Be Careful
89: Where You Hide
By Anne B. Walsh
Lord Albus Dumbledore of Hogwarts looked up from the message on his desk as his door opened. "Ah, Tom, Minerva, please, come in. Cecilia, Remus..."
"Danger stayed with the children," Remus filled in, closing the door behind himself. "Anything she needs to know, she will."
"I have no doubt." Dumbledore smiled at Cecy as she took one of the chairs. "How is Draco?" he asked her. "How has he taken the news?"
"With worry, and with some fear, but it is not paralyzing him." Cecy rubbed the fingers of her left hand absently. "He was even able to joke about it, saying how grateful he is that this prophecy, unlike the one concerning the other Harry Potter, does not call for his death. As for the note from the dementors, he is highly skeptical that anything would be achieved by, as he put it, ‘noble stupidity’ on his part. I must say I agree."
"As do I. But it is on that subject that I have asked you all here." Dumbledore tapped the parchment in front of him. "This arrived a few minutes ago by Floo-messenger, with a request for an immediate reply. It is a summons for one Draco Malfoy, requiring him to present himself at the Ministry of Magic for questioning without delay."
Cecy’s horrified "No!" and Remus’ soft curse overlapped one another. Minerva bared her teeth and hissed deep in her throat, and Tom sighed wearily.
"Trust the Ministry," he said. "If there is a way to make a bad situation worse, they will find it."
"You cannot mean to send him!" Cecy protested over this. "You know what could happen—"
"Please, Cecilia." Dumbledore held up a hand, and Cecy sat back in her chair, her eyes hooded and wary. "My first reaction was much the same as yours. But a decision this momentous needs facts, not emotions, behind it. We all agree we should not accede to this request, but why? And what will the effects of refusing be on the castle, and the people living here? Tom?"
"The ‘why’ is simple," Tom said, turning his chair to better face the rest of the group. "There are those at the Ministry, naming no names, who believe in peace at any price. They would consider the life of one young man, whether or not he has agreed to give it up, a small price to pay if it means the dementors will be mollified. It would never occur to them that the dementors might take Draco and continue to attack us anyway."
"Even if he is only questioned," Minerva took over, "what can he tell them that would be helpful? I doubt he has any grand plan for defeating the dementors, not when he only discovered he is meant to do so today!"
"And they would likely consider him a fugitive when he disappeared the first night he slept there," Remus put in. "Never mind that he can’t control his transits, that they happen whenever he enters dream state for the first time in a night. They would call it evading custody and arrest him for it, and the problem would be compounded."
"Not to mention, how would he explain where he awakened in his original world?" Cecy shut her eyes, likely against tears. "He would be arrested there as well, and that Ministry is controlled not just by fools but by evildoers. They would question him and discover his activities over the past year, and then he could only hope that they killed him quickly. He must stay here."
"And so he shall." Dumbledore gave the words the force of law. "I will not let him be taken."
Cecy sighed in relief, Minerva nodded briskly, and Remus smiled. Only Tom still looked concerned. "I hope you’re not thinking of invoking local authority," he said. "It’s perfectly legal, but it might be unwise just now."
"It will be my course of last resort only," Dumbledore promised. "But if the Ministry proves obstinate, I may have no choice. Unless..." He stopped as a new thought came to him. "Perhaps it will not be necessary. Tell me, Cecy, what would Draco think of spending a few days in hiding?"
"Let me see here." Draco held out his hands like scale pans, weighing his options. "A few days in hiding... getting caught by the Ministry..." His right hand went down as the left came up. "Hiding it is."
"Very well, then." Mum leaned up and kissed his cheek. "For the sake of truthfulness, I should not know where you are. I have no doubt your friends will be able to steer you in the right direction, though. Be well, and I will see you when this is over."
"You too." Draco watched his mum around the corner, then turned to follow Hermione, who had been waiting near the end of the hall. "So what’s this you were saying about my dear old Auntie Isabelle?" he asked as they started up the stairs. "Mum popped up just when you were getting to the good part."
