Be Careful
105: What Hopes You Cherish
By Anne B. Walsh
I disclaim the brief quote from DH.
Harry looked up at Draco over Snape’s body. “You’re going to have to explain this one,” he said.
“Can’t. No time.” Draco flipped shut the lid of the soul flask and tucked it back inside his robes. “Go do what he wanted you to. I’ll see you before it’s all over.”
“Since when do you give me orders?”
“Fine, it’s a suggestion,” Draco snapped, his patience wearing thin. “Do whatever you damn well please. I have somewhere else to be.” He turned his attention to the other two occupants of the room, nodding briefly to Hermione, who returned the gesture, before facing Ron. “Sorry about your brother,” he said, repressing an inappropriate laugh. “In caelo intret semihora ante malum scit mortuus est.”
While all three of them were still staring at him, he bowed, transformed into Luke, and darted between them and back into the secret passage onto Hogwarts’ grounds. Ron’s voice followed him. “What did he say?”
“It was Latin.” Hermione seemed torn between laughter and tears. “It means, ‘May he be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows he’s dead.’”
Luke snickered to himself. Damn, she’s good.
Out the other end of the tunnel he shot, weaving deftly among the Whomping Willow’s reactivated branches, and followed his ears into the Forest.
It’s finally time for that conversation with my father dearest I’ve been dying to have all year...
His limping pawbeats slowed and stopped.
Except I don’t know if I want to have it anymore.
At least, not for the same reason.
He rose to his hind legs and stood up human, hurrying towards the distant light of torches.
What the hell. I’ll figure it out as I go along, like I do everything else.
“What news, my Death Eaters?” Voldemort’s voice called from up ahead, a murmur of welcome and greetings sounding underneath his words.
“We lost half a dozen, they have a few more to mourn,” Bellatrix answered. “And a captive, as you can see.” A round of snickers from the Death Eaters. “No sign of Potter yet.”
“Very well.” Voldemort, whose shape Draco could now see, tapped the Elder Wand against his throat and began to speak, his voice magically amplified to carry over all of Hogwarts. “You have fought valiantly. Lord Voldemort knows how to value bravery...”
“What’s wrong?” Draco heard Lucius asking his aunt in an undertone. “Is it Rodolphus?”
“Rodolphus and Rabastan. Neither of them marked, both looking surprised.” Aunt Bella shook her head. “I underestimated my sister. But she did say she would kill them if I attacked her half-blood brat or its werewolf mate, and she is a Black...”
“Did you get them?” asked Draco, coming into the light.
Aunt Bella scowled. “No. The girl dodged my spell, and Dolohov waited a second too long once he had the werewolf down. Still, it isn’t over yet.” She cast a worshipful look at Voldemort, who had finished his harangue and was directing Rowle to kindle a fire in the center of the clearing. “One hour, that’s all we have to wait, and then Potter will come and our Master will win his final battle and defeat death forever...”
You keep on believing that, auntie. Hope it makes you happy. Draco tapped Lucius on the arm. “Come aside with me?” he asked when his father looked around. “I want to talk to you.”
Lucius smiled. “Of course. Excuse us, Bellatrix?”
She waved at them absently, her eyes still fixed on Voldemort.
Lucius tried to analyze the unusual feeling in his chest as he followed his son out of the torchlit clearing. After a few moments, he began to suspect that he was happy.
It has been long enough since such was the case that I’m not surprised I don’t recognize it. But it should no longer be strange to me after tonight. With my Master so close to winning, that insufferable prig Severus as dead as a traitor deserves to be, and my son returned to me, what can go wrong?
The thought was barely complete in his mind when he walked into Draco, who had stopped at the edge of a smaller clearing about a hundred yards from the one they had left. “I beg your pardon—”
“No, it’s my fault—”
“I should have looked where I was going—”
“I shouldn’t have stopped in your way—”
They both laughed at the sound of their absurd crosstalk.
“It’s been too long since we could share a joke,” Draco said, raising his wand. “Lumos libera.” A glowing globe sprang into existence above their heads, shedding a silvery light over the clearing.
Lucius frowned. “I thought Severus had taken your wand when he imprisoned you.”
“That does seem like an obvious step,” Draco agreed, leaning against a tree.
“Then where—ah.” Lucius chuckled as he recognized the wand his son was now twirling between his fingers. “I should pay more attention to my pockets. Smoothly done. Give it back now.”
Draco flipped the wand into the air and caught it. “No.”
Holding his anger in check, Lucius kept his voice soft. “Draco, jokes are all very well and good in their place, but I will be expected to fight later.”
“I know.” Another flip and catch. “But I took it away from you.” Another. “That makes it my wand now, not yours.” Another. “Funny how that works, isn’t it? You keep what you can grab.” The wand rolled across his palm, caught at the last second by his fingertips. “Rather like life.”
“Like... life?”
“Life. You know, that thing we’re both plodding through with our eyes and our ears shut to all the best things it’s got to offer.” Draco balanced the wand on one finger, then tucked it away inside his robes. “Or I was, until I got woken up this past summer.”
