Be Careful
12: Where You Fall Asleep
By Anne B. Walsh
Draco climbed awkwardly through the round hole in the wall, cursing under his breath as his foot got caught.
No wonder Gryffindors are always in shape. Getting out of their bloody Tower in the morning is a workout all by itself.
Not terribly to his surprise, Hogwarts looked much the same as it always had. The biggest difference he’d seen so far were the extra dorms in each common room set aside for "visitors".
I don’t know how they decide who sleeps where. Maybe just by last name.
However it was done, Abby had been sent to a bed in Gryffindor Tower, and had insisted Draco take her there and tuck her in. He’d expected some ribbing from the other boys, but only Ray had really seemed to notice, and that because Neenie’d teased him about being supplanted.
Of course, what with Ron lining up the first and second years by House and Harry taking little Callie down to the nursery to change her nappy before bed, I’ve got plenty of company. And Ray had his hands full when Nicki decided she wanted Mummy, right now, no arguments…
But that was past, and Abby was safely tucked into her bed and dreaming. Whimsically, Draco wondered if she’d dream of his own world.
I hope not. She deserves better.
He hid a yawn behind one hand. The nap on the skyship didn’t seem to have had much effect, and he was ready for some real sleep.
"Only question is, where?" he murmured, surveying the half-familiar corridor.
"Where what?" said a voice behind him.
Draco turned. A fat lady dressed in pink was eyeing him from the portrait which had swung shut over Gryffindor Tower’s entrance. "Just trying to figure out where I should go to sleep," he said.
"Well, what House are you in?"
"Slytherin."
"Then go to your dormitory. Honestly." The portrait tutted. "Young men these days… sometimes I wonder."
Thank you, Lady of Unhelpful Advice.
But it’s a place to start. Ray’ll probably be down there, and Mum. They can point me in the right direction.
"Thanks," he said aloud, and turned to find a staircase.
And here we have the other part of the reason Gryffindors are in shape. Stairs. Lots and lots of stairs.
Navigating the switchbacks and secret passages with only a fraction of his attention, Draco let his thoughts wander.
Four Houses, four Founders, but Slytherin doesn’t seem to be quite the pariah it is back home. Maybe because these Slytherins aren’t, oh, evil. They want power, but most of them seem to care about how they use it. They sneak and they scheme, but they do it because they think what they’re after is right.
A tapestry of trolls in tutus went by on his left.
Of course, the Dark Lord thinks what he’s doing is right too. He thinks the world would be better off with the Mudbloods and the blood traitors put in their place, and only the people who have the proper breeding running things…
Or does he?
If "Tom Marvolo Riddle" had once been the name of Lord Voldemort, if that part of the stories were true, then there was no reason the rest of them shouldn’t be. No reason that Lord Voldemort, the greatest hope of the pureblood world, the darling of all who believed wizardkind to be the nobility that nature herself had set over the lesser beings of the Muggle race, couldn’t secretly be…
A half-blood.
Draco jumped the vanishing step without thinking about it.
There’s no pureblood Riddle family in Britain, that’s for sure. And it doesn’t sound like a name that would come from anywhere else. Not unless it was translated… no, that doesn’t make sense either.
He wasn’t sure whether or not he liked what he was thinking of, but he couldn’t seem to stop.
It makes sense of him changing his name. He wouldn’t want to keep a Muggle name. Not with what he believed. And… wait. Weren’t there those old rituals, the kind of magic Mother never wanted me studying and Father would sneak me books on, that would make you technically pureblood even if your parents were dentists or greengrocers?
A one-eyed, humpbacked witch seemed to leer at him as he passed her.
You’d have to swear that your Muggle relatives meant nothing to you, that the magical world is the only world you care about… and then kill them all, everyone related to you in the first or second degree who’s a Muggle. Your parents, brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins, and grandparents. With your own hands, your own magic. And enjoy it.
If that’s what it takes to be evil, then maybe I want to be good after all.
Draco turned a corner and tripped over a bump in the carpet, falling headlong but catching himself on his hands.
No, that’s not a bump. Somebody left their snakeskin bag here.
His eyes traveled down the corridor—
Their very, very long snakeskin bag.
—then snapped back to what he’d tripped on.
Their moving snakeskin bag.
And something is hissing around that corner right there…
"Who’s that?" called a man’s voice.
"Just me," Draco called back, shoving himself upright and administering a mental slap for being an idiot. Parselmouths, remember? There’s bound to be a snake or two around. As long as they don’t eat me, I think I can handle it.
Professor Riddle came around the corner at the same moment as the head of the snake. The head was decidedly the larger of the two.
