Maybe
Chapter 9
By Anne B. Walsh
Chapter 9
"I’m sorry, Father," panted Theodore, running up to his father in the hallway. "I couldn’t find Draco anywhere. I looked all over — in the library, in the study, in his room..."
"Very well. Go to the safe room, Theodore. I will tell you when you may come out." Patroclus Nott walked away.
Obediently, Theodore went. But as he walked, he kept seeing and hearing little bits of things in his head. Things like the way the woman had wrestled with Draco. Or the way he had leaned against her chest, looking so at home there. The woman calling Draco "little fox," and saying things like "That’s my boy."
He started running, trying to get away from the thoughts. But others came in their place.
What have I done? I lied to my father — I lied to my own father — and for what? For who? For a boy who hates me — who gave me a black eye yesterday — and a woman I’ve never even seen before, who invaded my house! Why did I do that?
He turned into the safe room, and the door closed behind him with a satisfying slam.
Theodore sat down with his back to the wall and let his head rest on his knees.
She didn’t want to hurt anything, whispered part of his mind. She came to get him, that was all. She didn’t come to steal or hurt anyone — she just wanted to get him and get out. That’s why you did it. Because she wasn’t going to hurt anything, and because they were happy together.
No, that’s stupid, he tried to argue. Happy or not, she broke the law by breaking in here — and she’s obviously powerful —
He latched onto that idea. That’s it. That’s why I lied. I didn’t want my father to have to face someone that powerful. I didn’t want him to get hurt. If I had told him she was here, he would have gone to fight her, and she might have hurt him. So I lied to him, he doesn’t know she’s here, and she and Draco will probably just leave and...
And what?
He stared at the other wall of the safe room and wondered.
xXxXx
"I look like Ron," said Draco, examining his new face in the mirror Danger had conjured as he walked.
"That was the general idea." Danger had given both of them freckles and red hair, though her own was less flaming than Draco’s. "You’re not quite tall enough to double for him, but anyone who’s never seen him might mistake the two of you."
Draco rolled his eyes. "Ha ha."
"Thank you. How are you, Draco?"
Draco looked at the familiarly strange face that was Danger’s. "A lot better now than I was about ten minutes ago."
"Nice to hear, but uninformative about what I really want to know, and you know that. Spit it out. How have you been?"
Draco looked down at the road for a few strides, then back at Danger. "Lonely," he said quietly. "And very scared. And I couldn’t ever let it show. Because Pearl needed me to be strong for her. And then when we got split up, and I got sent there," he jerked his thumb back towards the Notts’, "I was even more scared." He grinned suddenly. "Until Theodore insulted Padfoot. Then I was just mad."
Danger sighed in a long-suffering kind of way. "What did you do?"
"Blacked his eye."
"Good boy."
"He gave me a bloody nose, but it didn’t last long, and I rinsed it right out."
"What, your nose?"
"No, my shirt."
"Oh, good."
They were both chuckling now. Danger reached over and affectionately knuckle-rubbed Draco’s head. "I’ve missed you a lot, little fox," she said softly. "I think I may have missed you the most. You always seem to know what to say to make me laugh."
"I wished you were there a lot," admitted Draco. "At night the most, I think. Especially on full moons. My necklace and Pearl’s would sometimes get hot then." He frowned. "Actually, they got hot other times too. And some of the pictures on them glowed. Why do they do that?"
"When someone’s upset. Did you feel it heat up a few minutes before I came in to get you?"
"Yes, and the picture of the cat was glowing. Does that mean something?"
"Hermione. I assume because Moony always calls her Kitten. Oh, and just so you know — she’s all right again. She has her memories back. Moony has her right now, and they’re getting ready to leave London."
One of the weights dragging on Draco’s heart seemed to lift. "How’s everyone else?"
"Just fine — or getting that way rapidly. Padfoot, for instance, is a lot better this morning than he was last night." Danger wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.
"Yeah — Theodore seemed to think it might be him in the house — but I thought he was still in jail..." Draco trailed off. "What did you do?" he asked, mimicking the tone Danger had used on him a minute before.
"That’s a big assumption, fox — assuming it was me..."
Draco shook his head. "Not an assumption. You’re smiling like you do when you just pranked Moony."
Danger laughed. "All right, you caught me. I did indeed break that ungrateful mutt out of jail — though I shouldn’t call him ungrateful, since he went down on bended knee to me this morning and told me he was at my command."
"What did you do?"
"Hit him on the head with my spoon and told him to get up."
Draco smiled, very well able to imagine this. "Letha?" he asked next.
"She’s just fine — she was disappointed, of course, that she wasn’t able to see you and Meghan a couple of nights ago. So were Moony and I — you two would have had a nice surprise if the casewizards hadn’t shown up, we were with her that night."
