and, though it was impervious to moisture, had long since ceased to provide any protection from the cold. Every few minutes he reached up to brush the icy drifts away, and every few minutes they formed anew. He didn't think he could have let go of his broom even if he'd wanted to – his gloved hands were so numb they might have belonged to somebody else. He was flying high enough that the wind flew past him in a steady rush, while below him it made sharp, shrieking bursts around the crests of hills and through the grey, winding valleys.

Every now and then the snow lightened, and he could see Draco – or the black, huddled lump piled on top of a broom that he knew to be Draco. And the words why don't we set down for a while rose up into Harry's throat … But he would never be heard over the wind. And if by some miracle he were heard, Draco would just snap back at him that this had been his idea, and speed off.

Harry wasn't sure whose idea it had been. It was true that they had agreed to make the last leg of their trip on brooms ostensibly because Harry had wanted to see the sights. Draco, although he had done his fair share of grousing about the probable cold and the ridiculousness of caring one way or another about a bunch of hills, hadn't put up as much of a fight as he might have. Harry thought he was tired of being cooped up. A frigid fly was better than no fly at all, better than Flooing from one living room to another without so much as setting foot outside. He had wanted Draco to have a little fun.

Well done, there.

He could only speculate as to why Draco had agreed to it; maybe they were both trying to do one another a favor. Draco hadn't expressed the first modicum of gratitude to Harry for agreeing to spend Christmas away from the Weasleys, his usual engagement, despite the fact that this would have been his first holiday with his brand new goddaughter … but it was possible that Draco intended to make up for it by being agreeable. And now they were tearing silently over patchy brown hills, still, silvery lakes and what looked like miles of dead, desolate cold, and they were both miserable, and it wouldn't stop until one of them put his foot down.

Harry sped up, inching forward to pull even with Draco. With great effort, he freed his hand from his broom handle and shoved the snow-covered scarf under his chin. "Hey –"

Draco pulled half a length in front of him again without saying a word.

Harry glared at his back. Draco had some nerve, really, giving him the cold shoulder when he had willingly – almost willingly – traded the Burrow and Mrs. Weasley's cooking and Ron and Hermione and Rose for some stupid old house up north and two of Draco's unbearable friends. He tried to remember that they weren't as unbearable as they had been, once, and that Draco didn't have many more than two, but what charity he'd started out with had been frozen out of him.

He was thinking of ways to have Ron owl him with some fabricated emergency when Draco dove, swooped beneath him and leveled out on the other side of him for a moment. Their eyes met, and Harry's heart made a clumsy leap in his chest when he realized Draco was grinning.

"We're almost there," Draco shouted, jabbing his hand down toward a distant ridge. "Are you going to stop dawdling, or am I going to have to fly circles around you the whole way?" He drew up and flew in a tight, close arch over Harry's head, the hem of his cloak whipping against the side of Harry's face.

"Prat!" Harry shouted, trying to stifle a smile. Draco reached back and wiped the caked snow off of his shoulders; it hit Harry square in the face.

That couldn't be allowed to stand, of course. Harry shot forward, swung to one side, and rammed Draco with his shoulder. Draco's evasive maneuvers were to no avail. Harry stuck with him, mere inches from his side, as they twisted through the empty, endless sky. They went hurtling toward a steep rise of cliffs, racing almost vertically to the top – and there, at the end of a long gentle slope, was a low, rambling, weather-beaten house, tucked in the corner of the valley and backing on a small, black lake.

They paused, hovering just inside the dip of the hill. Harry's stomach sank. There was his Christmas, waiting for him, probably quite warm and if not hospitable, at least with plentiful hot cocoa – and yet, he thought he might rather keep going. But there would be no point in letting Draco see that now. Harry squared his shoulders. "I'll race y –"

Draco was already plummeting away. Harry rolled his eyes and followed, making up a little time here and there by riding a gust of wind that came pouring down the hill after them, and came neck and neck with Draco about a quarter mile from the house. There was no more jostling or trying to knock one another off track, it was all speed, and Harry realized he had no clue where they were racing to and where they were going to stop. But he couldn't slow down, not with Draco edging forward, slowly, slowly threatening to take the lead.

In the end, Harry had to concede – he pulled up just before touching down, unwilling to go careening through the garden and possibly break his neck on the front step – but Draco was committed, and his boots nicked the ground and he went crashing straight through a dark, leafy shrub. He had pushed back his hood and was pulling a twig out of his hair by the time Harry touched down beside him.

"Better luck next time, Potter." Draco smirked, clearly unperturbed by the broken bush.

"Good look for you," Harry muttered, brushing half a mangled, deep red flower out of the folds of Draco's cloak. "Wind-burned, half frozen, just come from a roll in the – ouch." He pulled his hand back, grinning, before Draco could bat it clean off his arm. He shook out his own cloak, stretching some of the cold, aching stiffness out of his shoulders before turning to take in the front of the house. It looked warmer than he had expected – there were candles in all of the windows, and though all of the wood and stone was old and weathered, it was well cared-for. There were icicles hanging from the sloping roof, a bit too perfect to have formed naturally, and through the windows that flanked the front door he could see a banister wrapped in bright garland. In this light snow (much gentler now that he wasn't soaring through it as fast as his broom could carry him) it looked tranquil, welcoming.

The door opened and Theodore Nott stepped out, looking even lankier than usual in a too-large jacket made of ancient tweed. Harry had hardly seen him at all in the ten years that had passed since the battle, but he somehow doubted Nott had cracked a smile in the meantime. His weary, unimpressed expression was unchanged.

"Malfoy's arrived, dear," he called back into the house, as blithely as though he had been remarking on the weather. "And he's ripped out your camellias."

"Shit," Draco said under his breath, kicking a twisted branch under the undamaged side of the shrub as Nott disappeared. "Here – help me put this back together."

"Draco!"

Harry distanced himself from the camellia as Pansy shot out the door and made a straight line for Draco, running over the frozen ground in a pair of high, glossy purple rubber boots that did not match her neat black robes. She threw her arms around his neck and planted a kiss on his cheek as he muttered something about planting dangerous bushes so very close to the drive.

"Oh, don't worry about those stupid flowers – they're Theodore's, not mine. He's perfectly furious." She tucked her dark, bobbed hair behind one ear and turned to Harry with a broad smile, all teeth and determination. One of her hands lingered at the small of Draco's back. "Harry – it's so good to see you. We're so glad you could both come. Are those new glasses? They're so … sturdy-looking!"

"Yeah," Harry lied, ignoring Draco's encouraging smile. "Thanks." The next four days were going to be hell. Why had he agreed to this? "You have a – a really nice house."

"Oh, but let's go in and see it, shall we? And I can get out of these silly boots. I didn't expect to have to come outside to greet you, you know," she said, patting Draco on the arm and sending him up the stair. "I expected you to reconsider flying once you saw what the weather was like – you can put your brooms in the closet there, to the left, Draco – I can't believe you're not both frozen solid."

Harry stood in the bright, close foyer, wishing he could hide behind the fanning fir branches that made a perfect spiral up the banister. The thirty seconds that it took Draco to stow their brooms was as daunting to him as an hour, and he felt more than a little pathetic. He wasn't some child lurking in the corner and waiting to be dismissed to his room so that the Dursleys could entertain their company without him. He was a guest, and one who had been very much in love with Pansy's best friend for four years, and he shouldn't have felt so desperately uncomfortable when separated from Draco for less than a minute.

"Here, let me have your bags," Pansy said, after leaving her dripping Wellingtons beside the door and slipping far too easily into a pair of small black boots that made her almost as tall as Harry. "Theodore will unshrink them for you – you two will be wanting something to drink. Theo!"

Harry pulled the three suitcases out of his inner jacket pocket and handed them off to Nott when he slunk in from the kitchen.

"All this for four days?" Nott closed them in the palm of his hand, looking distinctly unimpressed, and went upstairs. Pansy giggled, Draco snorted, and Harry was reminded of that quicksand sort of feeling he'd had during his first year or so with Draco, when he was still learning how to navigate around what Draco called a sense of humor.

Draco stretched, free of their brooms, his traveling cloak and the last of the frost, and batted at the mistletoe hanging in the doorway between the foyer and the little hallway to the kitchen. "How about some buttered rum, then?"

"How about some tea?" Pansy replied. "It's hardly two o'clock."

"Coffee. And some of that cognac I got Theo for his birthday."

"I knew Harry would teach you to compromise." She threw a smile over in his direction, but Harry gave her nothing but a twitch of his mouth in return. What the hell was that supposed to mean, anyway?

He stewed quietly as they filed into the kitchen, and his arm found Draco's waist. It was some comfort, at least, to feel Draco's hip against his own. There was no tension in him at all, just growing warmth and relaxation. They leaned against the kitchen counter as the coffee made itself, and Pansy summoned a heavy bottle, half full of honey-colored liquid and bound up with a thin red ribbon that began to unwind as the cups and saucers settled in a row beside it.

