cher, can you—”

“No,” says a now-familiar voice, “he can’t,” and Horace Slughorn steps through the door to the storeroom.

“Dear god,” Draco says. He’s turned to blink at him, but one of his hands is still on Harry’s shoulder. “That’s—really Slughorn.”

“I told you,” says Harry.

“Yes, well, I thought the odds were heavily in my favor that you were raving mad,” Draco snaps, glaring at him, before he looks back at Slughorn and lets out a heavy sigh. “It’s really not good for the Slytherin reputation, you know, pulling stuff like this. You tarnish the name of the group!”

Harry rolls his eyes at Draco’s back, amused and faintly horrified that that’s what Draco has chosen to object to right now.

Slughorn does not look entertained. “And what would you know about maintaining Slytherin’s reputation, Mr. Malfoy? As I recall, during the war I stepped up for the winning side, and you—”

“Yes, made a lot of horrible mistakes, for which I was tried before a jury of my peers,” Draco snaps. “Is that how you excuse what you’re doing? Brutalizing this house, attacking innocent women in the street—”

“That wasn’t me, in fact,” Slughorn says. “It was on my order, of course, but I didn’t attend to it personally.”

“You must sleep great at night,” Harry mutters, and Slughorn smiles.

“You know, I do, my boy,” he says. “I truly do. But I would sleep better—much better, in fact—in one of the beds here than I would in any at my own home.”

“Wow,” Draco snaps, “thanks for that very important bulletin about your napping preferences, but do you know, I find myself oddly uninterested! Kreacher, I’m sorry, I got distracted by the madman; can you please Apparate Harry to St. Mungo’s? And then have him send all the Aurors he can think of right back here, that would be just excellent.”

“I’m not leaving you here,” Harry snarls, and the same time Kreacher whispers, “Kreacher is sorry, Master Draco. Kreacher would if he could, but he cannot.”

Draco blinks at Kreacher, obviously startled. “Why the hell not?”

“For the same reason he couldn’t do anything when I had you at my mercy, Mr. Malfoy,” Slughorn says. “One of the Masters of the House is in mortal peril. He can only Call another Master, or another House.”

“But,” Draco says, turning to stare at Kreacher, “I’m perfectly fine! I’m…” He trails off, and his gaze flicks to Harry, aghast. “You don’t mean—”

“Kreacher is sorry, Master Draco,” Kreacher says again. Distantly, through the wave of realization threatening to engulf him, Harry thinks there’s something a little odd about that —normally when Kreacher apologizes it’s apanied by wailing and suggestions of what kind of harm he deserves, not the wide-eyed, entreating gaze he seems to be directing at both of them now. “The House knows how Master Draco is feeling, and Harry Potter was its Master once before. Harry Potter stays here; Harry Potter has walked the House, attic to foundations, while Master Draco slept. The House has shown the way for him. It has let him enter the storeroom by himself. Master Draco is still Master of Grimmauld Place, but… Harry Potter is Master of Grimmauld Place, also.”

“I,” Harry says, his heart in his throat. The House knows how Master Draco is feeling— Harry doesn’t have time to think about that right now. “Kreacher, that can’t be right, I’m— I sold it. It’s yours,” he adds, quickly, to Draco, who looks like he might be having some sort of out of body experience. “I sold it to you, and it’s yours, dead to rights. This is—a mistake, or something—you bought it fair and square—”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Slughorn says. “You see, Harry, there was another offer on the table for this house. One that was put down rather before Mr. Malfoy’s, I might add. I even came to see you about it, if you recall?”

Harry thinks back, and does, with the murky haziness of all his memories from the year after the war, sort of recall Slughorning by the Auror office one day. “You wanted to know if it was true I was selling Grimmauld Place,” Harry says slowly. “You asked…about the Unbreakable Vow.”

“You see, that’s what really gets me about this whole situation,” Slughorn says, spreading his hands. “You were already so unconcerned about the place that you didn’t want to bother with all that mess; it all could have been so easy. If you had just gone to a less scrupulous solicitor to manage your affairs, I would have snapped the house up before Mr. Malfoy even knew it was for sale.” He glares at both of them, crossing his arms over his chest. “But, of course, old Bracefoot’s a sentimentalist, and just had to hold out for someone with a blood connection, who was willing to swear on their life not harm the old place! She was mine by rights, you know. I saw her first.”

“Are you serious,” Draco says, faintly, after a moment. “This is—this whole thing—is just about you wanting to get back at me? For having something you wanted?”