Lucius had the uncanny sensation of being poised on a precipice. “What are you talking about?”
“I hated you for a long time after I found out what I’d been missing,” Draco went on, as though he hadn’t heard what Lucius had said. “First for stopping me from getting to the things I wanted. Then for not teaching me how to get them years and years ago. Finally, of course, there was Mother, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s only tonight that I’ve come to the oddest conclusion.” He regarded Lucius levelly. “I don’t hate you anymore.”
Thank you sounded inane as a response to this, as did Why not? Lucius settled for a politely quizzical look.
“Oh, it surprised me too.” Draco reached up and caught hold of a tree branch above his head, setting his foot into a crack and pulling himself upwards. “I was angry about it. I wanted to hate you. But my feelings are what they are, and they say I don’t hate you anymore.” He straddled the branch, crossing his feet under it. “I’m sorry for you, if that makes you feel any better about it.”
“Sorry... for me?” None of this makes sense... was I dreaming the last ten minutes, or am I dreaming now?
“Yes, sorry for you. I’d feel sorry for anyone in your position, but I can’t help feeling a little more for you, because whether I like it or not, you’re my father.”
“Whether you like it or not?” I must find something to say besides repeating what he is saying. It makes me sound peculiar.
Of course, that matches the way I feel.
The rock of the precipice was crumbling beneath his mental feet. In a very few moments he would be falling, and no one was likely to come to his aid...
“You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about by your position, do you?” Draco leaned forward, shifting his weight until he lay face down on the branch. “Let me jog your memory a little. When I was little, just a baby really, you taught me a trick. A certain phrase I was supposed to say whenever you asked me to do something. Every time your friends came over, you’d show it off. ‘Draco, go upstairs and change your robes,’ you’d say. Or, ‘Draco, come here and say hello.’ Do you remember what I was supposed to say back to you?”
The memory drew a faint smile from Lucius. “‘What’s in it for me?’” he quoted.
“Exactly. ‘It’s the Slytherin mantra, my son,’ you would tell me afterwards. ‘Never forget it. Live your life by it.’” Draco looked searchingly at him. “When did you stop taking your own advice?”
Lucius scowled at him. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. Or you would if you’d think about it a little. That—” Draco’s finger pointed back towards the torchlight. “—is evil, Father. Evil is interested only in itself. Cuts its losses without a second thought. And until tonight, to him, we were losses.”
“You. Are lecturing me. On the nature of evil.” Lucius made his tone utterly flat, hoping to awaken Draco to his own sense of the ridiculous.
“You don’t seem to have noticed it,” Draco retorted. “Or if you did, you deluded yourself another way, by believing you could always come out on top. That’s just not possible. Everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes you won’t have a convenient sacrifice to throw to the wolves.” His eyes sparked in the silvery light. “Not everyone’s as obliging as Mother.”
“Do not mention her to me,” Lucius hissed. “She was my wife—do you think I cared nothing about her? I did what I did to save you, and you would do well to remember that!”
Draco sneered down at him. “Don’t give me that. You killed her to save me? What about yourself?” An accusing finger pointed directly at Lucius’ chest. “Why didn’t you volunteer to die?”
“I... I...” Lucius stammered.
“Never even thought of that, did you?” Draco shook his head, laughing humorlessly under his breath. “It never crossed your mind, not once, that of the three of us, you were the one who’d be missed the least. So you killed Mother to save me, and lost me anyway. Not that I’d have stuck around if you’d killed yourself instead, but I might have thought better of you.”
Trying to find some foothold within this preposterous paragraph, Lucius found himself hearing again an incongruous pair of words. “Stuck around? Where, pray tell, are you going?”
“Away.” Draco waved an airy hand. “Far, far away. Somewhere no one’s ever heard of Malfoys or Dark Lords or any of this. Somewhere people look at me and don’t see your son or the hope of Slytherin House or the boy who failed to kill Albus Dumbledore—they see me. Which is incidentally one of those things I wish you’d taught me, is how to have my own identity. But I seem to have worked it out.”
Lucius was the one who laughed this time, a brittle sound that didn’t seem to belong to him at all. “It must be quite far indeed if no one has heard our name there. I’d think you’d be lonely.”
“Oh, not so you’d notice.” Draco rubbed at a lump in his robes with a secret smile. “The people there are good company, and I’m bringing some of my own. I think it’s only fair to tell you now, since I’m afraid I can’t invite you—I’m going to be marrying Luna Lovegood sometime soon. Probably next month.”
“Lovegood?” She is pureblood, but that is all that is acceptable about her... “How dare you!”
“No, how dare you!” Draco swung his leg over the branch and dropped to his feet in front of Lucius. “How dare you think you have any right to interfere in my life now that I’ve finally made something worthwhile out of it despite the hash you gave me to start with! Do you remember how I celebrated my seventeenth birthday, my coming of age, the day that should have shown you what a good job you did raising a wizard and a man? Oh, that’s right, you can’t remember it, because you weren’t there. You were in Azkaban. But you heard about it, and you saw me afterwards, what I was like. Didn’t you ever wonder how I could have recovered from it?”