"I know Draco's been busy taking over the foundation," Pansy said, tipping out coffee. "But how's work treating you, Harry? Draco tells me you're doing really excellently – more than your share of terribly impressive cases, isn't that right? And quite the uniform, I understand."

Draco coughed.

"Yeah – it's going quite well." Harry accepted his coffee, relieved to have something to do with his hands, and something to talk about that could fill a lot of time. "I've got a good team built up, and more time off this year than last. But it's been –"

"He was personally responsible for getting to the bottom of that unpleasantness in Knockturn last month – you know, the girl cursed into a coma. Quite high profile," Draco said, digging through a small dish of walnuts.

"Oh, yes, we all heard about that one. It was her best friend, and they were fighting over … well, what was it? Some illicit romance, I hope." Her lips pulled up into a smile that was a little too enthusiastic.

"Profits, actually." Harry refrained from rolling his eyes as her smile faded slightly. He dropped his spoon back onto his saucer. "Not that it matters much, when one of them will never wake up and the other's bound for –"

"I kept telling him he ought to give an interview," Draco cut in, not quite managing to step on Harry's toes. "The papers were all after one, but he wouldn't."

"No?" Pansy blew lightly on her coffee. "But you've always been so good at them, Ha –"

"The snow's let up," Draco said, louder than he might have, propping his elbow on the counter and nearly upsetting a vase of holly cuttings.

Harry glanced out the high window just beyond the breakfast table. He beat back the urge to tell Pansy that she wasn't half bad at embellishing on the record, herself, and drank his coffee. It had a pleasant, warming bite that made the sight of the snow collected in wind-blown ribbons across the dark ice of the lake somehow less daunting.

There was a pause. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Draco's hand twitch in his direction.

"Well, so it has!" Pansy said, setting her coffee on the counter with a bright clink. "How marvelous – oh! Theo! Perfect. Why don't you go show Harry around the lake? It's such a lovely view, and there's so much … history."

Nott, who had just appeared in the mistletoe-hung doorway, did not appear at all interested in showing Harry anything, and cast a baleful glance at his wife – and a rueful one at the bottle of cognac – as she seized his elbow and hustled him around the counter. "There's nothing to –"

"But I want to hear about Draco's mother's new breeding pair of Granians, and I know Harry must have heard about them a hundred times already, haven't you, Harry?" she said, thrusting a cup into Nott's hand and herding them both to the heavy wooden door that led to the back garden.

Nott Levitated his coffee cup as he pulled on his boots, muttering. Draco looked relieved.

"All the time," Harry replied, without bothering to hide his growing irritation. For some reason, he hadn't expected that consenting to spend Christmas with Draco's friends would involve being packed off into the cold every time Draco and Pansy wanted to catch up. The ingratitude of it would have been hard enough to take under normal circumstances, but when Draco was the only comfort he had in this house in the middle of nowhere that was home only to two people he had never liked, it was grounds for seriously considering hopping on his broom and leaving.

Tramping around the lake in the icy wind would have to do for now. The moment Pansy Summoned his cloak for him, Harry was out the door, walking as quickly through the gardens as he could and hoping that Nott would take the hint and leave him alone.

Nott seemed to find nothing out of the ordinary, however, and sped along beside him as though this were his normal pace. The cold must not have bothered him at all; his only protection was that tweed jacket, hanging loose around his chest but too short in the sleeves. Harry thought he must have had it second hand.

"She just wanted us out of the way," Nott said outright as soon as they had passed through the short series of scraggly beds that passed for a winter garden. The lake stretched out flat and wide in front of them, its edges messy with frost, frozen mud and dead grass.

Harry glared at the bare hills rising above the water. "You couldn't have offered to show me the upstairs, instead?"

"Wouldn't have taken long enough." Nott shoved his hands into his pockets. He didn't seem troubled at all – his mouth was still tight and his brow furrowed in the annoyed expression he'd had since his guests had arrived, but he was focused on the ground, studying the dirt and scrub with some dull interest. Harry had the impression that he was equally indifferent to the lake and the parlor. "Pansy will be wanting to talk for a while. She always does. Not too many opportunities for it."

"Really." Isn't that just too bad, Harry wanted to add, hard-pressed to find any sympathy for Pansy's lack of a social life. It had been ten years since she'd tried to hand him over to Voldemort – and, as Draco always pointed out, Harry had just gone and delivered himself up anyway – but it was hard not to think it was indicative of something in her character. They weren't going to be fond of one another.

Nott nodded. He stopped to pull a twig off of an anemic-looking pine sapling. "But Malfoy's the same, I expect. Neither of them ever shut up while we were in school. Harder to find people to listen now, though."

Harry didn't answer. That was the only reason he was here at all, of course. Aside from his parents and Harry, there were very few people Draco could spend time with without difficulty. But Harry was subjecting himself to the Notts as a favor, and a favor deserved some favor in return – not this. He could have been at the Weasleys'. Ron and Hermione might have been distracted, but there was always someone in that house with whom he could feel at home. Watching everyone dote on the new addition would have been a very different sort of holiday, but missing it made him uneasy.

And if Christmas at the Weaesleys' meant that Draco was the one shifting from foot to foot in the foyer, rarely speaking up and contenting himself with being tolerated (or almost tolerated, if George should happen to drop in), that was no reason not to go, was it? He was used to it.

The thought made Harry's stomach churn with guilt. "Do you live here all year?" he asked, when they had reached the far side of the lake, glancing across the distance to the house with its burning points of golden candlelight. It seemed too small to persist for long under the huge dark slate of clouded sky.

"All year?" Nott repeated, his voice drifting as though he had not really understood. His gait was affected, like he was stepping over cracks in a sidewalk. After a few moments, he looked up. "Oh – all year, yes. We haven't all got three houses, you know. Malfoy's given you the wrong idea."

"I was only asking –"

"I've only got two houses. The family home is near Wadebridge, but I don't like it. It's too sunny." He turned his face to the ground again, and so didn't notice Harry rolling his eyes. "It's easier to work here."

"Draco hasn't told me what it is that you do."

Nott did not, apparently, understand that there was a question there. He simply walked on, nodding his head, counting something that Harry couldn't see.

This went on for quite some time. Harry settled into his own thoughts, imagining that he was about to arrive at the Burrow rather than return to Nott's little house, picturing the great raucous welcome that would greet him – a little muted, perhaps, because there was an infant to consider, but surely just as joyful as ever. It could not have seemed further away from this flat, cold, lifeless scene.

A white figure rose out of the frozen lake, its reflection a dim shimmer on the ice, and seated itself on a large rock between the path and the water's edge. Harry stopped, startled. It was a ghost – a woman, dressed in a very plain, old works robes with a smeared apron. Her stockings hung loose in rumpled folds just above the tops of her sloppily laced boots, and her hair was falling out of its braid. She tried to straighten her cap, but she was weeping, and after a moment she gave up.

"Nott," Harry said, reaching out to touch his arm. "Who's that?"

Nott stopped beside him. "That's just Mrs. Craig – better keep away from her. Hello Mrs. Craig," he said in a grudging drawl. He nudged Harry's elbow and started forward again, apparently none too keen to engage her.

"Hello, my dear." She stood and turned to face them, blinking her tears away and pulling her fingers in weary lines through her hair. "Might I borrow your jacket? My son needs a jacket for winter."

"Your son is dead," Nott said with what Harry thought was unnecessary flatness. "Good night, Mrs. Craig."

"He's cold, all the same," she replied, so quietly and so tremulously that Harry found himself stopping again, fighting an absurd urge to give her his cloak. Judging by her attire, she might have died hundreds of years ago, and her son must have been long gone, too.

Mrs. Craig gave him a watery smile. "You're a good boy," she whispered, reaching out to pat his shoulder. The chill spread all the way down to his fingertips. Then she turned and sat on her rock again, wiping her sleeve across her face.

Nott muttered at him to hurry up and Harry turned to follow him, no more eager to reach the house again than he had been before, but now just as unsettled by what lay without.

When the door had shut and the cold from the outside had swept through the room and subsided under the eager efforts of the kitchen fire, Draco propped his elbows on the counter and glared at Pansy. She raised her eyebrows, chewing daintily on a walnut with a blank, patient expression.

"Are you going to keep sniping at him like that all week?" Draco asked, snatching up his coffee. "Shall I just tell him now to confine himself to the bedroom?"

"Sniping like – what are you talking about?" She took a careful sip of her coffee, regarding him with more curiosity than concern.

"Oh, don't pretend. 'What wretched glasses you've got on, Harry,'" he said, affecting a pinched falsetto and clutching at an imaginary string of pearls. "'You're so good at interviews, Harry.' Just what do you think you're doing? Trying to get me the cold shoulder for my entire holiday?"

