Be Careful
20: How Long You Take
By Anne B. Walsh
Draco opened one eye and sighed.
Joy, rapture, and other expressions of glee. I’m back.
He flicked the light on the ceiling to life with his wand and got up, glaring around a room that looked even smaller and dingier than it had a few hours before.
On the other hand, I can do real magic here, and talk to people face to face. Or I could, if there were people.
There was, however, a piece of parchment on his desk that hadn’t been there when he’d fallen asleep.
Could that be…?
No. It can’t. Draco sat back down on the bed, pressing on his knees with the palms of his hands, willing his heart to slow. It’s plain old parchment, not magic. It’s probably just a note from Mother. Nothing to get all excited over.
When he thought he was calm enough, he crossed the room and picked up the parchment. As he had expected, the few lines on it were in Narcissa’s handwriting, and explained the improvements she’d made to the room while he slept.
At least she knows a little more than Lucius about the necessities of life. And letting me have any book in the library sounds promising. Draco glanced at the bookshelf under the window. I wonder, did I have any ancestors who weren’t quite such rampant xenophobes?
Only one way to find out.
He knelt beside the bookshelf, drew his wand again, and rapped it against a corner. "Catalogue," he said in the commanding tone it was always best to use with enchanted objects. A niggling thought in the back of his mind prompted him to add, "Please."
The empty space he’d left on the shelf when he’d loaded it with his schoolbooks shimmered. Then a huge, leather-bound book lay there, the dust on its cover settling into new patterns with the wind of its journey. Draco picked it up and sneezed. "Tells you how often we’re in there," he muttered, carrying it back to his desk. "All right, time to look a few things up."
Ten minutes later, Silencing Charms carefully placed on the doors and window (it was one in the morning, after all), Draco traced the complex pattern on the cover of the brightly-colored book sitting on his desk with his wand’s tip. "Aperium piraticum!" he intoned.
The book opened of its own accord, and a miniature ship appeared above it, sailing through invisible water. Draco turned the lights off, tucked his wand away, and sat back as a sprightly tune began to play.
So somewhere along the line, one of my ancestors thought enough of this show to not only save the program, but to bind his memories into it so that it would reproduce the performance for which it was created.
Why am I suddenly tempted to leave this where Lucius can find it?
But as amusing as Lucius’ reaction might be, it would end in the destruction of the little pamphlet, not to mention a furious search through the Malfoy Manor library for any other such defiling matter, and its swift annihilation when found.
And I have plans for some of that.
He leaned forward and planted his elbows on the desk, watching the antics of the tiny pirates on the deck of the ship as the overture played on.
"So he arrived back here around two, and Abigail last saw him at eleven." Tom paced up and down the length of the room. "That sounds suspiciously like a one-to-one, instead of the sixty-to-one we’d established from his earlier visits."
"One-to-one what?" Aletha asked, taking baby Aurora from Minerva and wincing at an extra-loud thump from next door, where Sirius and Regulus were entertaining their various offspring.
"Time substitution." Tom’s hands described circles in the air. "Imagine two clocks. Both set to midnight. One shows time in our world, the other in the world from which Draco comes. If he makes a transit at midnight—"
"One of the original type?" Minerva interjected.
"Yes, one in which he sleeps normally. If he enters his dream state, and thus makes transit, at midnight, he arrives here at the same time. He then finishes his night’s sleep as he usually would and wakes to a day in our world. For the sake of argument, say he spends a full twenty-four hours with us. When he falls asleep and enters dream state again, he makes transit back to his own world—but he arrives there not twenty-four hours after he left, but twenty-four minutes."
"Ah-ha." Aletha nodded, bouncing Aurora in her arms as the small face began to wrinkle. "I had wondered why no one in his own world had missed him until now."
"And after that twenty-four minutes away, he sleeps out the night he left, and wakes to a day in his own world." Minerva shook her head. "I would find that constant switching maddening."
"He will inevitably come to think of one world or the other as unreal." Tom rested a hand on the stone of the wall. "But that is only part of the problem. The spirit form Luna and Abigail described to me seems to experience time in the two worlds at the same rate, which means there is no time ‘left over’ for his mind to recuperate in sleep as is normal. If that continues for longer than a few days, it could well drive him mad in reality."
"But so could being trapped alone in a world where he is despised," Minerva pointed out. "Especially as he is adopting our ways quickly, by what little I saw and all that I’ve heard. I’m well aware of the physiological consequences of going without sleep, but there are such things as psychological needs as well."
"Even if he gets back his more normal schedule, wouldn’t he be living each day twice?" Aletha asked, handing a now-fretful Aurora back to her mother as Morgan emerged from the bathroom. "I’d be worried about the cumulative aging, if he kept it up for longer than about a year. Similar to what you see in people who’ve had to use Time-Turners extensively."