Lucius returned Draco’s angry glare with a veneer of cold indifference. “I await your disclosure with bated breath.”
“I... went away one night.” Again the waved hand dismissed the mechanics as unimportant. “After I’d finally realized that I wasn’t even strong enough to stand on my own two feet, and that by everything you ever taught me, my weakness made me a worthless piece of garbage. But the people I met in this other place wouldn’t accept that. They saw my weakness, but instead of throwing me away for it, they helped me. They taught me how to be strong, most of them without realizing what they were doing, and I owe them everything because of that.”
“Can the secret of this great strength be shared?” Lucius asked, letting his lips curl into a cool smile at the suspicious gleam in Draco’s eyes.
Draco shook his head. “I could say the words, but you haven’t got the kind of mind that would understand them. It would sound like gibberish, or like weakness itself. But you’ve seen the results.” He grinned. “Haven’t I been strong, all this year? Haven’t I been the son you always wanted?”
“You have,” Lucius said, feeling the second-to-last rock slip from under his mind’s feet. “Why do you ask?”
“Just enjoying the irony.” Draco chuckled under his breath. “The one time in my life I do things you approve of, I’m actually working with the other side.”
“With the other...” Lucius backed away. “So you are the...”
“Now don’t misunderstand me.” Draco kept pace with Lucius, one step forward for every step back. “Most of what I said about Snape was true. He did love Potter’s mother, he did change sides when she was first threatened, he has been Dumbledore’s man all this time. But he never imprisoned me or stole the Elder Wand. I made that up so the Dark Lord—so Voldemort—would trust me.” He laughed aloud this time, triumphantly. “You hear that, Father? Your Master trusts me. Me, who let Granger and Ollivander go this past fall, who helped Ginny Weasley escape this winter, who brought down my own house to get Weasley and Granger out safely this spring.”
And he accuses me of killing Narcissa...
The words formed in Lucius’ thoughts, but they would not on his tongue. Tree bark grated rough against his palms. In his mind, the last rock had given way and he was falling, falling through endless dark despair.
“Me.” Draco leaned in close to Lucius, positively beaming. “Who’s been ferreting out the things that keep him from dying and sending them on to Harry Potter to be destroyed as fast as ever I can.”
“Traitor,” Lucius breathed.
Draco cocked his head thoughtfully. “Would you call an animal born in captivity a traitor if it escaped? That’s really all I’ve done. Escaped the cage you brought me up in, the cage you’re still inside. And that’s why I’m sorry for you. You’ll live and die in your cage, and you’ll insist to the last second of your life that it’s the whole world. Maybe you’ll admit that there might be a little something beyond the bars, but you’ll be positive the uncouth outside could never be as good as your wondrous inside. And meanwhile there’s life going on out here.” He spread his arms as wide as one and a half arms could go. “There’s music and laughter and love and all the things you think don’t matter. I wish I could show you how wrong you are. But I know I can’t.”
He was right. His marvelous discovery is gibberish to me. It obviously has great meaning to him, since he has betrayed everything I taught him for it, but to me it conveys nothing more than a warning I must bring to my Master...
“If you’re thinking of telling Voldemort about this,” Draco added, “don’t. He won’t want to hear anything against me tonight, not after I brought him what he wanted. You’d be more likely to catch a Killing Curse for lying about me.”
“Why warn me?” Lucius croaked. His voice sounded in his ears like his father’s, in the last year before the old man’s death.
“I don’t like you much, but I don’t want your death on my conscience. I’ve got too much to do with my life to let that get in the way. So consider yourself warned.” Draco turned to start back to the large clearing, then paused. “You might also want to know,” he said. “Hermione Granger didn’t have Malfoy blood when she visited us this spring. She does now, though. I took her as a blood-sister a week or two ago.”
In case there was any stone of degradation yet left unturned. Lucius wasn’t sure how much more he could take. “Why?”
“I didn’t want to leave you completely alone in the world when I went away.” Draco grinned again. “Not to mention, without a clear legal heir. I’m sure Hermione will find something suitable to do with the vault and the estates.” He glanced at the place where his left wrist wasn’t and tsked. “Look at the time. Harry should be along soon. I’d better get back. Coming, Father?”
“Go,” Lucius said, staring at the ground. “Just... go.”
Draco went. Lucius waited until his son’s shape was lost among the trees, then sank to the ground and covered his face with his hands.
Is it possible any living man could be more wretched than I am tonight?
Of course it is. But we all know that and he doesn’t, so we’ll just let him wallow.
I have recently made the marvelous discovery that Be Careful... drumroll, please... is fewer than ten chapters away from being finished! Isn’t that great? Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that... well, don’t everybody speak up at once.
Seriously, though, I think ten chapters at most ought to wrap things up. And before you ask, yes, I have an idea for a sequel, and no, I won’t start it until FD is quite a bit further along. Thanks in advance for coming along on this surprisingly epic little trip!