She looked genuinely taken aback. "But he knows he can snipe right back, my dear. I think you're being a little –"

"No he doesn't! I mean, of course he does, but – it's not the same. He'll mean it. They're not jokes to him. He doesn't understand." Draco didn't know how she could have missed it. It was so painfully obvious to him when Harry was teetering on the edge of anger – well, prickly irritation, at least – that it seemed impossible that anyone else might miss it. Pansy was sharp enough that she should have known better.

"Well, if you like," she said with a skeptical sniff. "I was only trying to make him feel welcome. I can't think he'd feel better if I told him he looked wonderful, shoved him into the most comfortable chair and insisted upon making him a sandwich."

"Well, that would just be –"

"And considering he's stuck with you for several years without dashing off in a rage, I expected he'd be used to it by now. Unless he's taught you some manners?"

"I've got all kinds of manners," Draco shot back, not sure he appreciated that twitch in the corner of her mouth. "And I told you, it's different. I'm allowed." He rested his hand on his chest with unwarranted pomposity. He was not, in fact, always allowed, but after four years of doing it anyway he had discovered where the fault lines were, where the ground would crumble away under him if he stepped too hard.

Pansy came around the counter and patted him on the back, Levitating their coffee cups and the bowl of nuts with a sweep of her wand as she directed him to the breakfast table. It was as thick as a chopping block, and polished to a high, auburn sheen that glimmered as though it were wet. A chair slid out for him and he sat with his back to the arched window, glancing once over his shoulder at the corner of the lake that was not obscured by black, dormant trees. He couldn't see Harry.

Pansy sat beside him. "Well, I'm not surprised." Her face was searching now, her eyes slightly narrowed. "It's clear that he cares for you. I think it was lovely of him to bring you here for Christmas. I know it must not have been his first choice."

"What – like it's lovely of me to go with him to the Weasleys' shack? There's nothing lovely about it. It's my turn, that's all." He hunched back into his chair, wrapping his fingers around his coffee to bleed the last bit of warmth out of the porcelain. He should have kept his mouth shut, but Pansy's probing was not new to him, and putting up an immediate and stubborn defense was the only way to head her off. He wished he could do so more gracefully. "Anyway, he practically suggested it, this year. Weasley and Granger – she's still Granger, you know – have just had a kid. So of course we weren't going to go there."

"Oh?" Pansy tucked her hair behind her ear, looking down into her saucer with a gentle quirk of her eyebrow. "Harry doesn't like children?"

"It's not a child, it's a squalling brat, not even two months old. Who would want to spend a vacation in the same house with it? Can you imagine? I don't know why they're visiting anyone this Christmas, it seems like a miserable imposition. Especially in the – in what the Weasleys have got for a family home." He had never been able to bring himself to call it the Burrow.

Pansy Summoned the bottle of cognac. "Hm," she said.

"What?" Draco barked.

"That's why he wanted to give his best friends a miss this year? He thought it would be too – loud?" She poured them both a little more cognac, and Draco's coffee turned a thin, amber color.

He grit his teeth. "And messy. Yes." It was certainly the reason he hadn't wanted to go. It was clear that Pansy disagreed, but he didn't see that it was her business, or how she would have the first idea about it. She might have known him too well, but she had no insight into Harry's thoughts that he didn't. She couldn't. "What is it that Theodore does?" he asked, lifting his chin a little as though defying her to confront the change of subject.

"He writes," she said, giving him a tiny, tight smile he had known her to use when steeling herself.

Draco had half expected to hear that Nott did nothing – he seemed the sort to spend his days out wandering or pressing leaves. He'd always been too interested in books. "Writes what? For some newspaper?"

Pansy's expression was unnaturally fixed. "Poetry."

Draco suddenly found he was very interested in the construction of the empty chair sitting to his left. "Oh," he said, and cleared his throat and looked aside, floundering as though she had just told him that Theodore had a terminal and very embarrassing disease. He felt that it would have been indecent to look her in the eye. "Well, that's – that is to say, I'm sure he's –"

"You don't think Harry might have decided to avoid the Weasleys because he didn't want to feel left out?"

"That's stupid." Draco rolled his eyes, searching for another, less tactically disastrous change of subject. "If he were worried about being left out, the last thing he would have done was not go. What, you think he's come here just to sulk?" Pansy only knew Harry the way they'd known him in school – the fainting, coddled favorite, the orphan so nauseatingly doted upon. Harry had grown more practical than that. "Not that the weather isn't perfectly suited for it, mind you – and Theo, for the love of –"

"I think you're awfully determined to believe Harry's not doing you a favor."

Draco slouched back into his chair and cast a sour glance over at the garden door. "I think you just can't bring yourself to agree with me on anything. I thought you wanted to hear about Mother's Granians." Sometimes he thought he had liked Pansy better before the war, when he had always been able to count on her for her zealous support. Now who did he have to cling to his arm and tell him how very right he was? He had no one at all.

But while neither Pansy nor Harry made any extraordinary effort to please him for the rest of the day, neither did they allow any real conflict to come of their frequent brushings-up against one another. Harry's return to the house with a subdued but somehow more agreeable Nott marked the beginning of an evening of near misses, personality collisions avoided at the last second either by Pansy's ability to turn a conversation on a dime, or Harry's clumsier but no less stubborn determination to refuse to take offense. Draco didn't know what had happened out at the lake, but Harry seemed to have decided to hunker down.

A little sprout of gratitude started in Draco's chest. Pansy was wrong – Harry was not doing him a favor, and wouldn't have presumed to – but all the same, Harry's efforts pleased him. It was good to think that perhaps this could become as regular a way to spend a holiday as packing off to the Weasleys'. It would have been easy for Harry to make their time here intolerable, but he was not doing so. Draco was almost certain it was because Harry knew that the alternative, fussing over bottles and nappies with Granger and Weasley, was so very hideous. Not that they couldn't have spent the holiday alone at home, of course, but …

Well. Pansy was mostly wrong.

He decided not to think on it any further. He had what he wanted, and Harry, who was even less given to worrying through these sorts of muddy social problems than Draco was, seemed to be at peace. That was what mattered. When, after dinner and a nightcap, they were shown to their small but well-appointed attic bedroom, Draco was perfectly content to let everything slip away under the warmth of the wine and cognac.

Harry went to lean his elbows on the windowsill, pressing his forehead against the frosted glass. When Pansy's footsteps receded from the attic stairs and moved into silence in the second floor hallway, Draco joined him, wrapping his arms around Harry's waist and resting his cheek against the back of his shoulder. His hands, gathered in the front of Harry's shirt, were close enough to the window to feel the gentle chill seeping in – but the cheerful firelight breaking up the shadows of the steep eaves of the bedroom banished all thought of the snow outside.

"It can't be much of a view," Draco prompted when they had stood there a few moments too long.

"It's not. Skip the tour, if they offer." Harry twisted about to face him, leaning back against the sill. His eyes were a bit dull behind his glasses and his shoulders were sagging, but Draco couldn't tell whether he was troubled or simply tired.

Most of the time it was better to let Harry pretend, though. It was no good talking about things when he hadn't had time to sort them out himself. "Was it a tour?" Draco shifted his hands to the small of Harry's back. "Nott seems a little quiet for a guide."

"More of a walk, I guess. There wasn't much to see." Harry paused, pressing his mouth thin. "But we'll be indoors most of the time anyway, I guess."

"You don't mind, do you?" It was a short trip from the windowsill to the bed, squeezed into a corner that seemed too small to accommodate the mountain of brown and vermillion throw pillows. Draco dug his fingers under Harry's belt and tugged him along.

"No – no, it's nice." Harry landed on the bed with enough force to send two of the pillows bouncing to the floor and smiled slightly, as though surfacing from some distraction. "Not really what I expected."

Draco sat beside him, kicking some of the excess cushioning onto the floor. "Well, I don't blame you. I thought for sure Nott slept hanging upside down in a belfry." His elbows sank into the thick down bedding when he leaned back, watching Harry flip a pillow over in his hands. "Do you know he used to sleepwalk? About twice a week I'd wake up to the sound of him tripping over someone's trunk. My third year I told him to go take a walk off the Astronomy Tower, and he was one leg over the parapet before someone caught him. Snape about had a conniption when he found out. But this place is nice," he said, cutting himself off before he descended into nervous babbling. Why was he nervous? "I'm glad we came."

Harry tossed the pillow onto the discarded pile on the floor. He lay back, shutting his eyes and stretching his arms up toward the ceiling before turning onto his side. "It's nice," he said, and something in his face seemed to grow easier. "I'm glad you like it." His eyes drifted from Draco's face to where his hand lay between them on the blanket and back again.

Draco plucked his glasses off his face.

