Be Careful
35: Who You Call Family
By Anne B. Walsh
"I worry about them sometimes."
Ray turned away from watching Draco sitting quietly in a wooden chair beside Abby's bed in the hospital wing to look at his twin. "Worry about who? And why?"
"Those two." Hermione waved a hand in Abby and Draco's general direction. "They seem… I don't know how to put it. Mismatched, perhaps?"
Ray shrugged. "I've seen worse. If he's willing to wait that long, Abby could do worse. But I don't think that's where either of them is really headed, Neenie. It just doesn't feel like that sort of thing."
"I hope you're right." Hermione smiled ruefully. "Aren't I supposed to be the one of us who understands feelings? Being the girl and all?"
"How old-fashioned." Ray stuck his nose in the air. "As if boys can't understand feelings."
"Most of you don't."
"That's just because you girls insist on making everything so complicated. There's food, there's Quidditch, there's theatre, and there's kissing. Either you want them or you don't. What's so hard to understand about that?"
Hermione stared at her brother. "You can't be serious."
"You can't have given me a straight line like that." Ray grinned. "If I were serious, I'd be grown up and married to Aunt Letha, and I'd live in London at number twelve…"
Hermione lunged. Ray dodged out the door. "Come back here!" his twin screeched, though the effect was rather spoiled by her giggles as she gave chase. "When I get my hands on you…"
"You've been saying that since we were four, but you never finish the sentence!"
"That's because I'm still deciding what would hurt the most!"
Draco smiled at the sound of Ray and Neenie's affectionate rivalry, but absently. Most of his attention was on the little girl lying still and silent on the bed beside him, her chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm too quiet to hear.
Get better soon, Abby, he willed her. I need to know just a little bit more about what you Saw…
A footstep at the door brought his head around in time to see Danger coming in. She rested her hands on the small of her back and stretched, then crossed the room and sat down on the next bed to her daughter's. "Christmas cannot come too soon for me," she said, massaging her swollen stomach with one hand. "I love all my children, I will love this one just as much as the rest, but this is positively the last." Her other hand went out and stroked a piece of Abby's hair out of the girl's face. "Has she woken at all?"
Draco shook his head. His eyes kept creeping back towards Danger's belly—he'd known, in a general textbook way, what a pregnant woman looked like, but Danger was the first he'd ever seen up close. He'd managed not to stare through the summer, he was doing his best now, Mum would be annoyed with him if she heard he was being rude, but he couldn't help being curious…
Danger caught his gaze with her own and smiled. "It's all right," she said. "You can look. If you ask nicely, you can even touch."
Draco felt his cheeks go brilliant pink. "I don't want to intrude," he mumbled, staring at the floor.
"Once you've asked, it's not an intrusion. And I'll take the thought for the deed. Come here."
Draco recognized an order when he heard one, kindly worded though it was. Thinking of ice creams and sleigh rides in an effort to cool his blush, he scooted over to the bed where Danger was sitting, then tentatively laid his hand against the taut curve of her stomach.
"Say hello, little one," Danger murmured. "This is a new friend for you to meet."
A few seconds later, a definite impact thumped against the center of Draco's palm. He nearly jumped off the bed. "Was that—"
"That was a kick," Danger said. "You were lucky—she's almost never so prompt. Not even born yet and already trouble." Her sigh prophesied years of trouble ahead for her and Moony. "Of course, it could just be that you have a way with my daughters."
"Daughters? Is this one a girl, then?"
"I don't know for sure, but I think she is, yes. I tend to have feelings one way or the other as the time draws nearer, and I've been feeling definitely girl-ish for a month or so now." Danger chuckled. "Ray and Neenie kept me guessing until the day they were born, but I was younger then, and I didn't know what to make of the mixed signals I kept getting. Boy and girl twins cleared it up nicely, and all the rest have come on their own, so I've been able to tell."
