Be Careful
28: Who You Show Off To
By Anne B. Walsh
After a quick shower, Draco slid into a clean set of robes (the house-elf network appeared to be functioning properly, as the clothing from his wardrobe at Fidelus Manor was now in the one next to Ray's) and headed out of the dorms with the Beauvoi heir, chatting about the day's plans.
"We were right on schedule up until yesterday," Ray said, making a face as they climbed the final flight of stairs to the main floor. "Then Jonathan went and—"
Draco held up a hand, peering forward. "Do you see what I see?" he asked quietly.
Ray followed his line of sight. Luna and Abby were standing in a corner of the entrance hall, looking up at one of the statues and discussing it. "I don't know. What do you see?"
Draco grinned. "I see a first-rate opportunity."
Ray returned the grin and picked up the cue. "To get married with impunity."
"And indulge in the felicity of unbounded domesticity." Draco spread his arms expansively, nearly hitting Ray. "Sorry."
"It's all right." Ray assumed a prayerful pose. "We shall quickly be parsonified."
Draco copied him, clasping his hands and looking up to heaven. "Conjugally matrimonified."
"By a doctor of divinity who is located in this vicinity," Ray finished, half-turning at the sound of footsteps behind them. "Morning, Professor."
"Good morning," Draco echoed as Professor Riddle came up the stairs they'd used.
"Good morning, gentlemen." The Professor stepped between the boys, who squeezed to opposite sides of the doorway, and looked around the entrance hall. "May I assume you're planning a bit of girl-stealing?"
"Who, us?" Ray looked shocked. "We are models of virtue! We would never steal anything, particularly not a girl!"
"Why would you ever think such a thing of us, sir?" Draco finished. He'd begun to get a feel for the way professors and students bantered in this world, but he knew he was still an amateur compared to Ray or Harry.
"Partly the lyrics you were quoting so adeptly, but mostly the view." Professor Riddle flicked a glance towards the two girls, who were giggling over something Abby had just said. "I think I shall excuse myself. What I do not see, I cannot be held responsible for."
Both boys bowed. The Professor nodded back, then turned and went into the Great Hall, from which appetizing smells were wafting.
I could deal with breakfast. But in a minute.
Draco slid carefully out of the doorway and began to cross the hall on tiptoe. Ray moved quickly to flank him, setting his feet down with great caution. Luna and Abby remained blissfully unaware, Luna now pointing out some detail on the statue's shoes to Abby. They were twenty feet away—ten feet—five—
Ray lifted a hand, then slashed it down, and he and Draco pounced at the same moment. "Ha-ha!" they shouted together, snatching the girls off their feet.
Abby's wordless shriek turned into a gleeful "Draco! You're here!"
"Where else would I be?" Draco asked, slinging Abby over his shoulder. "You've got your lines wrong, though. It's ‘Too late!’"
"That's for tonight," Abby said into the back of Draco's robes, squirming until her weight was evenly adjusted. "Right now I'm happy to see you!"
"I never would have guessed," Draco said dryly. "And you two need to get a room," he added to Ray and Luna, who had taken advantage of the moment.
"No thanks," Ray said, breaking off the clinch. "We're done. Breakfast time for pirates and daughters."
"I didn't think you were a pirate anymore," Luna remarked as Ray carried her away towards the Great Hall.
"I'm getting in touch with my roots."
Abby laughed so hard at this that Draco had to put her down before he dropped her.
"So, Mistress Kate," he said, taking her hand instead. "Are you ready for tonight?"
Abby nodded. "What about you?" she said. "It worked perfectly yesterday—Aunt Letha's furious about it…"
"I think I can handle it."
Unseen, Draco crossed the fingers of his free hand. He knew he'd mastered the music of the part in Pirates that he wanted, and he thought he had the dance steps down well enough, but he'd never performed it for an audience, only alone in his bedroom, or in his invisible spirit form behind the other boys on the rehearsal stage.
Am I going to freeze up when I have to do this in front of people?