"I've told you," Harry muttered, heaving himself up on one elbow and reaching across Draco to where he was holding his glasses away at arm's length. "I need those –"

"No, you don't." Draco stuffed them under a pillow with a grin and seized Harry's wrist, pulling him off balance. "You just have to get close enough." He kissed him, some of his inexplicable anxiety dissolving when Harry's mouth welcomed him on the spot, his tongue sliding over his lower lip and his teeth pressing against his skin as he shifted his weight on the bed, finding a better position. Draco inched closer to him until they were too close to have any hope of seeing each other's faces, until Harry couldn't so much as breathe without Draco feeling the shallow disturbance he made in the mattress. After a few minutes, they could have been anywhere – home, the Burrow, some nameless hotel room. It didn't matter. The speeding pulses and increasingly desperate kisses were tranquil in their familiarity.

Soon they were too warm, though, and Draco hauled himself to his knees to straddle Harry's hips. He dropped his shirt onto the floor. Harry's followed soon, and the terrain of his body was the same as it always was; the spread of scars was strangely comforting, from the mysterious but unimportant scattering of minor scrapes badly healed to the place where a piece of the Dark Lord's soul had printed itself on his chest. Harry was running his hands deliberately up and down his sides, which made it very difficult to concentrate on anything, but still he made his usual survey, letting his eyes flicker up to the jagged, half-hidden mark on his forehead. He was often glad that Harry couldn't see properly at times like these. Draco did not enjoy being watched, and he had his own scars, pale and faded though they were, that were so much less heroic. He leaned down to kiss Harry, burying his forearm in the blanket.

Draco rose to fumble with his belt, and toppled over onto his side as he tried to slide out of his trousers. Harry was flush against him an instant later.

"Out of practice, Malfoy?" Harry's lips and teeth worked at his throat, vibrating gently when Draco growled. "Or just drunk?"

"Oh, please," Draco muttered, too focused on ridding them both of the rest of their clothes to formulate much of a retort. "You know how much practice I've had. I wasn't the one looking for the wine bottle every ten minutes."

"I've got to put up with the three of you for Christmas sober?"

Draco snaked his hand behind Harry's back, along his waist and down between his legs, and the unwelcome sting that Harry's words brought back to mind was soothed entirely by the little gasp that drew warm air past Draco's ear. There was a rustling sound behind him as Harry's hand groped across the bed, then a muffled Accio, and then Harry's entire bag of toiletries hit him in the back.

"Damn it, Potter –"

"Don't." It was half a plea, but Harry was grinning. He was always so sincere in his enjoyment – he never thought to hide the fact that he liked something. At first it had put Draco off, because it was hard not to suspect that he was being made fun of, but now he craved that smile, that body that was so honest in all of its movements. The thick sigh that came when Draco had finally found the tube he was looking for and sunk his first finger into Harry was enough to make every muscle in his body melt, freed from apprehension. Harry was twined around him, all hot skin and heavy arms and legs, his hand tight around Draco's cock, and yet all Draco felt was liberation. He pushed another finger inside of him, surrounded at once by soft, strong flesh and Harry's breath and tongue on his ear, immersed.

The peace of it couldn't quite withstand the slightly frenzied pitch of their need for release that followed. But while the serenity broke apart minute by minute – there was not much relaxing about Harry's hips bucking up against him or his arms digging with bruising force into Draco's back or Draco's hand twisting into Harry's hair – still it served to make him forget everything that wasn't Harry.

And no matter what had happened that day or what would pass tomorrow, no matter the reasons why perhaps they shouldn't have come or the questions about why it had happened, it made Draco glad to be there.

Harry woke in the darkness feeling as though the blankets had thinned to nothing. He was frigid, try as he might to gather more of the bedding around himself. He sat up, still bleary, to see whether they had left a window open or let the fire go out, but all was as it should have been. He patted around on the bedside table for his glasses, and stared at the clock that peeked over the covered mound in the bed that was Draco until he thought he could distinguish its hands. It was just past three in the morning.

He slid out of bed. The cold seeped up into the bottoms of his feet as he walked across the pale squares of grey light that lay on the floor below the window. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest and went to the fireplace, which helped very little. He wondered if had come down with a fever – Draco was clearly warm enough. He almost hoped he was sick. At least it would be an excuse to stay in bed for the rest of his time there.

He would go down to the kitchen and make some tea, he decided. After stopping at the dresser to pull on a pair of thick socks, some shorts and one of Draco's dressing gowns, Harry took up his wand and went down the narrow, shadowed stairway, thumping along rather more clumsily than he had intended, still heavy with sleep. The landing was much, much warmer, and he stopped for a moment to breathe in the comforting scent of the hallway. The frost that covered the garlands glowed a delicate gold in the light of the candles burning clean and silent in the windows. The air was full of pine and mellow wax and wood polish, sharpened by the bite of firewood. As he gazed down the main stair to the black, narrow windows that flanked the front door, he felt nothing but profound quiet – the peace of knowing that everything in the house was still, that the clouded night was tranquil, and that outside of this perfect shelter there were vast expanses of emptiness on all sides. He was alone, but not alone.

He thought of curling up against the railing, or going to lie in the chair beside the tree in the parlor. Nothing, he was sure, would be warmer – but he couldn't let himself be discovered that way in the morning, and couldn't leave Draco alone for the rest of the night. He would have a cup of tea. Whatever had ailed him had apparently passed. Taking a bit of warmth back to the room with him was the best thing to do.

But the cold gripped him again in the kitchen. The long shadow of the breakfast table stretched into the space just before the stove, chilling him up to his knees; the lake was invisible in the blackness, but the trees just beyond the window were faintly lined in silver. The light of the candle on the sill seemed not to reach them. Harry lit his wand and sent the kettle to the sink to fill before rummaging in the cupboards for a mug.

He was pouring dark, boiling tea into a ridiculously dainty cup when the shadows under his feet disappeared and he remembered that there was no moon that night. He spun to face the window, slopping steaming liquid onto the floor and jumping back to spare his toes. He gasped and the muscles in his back coiled as though someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water on him. Mrs. Craig was standing just inside the window, radiating a silver, pulsing cold.

Harry stared, gripping the burning cup in one hand and his wand in the other. "What are you doing?" he demanded after a pause, too loud. "I mean – is everything all right?" He tried to look more concerned than shocked; he hadn't meant to yell at her. The sharp string of adrenaline that had pulled through his chest was fading.

Mrs. Craig was no longer weeping, but she was wringing what appeared to be a handkerchief between her hands and her eyes sparkled – though whether they were full of tears or simply her own light, Harry couldn't tell. She fixed him with a pleading glance. "There is a child in the lake."

Harry swallowed, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "Your son," he said, holding her gaze but rather wishing he could look down into his cup. He did not want to talk about Mrs. Craig's son, because he couldn't help him – and the thought of a dead body lying nearby under the water threatened to disturb the perfect sanctuary he had imagined only minutes ago. He should have guessed that the boy had drowned. Why else would she be wandering around the yard, moving in and out of the water?

"My son is dead," she snapped at him. She seemed on the verge of saying more, but drew back a step and looked out into the dark gardens. "There is a child in the lake." There was an edge of frustration in her voice.

"Another child?" Harry asked, glancing beyond her to the window – but he could see nothing but her glaring reflection. He could not understand why she was telling him this, why she seemed to think it was so important.

"A child in the lake." She shut her eyes and her shoulders sagged in what Harry thought might be relief. "Help him."

"But your son –"

"No!" She flew toward him, furious, and Harry backed against the stove. "My son is dead!"

No ghost he had ever known had made him so cold, nor had they ever spoken so cryptically. Harry knew that she couldn't hurt him, but the hair on the back of his neck was standing and he wanted her away from him. His eyes fell on the coat tree beside the back door, and on Nott's jacket. His boots sat on the floor, toppled onto the doormat.

"All right," Harry said, easing along the counter to put a little distance between them. "Why don't we go and see? I'll help if I can." She was distressed, whether there was any reason for it or not. It seemed cruel to ignore her, and he felt sure she would follow him back up to bed if he tried to go.

She raised her handkerchief to her eyes and her reflection glinted on every polished surface in the kitchen, curving along the kettle and twisting in the spiral column of a candlestick. She nodded.

Harry tugged on Nott's boots and jacket, braced himself against the cold, and opened the door. There was very little wind, at least; by ducking his chin against his chest he kept his throat more or less warm. He shut the door and started toward the lake, sweeping the thin beam of light from his wand along the ground, searching for footprints. Mrs. Craig's glow soon made his wand unnecessary, illuminating the ground all the way up to the bank. There were no markings that Harry could see. The ice of the lake was not smooth, covered here and there with drifts of snow and fallen leaves and pine needles, but it seemed intact.

"No one's fallen in," he said when he had reached the edge of the water, turning to give Mrs. Craig a reassuring smile, though his teeth were chattering. "See? Everything's quiet." There was no breeze, no sound of shifting snow or animals rustling in the trees. The only sound was his breathing and the crunch of Nott's heavy boots on the dead grass. Harry stepped onto the ice to sweep his wand out over the extent of the lake. It creaked underneath him, but it didn't give. "If there were someone here," he said, "we would be able to hear them. I promise."

