Be Careful
91: How You Get Down
By Anne B. Walsh
Draco leaned on a windowsill in the Owlery, brushing a stray feather across his palm and enjoying his last full day of quiet. Tomorrow by the calendar, the day after tomorrow on his personal timeline, the students of acceptable bloodlines would filter back into Hogwarts, to be greeted by their black-haired Headmaster, their lumpen Dark Arts teacher, and his smirking sister with the lies she passed off as Muggle Studies.
But it won’t last much longer. Ten more days, that’s all. Wish I had some way to tell everyone else that and have them believe me...
Rustles and soft hoots behind him told him an owl had just arrived. Curious, he turned.
Feathers of shining white stood out clearly among the brown and tan of the other owls in the Owlery, who were edging away from the newcomer. As Draco watched, half-disbelieving, the snowy owl finished preening a wing and looked up. Her eyes were a shade of blue-gray not usually seen in birds, and filled with the same unmistakable joy he was sure inhabited his own.
"Luna," he breathed, crossing to her. "Can you—no, you can’t change back here, it isn’t safe—and what are you even doing here? Not that I’m not glad of it, but why put another use on your amulet just to see me?"
A white-feathered head shook.
"No? It wasn’t just to see me?" Draco pulled a hurt face for a moment, and Luna hooted in laughter. "This isn’t going to get us anywhere," he said with a sigh. "We need to go somewhere we can talk, really talk."
Luna bobbed her head up and down, then poked her beak in a particular direction. Draco followed its line with his eyes and frowned. "Hogsmeade? I guess that would do, if we’re careful not to be seen, but how am I going to get out? They have all the secret passages covered..."
A swat to his chest with a wing sent him back a step. "Hey! What was that for?"
The same wing pointed at him, then swept downwards, coming around at the end to point towards Luna herself. "Me, down, you," Draco repeated aloud, twirling the feather between his fingers. "You know, this’d make a great party game. Right up there with ‘Guess My Patronus’ and ‘Guess My Animagus’—"
The feather drifted away on a gust of wind as its holder vanished, replaced by a small grey streak of fur headed for the stairs. Luna gave her soft hoot of laughter again and took wing, flapping towards Hogsmeade.
The barman of the Hog’s Head was enjoying a quiet pint by himself in the kitchen when his own surname caught his ear. It was spoken in a girl’s voice filled with laughter, and it had come through the open window which overlooked the alley behind the pub. Setting down his mug, he moved nearer to listen.
"...good thing Ray and Starwing looked back and found out he wanted to talk to me," the girl was saying reproachfully. "Bad Draco, to forget to tell me such an important thing."
"Yes, yes, bad me," said a boy in tones dripping sadness. "What did he want to talk to you about?"
"Oh, quite a lot of things. Some messages for you. One is that you should think about what you know of Professor Snape, that it might help you work out why you’re so interested in a certain object. And another that’s very, very important—you need to have the diadem before Harry and the others and I come to Hogwarts, because you have to challenge Harry to a duel over it, and you have to win."
"I what?" The boy’s voice rose into a squawk of surprise. "Luna, I can’t do that!"
"You’re going to have to. He can’t win unless you do."
A long sigh. "Great. Talk about achieving your dreams at the moment they stop having meaning. Anything else?"
"Just that it would be best if you were to do the first part of what you’re thinking of doing with Hermione today. She’s strong enough now to listen and understand, and it will have more than a week to settle in so that the second step will take right away."
"That’s assuming she doesn’t hex me on sight," muttered the boy. "All right, all aboard for my auntie’s house. My sane auntie."
"Yes, please, I don’t think I want to see your mad aunt again..." A light laugh, cut off by the branch-breaking crack of a Disapparition.
The barman snorted once and went to refill his mug. The conversation might have meaning to others, but he wasn’t in the mood to recount it to them, not even if it meant he might understand it better. In his experience, explanations paid for with trouble were seldom worth the price.
Hermione was in the middle of reading the Act I Finale when she heard the knock on the door. "Come in!" she called without taking her eyes off the page, with its three columns of tiny type all meant to be sung simultaneously. "How do they keep it all straight?" she said musingly to herself as the door opened. "Wouldn’t they end up singing each other’s words by accident?"
"Sometimes they do," said Luna, shutting the door behind herself. "But everything is always so mixed-up that no one can tell. I’ve brought someone to see you."
"To see me?" Hermione looked up and smiled. "Hello, Luke."
The mongoose, perched on Luna’s shoulder, gave a nervous chit-chit for answer and leapt down. Halfway through his fall, there was—if it hadn’t been so absurd, Hermione would have called it a flash of darkness—and a boy her own age hit the floor hard, fair hair flopping over his flushed face as he lay on his back.
"Grace, delicacy, and poise," he said breathlessly. "Three things I seem to have left behind in my dorm today." He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow, wincing. "Ow." Grey eyes blinked back their slight extra shine, then focused on Hermione and joined in the smile his lips had started. "Hello."
