Be Careful
60: What You Accept
By Anne B. Walsh
"Does it hurt much, Draco?" Luna asked, laying delicate fingers against his arm. They were curled up together in one of the smaller rooms on the ground floor of Fidelus Manor, away from the bustle of Christmas Day but within call for things like dinner and carols.
"Probably not as much as it should. And with some extra luck, it would hurt even less." Draco tilted his head soulfully towards Luna, who smiled and leaned in.
Halfway through the kiss, a fragment of memory came to Draco, and he had to pull away to avoid spitting on Luna.
"Is my kissing so funny?" she asked with a slightly offended air.
"No." Draco caught his breath and focused on her to stop his laughter from returning just yet. "You reminded me of something that happened a long time ago, is all. Another of my stupid me tricks, back when I was still Draco Malfoy, Slytherin Poster Boy."
Luna giggled at this. "How long ago is a long time? Was I at Hogwarts?"
"Yes, you’d have been a second year. I was third. It was my first year in Care of Magical Creatures, first class, actually, and I went and insulted a hippogriff, after we’d been specifically told they were proud." Draco crooked his fingers and raked them downwards in a slashing motion. "Madam Pomfrey fixed it right up, of course, but I made out like it still hurt for weeks, and I specifically remember Pansy asking me about it in exactly the same words you just used. Except she didn’t really mean it, and you do..."
He trailed off, cupping his palm around the smooth, skin-covered knob which was now the end of his left arm. "I panicked that day," he said. "And that was nothing, compared to this. There’s a part of my body missing—I should be taking this much worse than I am."
"Maybe you’re happy to be alive," Luna suggested. "Or maybe your mum is helping you."
"Do I hear myself mentioned?" said Mum from the doorway.
"Someday I’m going to figure out how you do that." Draco half-turned to see her. She carried a box about the size of a Beater’s bat in her arms, with an ornate envelope balanced on top. "Were you looking for us?"
"For you specifically, love. Will you excuse us for a time, Luna?"
"Of course." Luna kissed Draco’s cheek, then left the room, shutting the door behind herself.
"What’s in there?" Draco asked as his mum sat down beside him, laying the box on the low table in front of the sofa.
"Presents, of a sort. But I feel I owe you an explanation first. Luna mentioned that she thought I might have helped you. May I know with what?"
Draco indicated his missing half-arm. "Did you do something about this?" he asked. "Because I ought to be a whole lot more upset, but instead it’s not even bothering me that I’m not upset. If that makes any sense..."
"Oh, it does." Mum squeezed his hand once, then withdrew. "Yes, Draco. I did lay a temporary cushion around your emotions on this matter. I justified it with the perilous condition of your physical health—you had been bitten by a venomous snake, lost a limb, and done highly taxing magic in quick succession—and the need to keep you from spiraling downward. But such blocks are dangerous to leave for long periods, and now that you know about it, you might well break it yourself simply by worrying at it within your mind."
Draco nodded. "Like picking a scab. You know you shouldn’t, but it’s so tempting."
"Precisely." Mum slid closer to him. "And like that, having this cushion removed will be painful. You will feel everything that you have not felt since you lost your arm, all at once. But I am here, and I will stay with you if you want me."
"If I want you?" Draco laughed once. "I think it’s more a question of, are you going to be able to pry me off afterward. I know what I ought to be feeling about this, and it’s not pretty."
"No, it is not. But pretty or ugly, I will stay with you through it all." She put her arms around him, and he leaned into her shoulder, clasping her hand with his. "Tell me when you are ready."
Draco swallowed once against a throat gone dry. "Go on," he said, bracing himself.
Fingertips brushed his forehead.
"Painful," you said, Mum.
What masterful understatement.
It was as if someone had invented a Cruciatus Curse for the mind. Fear, disgust, anger, revulsion, the feelings ricocheted and recombined within him too quickly to name or understand, shaking him like a jarvey with a gnome, like his Animagus form with a snake. The arms around him held him in place, held him together, as he fought to make some sense out of it all.
My arm is gone. A piece of my body, a piece of me, is gone. Forever. And I did it. With my own wand, my own magic, I maimed myself, I turned myself into a freak. Maybe it saved my life, but I’m a cripple now and always will be.