Mrs. Craig made no noise as she drifted toward him. There was a hint of a grateful smile pulling at her lips as she followed him onto the ice. She reached out her hand; at first Harry thought she was going to try to embrace him, but she was coming too close, too quickly. She walked through him, surrounding him, steeping him in an unbearable and almost liquid cold. Harry couldn't breathe. He waited for her to move away, but she didn't. For a moment he flailed uselessly with his arms, desperate to push her away – and then blackness swallowed him and he sank, numb and blind and deaf to everything but his own constricting throat.

"Where's Harry?"

It was well past ten by the time Draco strode into the kitchen, well-rested, high-spirited and ready to attack anything and everything that might be set in front of him for breakfast. He had been pleased to see that Harry had preceded him downstairs – an unexpected sign of comfort, or at least courage – and had thrown on the bottom half of his pyjamas, a dressing gown and his favorite slippers, and taken the steps two at a time on the way to rescue Harry from whatever chatter Pansy had decided upon to fill the inevitable and awkward silence.

But Pansy was quite alone at the table, already dressed in deep violet robes and a set of fantastically intricate tights; nor was Harry in the kitchen, where Nott was pulling down another coffee cup form the cabinet. "Sleeping, surely?" Pansy smiled at him, patting the chair beside her. "Come eat – I'm sure he’ll be along soon, after hearing you thunder your way downstairs just now."

"Hasn't been down," Nott added, fetching plates.

"Oh." Perhaps Harry had been in the bathroom, and Draco simply hadn't noticed; surely he would be along soon. The smell of breakfast was enticing enough that the thought of delaying it made his stomach growl. But Draco was keen to preserve last night's harmony for as long as possible, and leaving Harry to linger upstairs while he started in on coffee seemed a poor way to begin. "I'll just go get him. Set two places, will you?" And he would take the opportunity to change, since the Notts were clearly not in the habit of taking breakfast half-dressed.

But Harry was not in the bathroom. Nor was he in any other room in the attic or the second story, nor the first. By the time Draco had come full circle into the kitchen, his heart had begun to race from more than climbing stairs. This felt wrong.

"Do you think he's gone for a fly?" Pansy asked.

Draco turned away from her without responding. He didn't care for the pitying look in her face, that solicitous cast to her eyes that seemed to ask a deeper question. There was nothing the matter between him and Harry, no reason one of them should just walk off without saying a word. Was there? He had been sure of it last night. But it seemed like he was always sure of it, almost always astounded when Harry chose to find something with which to confront him. It was with mixed relief and fear that he found Harry's broom and cloak in the closet where they had been left the day before, and his boots in line with Draco's on the rack.

"Everything's still here," he murmured. But the words meant nothing.

The click of Pansy's shoes stopped in the doorway, and a rush of cold air filled the foyer. Draco ran back to the kitchen, trying to find it in himself to act unconcerned – Harry might only have been gone twenty minutes, and it wouldn't do to make a scene over nothing – but it was only Nott. He had opened the garden door and was gazing out over the icy lake with a dry expression.

"Oh, damn," Nott drawled, and took a leisurely sip of his coffee.

Draco waited, then stalked up beside him and peered out the door. He saw only patchy snow and wet trees and ice backed by forbidding hills. "What?" he snapped, resisting the urge to smash Nott's coffee out of his hand.

"It's that bloody ghost again."

Pansy rushed to the door, and her hands flew to her mouth. "Oh, Theo, she hasn't taken him?"

Draco rounded on her. "Taken him where?"

"It's all right, dear," Pansy said, resting her hand on his arm. Her smile was stiff and her eyes kept darting out the door. "He's going to be fine – he is fine – it's just that he's been –"

Nott set his cup on the window ledge and started out the door. "She's got him in the lake, under the ice." He pointed to a line of wind-softened footprints in the snow.

Draco threw off his slippers and followed him out barefoot. "But then he's frozen!" he shouted, sprinting along the line of footprints until they disappeared at the water's edge. The ice there was twisted into a glassy whorl, as though it had frozen in a vortex. "He can't last five minutes in that water, he won't –!"

"Draco." Pansy grabbed his elbow before he could dash out onto the ice. "I promise you he's all right. Let me explain inside, dear, you're going to catch a cold standing around in the snow –"

"I'm going to catch a cold?"

"Harry will be fine, and we'll have him out before you know it. It isn't the first time. You did tell Harry about the ghost, Teddy?" she said through gritted teeth as she was dragging Draco back inside the house.

"I told him not to talk to her, sure."

"Oh, well," Pansy said, slamming the door behind all three of them. Her teeth were chattering, which somewhat undermined the waspish force of her voice. "It sounds like you were very thorough."

Nott paused and turned to her; his hands were hanging at his sides and he looked strangely lanky and boyish. "I was distracted, I suppose," he said, his voice devoid of sarcasm. "I'm sorry."

Pansy glared up at him in silence, one hand clenching, and seemed to want to say more; the frustration of dying anger written on her face was so familiar that Draco could feel it forming over his own.

"Sit down," she snapped after a moment. She whipped her wand through the air and the teakettle smacked against the side of the sink before wobbling up to the faucet in a daze to fill. "Harry's not in any danger, Draco. Theo will tell you all about it, and we'll have tea."

Draco did not want to sit down. He wanted to go back outside and shatter the ice and find Harry – Harry, who had been so warm and close last night, and whom Draco could not imagine wasn't dead or dying in the dark, freezing water. His legs wouldn't bend. He had wanted so badly to come here, and so badly for Harry to come and for Harry to like it, and now –

"She's dragged me in a couple of times already," Nott said, taking his seat.

Draco collapsed into the opposite chair, his back to the window. He couldn't look at that unmoving sheet of ice and believe either of them.

"I was sleepwalking one night, three or four years ago," Nott continued. "And I woke up down there – it was cold and dark and not very clean, but it wasn't so bad. You just have to convince her to let you out."

"The ghost? How did you convince her?" Draco's hands were on the arms of his chair, ready to propel himself towards the door again – but Pansy's hand landed on his shoulder, and a cup of tea settled in front of him. He folded his arms on the table, nudging the saucer away.

"I told her that if she didn't let me out, Mr. Clarke would sack her and she wouldn't have any way to take care of that kid of hers. But it's all a matter of luck, really. She's mad. There's no telling what she'll say or want to hear from day to day."

Whatever either of them said, Draco thought it sounded hopeless. How was he supposed to reason with a mad ghost while Harry was down there in the – cold, dark and filthy whatever it was? How had he been taken in the first place? He didn't sleepwalk, he never had.

Nott stretched his legs out under the table, and continued. "Mrs. Craig lived at the neighbors'," he said, nodding toward the hills. "The Clarkes, who lived about two miles over that way. I don't know her first name; she might have been a servant. That was some two hundred years ago. My mother's family had just built this house, and my great-great grandfather was born here about the same time Mrs. Craig had her son. I suppose they were friends – they certainly went to Hogwarts together.

"One summer Mrs. Craig's boy was playing on the lake here, and he drowned. Mother used to tell me that they found his shoes, untied, caught up in the reeds on the other side of the water." Nott rested his chin in his hand. There was a certain coldness to his telling, stark and unconcerned. "Mrs. Craig went mad, anyhow, and started spending all her time around the lake, tossing things in or shoving in branches to try to drag the boy out, although of course he'd been buried already. Eventually she took to jumping in herself to try to find him, and so they kept her confined to the house. But they couldn't hold her back forever. She escaped, and they never found her alive after that. There were signs that she was still hanging around – she worked up all kinds of enchantments on the lake. They couldn't all pass unnoticed. And then they found her body one morning, stretched out beside the road to the churchyard. She had frozen to death.

"Mad as she was, though, she managed to come back a proper ghost. The next day she was up to her old tricks, except she couldn't lay hold of anything on her own anymore; she started asking people to put things in the lake for her, for her son, she said. She's been doing it ever since. Just yesterday she asked me for my jacket." Nott broke for a moment to sip at his cooling coffee. "She asks people to come in, too, to help the boy. I was sleepwalking both times she got me, so I don't remember just how she –"

"She wandered in late at night a couple of months ago and tried to tell me that a child had fallen in the lake." Pansy squeezed Draco's shoulder. "I'm sure Harry wouldn't have been taken in by that sort of nonsense –"

Draco groaned and dropped his head on his arms. Damn it, Potter.

"But it doesn't matter, does it?" Pansy asked, her voice unnaturally bright. "Theo got out safe and sound, and it only took a couple of hours. Some cocoa and a hot meal put him back to rights. I'm sure Harry will be out in time for supper. He's been through much worse, hasn't he?"

It was true, but it meant very little. Harry had taken great pains to impress upon Draco just how little he had ever accomplished on his own, and everything that he had ever told Draco about his victories inspired more doubt now than confidence. He could not see Harry threatening some madwoman who had lost her son, no matter how long she had been dead. How was he going to free himself?

"I want to talk to her," Draco said, lifting his head and leaving his drink untouched as he scraped his chair back. "He's hopeless. You have no idea."