"Hold, monsters!" Luna's clear voice rang out from the door to the Great Hall.
"Come on!" Abby whispered, holding out her arms to Draco. "Steal me!"
Draco bundled her over his shoulder again as Luna continued her recitative, chanting her words on a long-held note. "Ere your pirate caravanserai proceed, against our will, to wed us all, just bear in mind that we are wards in chancery, and Father is a Major-General!"
Hey, that's my cue! Draco peered around the door as though he were afraid of something. "We'd better pause, or danger may befall," he chanted in his turn, addressing the group of students sitting at the nearest table. "Their father is a Major-General!"
Several of the girls in the group stood up, and Abby wiggled until Draco set her down, though he kept an arm around her. "Yes, yes, he is a Major-General!" they echoed worshipfully.
"Yes, yes!" Neville stepped up onto the bench and struck a martial pose. "I am a Major-General!"
Draco swept his arm towards Neville. "For he is a Major-General!" he sang. Harry sat upright, looking offended—the melody Draco'd just used was the same as that of the Pirate King's song near the beginning of the show.
"He is!" the rest of the students chimed in. "Hurrah for the Major-General!"
Neville drew himself up with pride. "And it is, it is a glorious thing to be a Major-General!"
The other actors applauded him or gazed at him adoringly as they sang. "It is! Hurrah for the Major-General, hurrah for the Major-General!"
"You stole my song!" Harry said accusingly over the cheers, pointing at Neville.
"No, no." Neville climbed down off the bench. "I requisitioned your song. In accordance with proper Army regulations."
Snickers ran around the table.
"Everyone, look who's here!" Abby said, bouncing to a place beside Meghan.
"Hey, Malfoy," Harry said, waving at Draco.
"Morning, Malfoy," rang out in other voices. "Good to see you." "Glad you made it." "Have a seat."
"Porridge?" Ron offered from his seat beside Hermione, who was across the table from Meghan.
"Thanks." Draco sat down beside Abby and accepted the large tureen. "So how are things here?"
"Well, we were thinking we'd have to put off the show," Harry said, flicking a finger at a sausage link, which fell into two pieces with a slight smell of smoke. "You remember Jonathan was going to play Samuel?"
"The pirate lieutenant. Yeah, I remember."
"Well, yesterday, for some reason known only to God and himself, he decided he wanted to experiment with Timed Silencing Charms." Harry's voice dripped disdain. "And he managed to lock up his vocal cords for the next seventy-two hours. Which means we'd be short a part if we tried opening tonight, and we didn't bother with understudies because it's just a pick-up show."
Draco made a noncommittal noise, which he hoped the rest of the group would attribute to his mouth being full of porridge. In fact, despite not being either God or Jonathan Beauvoi, he knew precisely the reason why the younger boy had laid that particular charm on himself.
Because he can't resist Abby's big pleading eyes any more than I can.
"But it sounds as if you know the part pretty well," Hermione took over. "You had that bit we were doing spot-on. Have you been coming to the rehearsals?"
Draco nodded and swallowed. "Every chance I get," he said. "You don't understand how new it is for me. We don't do this kind of thing where I'm from. It's not just that it's rare—we wouldn't think of it, it would never cross our minds. If we were stuck at Hogwarts for a summer, we'd probably… I don't know, start a prank war against the other Houses."
The snickering reemerged, louder this time. "We do that too," Ray said, wiggling his eyebrows at Ron, who made an obscene gesture back at him. "But shows don't require us to watch our backs every second of the day."
"No, they don't. Tipping me out of bed to wake me up, however…"
"Ray!" Hermione snapped. "That wasn't nice!"
"It's no business of yours whether I'm nice or not," Ray said defensively.
"It is when you're probably going to come to me to fix whatever he does back to you!"
"Note to self," Draco muttered loudly enough that the rest of the table could hear him, pretending to write on the back of his hand. "Use a charm Hermione doesn't know."
"Is there such a thing?" Ginny asked.
"I'll find one."