Not to mention, this means I can never go back. There’s no possible way I can explain this one, what am I going to say, a hippogriff bit it off? When I wasn’t even supposed to be out of the house, much less playing around with any spell that could have done this? And they’ll want to know how it got so well healed, why it looks like it’s been done a week instead of a day, and I won’t have an answer they’d understand or even believe.
A smile touched his lips for an instant and was gone. Not that having to stay here forever is so bad. It’s what I’m after, in the end. But this isn’t the end yet, or it shouldn’t be. I haven’t done all I could to help Harry. I know the last Horcrux, I can get at it, and I had an idea about how to get him the sword too. Maybe Luna can sneak into Hogwarts and do those things for him, but maybe she can’t.
Anger surged to the fore. Damn it, I wasn’t done yet! I’d barely even started! And now I’ve ruined my chances of finishing the game, and for what? What did I get out of it? I mean, other than my life, and Luna’s, and getting rid of a Horcrux...
"Do you want an answer to that question?" murmured a voice close to his ear.
"Was I talking aloud again?"
"Only a sentence or two." Mum freed a hand to stroke his hair, laying her cheek against his head for a moment before continuing to caress him. "I have been able to follow the general course of your feelings, and they are what I expected, but there is one benefit to what has happened that I do not believe you have quite realized yet."
"Enlighten me." Draco deliberately overdid the drawling tones of proper pureblood boredom. A chuckle rewarded him, and the smile that came in answer to it lingered for a few moments more than its predecessor.
Maybe I’ll get over this after all.
"You recall what concerned me most greatly about your magical health when we first met," Mum said, twining a piece of his hair around her fingers.
"Of course. My Mark."
"Yes. Its darkness was beginning to encroach upon your own magic, to stain your soul. But as you grew stronger under our influence, you fought it more successfully, until when I last saw you the darkness was nearly undetectable. It was still present, certainly, but it was concentrated in the brand on your arm. Nowhere else within you." A hand slid down to his chin and cupped it, lifting his face so that he could see her smile. "Do you understand yet?"
Draco opened his mouth to say no and stopped halfway to forming the word.
All the Dark magic on me was in my Mark.
My Mark was on my left arm.
And my left arm is no longer with us.
Mum’s smile grew warmer. "You do understand. I thought you might." Her fingers caressed the spot Luna had touched earlier. "You have paid a high price, Draco, but you are magically free of your ‘master.’"
Snape must’ve taught her how to do sarcasm. She sounds just like him.
That should disturb him far more than it did, Draco knew, but he couldn’t find anything left over from his earlier storm of feelings and his current tired exaltation.
There wasn’t supposed to be any way to get out once you were Marked. It was supposed to last forever, the way he wants to live forever.
But I found a way around one of those.
Maybe I can still help fix the other one too.
"I almost don’t want to ask," he began hesitantly.
"Ask anyway." Mum smoothed his hair and nudged him into sitting more upright.
"You said yesterday I could stay a week without anyone noticing I was gone back home." Draco rearranged his legs under him, searching for the right words. "That sounds like you think I’m going to be able to go back."
"Why would you not?"
Draco favored his mum with a variant of the look of intolerance for stupidity he used most often for Ron. She only laughed. "Shall I show you one of your presents now?" she asked when she was done.
"If you like."
Mum leaned forward and opened the box on the table, lifting out what looked like a block of wood, about eighteen inches long and six inches wide by six deep. Draco reached out to touch it, then jerked his hand back.
"Is something wrong?" Mum inquired.
"It’s alive!" Draco laid his hand on it again, more hesitantly. The flat surface of the—whatever-it-was—held all the softness, the slight give, even the warmth of a living being. "What is it?"
"We call it ferecarne." Her pronunciation gave the word four syllables, accenting the second to last. "I am sure you mistook it for wood at first, and it begins as wood, but the trees from which it comes have never known the outdoors. They are nurtured in a Healer’s workroom, and live on a mixture of three potions. As you have discovered for yourself, their purpose is to give the wood the appearance and feel of human flesh."
"Weird." Draco took his hand away. "What’s it used for?"
Mum drew her wand and pointed it at the ferecarne, a crease appearing between her eyebrows as she concentrated. The block wobbled for an instant, then shrank and twisted in on itself—
And a forearm and hand lay where the block had been, an exact mirror image of Draco’s right arm. Pale blond down sprouted on the back of the arm and hand as he watched, and the fingernails developed slightly ragged edges. "Mum," he protested. "I haven’t been!"