"I heard something about them," Draco said, deciding this was as good a time as any to ask about what Luna had told him over the summer. "Ray and Neenie, I mean. Is it true Moony used to be—I mean, with his nickname and all, and his counterpart back in my world was one of my professors third year but he had to leave when people found out he was—"
"A werewolf?" Danger finished. "Yes, Remus was bitten when he was four. It never made a difference to me, except that he insisted I finish my Animagus studies before he would officially date me, but we were afraid it would keep us from having children."
Draco frowned. "I've never heard of that being a problem before. Professor Lupin, his counterpart, Moony's, I mean, he just married a cousin of mine over the summer, and I heard she's already…" He trailed off, seeing the expression on Danger's face go from curiosity to quiet sorrow. "Did I say something?"
"No." Danger glanced down at Abby, who had shifted in her sleep, then lifted her eyes to the ceiling. "You can't help the facts of life in your world. And I will admit I had wondered, if Hermione was my parents’ child instead of mine, what might have happened to me. I suppose now I know." She turned back to him, her usual thoughtful smile back in place. "I hope you'll forgive me for preferring my own world."
"Nothing to forgive," Draco said promptly. "I prefer your world too."
Danger laughed. "I don't blame you. So yes, among the differences between the worlds, we can add that here, lycanthropy makes its victim unable to have children." A grin of pure mischief flashed across her face, making her look very like Ray for a moment. "Or it did, until eighteen years ago. The process was highly technical, I won't bore you with the details, but Ray and Neenie were the result, and…" She stopped, looking thoughtful. "How much theory does your Charms curriculum cover, Draco? That would be the only class I've heard you talk about where this might be covered. "
"Not too much," Draco said, casting his mind back over his six years with Professor Flitwick. "It's mostly practical, learning and practicing the spells—sometimes the teacher brings up the Laws of Magic, but I don't think I've ever seen a complete list of them."
"Given that the best scholars in the world can't agree on exactly what they are, that would make sense." Danger drew her wand and slid down a short way on the bed, smoothing flat a piece of the duvet between her and Draco. "All right, here's your extra credit Comparative Cultures assignment for today. A bit of logic for you, and what you can and can't prove from certain statements."
She began to write with her wand as with a quill, and letters of light appeared on the duvet: If a person is a Muggle, then he cannot do magic. "Does that make sense?" she asked.
"Yes…" Draco wondered what Danger was getting at. Everyone knew that.
Danger wrote a second sentence under the first: If a person cannot do magic, then he is a Muggle.
"That's not right," Draco protested. "Squibs can't do magic, but they aren't Muggles."
"Oh, you are good!" Danger's smile warmed him, and he returned it without thinking. "Just bear with me for a moment or two. You'll understand as soon as I get all four down—that's called the converse, and the inverse looks like this…"
"And it was really that easy?" Draco said in surprise when the lesson was over. "Everyone talks as if…"
"I know." Danger sighed, shaking her head. "Part of it is entrenched beliefs—the feeling that surely if it was out there to be found, someone would have found it by now—but part of it, I think, is the general wizarding belief that werewolves deserve what they get, that they're…"
"Dirty," Draco filled in, the night before he'd first traveled to the other world playing itself back in his mind. "Worse even than Muggles."
Danger slid closer to him. "You sound troubled," she said, holding out her hand. "I may not be your mum, but I can listen."
Draco reached for her hand, took a breath to answer—
"I'm sorry, am I intruding?"
Two heads jerked around. Moony stood a few feet away, looking between them and Abby, still unconscious on her bed. "I just came down to check on Joy, but you seem to have everything under control, love—"
"No, please do stay," Danger said, beckoning her husband closer. "I think perhaps you should hear this."
Moony took a seat on the bottom of Abby's bed, a polite half-bedwidth between him and Draco. "I think perhaps that depends on the teller," he said deliberately.
"Oh, watch me forget my manners." Danger covered her mouth, chagrined. "Draco, do you mind? If this is what I think it is, Remus would be the one who could help you understand it best, but it's entirely up to you…"
Draco managed to say something that sounded like a request for a moment to think, at least he thought it did. His mind was occupied with other matters.