"Who says I'd come to you, Mrs. Weasley?" Ray stuck out his tongue at his sister, who reddened. "Why did you do that, anyway? You're still in dorms for this whole year, students don't get married quarters unless there's some magical need for it—why the rush?"
"This is how you can tell someone whose father works at Hogwarts from someone whose father works at the Ministry," Ron said to the table at large.
"Go on, rub it in how you hear everything months ahead of time," Ray grumbled. "What is it this time?"
"They're talking about a marriage law again."
The table groaned. "That was defeated years ago!" Meghan protested. "Just after the Troubles, when we were all little!"
"Yes, but this time it looks like it might pass." Ron looked unusually serious. "They're keeping it quiet until they're sure they have enough support. It's slow going, but with attacks on the rise like they have been…"
"What's this about?" Draco asked Abby quietly.
"Well, dementors tend to fall into two groups." Abby portioned off her beans to illustrate. "One group likes to try to attack wizards, because our magic makes our souls and our feelings taste better, and they grow stronger feeding from us. The others go after Muggles, because they know Muggles can't see them and can't defend against them properly. We ward cities and towns strongly enough to keep that kind away, but sometimes the ones who like us will go and attack those wards, and that can make them fail. Every wizarding family has a responsibility to the wards of the place where they live, and the ones like us who have manors have a responsibility for all the land and people around them, but we can't always get there in time…"
"And some Muggles end up Kissed, or mad from overexposure." Draco shuddered. He'd rarely been close to dementors—once or twice during his third year at Hogwarts, a few times since the Dark creatures had changed their allegiance before his sixth, and his two adventures here in the other world—but he never wanted to repeat the experience.
And I can fight back. I have a wand, I know the charm, I've even managed to do it properly. What would it be like to be stalked by this clinging darkness I couldn't see or fight?
Abby nodded gravely. "There've always been people who said we should make the two kinds turn into one," she said. "By making the two kinds of people into one."
"Not following," Draco said after a moment to try to decipher this.
"They want to make everyone magical," Abby clarified. "Stop there from being any more Muggles, because they think Muggles are a drain on our society and shouldn't exist."
Draco nearly snorted porridge up his nose. "Some things never change, I guess," he said when he was sure he could breathe again.
"What?"
"Never mind. So how exactly are these brilliant minds going to stop there from being any more Muggles?"
"Do what Ron said. Pass a marriage law. Make it illegal for a wizard or a witch to marry anybody but a Muggle."
Draco stared at Abby. "Please say you're joking."
"She's not," said Meghan from beyond Abby, her face entirely straight. "The idea's been around for years—a radical party came to power in Germany in the 1930's and tried it out in practice, though their ideas were a little stricter."
"How did that go?"
"Started the worst magical war in history," Harry said bluntly.
"Ouch."
"Not only that, but the war made it impossible for us to stay secret any longer," Hermione added. "There were simply too many people who'd seen too much. We keep to ourselves out of habit here, but everyone in a village or a neighborhood will know which family living there is magical."
"For their own survival's sake, if nothing else," Ginny put in. "Even the ones who ‘shall not suffer a witch to live’ change their tune once they've seen what's left after the Dementor's Kiss."
"And it works?" Draco asked, thinking of the fragile and much-mended curtain of secrecy which shrouded magic in his own world.
"It was rough at first," said Ray. "There were mobs, protests, some bricks got thrown. But once they worked out that we could protect ourselves without hurting them, that protesting our existence wasn't going to make us go away, and that we could help with a lot of problems that didn't seem to have answers, suddenly we weren't evil anymore."
"Sounds nice." Draco speared a piece of bacon with his fork.
"So it does," said a woman's voice from one of the side doors of the Great Hall, and Meghan's mother—Professor Black, Draco recalled he should be calling her now, she taught elementary Potions—strode over to the table.
"Mum!" Meghan jumped up to hug the woman. "How long were you there?"
"Long enough to hear something else ‘nice.’" Professor Black returned her daughter's embrace, then looked at Draco. "Malfoy, when you're finished with breakfast, my office, please?"