"Hello"? You’re going to marry one of my best friends, the last time we met you destroyed my ability to take care of myself but saved my life, you spun this absurd tale about the horrible things you’d do to me which fit with the way you’ve behaved to me for six years, but I’ve since found out that was really because you wanted to be my friend yourself—and the best thing you can think to say to me now is "Hello"?
"Hello," Hermione answered.
I suppose absurdity is catching.
Luna had left again. They were entirely alone. To keep from staring, Hermione looked down at the book in her lap. "Why do they suddenly sing about poetry?" she asked.
"Why not?" Her companion sat up, shaking his hair back. "They’re unusual pirates, if you haven’t noticed."
"Oh, I’ve noticed." Hermione battled with her better instincts and lost. "They say it takes one to know one."
"What, me? I’d like to think I’m getting more usual, not less." Draco Malfoy arched his back, sighed in relief, and scooted closer to her, craning his neck to see the book. Hermione obligingly turned it. "Thank you. Developing a few interests outside my ‘sacred family name and bloodline’, that sort of thing."
"You sound like Sirius," said Hermione before she could stop herself.
He twitched his eyebrows. "Do I?"
"Yes. He used to be just that sarcastic about purebloods and the way they think."
"Well, then, good for me." Draco glanced at her and looked away, his cheeks flaring pink again.
"Is it so hard for you?" Hermione said acerbically. "Sitting next to a—"
"Please," Draco cut her off, his voice thick with an emotion she hardly dared identify. "It’s nothing to do with that, I swear. I know what I used to sound like, how much of a fool I used to make of myself, and it doesn’t sound any better coming from you."
It was Hermione’s turn to flush. "I was being just as bad, wasn’t I?" she said. "Only in reverse. Backwards snobbery."
"At least you have the courage to admit it. It took me a month and getting hit in the face to come to that point."
She looked sidelong at him. "That sounds like a story I wouldn’t mind hearing."
He grinned. "Because I worked out it doesn’t matter what people’s blood is, or because I got hit in the face?"
Surprised, she laughed. "A little of both, really."
"Thought so. But for you to understand that story, I’d have to tell you the whole thing, and we don’t have time. You will find it out," he added hastily. "I’ve made plans for that. Just not now, and not here."
Hermione nodded. "Fair enough. But Luna said you’d come to see me..." She let the final word trail off, inviting him to take up the thread.
"Yes. Well." Draco undid the clasp on his robes, sliding them off to reveal a very Muggle pair of jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "There wolf. There castle" and small pictures of these two things, arrows pointing them out. "Christmas present," he explained at Hermione’s incredulous look. "From my godparents’ daughter—my godsister, I guess, if there is such a word."
"There used to be." Hermione tried to think what family would have been acceptable to the Malfoys as godparents to their only son while still retaining enough knowledge of Muggle culture to have a daughter who gave such presents, but gave it up as a bad job. "Women would say they were getting together to talk with their godsiblings, or their godsibs for short, and the word got corrupted and came to mean the kind of talk they did together."
"Godsibs," Draco repeated, frowning in thought. "Gossibs... gossip? I never knew that."
"Now you do." Hermione shut the book still sitting on her lap and set it aside. "Tell me more about your gossip."
"She reminds me a lot of you." He smirked for a second, as at some private joke. "But she’s the oldest of a big family. Second oldest, really, she has a twin brother who’s a couple minutes older, but they don’t play for precedence like that unless they’re teasing. And she’s married, she eloped with her boyfriend on her birthday over the summer, though you can’t really call it eloping when they did it out in full view of everyone. In any case, they got right down to business, she’s going to have a baby this fall, and if they’re anything like either of their parents, it’s only the first of many..."
"It sounds like you really care for them," Hermione said when he was silent for a few moments.
"I know, shocking, right?" His smile invited her to share the joke. "But it’s true. If I know anything about caring for other people, it’s because of them. And one other person... but I said I wasn’t going to get into that now, and I’m not. I came here on business. In a way." He held out his hand, palm up. "May I?" he said, indicating her right arm.
Hermione moved closer to him and laid her wrist in his grasp. "Thank you," she said quietly.
Draco laughed once. "For what? Stopping you ever using a wand again?"
"Stopping me dying," Hermione retorted. "Don’t think I can’t slap you just as well with my left."
"Mercy!" He pretended to cower, making her giggle, then sat back up, his face straightening out. "I don’t know how much you know about the night you escaped," he said. "Do you know who was able to tell Aunt Andromeda what you’d been hurt with?"
"Yes, it was Luna. She said she’d seen someone else hurt with Fiendfyre..." Hermione stopped as a conclusion came to her. "You?"
"Me." Draco took her remaining hand in his other one and guided it to a spot just above his left elbow, where a line like a scar was just tangible. "And I want to help you the way I was helped. But it’ll have to be a bit different, since all I have to work with is my own, and that’s why I’m here." His hand went to his pocket and drew out a tiny silver knife, of the sort they used in Potions class. "To ask if you’d be willing to make one piece of my terrible story the truth."
I don’t know why this chapter took so long to write, but here it is. Now to do my huge sinkful of dishes, and hope there will be reviews to reward me when I’m done... please? I might get another chapter written today or tomorrow if there are!