Draco swallowed surreptitiously. I was never the greatest in Care of Magical Creatures, but I think this just might be a basilisk…
But the tips of the fangs protruding from the green-scaled mouth glinted silver in the light of the wall-mounted torches, and the sunken places on the snake’s head where its eyes should have been were scaled over.
So it’s a tame basilisk.
Marvelous. Just what I needed to cap off this day.
"Draco, meet Sangre," Professor Riddle said, stroking the basilisk’s cheek. "She’s one of our castle guards, and a fine storyteller as well."
"Er." How did one shake hands with a snake? "Pleased to meet you," Draco said, settling for a bow.
Professor Riddle turned to the snake and spoke a few sibilant sentences, which Draco took to be the reverse of the introduction in Parseltongue. The snake replied, its—her—tongue flicking in and out once.
"She wants to get your scent, so she knows that you belong here," Professor Riddle translated. "Hold out your hand—she won’t hurt you."
Draco told his nerves to take a flying leap without a broomstick and extended his left hand to the basilisk. Her forked tongue flickered out again, touching his skin, then went back into her mouth, and a long sigh emerged.
"She likes you," Professor Riddle said, smiling.
"I… wish I could say the same." Draco edged along the wall, pushing back panic as Sangre’s head turned to track him.
"I am sorry, Draco, I forget not everyone is as comfortable as I am around snakes." Professor Riddle stepped between Draco and Sangre, laid his hand against the snake’s nose, and hissed two or three words at her. She butted her head gently against his shoulder, knocking him back a pace, then turned and slithered off the way Draco had come.
"You’d mentioned some trouble at your Hogwarts with the Chamber of Secrets?" Professor Riddle asked, starting down the opposite hallway.
"Yeah. Someone was letting out a basilisk. It never killed anyone, mostly through luck. Is that…"
"Yes, she is." Professor Riddle set a fast pace, enough so that Draco had to half-trot to keep up. "I found her when I was fourteen, poking around an old bathroom with some friends. She was half-starved and very confused—she’d hibernated for over nine hundred years, and didn’t understand why her master hadn’t come back to wake her the way he’d promised…"
"He is this way!" insisted a childish voice nearby. "I heard him talking to Sangre!"
"We’ll look around two more corners," said a woman’s voice, strangely familiar to Draco’s ears. "But then we need to go back to bed—it’s very late—"
A little girl poked her black-haired head around the corner and squealed at the sight of Professor Riddle. "Granddad!"
"Diana!" Professor Riddle took three steps and scooped the girl up. "What are you doing here? Is your mummy all right?"
Diana bounced in her grandfather’s arms. "The baby’s coming!" she announced happily. "The baby’s coming and Daddy had to take Mummy to hospital so he was going to take me and Paul to Fidelus Manor ’cause Uncle Sirius and Auntie Letha are there but the Floo just sent us back home when we tried to go there so he took us here instead and we saw Gran and told her already and can Sangre tell me a bedtime story please?"
"No, Sangre will tell you a good morning story tomorrow," said Professor Riddle, setting Diana on the ground to accept a littler boy from the arms of a bespectacled woman in a nurse’s uniform. "Thank you, Myrtle, I’ll bring them back in a few minutes…"
Myrtle? Draco stepped back against the wall. Oh, no, please…
Then he got a good look at her face.
Sure enough. No mistaking that expression.
"Sir," he said, fighting the urge to giggle insanely or run away screaming.
"Yes?" Professor Riddle turned towards Draco.
"Where am I sleeping? Down in the Slytherin dorms?"
"No, you and Cecy have a guest suite. You’ll be in the dorms when you come to school, but not tonight. It’s near there, though, and she’ll be looking out for you. I assume you can get to the dorms on your own?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then it’s the second corner to your left and straight on till the end of the hall."
Draco got a sense of ‘missed joke’ about this but let it pass. "Thank you, sir. Good night."
"Good night, Draco. Sleep well." Professor Riddle turned back to hear what his grandson was saying to him.
Grandson. And granddaughter. And Moaning Myrtle. Draco slipped past the lady in question and got a smile and nod from her. I guess she grew out of the Moaning bit, when she had a chance to grow up at all…
If I don’t get some sleep soon, my mind is going to fall apart.
Luckily, he wasn’t far above the dungeons now, and his feet could have taken him to the Slytherin dorms in pitch blackness. He kept walking past the entrance, took the second left, and saw a gleam of light at the end of the hallway.
There are rooms down here, back at the other Hogwarts. I just never knew what they were for.
"There you are," Mum said as he came in. "Did you get lost, or just delayed?"