“You don’t even know what you have!” Slughorn cries, throwing his hands in the air. “Children, all of you—the core of the Black house hasn’t always lived here, you know. This is just a row house! A shell! That core has been carted around since the middle ages, from hut to hovel to house to castle—wherever that family went, for hundreds and thousands of years.” He looks around, eyes gleaming. “This is the Preservation Room, you know. It always shows up, in every version of the house. Malfoy Manor doesn’t have one, does it, Mr. Malfoy?”

“No,” Draco says, and for the first time since Slughorn stepped into the room, he sounds genuinely nervous. “But that’s—I’ve done all kinds of research, this is just—I would know if this house had a core from the middle ages—”

“Oh, you know nothing,” Slughorn snaps. “I can’t tell you how painful it was, sitting and listening to you and your twittering little friends yesterday, all of you barely more than Hogwarts students! Talking like you knew anything at all about the history you claim to love.”

“What?” Draco exclaims. “How could you have—what?”

“He likes to be furniture,” says Harry, fixing Slughorn with a look of deep disgust. “He was the settee in the sitting room for the last two days.”

“The green one?” Draco demands. “Harry, I sat on that!”

“And it was no pic for me, either,” says Slughorn, making an unhappy little face at him. “But it was worth it! My mother used to say that in ancient times, the Blacks were necromancers, and they’d put their dead in here for reanimation—this core once had the power to wake the dead, Mr. Malfoy, and you’re wasting it running a quaint little household museum!”

“Oh, and what would you do with it?” Draco snaps. His voice is fierce, but his hand is gripping Harry’s shoulder so tightly that Harry thinks it’s probably going to leave a bruise right over his fire poker scar. “Think an army of zombies is likely to win you a lot of power and influence, do you?”

“Don’t be silly,” Slughorn says smoothly, and then—

Harry uses the word insane a lot, its derivatives and variations. He thinks it about Draco at least three times a day, about Ron and Hermione, about people he works with, the rest of his friends. He thinks it about himself, which is the crux of the whole thing, really. Harry’s been afraid for his entire adult life that he’s wired wrong, that he was damaged too young and too severely to ever be a whole person again. He lived with himself the year after war, when the scarring in his mind was so fresh and so intense that his magic went haywire, sometimes, crashing out windows and cracking craters into the ground. He’s lived with himself all of these last seven years, watched himself standing still from a bit of a remove as his friends flitted and danced around him, building themselves, building their lives. Harry has called people mad, crazy, lunatic, maniac, has done it jokingly, has done it a lot, because the truth is that he’s been afraid to his very foundations that it was what was true about himself. He’s wanted, with such a pathetic desperation that he couldn’t admit it even in the privacy of his own mind, not to be the only one.

But the look that crosses Slughorn’s face now—it’s true insanity, the kind of lunacy Harry last saw end in a rebound of its own curse in the middle of the Great Hall. It’s the look of a man who cares about nothing and no one but himself, his own ends, who will hurt and kill on the theory that he deserves to, and nothing more. And for all he hates to see it in the circumstances—for all he hates to see it, ever—Harry feels relief settle over his shoulders, sweet and simple and long sinceing.

Harry’s not crazy. Draco’s not crazy, either. Or, if they are, then the word means— flawed andplicated and wounded and human, and if that’s true then everyone’s crazy, so no one really is. Maybe Harry isn’t a well-adjusted person. Maybe he has lost years to a pervasive fog, thick around his head and heart, that bled away the things he felt so easily when he was young without his even noticing: so what? It doesn’t mean that he’s beyond repair, that he’s hurting anyone, that there’s anything wrong with him. It just means that this is the person he turns out to be, that’s all. It just means that this is what he’s got.

It also means that whatever’s about toe out of Slughorn’s mouth is bound to be off- the-charts madness, though.

“I was cheated, you know,” Slughorn says. “All those years spent with the guilt eating away at me—and for what! I’m sure Tom would’ve found out about Horcruxes some other way, if it weren’t for me. I’m sure it would still have ended the same way! But now, with the hindsight of years, as I am forced to live without theforts and hierarchies to which I grew ustomed—it haunts me, the time I wasted. The things I could have done with it.” Slughorn smiles beatifically, spreading his hands. “I don’t want to raise a zombie army, Mr. Malfoy. I simply want to take the core and install it in my own home, where I can take all the time I need to work out how to age myself back, say, fifty, sixty years. Ha

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