Chuckling, Mum twitched her wand, and the nails smoothed out once more. "So much, any trained witch or wizard may do," she said. "One who knows the spells, at least. But to fit the prosthetic and make it obey the body’s signals, that requires a Healer."
"Hmm, a Healer." Draco rubbed his lips thoughtfully, trying to disguise his rising glee. I’ll be able to go back after all, finish what I started... "Wonder if we know any of those?"
Mum flicked the side of his head. "If you wish to have two functional hands in time to applaud Abigail’s exhibition tonight, I suggest you stop being silly long enough to let me do my job."
"Yes, Mum," Draco said obediently, shifting himself around so that she could get at his left side. "What do I have to do?"
"Hold still, to begin with." Mum lifted the prosthetic arm with her own left hand, her wand in her right reshaping its top. "You will need to take some care with this, Draco—the magic which holds it in place will not withstand any spell which would have injured your original arm badly enough to make you lose the use of it. I will teach you the spell to reattach it, of course, and the one to release it without damage, but I thought you should be warned."
"Thanks for that." Draco watched as the ferecarne arm developed an elbow and a cup-shaped depression just above it. "Do I have a dirty mind if..."
"Yes."
"Thought so."
The ferecarne closed around the remains of his arm, and Draco stifled a shudder. There was no reason for it, really—it was very like the feeling he’d had from touching the stump with his own hand—but knowing there was a magical creation affixed to his body made his spine prickle and his hair itch.
"Now," Mum said, putting her wand away, "you have a decision to make. I can give this arm the treatment that any Healer could give. That will allow it to move as you wish, but you will have no feeling in it and it will always be more clumsy than your other. Or I can use my own magic, and see if I can convince your mind to receive signals from this arm as it does from the rest of your body. You will take longer to learn to use it again, and it will feel very strange to you at times, but if it works as I think it will, when you are through, there will be little to say this is not the arm you lost. What do you say?"
"I say..." Draco ran his hand along the place where the ferecarne blended with his skin, feeling no difference in his fingertips. "I say I have a star of a mum." He arranged his left arm around her, then hugged her with his right, making her laugh again. "I’ll try it if you will."
"Very well." Mum laid her right hand against his left upper arm and began to stroke her left forefinger against the fingertips of his lax left hand. "Tell me when you begin to feel this..."
Nearly three hours later, she called a halt. "We will work more on it tomorrow," she promised when Draco pouted. "I have another gift I hoped you would open tonight."
"Well, when you put it that way." Draco lowered his left arm to the couch beside him, moving with deliberation in case the ferecarne misunderstood his intentions, as had happened several times already, and flung his hand out as though signaling the Knight Bus or trying to catch a Snitch. "Is that it in the envelope there?"
"It is." Mum picked it up and handed it to him. "And I am afraid your work is not yet done for the day. This gift also requires a decision from you."
"You just love working me to death, don’t you?" Draco gripped the envelope in his left hand and tore it open with his right, then pulled out the neatly lettered sheet of parchment within. "What do I have to do with..."
He turned it over to read it, and his last word went unsaid.
I, Cecilia Mariana Black, being of sound mind and body and full age of adulthood, do, on this day, the twenty-fifth of December, 1997, take Draco Lucius Malfoy to be my lawful son, heir to all I possess, and in token of this do I of my own free will here sign my name.
Mum’s signature, the rusty brown of dried blood, filled the next line. There was another section below, but Draco didn’t bother to read it. He knew what it said.
"What did you think the answer was going to be?" he said, looking up at his mum without shame for the blurring of his vision, since he could see her eyes shining with the same joy he knew filled his own. "No?"
"It is always polite to ask." Mum drew a sharp black quill from her pocket. "Still, I will admit to having very little doubt of your response."
Draco set the contract on its envelope and accepted the Contract Quill. Steadying the parchment with his left hand, he signed his full name at the bottom with his right, ignoring the pain like a knife across the back of that hand.
Anything worth doing hurts.
And making myself a place in this world is most definitely worth doing.
Author Notes:
Yes, I'm back to this one. Hope it's acceptable.