"A little of both." Draco yawned profoundly. "I don’t know why I’m so tired," he said on the end of it. "I slept on the ship…"
"We were all bespelled not to sleep deeply," said Mum, folding back the duvet on one of the two twin beds. "There have been sleepwalking incidents aboard skyships before. They ended badly."
A few thousand feet up in the air… yeah, that would be pretty bad. "Well, we’re not on a skyship now. And I am about to fall over." Draco suited action to word on the other bed. "Should I just sleep in my robes, or can you conjure your widdle baby boy somefink else?"
Mum gave him a cool look, then swirled her wand three times in his direction. His robes vanished, and loosely-woven green pajamas took their place.
"Oi! I haven’t worn anything like this since I was three!"
"As you behave, so you will be treated." A reverse flick restored the missing clothing. "Sleep in your robes for tonight. The house-elves will find us fresh ones for tomorrow."
"Right." Draco fumbled in his pocket for his wand and pointed it at his mouth. "Scourgificus menthae." The film coating his teeth and tongue vanished, and he licked his lips at the taste of peppermint, then tucked his wand away again and looked up with his eyes innocently wide. "I’m ready for my bedtime story now, Mummy."
Mum began to lift her wand in his direction.
"I didn’t mean that." Draco scrambled under the covers and pretended to cower. "I’m good. See how good I am. I’m asleep, that’s how good I am." He shut his eyes and began to snore.
Mum’s light chuckle drifted across his ears, followed by a whispered incantation. Draco considered opening his eyes to see if anything about him had changed, but sleep decided the question for him.
He could investigate in the morning.
Cecy watched from her own bed as Draco vanished, the covers falling to the mattress where he had lain only a moment before.
I knew it would happen. I made preparations for it. Why does it still hurt so much?
Perhaps because it reminds me that when all is said and done, I have only borrowed another woman’s child.
She waved her wand at the candle in the corner, snuffing it, then lay down and buried her face in the pillow.
Why, my love, why? Why forever keep faithful to one who never loved you in that way? Why will you never take notice of me? I am here, waiting…
In the hall, footsteps passed by, the confident tread of a man secure in his own place in the world.
Cecy pressed her face harder into the pillow, that he might not hear her cry.
Draco dreamed.
He was walking up and down the halls of Hogwarts, an empty and deserted Hogwarts. No one was in sight—Mum hadn’t been in her bed beside his, the dorms were bare and cold, even the ghosts seemed to have vanished. Out on the lawn beside the lake stood a white marble tomb, the image of the one he’d heard stories about from the other students back home…
No, he thought hazily, that was just a dream. Silly dream. Why would Lord Albus be dead? He may be old, but he’s still strong. Besides, he has Fawkes to heal him from anything that could hurt him.
There were still house-elves in the kitchens, though. There were always house-elves in the kitchens. They seemed surprised to see him, but made him up a plate anyway, and he took it outside to eat by the lake, where he could skip rocks and watch the thestrals circling above the Forest.
I never saw them before. Maybe I can only see them in my dreams. That makes sense—the only place I’ve seen someone die is in my dreams. The night I dreamed I saw Professor Snape kill Lord Albus. It was awful, but Mum made me feel better afterwards. She does that.
When he was finished eating, he left the plate on a rock by the lake and wandered aimlessly about the grounds for a while, until he started to feel sleepy again. His feet took him back towards the castle without his thinking about it much. He’d find his bed again and sleep, and Mum would wake him in time for breakfast.
He’d come in the back way, and was just crossing the entrance hall to the dungeon stairs when he heard the voices.
"—would he be here?"
"I have no idea, but this is where the Dark Lord says he has sensed him. Spread out. Search everywhere."
Draco nipped behind a statue and peered around the plinth as three people came in through the great oak doors.
I know them. Two of them just from the dreams, Marrow or Harrow or something. But there’s no mistaking him. He made a face at the dark, slick hair and beak-like nose of Severus Snape. As much as I might want to.
I wonder who they’re looking for?
The witch snickered. "Have you ever seen anything so touching as Lucius with his precious son missing?" she asked. "Pacing about the house like a caged quintaped. And Narcissa sniveling in the drawing room when she thinks no one’s listening."
Lucius—Narcissa—wait a moment—
Dream and reality did an acrobatic act within Draco’s mind, and he bit down on a loose mouthful of his robes to keep from shouting.
It’s me. They’re looking for me. I’ve gone missing somehow. But a dream couldn’t do that—unless I was sleepwalking again—
He glanced upwards at the high ceiling above.
I don’t think I could sleepwalk to Hogwarts. Not without someone seeing me, at any rate.
Something very strange is going on here…