To this point, he'd managed to ignore, or overlook, the fact that Abby and Ray and Neenie's father, his host for the summer, and his own father's closest counterpart was, or had been at some point, a werewolf. Somewhere inside him, there lived a little boy who still believed the spooky bedtime stories of prowling werewolves snatching bad children from their beds, who had lain awake on full moon nights shivering at every creak in the floor and huddling in a ball under the covers, who had sometimes awakened screaming from nightmares of bloody-fanged monsters chasing him down.
But I'm not a little boy. I'm adult now, and I need to act like it. Besides, I've handled the Dark Lord's counterpart just fine—why should an ex-werewolf bother me?
That made perfect logical sense, but didn't seem to be convincing his emotions much, Draco noted dryly.
Then another thought occurred to him.
If I'd been born in this world, Moony would have been the one coming in to wake me from those nightmares. He'd have stayed with me until I calmed down, maybe let me leave the light on all night, or even taken me back to his and Danger's bedroom to be sure nothing could get me.
And right now, he's willing to do the equivalent for somebody my age. Listen to what's bothering me, give me advice if he can.
He's not a monster. He's a father.
Just because Lucius manages to combine the two doesn't mean everyone does.
The thought made Draco smile, and it was with that expression that he looked up.
"Please do stay," he said to Moony. "It's not a nice story, but what else is new with me?"
The tale of the night before his life changed took less time to tell than Draco had expected. Moony and Danger both burst out laughing when he told them the name of Remus Lupin's wife, and Moony grinned at the question Draco had been asked by the Dark Lord. "We haven't given you much choice about cub-sitting, have we?" he said when the story was over. "I'm afraid it's just the way we are—our particular set of cubs have grown up expecting that anyone who's welcome in the house is a friend, which to them is the same as a member of the family."
"I don't mind it." Draco scowled, thinking of the night he'd narrated and the year that had preceded it. "I mind being used and set up to fail. I mind being a laughingstock in my own house, and having to watch my back every second of the day. If it's a choice between that or Dragon wanting me to read him just one more bedtime story…" He had to stop and look away, blinking hard.
"I wished, that night, for someplace I could start over," he said when he could speak again. "And that's what I found here. You treated me like a friend, like family, from the beginning. You didn't have to, maybe you shouldn't have, but you did, and I could do chores for the rest of my life before I could even start making up for that."
Danger got to him first by virtue of being closer. "No need to make up anything," she told him, holding him by the shoulders and shaking him gently. "No debts, no grudges. That's not our way, and you belong to us now."
"Even if we wanted to send you away, which we don't," Moony added, joining them and putting his arms around them both, "we'd have to fight off our own cubs to manage it. Not to mention half the population of Hogwarts. You've been making yourself quite popular, did you know that?"
Not trusting his voice, Draco shook his head.
"Well, it's true." Danger gave him a brisk peck on the forehead. "And once you've finished school, you are always welcome at the Manor, though you might prefer Cecy's place; she lives in town, up the street from Sirius and his family—well, good morning, sleepyhead!"
Draco turned to see Abby pushing herself upright with one hand, rubbing at her eyes with the other. Moony went to her side, putting an arm around her to hold her in place. "Did you dream, Joy?" he asked her.
"Uh-huh. Is Draco here?"
"I'm here," Draco said, sliding out of Danger's arms to sit down on the bed Abby'd used. "Did you remember something about one of those days you told me?"
Abby nodded. "Ron's going to go away from Harry and Hermione on St. Luke's Day," she said. "And you do something funny." She giggled, then sobered. "But I don't remember what. I do remember you need to know exactly where the cup is before that day or you'll miss your big chance to get it. It's the hardest one besides the snake."
"Weasley leaves, I do something funny, need to know what vault the cup is in, before St. Luke's Day," Draco muttered, committing it to memory. "It would help if I knew when St. Luke's Day was, wouldn't it?"
"18 October," said Danger.
Moony, Draco, and Abby all turned to stare at her. She chuckled. "I was marking Hogsmeade weekends on my calendar and I happened to notice it, that's all. No visions for me, not this time."
"It's a Hogsmeade weekend?" Draco grinned. "Brilliant. As long as that carries over, I think I've got a fair idea what I need to do…"