Be Careful
5: What You Believe In
By Anne B. Walsh
The small dining room, located at the rear of the manor house, seated twelve. It was neither as ornate nor as well-appointed as the main dining room. Draco could remember laughing in his sleeve at guests who had thought they were going to dine with his family and had, instead, been fobbed off with this imitation luxury.
But that was in the real world, at Malfoy Manor, and he wasn't going to think about that. Not when there was a world of his own making, all around him and ready for the exploring.
This might be just a dream, but that means I don't have to worry about what people will think or whether or not I'm behaving as befits a Malfoy. I can just do what I want to. Like slurp when I eat soup, or throw a slice of bread at the prat across the table who won't stop showing off how he can belch on command.
Draco grinned to himself. Bread bouncing off Weasley's forehead: good. Everyone laughing at the expression on his face: better. Him picking it out of his soup and stuffing the whole thing in his mouth: priceless.
He wouldn't have expected a dream world of his own creation to be populated with recognizable versions of his enemies, but there was a perverse logic to it. They all loathed him in the real world? Fine, let them. They would love him here, and treat him exactly as they would treat one of their own, and none of them ever had to know it.
Besides, I never thought I'd say this, but they're fun to be around. Draco let his eyes travel once around the table. His mum had left quietly once the meal was underway, so there were only eight other people present: Lovegood, the Beauvoi twins, the two youngest Weasleys, Potter, Longbottom, and Meghan Black, who was just finishing a story about the older of her brothers.
And they have really good food. Which has been lacking at home lately.
"What is this?" he asked, mopping out his soup bowl with another piece of bread. His mother would have been horrified. He didn't care. "It's the ugliest green I ever saw, but it's wonderful."
"Ham and split pea," Granger—no, Hermione, I have to remember that—said from farther up the table. "It takes all day to make, and the kitchen smells heavenly."
"We filled a kitchen cabinet with it once," Beauvoi—Ray—said reminiscently.
Draco tried to imagine this and failed. "How?"
"We drilled a hole near the top of the door," said Hermione, twisting her finger in midair, "and I slid my wand through. Then Ray did a Transference Spell on the soup from the night before, and specified my wand as the ending point." She spread her hands. "Voila. One cabinet full of soup."
Ray grimaced. "We weren't expecting Father to be the one to find it, though. That was messy."
"What was?" inquired Neville Longbottom from the other side of the table. "The soup, or what he did to you for setting it up?"
"Oh, he wasn't too angry." Hermione giggled. "He sent Dobby to find us and bring us to the kitchen so we could see him all green and dripping."
"Said if we could do that advanced of magic in our second year, then we deserved to have our fun." Ray was grinning. "He made us clean it all up, but it was worth it."
Draco swallowed a last bite of bread. "I think I like your father."
"How nice," Ray said blandly. "We like him too."
"I'm so glad. Things would be difficult at home otherwise."
Hermione groaned. "One was enough," she said to the ceiling. "One was really, truly enough."
"One what?" Harry Potter asked, studiously innocent.
"One person around with this sense of humor!"
Ray and Draco both sat a bit straighter in their chairs. "My dear sister," Ray began, in an offended tone.
"It's not humor," Draco continued, looking down his nose at her—not hard, considering all the practice I've had. "Not in the least."
Ray straightened his back a trifle more. "It happens to be called wit."
Draco followed suit, lifting his head still higher. "And it is the mark of a highly advanced mind."
"Lesser minds try to reach this pinnacle and fail." Ray sneered the final word, drawing it out.
"They sit below and scoff." Draco hissed the final "f" through his teeth. "This is, of course, how we know them to be—"
"All right!" Ginny Weasley shouted, holding up her hands. "I get this enough at home—knock it off!"
The round of laughter which swept the room was everything Draco could have wished for.
"So," Remus Beauvoi said, turning away from the window to face the room. "I assume you've asked us here to discuss our latest addition, Cecy?"
"Insightful as usual, Remus." Cecilia smiled at him, a bit wanly. "Nothing here goes farther than this room, of course. As if I needed to tell any of you that."
"We're listening," Molly Weasley said, settling herself more firmly into her chair beside her husband. "Who in the world is he?"
"No one in the world. Not in our world." Cecy flattened her hands on her knees. "He believes himself in a dream while he is here. His own world, the only one he thinks is true, is far from here."
"But he is truly here," Danger said, her tone that of a woman wishing to clarify a point. "Not dreaming."
"Unless a dream has form and substance, he's here," Andy put in. "I touched him, I Healed him. He's real, and he's here."
"And I watched him disappear as he slept," Cecy continued. "He travels between worlds when he reaches the dream-state of his sleep, but his traveling is no dream." She rose abruptly. "But I wish him to continue to think it is."
"Why?" asked Alice Lovegood, her hand in her husband Gerald's. "I could understand simply not telling him if it doesn't come up, but it sounds as though you're advocating actively lying to him."
"If necessary, yes." Cecy paced restlessly to the end of the room and halfway back, stopping as she neared Sirius. He rose and embraced her without being asked, and she smiled thanks before starting on her way again.
"I think I may understand," James Potter said, one hand slowly twisting a piece of his robe. "If he thinks this is a dream, then… he'll be more free with us, more open, less guarded?"
"Yes." Cecy reached her chair again, but did not sit, instead slowly circling it.