"Good luck," Nott said. His attention seemed to have drifted inward once more. "She doesn't exactly come when you call."

Pansy leaned in closer, her arm warm against his; Draco didn't look at her. It was stupid to be frightened.

"I'm sorry, Draco," she said, sliding her hand up his back to rest between his shoulders, a comforting weight. "I know it's a horrid way to spend Christmas Eve. But there's no reason you should have to sit out in the cold all day."

Draco realized with a wash of irritation that it was the sort of thing he would have told Harry. He jerked his shoulder and her hand fell away. "I'm going for a walk." He had hoped Pansy would protest, at least tell him to dress first – he would have liked to argue with her now – but she said nothing. He went to the closet to find his coat and boots, batting at the mistletoe when it brushed against his hair, and stormed back to the garden door. "If you think of a way to scare up your damned ghost, do come let me know."

Neither of them followed. He tried to be angry – what kind of people invited you to their house and neglected to mention that an unstable spirit might suck you underground? – but was annoyed to find that he felt more gratitude than anything. Sitting out here, even in the wind and the light snow that was once again beginning to fall, was better than bristling under Pansy's attentions or pretending not to be afraid.

He was afraid. He sat on a rock that overhung the water under a sagging old tree and pulled Nott's words through his head over and over again – just cold, just dark, just not very clean – to try to picture Harry, perhaps sitting just below, bored or annoyed by a ghost that might be talking him in circles. Nott had said that he could talk, so of course he must be able to breathe. And he would have his wand – Draco realized he had forgotten to check for it when he went up to the bedroom, but Harry wouldn't have gone anywhere without it, and he didn't want to go back inside to look. He would be all right.

But the bleak, empty pitch of the wind made him shiver. A bird, small, black and silent, skidded across a patch of reeds and left behind a hollow clacking sound; there seemed to be no other life. As the minutes passed in stifling silence, it became increasingly difficult to believe that anything could exist below the surface of the lake but mud and stone.

His eyes had begun to ache when the door opened.

"Tempus," he muttered, resting his elbows on his knees and glaring down at the ice instead of Pansy, who was making her way through the wiry hedges with a bundle underneath her arm. He had been here for almost an hour.

Pansy perched beside him and draped a thickly knitted camel scarf around his neck. "You're going to freeze," she said.

"I'm all right." He wound it around his throat, though, stuffing the ends into his dressing gown.

There was a crinkle as Pansy unwrapped the rest of her package in her lap. She had brought him biscuits and a thermos. "Draco, I didn't –"

"It's not your fault." He didn't want to hear an apology, couldn't listen to any more assurances that Harry was perfectly fine. "I don't know why he wanted to come here, anyway," he said, wanting it to sound biting – but even in his own ears the words seemed to wander, lost. He had no idea why Harry had agreed to this, not really, no matter what he had told Pansy. There were times when he felt like he knew Harry well enough that there was no need for speaking, but when it came to Weasley and Granger he was facing a grey void. Harry had never refrained from speaking about them, had never hesitated to keep their company even after Draco had moved in, and yet whatever held them all together was something that he failed to understand. He had never worried too much over it; if he couldn't comprehend how Harry could tolerate Granger's fault-finding, it seemed natural enough that Harry's reasons for avoiding her should be beyond him as well.

Either way, he was sure Harry was regretting his decision now. That was more important to him than he had expected it to be.

"I'm glad you decided to come," she said after a quiet, hollow minute. She patted his knee. "Theo's having a fantastic time, although I'm sure you wouldn't know it. He doesn't like to leave the house. I keep telling him he ought to catch up with more people, but I think he doesn't really believe that he needs to."

Draco stared at his boots, their laces soaking in the snow. "What about you? You keep up with everyone, I suppose?"

"Of course." She handed him a biscuit. "We miss you, you know. Harry could –"

"I can go out without Harry," Draco said, a little stung. He let it pass, though; he hadn't gone out without Harry for ages. "And no, he couldn't. Even if he would, who the hell would want him around having drinks with our lot? You don't like him, do you?" He had been trying to decide since they'd arrived what Pansy thought. She was another one who was difficult to read, sometimes – she could be so cold and so welcoming at once. When she was being formal, being the hostess, she was inscrutable. Part of him felt like he hadn't seen her yet during this visit. Harry stood between them whether she liked him or not.

"I think he's … kind," Pansy said, smiling at him with a hint of apology. If Draco hadn't known her, he would have discounted it as something you simply had to say if everyone had seen you trying to sell out the object of conversation to Lord Voldemort. "He's a little boring, of course. But I like the way he treats you, and he doesn't say much at the table anyway."

Draco snorted. "'Boring.' He'd probably like that, you ought to tell him –"

Something shifted off to the side; it was white on white, as cold and insubstantial as the threads of frost that crept through the earth at the water's edge. Draco shot to his feet.

"Oh, hello, Mrs. Craig," said Pansy, brushing biscuit crumbs from her robes. "How are you feeling today?"

"Tired." Her features were hard to make out; the snow kept throwing grey shadows through her face. "Tired, but well, thank you."

Draco straightened and sunk his hand in his pocket, curling his fingers around his wand. He doubted he could actually curse her, but if she wasn't in her right mind, perhaps she wouldn't know. "Listen," he said, as the ghost shifted her gaze to him with a polite but wary smile. "You've got –"

Pansy cleared her throat. "I wonder if you’ve seen my friend Harry, Mrs. Craig?" Her speech was rushed slightly with what might have been exasperation. "He left last night, and we can't seem to find him."

"Oh – no. No, I don't know." The ghost shoved her hands into the pockets of her apron and shook her head quickly from side to side. "No."

Pansy stood. "Are you sure? He's got dark hair and glasses, Mrs. Craig, and he would be wearing my husband's boots. You do know what those look like? We saw his prints in the snow."

Mrs. Craig slipped further back over the water. "But he's such a good friend," she said. Her voice grew more strained with each passing word. "I know he'll be such a good friend, and my son is so lonely –"

"Your son's dead," Draco barked. He couldn't see how coddling someone who couldn't even appreciate it was going to do them any good. "He doesn't need friends."

The ghost shrunk away from him. Her hands were bunched in the fabric of her robes. "He does, though," she said, so quietly that the wind nearly drowned her out. "All the same, he does. He's only a boy."

"And Harry's a godfather, twice over, and he can't sit around tending to your – your delusions." He had been about to say son; she was driving him mad, too. This was ridiculous. He turned to Pansy, his hands planted on his hips. "Get Nott out here, he knows how to talk to her, doesn't he?"

But it was too late. With a heavy sigh and a flare of ratty, weightless hair, Mrs. Craig disappeared beneath the ice. The unnatural silence returned. Pansy's expression was grim.

"Will you come inside now?" she asked. "I think you've done about all you're going to do."

Draco sat and took up his package of biscuits. Why she was acting like it was his fault that the woman had been full of nothing but lies and gibberish, he didn't know. "I'm staying. Go in if you want." No doubt the ghost would come back when she had forgotten that he'd hurt her feelings. She'd want to be best friends, probably.

Pansy left him. A couple of hours later she sent him his lunch; when the light began to fail she sent him tea. And when the darkness fell and he had begun to despair of seeing the ghost again, when he was trying to think of some way to break through to the water and drag Harry up himself, she brought him a lamp. It hovered at his side, swaying in the gusts that burst across the hills, and painted his reflection on the ice in blurry and flickering orange.

Harry had no idea how long he had been trapped. He had heard a fairy tale once about a girl who had gone into the woods for three days and returned home to find that decades had passed – the details were shadowy, but everything here was so cold, so thick and slow, that he was sure time must move more quickly up above the surface of the lake.

He was in the lake, that much he had figured out almost immediately. When he had come to ankle-deep in silt he had struggled, blinding himself in kicked-up mud, and groped his way to where the ground tended upward and turned into a firm earthen wall. By the time he had hit his head on the ice, he could see clearly again, although it did him little good. The only light came from what seemed like miles away, a silver speck that must have been Mrs. Craig and did no more than illuminate the barest outline of his hand.

He had panicked then, wondering if anyone had heard him, wondering why he was still alive when he could feel the frigid water everywhere around him and thick in his lungs. He had reached up to pound against the seal of ice, half expecting to find Ron there to drag him out again. But Ron wasn't here, couldn't be here – Ron was far away with –

Harry shuddered. How could he have forgotten? There was a child in the lake, someone had fallen in.

That had started him on his slow march toward the light. But by the time he had been able to see more than vague shapes, he had remembered that there was no child here. Mrs. Craig had only told him so to get him to … what? He had aimed his wand above his head, trying to envision the ice that lay some ten feet over him, and said a garbled Deprimo.

The rush of angry bubbles had changed course not twelve inches from his face and shot out to the side; a moment later there had been a powerful thump and a cloud of even thicker blackness started to unfurl where the spell had landed. Harry had run, his feet sticking in the mud, and had left one of Nott's boots for lost. Now he was a little closer to the one source of illumination, but still could barely see.