"It’s been worked out how she faked her death—well, worked out in a mechanical sense, no one’s quite sure on the details yet, we know someone must have helped her but not who or how they got in and out without being seen, you can’t Apparate on the secure wards at St. Mungo’s and the Healers swear no one passed them, but in any case, do you want to hear?"
"Yes, please." Draco patted his friend’s shoulder. "And try to breathe a little more often. Purple is not your color."
Hermione stuck out her tongue at him before she went on. "It starts with this idea of wise dementors. They shouldn’t be able to hold onto a soul like that, any more than I should be able to keep on being pregnant after it’s the baby’s time to be born." Her hand rested protectively on her belly, still flat for the time being. "So that means someone must have done it to them, and the Blood Purists seem the best candidates."
"You think Bella did it herself?"
"I think she was part of it, but she can’t have done it all, because otherwise she would have made an army of wise dementors and found the weak spots in everyone’s wards by now." Hermione stepped neatly over the vanishing stair, which Draco leapt, making her smile. "I’d guess it was someone else, maybe her husband or his brother, who did most of it, and she’s had to try to reproduce it all this time before she finally got it last summer."
"In time to make enough wise dementors to get through your wards at Luna’s ball." Draco shivered, remembering how near a thing that had been. "All right, but that still doesn’t explain how she faked being dead well enough to fool Healers."
"Once they had one wise dementor, it could communicate with them," Hermione explained, turning down a particular hallway. "Tell them things about itself. Like how the Kiss works, and what kind of magic might be able to reproduce it." She rapped at a door, which was opened by Professor Riddle. "May we see it, please, Professor?" she asked.
"‘It’? What ‘it’ might this be?" Professor Riddle smiled at Hermione’s growl. "Yes, I’m only teasing, come in." He moved aside to allow them entrance. "Meet the only piece of magical technology I’ve ever been unsure if I wanted destroyed or not."
"That can reproduce a Dementor’s Kiss?" Draco asked, staring at the small smoked-glass bottle in Professor McGonagall’s hands. It looked like something he’d give his mum for Christmas, not a weapon of magical destruction. "How?"
"It isn’t charged at the moment," Professor McGonagall said, carefully setting the bottle on the table. "But when it operates at full power, simply opening the top will attract all souls in the area towards it immediately. A normal, healthy person should have no difficulty, her attachment to her body should override it—but if someone should happen to be ill, weak, even dying..."
"It pulls their soul into it?" Draco took a closer look at the little bottle. "That can’t last very long."
"It doesn’t." Professor Riddle removed the stopper from the bottle and peered at it. "The captivity lasts twenty-four hours at most, less if the magic runs out. But for Isabelle Lestrange, twenty-four hours was enough."
"She had an accomplice," Hermione explained. "We don’t know who, but she has to have done, because what happened was they cast a spell on her that made her die a little slower than a Killing Curse. Just before she died, they used the soul flask to catch her soul, then put a spell on her body that would keep it from..." She shifted uncomfortably. "You know. In any case, once the Healers confirmed she was dead and her body was moved to the morgue, her accomplice came back, took that spell off, started up her heart and her breathing again, and let her soul out of the flask."
"And it went home." Draco frowned, thinking. "But then, couldn’t Snape just have gone back into his body after I’d taken that bloody dementor down a peg?"
Professor McGonagall shook her head. "Dragging a soul from a living body does irreparable damage to that soul," she said, pulling a sheet of parchment thick with notes towards her and beginning to study it. "This device is designed to get around that limitation by catching the soul at the moment of death, when it would naturally leave the body in any case. Also, Isabelle was prepared for what would happen to her, and expected to be able to return. Severus had no such expectation."
"His body’s still alive, isn’t it?" Hermione asked. "Down in the hospital wing?"
"It is," Professor Riddle confirmed. "Magic does make invalid care that much easier, I must say."