"It seems praiseworthy enough," Lily said doubtfully from her perch on the arm of James’ chair, "but lying to him…"
"Think what he must accept while he is here," Cecy broke in. "That the only home he has ever known is not his. That his family, an old family as his world reckons things, does not exist. That people with the faces and names of his enemies can be his friends, or at the very least not actively hostile towards him. In a dream world, this can be so without need for explanation. He can rest and heal. If he accepts our world as real, he will have to struggle with our realities and his own at the same time, and he is not strong enough for that."
"Why not?" Aletha asked, her tone slightly hostile. "He seems healthy. Young, intelligent, though with that strange fascination about blood…"
"He knows nothing about our Troubles." Cecy stopped once more, staring at a blank space on the wall. "Though the war he has come from has their same flavor to it—fools using ‘blood purity’ to cover their desire for blood, pure and simple. That boy is trapped on the wrong side of that war, as much a casualty as anyone who has died or bled in it. His soul is wounded more deeply than I believed possible for sanity to remain in him. And there is one stain on it, and on his magic, that we cannot remove." She waved a hand at Andy. "It seems he serves, or served, the leader of the evil ones in that war, and is marked with that one's symbol."
"What symbol is that?" Remus asked.
"A skull." Cecy turned to face him. "With a snake emerging from its jaw."
Remus went still. "My unhallowed ancestors," he murmured.
Cecy half-smiled. "I believe so."
"The magic on that marking is unmistakably Dark," Andy said, taking up the thread of the conversation. "Draco's own magic has gathered around it, trying to keep it away from his core, but it's starting to bleed through. If it can't be removed, I estimate he has at best a year before the effects overtake him."
"What sort of effects are we talking about here?" Danger asked. "Physical, mental, magical, all three?"
"I doubt physical," Andy said. "And I'm not qualified to diagnose mental. But magical… his own magic will be touched by Dark magic at all points, and any brush with Dark magic has bad effects. What will a constant spreading stain do?"
"It will destroy him," said Cecy quietly. "He will find thoughts constantly in his mind about darkness and pain and corruption, and the only way to escape them will be to allow them to be enacted. And when they have escaped, others and stronger will come in their place. Unless he becomes strong enough in these next years to resist that darkness, he will go mad, or he will become as evil as the one who marked him. And even if he resists, there will still be some residual effect."
Sirius coughed into his hand, making a sound remarkably like a name beginning and ending with sibilants. Aletha elbowed him in the side.
"One other thing I think you should all know," Cecy said, glaring at her cousin for an instant. "I have identified his closest counterpart in the native people of our world, and the counterparts of his mother and father."
"Please, tell us," Lily said. "I would assume you're his mother's counterpart?"
"I am." Cecy lifted her chin proudly. "And glad to be so. Draco's father, though, has no truly direct counterpart among us. He was the result of a line of breeding which never occurred in our world—your ‘mad cousin’, Remus, in that world succeeded."
Remus shuddered. "A fool in the early seventeenth century," he told Molly and Arthur, and Gerald and Alice, who were looking at him curiously. "He was the child of the branch of the Beauvoi family which was not magical, the descendants of Dafydd Beauvoi's brother, and suddenly found himself with magic and a cousin named William he had never known about. When he saw the wealth that William enjoyed, and the pleasure William found in both magic and his chosen vocation, he decided that if he could only inherit William's place he would find that pleasure."
"Ah, yes," Arthur said in sudden recollection. "He tried to use a magical poison, didn't he? One of the sorts that mimics a natural illness?"
Remus nodded. "He ingratiated himself with William, flattered him and complimented his acting, and finally got himself invited on a boating trip with the company which included an outdoor lunch. William went to answer a call of nature, the cousin dropped his present into the wineglass he'd been asked to hold… simple as that, or so he thought. When William returned, he handed the wine back and walked away."
"But, of course, it didn't work," Gerald said. "Because of your line's natural affinity for snakes, William was immune to the poison."
"He… might have been," said Remus diplomatically. "Fortunately for me, he didn't test that theory, as a snake he'd been conversing with earlier had seen the poisoning and warned him away. He was actually breaking his usual rule to have that conversation, or so his diary says. It was as though someone whispered in his ear that this would be a good day to get to know the local wildlife."
"A good day for me, certainly," Danger said, running her hand up her husband's arm. "And for our family." She shook her head. "I'm sorry, Cecy, we flew past what you were going to tell us…"
"What you did," Cecy said, "was provide me with the perfect explanation. Draco's surname is Malfoy, an obvious derivative of your own—or is there not a piece of the story about that?"
"Oh, yes." Remus sighed. "William spread the story around, and no one would have anything to do with his cousin. They called him "Malfoi", or "bad faith", a play on words with his surname and what he'd tried to do. There were a few bad apples who took him to their hearts, of course, and he tried to claim the name was a badge of honor for his daring, but he never amounted to anything. In Draco's world, I assume, the opposite is true."
"Precisely." Cecy inclined her head. "Can you then guess who might be the closest analogue we have to a father for Draco, and to Draco himself?"
A long moment of silence.
"Well," Remus said finally. "It seems I've surpassed you after all, Arthur. If by rather unconventional means."
If the laughter resulting from this quip was a bit strained, no one was impolite enough to notice.