"This the dream-boy?" Morgan asked, sitting down on her bed and rearranging her robes and her daughter to cut off the incipient wail before it got started in earnest. "The one Cecy’s adopted?"
The other adults nodded.
"Don’t know about you, but I’d be looking for a root cause." Morgan had inherited both her parents’ brains and put them to good use as one of the most tenacious investigative officers the DMLE had seen in years. "What’s causing such a huge magical imbalance that this boy can come and go pretty much at will from one world to another? Which world is it in, ours or his? And most important, what happens when it clears itself up?"
Tom smiled ruefully at his daughter. "That has the sound of a far better point than I would prefer it to be. Those, I should say, rather, since all of them are good points. But the last, as you said…"
"If the imbalance corrects—no, when it corrects—traveling as Draco does now will become impossible." Minerva had her eyes shut, likely visualizing a diagram. "Even spirit-travel would be untenable, with the amount of energy needed. Once, perhaps twice, it could be done—but no more than that. Not without risk of burning out one’s magic, or even one’s life."
Aletha sat down at the table in one corner. "None of you really got a chance to see Cecy with him, did you?" she asked. "I know you saw a bit of it getting here, Tom, Minerva. But I was there for a week, watching them together. No one who came at this fresh, without an idea of the situation, would have been able to tell you that those two were new to each other. He takes to her mothering like Meghan takes to dancing. As for Cecy, she’s in paradise. After years of helping other people’s children overcome pain, always having to stay that Healer’s distance away, now she has one of her own, one who needs all the love she can give him, and who gives it back to her in kind." She laughed. "He occasionally looks a bit dazed by it all."
"Occasionally?" Morgan said, looking up from Aurora. "If I’d lived a life like the one Cecy told me about, and then been thrust into our world, I’d be more than occasionally dazed. I’d be convinced I’d lost my mind."
"He still wonders," said Tom, hands in his pockets. "I think I may have helped to convince him more than anyone else."
"You?" Morgan tilted her head at her father. "How?"
"His world is currently engaged in a war. Think of our Troubles, make them a few dozen times worse, then add a leader for the ‘blood purity’ side whose only morals involve getting what he wants and remaining alive as long as possible, to the point where he seems impossible to kill."
"Got that. Doesn’t explain what you have to do with anything."
"Many people in our world have counterparts in that one." Tom gazed out the window at the bright sunny day, his tone thoughtful. "It seems that, had things gone different, I could have become the Darkest wizard in a hundred years."
"You? Dark?" Morgan burst out laughing, then yelped. "Aurora! Bad girl! No biting Mummy!"
"Don’t startle her, then," Minerva retorted. "Honestly, you should know better by now."
Morgan sniffed at her mother. "Come on, Rory, let go now…" She broke the suction with a finger, then tickled the baby’s lips until they opened again. "So you’re Dark somewhere?" she said once Aurora was reattached, looking up at Tom. "Now I really have heard everything."
Tom smiled. "Thank you," he said quietly. "I need every reassurance I can find that I am still myself."
"With these ladies around, would you dare be anyone else?" Aletha asked.
"No." Tom crossed to the bed, to watch his granddaughter finish the first course of her lunch. "I cannot say I would."
Draco had finished with The Pirates of Penzance and was just watching the finale of H.M.S. Pinafore when a rattle by the door alerted him to the arrival of a new tray.
Must be breakfast time. Good thing, I’m starving. I should see if I can’t get something to keep up here, since I’m likely going to be sleeping at odd hours and that will mean eating at even odder ones…
He made quick work of the contents of the plate while sailors and ladies danced on his desk, then closed the Pinafore program and returned to the Pirates one.
They open the first day of school, Harry said. If I can get there—if I can get rid of the potion in time—if I can prove I’m ready, and I ask as nicely as I know how…
It was just possible that the ship of the Pirates of Penzance might have an extra crew member aboard when it sailed into Hogwarts.
If I could play any part I wanted, I think it’d be Samuel. The ‘sidekick’ pirate. Draco watched closely as Samuel proclaimed that Frederic was no longer a pirate’s apprentice but a pirate full-grown. He has a few solo bits, so I’d get a moment in the spotlight, but it would only be a moment. Less chance of making a complete fool of myself than if I were to try to be Frederic or the Pirate King.
Maybe someday I’ll try for something more like that. I know they do amateur theatricals, and Pirates has to be popular…
Then he snorted at the assumption he was so blithely making, that he’d be around to perform in said theatricals.
All I can do at this point is hope. Hope, and prepare. In every way.
And one or two of those ways would be good for him in all senses of the word.
Sitting around reading and watching memory-shows is fun, but I need to keep myself active as well. Fencing and dancing should do just fine. Though our houseguests might start to wonder what all the thumping up here is…
Draco grinned. Our houseguests can kiss my piratical arse.
Now if only I dared say that to their faces…