Draco fished a Galleon from his pocket and began to toss and catch it in his left hand, the familiar motions quieting his thoughts. Several fragmentary ideas were jostling for position in his mind. "May I borrow that?" he asked, pointing to the flask. "I’ll be careful with it. It’s just that I’ve got the first bits of something important, and this is related somehow..."
"I don’t see why not." Professor Riddle replaced the stopper in the flask and handed the whole assemblage to Draco. "Now, I think you’d best be getting along. I have no more wish than Cecilia to have to lie to the Ministry."
"Any more than necessary," added Professor McGonagall without looking up from her notes.
Draco and Hermione managed to make it through the door before they burst out laughing. The remaining staircases and hallways were traversed in alternate states of carefully avoiding one another’s eyes and giggling like lunatics.
At last they reached the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, and Hermione hugged Draco tightly. "This is where I get off," she said. "Be sure to say friends can find you, or none of us will be able to get in to bring your meals."
"And how terrible that would be." Draco was about to release her when he remembered a debt still owing to someone who looked very much like this. "Can you ask Meghan to stop in if she can? I need to ask her something."
"Of course, I’m sure she will." Hermione squeezed him once more and let him go. "Break a leg."
"Thanks." Draco leaned against the wall to watch his friend out of sight, wondering idly if he’d ever get to hug his original world’s Hermione that way.
Not if I don’t keep my promise to her, I won’t.
But first things first. Staying out of the Ministry’s way.
He began to pace back and forth along the corridor, concentrating hard on a place to hide, a place to be safe, a place where only friends could find him, no one who owed their allegiance to the Ministry and wanted to question him about his plans to miraculously save the world...
Yeah, if I could do that, don’t you think I would have by now? Draco pulled open the door that had appeared in the wall and stepped inside, shutting it behind him. I’m flying blind here, just like everyone else, the only difference is there’s a bunch of words written down that seem to say I might do something special, I don’t necessarily know what it is...
Pushing that thought out of his head for the moment, he looked up at his new hideaway.
"Wow," he said, impressed in spite of himself. The Room of Requirement had formed itself into something like a ship’s stateroom, done in dark wood paneling, with a balcony from which a hammock hung, a large bookshelf and wardrobe, a wireless in one corner besides a desk and chair, and a door slightly ajar to show bathroom fixtures behind it. "Nicely done."
As if in answer, a ripple appeared on the paneling near the hammock, and a green banner unrolled, emblazoned with the silver serpent of Slytherin.
"I suppose that’s ‘Welcome aboard.’" Draco leaned his head against the door, only to jump nearly out of his skin as a brisk knock sounded on the other side. "Come in!" he called when he thought he had his voice back under control.
A head decorated with bright-beaded braids poked around the door. "You wanted to see me?"
"Yeah, Pearl, come on inside. Extra chair, please," Draco said to the room, which developed one beside the desk. "I had a question about my world’s Hermione..."
Meghan listened to his half-formed ideas, but her face was grave, and she shook her head when he was done. "The spells for patterning ferecarne are just too complicated," she said. "It’s third-year Healer apprentice work, way beyond anything you could learn in the next couple of weeks."
"That’s what I was afraid of." Draco nodded, fighting to conceal his crushing disappointment. He’d given his word, and now it looked as though he was going to be forsworn.
Living up to my name. Or down.
"Don’t look like that," Meghan scolded. "There could still be a way."
Draco laughed ruefully. "Not too good at hiding what I feel, am I?"
"I think you’re just storing it up for when you really, truly need it." Meghan planted one heel on her chair and hugged her knee thoughtfully. "And I read up on this after you got hurt at Christmas. Putting a pattern into brand-new ferecarne is too hard, but there is something else you might be able to learn to do..."
Author Notes:
Hmm, wonder what that might be. Things starting to pull together for people now? Plenty more explanations to come, both to you and to characters! Hope you're enjoying it!