"Lumos."

The beam from his wand refracted strangely in front of him, turning in unnatural angles and forming useless shards of trapped light. It was like trying to see through an immensely complicated crystal. Nothing here worked the way it was supposed to. His heart beat more urgently in his chest, but his breath could not keep up when all there was for air was this baffling water that seemed to thwart him no matter what he did. He walked on.

When he was within fifty feet of Mrs. Craig – when he could make out her figure, her arms clutched over the top of her head – there was enough light that he could begin to discern his surroundings. He was powerfully reminded of the Room of Requirement and its endless maze of lost objects; there were half-disintegrated books, toys made grotesque by growths of algae, fluttering strips that might have once been clothes or were perhaps simply ragged plants. A rocking chair jutted out of the sediment like the bow of a ship run aground.

Mrs. Craig sat on a trunk whose leather covering was floating away from its sides, a rippling fan held on only by the iron bands that kept the whole thing shut. She was rocking slowly and seemed to be murmuring to herself, but her words were muffled in the crook of her arm.

"Mrs. Craig?" Harry ventured. He kept his wand at hand, although it probably wouldn't do him any good. She had proven herself dangerous.

Her only response was to tuck her chin even further down toward her chest.

Harry took another step forward, propelling himself on a long, gnarled branch that had been thrust into the bottom of the lake. He ran his hand along it to see whether it might lead him out of the water, but nearly jumped back when he encountered something soft and shapeless. He leaned closer, dread building in his chest – but it was only a swollen mass of wool yarn, arranged in familiar, if malformed, stripes. Though it was black and filthy grayish-brown, Harry recognized it at once as a Hogwarts scarf. He couldn't tell what colors it had been when it was new; it might have belonged to any House.

He cleared his throat. It seemed wrong to disturb her when she was so distraught, but he wasn't sure how long he could stay here. "Excuse me – Mrs. Craig?"

She peered at him over her billowing sleeve for several seconds before lifting her face to him fully. She gave him half a smile. Harry had the impression that she did not remember him, but didn't want him to know it. "Yes – yes, hello." She sniffed. "I'm so glad you're here."

"Well – I was wondering," Harry said, telling himself that it was stupid to feel so guilty, "whether you knew how to get out?"

"Out?" She cocked her head and a tendril of hair worked itself free from behind her ear. "Oh, yes, of course. I know how to get out."

"Great." Harry smiled. His lips felt like they were about to crack with cold. "That's really great. Do you think you could tell me how?"

She regarded him almost fondly for so long that Harry thought she might have forgotten what he had said. "I'm so glad you're here," she replied. "You're such a good friend to him. It does me good to know that he has you to play with."

"Your son." Harry's stomach sank. Was there a body here, lurking somewhere in the dark? He resolved to keep very still.

Mrs. Craig's attention drifted. When Harry was about to call her name again, she nodded. "My son." She tilted her face up to the surface. "You have a child."

"No," said Harry at once, his mind flying to Ron and Hermione and Rose and recoiling. He couldn't bear to think of them here, to think of them like –

"You have two children."

Harry shook his head. "I haven't got any children at all."

This seemed to confuse Mrs. Craig. Harry thought he might like to get back to the more pressing subject at hand, really, but she was not finished.

"Your friend," she said, touching her forehead as though trying to force out a memory, "said … well, I thought ..."

"My friend?" Harry looked up. The blackness was impenetrable. But up there somewhere was Draco, perhaps no further away than the house, perhaps working even now to pull him out. "You spoke to him?"

"You're such a good friend," she murmured. "Such a good friend. I'm so glad he has you to play with. So very glad."

Harry looked away, reluctant to try to make her speak sensibly again. Her son, wherever he was, was clearly long dead. Why did he feel so badly about asking her to show him to his escape?

A light flared up in the distance, soft and orange, a gentle stroke of color that brought the barest hint of warmth to the lifeless silver of the lake. After a moment's hesitation, Harry shuffled as quietly as he could through the mud and past Mrs. Craig, moving toward the new light that he knew beyond a doubt was Draco. He swam and walked in jerky spurts for what seemed like hours, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder. Mrs. Craig was not chasing him. His eyes slowly adjusted to the increased illumination, aching more with every step – craving more, he was sure, desperate to see again.

When he was so close to the edge of the lake that he had to kneel to keep his head from knocking against the ice, he looked straight up. The long, slumped, blurry shape was absolutely Draco, washed in firelight and huddled in on himself. How long had he been waiting, Harry wondered? An hour? Had Draco noticed that he was out of bed straightaway? Had a day passed? Was it already Christmas, already the new year?

He shouted, but the ice was too thick. Draco was so close that it actually hurt, a burning feeling in his lungs and his throat and his eyes. Harry pressed the palm of his hand up against the ice; the cold seared his skin, but he did not move.

Draco jolted. Then the light was gone, but Harry didn't miss it; the shadow that had taken it from him had a very familiar shape, one whose every detail he knew even when it was distorted behind this frozen barrier. He saw the outline of Draco's hand slip down to lie over his. He knew he was imagining the warmth, but it made him shudder to his toes all the same.

He shut his eyes, drew in another impossible breath, and turned to swim away. He felt Draco's no in his bones without hearing it, and reached up to show his hand again, a fleeting signal that he hoped would be enough to sustain him for … however long. Harry needed to get out, but if Draco hadn't found a way to do so from the outside, he expected the only power that could free him lay here below.

Mrs. Craig, when he found her again, was chewing anxiously at her lip. When she smiled at him this time, Harry knew that she remembered him. But it was clear that she was worried.

"Hello," she said. "Hello. It's so good to see you." Her fingers dug through the top of the trunk as she leaned forward to look him over from top to bottom. "Might I borrow your boots? My son needs boots for the winter. I know they would fit him perfectly."

"They're not mine," Harry replied, not sure why he had said so – he didn't give a damn whether Nott had one less pair of boots or not, and he had already lost one of them. "So I can't give them away. But – here." He lifted his foot to remove his remaining boot and tucked it under his arm before peeling off his sodden sock. He shifted his weight and leaned down to tug the other one off, waving it about to shake off some of the mud. The cold was even worse when he was barefoot, and the soft lake bottom was slimy between his toes.

He held the socks out to her, faintly embarrassed now – they did not make an impressive gift. "You can have these, if you like," he said. "You don't have to borrow them."

Mrs. Craig reached out to take them. The water around her hands seemed to thicken; the socks drifted toward her almost as if she were handling them herself, though she could never touch them without her fingers passing right through. She smiled at Harry; her throat worked as though she were swallowing or trying to speak.

"Oh, thank you," she said at last, her voice so thick that Harry immediately looked away. "They're lovely. They'll fit him so well. He's not here right now, but you can come back and see, if you like. It's nearly Christmas, you know. You can come back then. Such a nice present."

"Maybe," Harry said, and felt terrible for lying. "We'll see. But you're welcome."

She shook her hands and the socks flopped a bit; then she twisted her fingers like she was folding the socks, unfolding them, folding them again. Harry watched her do it four or five times before he realized that she was humming.

He didn't know if she was even aware that he was present any longer, but he took a seat on the edge of the trunk, at the outer perimeter of her unbearable aura of cold, and listened. It wasn't a melody he knew, but it was peaceful. It ran in a circle, repeating itself endlessly as she folded and unfolded Harry's socks.

"Well," he said softly after some time had passed. "I had better be going. I'm glad you like them."

"Of course. Thank you." The socks fell into the mud and Mrs. Craig's hand slid through his shoulder. "Goodnight. It's just this way." She shot up so quickly that she left a trail like lightning.

Harry struggled after her, pumping his arms too slowly through the icy lake, convinced that he would never make it – she was moving too fast and too far away – she was going to leave him behind. He lost sight of her and panicked, unsure of where to go or even which direction was up. The light was gone –

And then it surrounded him for one final split second and vanished. The cold of real air in his lungs was explosive. His skin was on fire. He wanted to cough and hack and claw heat back into his skin, but he couldn't move. There was an orange light, an unbearable heat on his face, a distant noise past the blood pounding in his ears, and that was all.

Very, very slowly, the burning in his skin turned to numbness, then to warmth. The gritty plane of ice underneath him softened. The light changed from orange to yellow to a low, calming red, and the noise resolved itself into a voice.

"Out," Draco was saying, and he sounded rather cross. "Out!"

A door slammed. Harry moaned into his pillow as the sound split through his skull.

"Harry!" Draco spun on his heel and rushed to the side of the bed, sitting down with a deafening creak and a sickening sway of the mattress. "You're awake, finally, it's been half an hour already – cocoa and a hot meal indeed, more like every blanket in the house, about eight different potions and a shot of whiskey for good measure - what the hell were you doing following mad ghosts in the middle of the night, you stupid prat?"

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and said, "Mmfgl." His brain was working very slowly, but he strongly suspected that he was being treated unfairly.

"Shut up," Draco snapped. "And lie down." He took hold of Harry's shoulders and pushed him even more firmly into the pile of pillows they had had so little use for the previous night. Had it been the previous night? He found it hard to care.

When next he opened his eyes, Harry supposed a good deal of time must have passed. He propped himself up on his elbows with only a mild, tingling stiffness in his arms and back; Draco was lying beside him, his mouth hanging slightly open. Harry slid up against the headboard and stared out the window, shivering at the pale stretch of light that threw twisted shadows of branches over the ice and the ground. But there were stars visible; it might only have been the moon.

He thought of the dead boy, wherever he was – trapped in that lake, perhaps, for the rest of his …

Well. His being? Did he exist anymore at all? He did, of course, in his mother's mind, if she had a mind, her heart if she had one. But she was only a cold shadow and it was all very confusing –

"If you so much as think about going out there again," came Draco's groggy drawl from behind a chocolate-colored pillow, "I'll drown you myself."

Harry smiled down at him, more sheepishly than he would have liked. "I've had enough, thanks."

"What happened?" Draco sat up, sliding his arm around Harry's waist and tucking the blanket up over his shoulder. "Nott's told me all about how she got you down there, I mean, but what did you do for twenty-four hours? How did you get back up?"

"It was just …" Harry shrugged, forcing himself to face Draco rather than the window. "I don't know. I don't remember being down there for that long. Mostly we just – talked. She didn't make very much sense." He didn't want to talk about how he had escaped. He had said he would go back, and he had left her there alone, content as far as he knew but still without company … "I think that might be what death is like," he said slowly. "It was weird, all cold and –"

"No one knows what death's like," Draco said, too sharp, dismissive but affronted. He glared the way he only did when he was concerned, with the corner of his mouth pushed down ever so slightly. "Maybe it's what being a ghost is like, which is just as well. If you're daft enough to hang on that long just to chase after nothing, you shouldn't have a good time of it."

"Maybe." Harry pushed his hand into Draco's. "I don't know. It's like you said – no one knows. It could be anything."

"It's an end. It's nothing." Draco sat up straighter, the better to take advantage of every centimeter of height, the better to look down that sharp nose of his, and Harry felt a rush of warmth that had nothing to do with blankets or potions or whiskey. "And if you would just listen –"

"But it can't be nothing. You can hear them, or – you can hear something, beyond the veil. I know it's not people, I know they don't come back, but she couldn't still be here if –"

"Shut up, Harry."

Harry blinked and almost winced. Draco's fingers were clenched so tightly around his hand that a sharp pain rushed up to his elbow, but Draco's face was a cool, determined mask – a little irritated, maybe, but otherwise closed. Harry realized he had disturbed him. He hadn't meant to do it; he hadn't been talking about himself at all, but he had no idea what Draco might have thought when he had disappeared. And he knew, of course, that he and Draco had very different opinions on the desirability of reuniting with anyone who had passed away. They had lost or escaped from different things, and some – perhaps all – were better left buried. All he had wondered, he supposed, was what it would be like to have the sort of love that kept one rooted to the spot and waiting against all hope and reason that something would reappear, but maybe it was stupid to be jealous of Mrs. Craig or of Ron when there was this. The shadow of Draco's hand beyond a wall of ice and a fleeting, phantom warmth flashed through his mind.

He leaned against Draco, pressing his cheek to his bony shoulder and resting his hand at his side. As soon as he managed to shake his hand free of Draco's grip, he embraced him. He feigned a yawn. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm just really tired."

"It's all right." Draco's hand pulled through his hair once, terse, and then slipped down to his back to twist into his pyjamas as though he were preparing to haul him out of the water again.

Harry understood; he fell asleep still clinging to him, and woke up with his arm pinned under Draco's back. It did not help his aching joints and screaming muscles, but for a few minutes he lay still as the rise and fall of Draco's ribs bit into the soft part of his wrist. Then he sat up; his head swam and his body tingled uncomfortably.

"Hey." He shook Draco's shoulder. As usual, it took about twenty seconds to get any response beyond an impatient grimace. "Hey – wake up. Happy Christmas." The gifts he'd arranged to be owled were not at the foot of the bed; Pansy must have gathered them all under the tree in the parlor. The thought of opening everything with the Notts made the prospect of Christmas morning a little less appealing than it would otherwise have been, but now he knew that Draco would stick close to him. It wouldn't be so bad.

"Right. Happy Christmas." Draco leaned forward, extending his fingers toward his toes and groaning. "I hardly slept at all. You're still like ice," he said, planting his hand on Harry's forehead and frowning at him with a shadow of the same disapproval that had been marked so clearly on his face when Harry had tried to speak to him about death. "Stay here, I've got another dose of Pepperup that you're going to have to take, I don't care what the bottle says about overdo –"

Harry managed to grab him around the ribs before he climbed out of bed. "I'm warm enough." He kissed Draco's neck behind his ear, firmly suppressing the shudder that ran along his back when the blanket fell away. "Just lie with me a while. I'll be fine. We don't have to go down to breakfast yet, do we?"

"Not just yet, no." Draco turned to him, twisting in Harry's arms and falling against him to force him flat against the mattress. "We'll lie here and warm up, then – but if you so much as sneeze, Potter, the deal's off."

Winding his arms around Draco's neck, Harry slid closer and closer to him until he'd found his way under the blankets again. "I'll be good," he said. "Promise." This was all the warmth he needed, he was sure. Kissing Draco was almost intolerably hot, his slow lips and heavy tongue recoiling at first from Draco's ready mouth. But it got better, much better as the morning progressed, and if Harry was still a bit sluggish and stupid when Draco finally consented to let him up, at least he was warm at his core. His mind was entirely back on solid ground.

A clock was ringing out the hour as they descended the last few steps to the foyer – nine or ten; Harry lost count. Pansy met them in the kitchen doorway, ready with a kiss for Draco's cheek and a touch to Harry's shoulder that was no briefer than he wanted it to be.

"Good morning," she said, leading them both through to the table, where Nott was hidden behind a newspaper. "You look much better, Harry – did you sleep very well? I hope you're feeling all right. We'll get some food in you this minute."

"He'll be fine," Draco announced. "As soon as we get him fed, anyway, and assuming you haven't got any other traps lurking that we should know about."

Nott gave a noncommittal grunt.

"Oh, good," Pansy said.

Harry thought he saw genuine relief in her face as she bent to inspect the pans cluttering the stove. Whatever she was feeling was more for Draco than for him, he knew, but he wouldn't begrudge them that. Draco stood and hurried to her side just in time to stick his nose in the oven as she was pulling out a sheet of rolls and to explain exactly how famished he was.

"Have you been up long?" Harry asked Nott, glancing over the sections of the paper that lay on the corner of the table, several of which were slightly rumpled and folded in the wrong places.

"I've only been up since eight." Nott's eyes flickered over to Pansy. "That's about my usual wait."

Draco fell into his chair with a short, sharp laugh, and set his elbows on the table. "I say – that rhymes! Excellent."

Nott blinked at him; then his lip curled a little and his heavy, dry expression pinched into a rather withering glare. He stuck his nose into the folds of the Prophet again and disappeared from view.

"He's in a bit of a mood," Draco called over to Pansy. "You'd better give him some food –" He broke off when Harry kicked him under the table, but Nott gave no indication that he had heard anything.

Harry was too wrapped up in anticipation for what looked and smelled like a very well-made breakfast to object all that strenuously to Draco's teasing. The imagined taste of it filled his mouth, heavy and warm, pushing last night's chill out to the very edges of his body. The lake seemed very far away, a dull and unassuming grey under a sky that looked little different; but the sad smile of the woman whose home it was lingered at the back of his mind, try as he might to wash her away with thoughts of the knife he'd bought for Draco, the broom for Teddy or the blanket he'd had made for Rose.

Draco inched forward in his chair as a large platter settled in the center of the table. "That looks great," he said. "Here – put some on my plate."

Nott slapped the paper shut, flung it down onto the table and stormed off into the parlor to the sound of Draco's roaring laughter.

"Really, Draco," Pansy said quite mildly, looking after Nott with an affectionate smile.

"He writes poetry, Pansy." Draco threw his arm around Harry's shoulders for support and gave another gasping laugh. "Not that I'm not saying he deserves it, mind you, but – don't you think he'd better get used to it? And if he thinks there's going to be any bacon left when he gets back from his snit, he's an idiot."

Harry rolled his eyes. Still, Draco's laughter was a great relief, another warming force that seemed to work at him from the inside.

Pansy gave a small sigh. "We'll just have breakfast with presents, I suppose." She began serving out portions and marshaling the plates one by one into a hovering line; and it was hard not to think that the stupid grin stretched across Draco's face had quite a lot to do with the extra large heap of eggs that Pansy laid on Harry's plate.