Draco’s hands briefly balled into fists. "Why did they do that, anyway?" he asked angrily. "Why did they do all of this? Why do we have to sneak around in disguise and run away and hide? It’s not fair."
"You, of all people, should know life isn’t fair, dearest." Danger laid a hand gently on his shoulder. "If life were fair, Harry’s parents would never have died, neither would mine, and you would have been born to Moony and me instead of Lucius and Narcissa."
Draco gave a small laugh. "I would have liked that," he said quietly.
"So would I." Danger stroked his cheek. "But you have the next best thing. You’re our cub, no question about it, and don’t you forget it."
"I won’t," promised Draco. "As long as no one makes me."
Danger winced. "Yes. As long as no one makes you."
They walked in silence for a few moments. Then Draco realized he hadn’t yet asked about one person. "How’s Harry?"
"What do you know already?"
"I know they tried to make him think he’d been living with his relatives all along. Did they send him back there?"
Danger nodded sadly. "Back where he started from. And just to make things weirder, they’re living in my old house, the one I lived in when I met Moony."
Draco made a face.
"Agreed." Danger sighed. "But Harry will be all right — and I do really mean that." She smiled mischievously. "His school’s recently hired a new counselor. A very nice woman, really she is — except that she has plans to kidnap one of the students..."
Draco returned her smile. "Letha?"
"No one else." Danger turned off the road into a clump of trees, and Draco followed her. "We’re going to need to Apparate a ways from here. Hold on to me tight now, and don’t forget to take a deep breath."
Draco grimaced, but grasped Danger’s forearm tightly, realizing with a little shiver that he was not all that much smaller than she was anymore. And the bigger the other person was in Side-Along-Apparating, the slower the transit tended to be...
Just as long as we don’t get splinched.
The familiar feeling of being squeezed through a rubber tube, but it seemed to take forever — his lungs were screaming, his throat burned —
And then they were there, and Draco gasped in air gratefully. Danger, too, looked a bit blue, and staggered a little as her feet touched the ground, but Draco steadied her until she caught her breath. "Everything still attached?" she asked.
Draco checked himself over, then nodded.
"Good. Let’s get moving, then — we’re closer to town, but not there yet, and our train leaves in twenty minutes."
They set out.
xXxXx
A man and a girl rode the London Underground together, sitting very close together. Whenever they got up to change trains, or whenever someone new got onto their car, the girl clung to the man as if she were terrified. He, for his part, held her close and stroked her dark and flyaway hair, comforting her.
They departed the Underground at one of London’s major train stations. Their first stop there, of course, was the ticket window, where the man purchased tickets for a certain town, first consulting a piece of paper in a woman’s elegant handwriting. Next, they stopped at a souvenir store, where the man bought a small bag for the girl to carry, into which they put their other purchases — two toothbrushes, two pairs of socks, and two children’s T-shirts. The girl kissed the stuffed toy that the man took out of his pocket and gave to her, then added it to the load in the bag, and the two of them left the store and went to find someplace to eat.
They were in physical contact at all times, hand in hand, his hand on her shoulder, her hand around his arm. It was as if the two were glued together — which, truth to tell, neither would have minded at this point.
Perhaps we’re being paranoid, Remus thought, managing his hamburger with only one hand because the other arm was around Hermione’s shoulders. But better paranoid than separated again. He repressed a shudder.
After they were finished eating, they went to wait for their train.
"Tell me a story, Daddy?" murmured Hermione, lying down on the bench with her head in his lap.
"What kind of story do you want, Kitten?"
"Tell the one about the wolf who made a Pack for himself."
Remus smiled. "All right. Once upon a time, there was a wolf — Won-tolla, they called him, an Outlier, a wolf who answered to no Pack. But he answered to no Pack not because he was proud and wild, but because his Pack was scattered and gone — his Packmates slain or taken by hunters, and the one cub of their Pack, the boy-cub of the alpha male and female, missing. He mourned them day and night with howls and wild cries, but not all his howls could make them come back.
"But his howls did bring a female wolf to him, and by some chance it was she who had taken his dead alpha’s cub and cared for him as her own — although she was no mother wolf, but only the older Pack-sister of another cub, this one female. Their Pack, too, had been slain by hunters, and the sisters were trying to live by themselves.
"The wolf returned to the female’s den and saw there the two cubs, playing as littermates, and he loved them." Remus stroked Hermione’s hair away from her face. "He had already known he loved the boy-cub, but there in the den he learned to love the girl-cub as well, and he took the older sister as his mate and loved her too.
"Together, they sought out others. They saved the wolf’s Packmate who had been taken by hunters, for the older sister was clever and knew how to open traps, and reunited him with his mate, who had been sorrowing by herself in the forest, much as our Won-tolla had. But he was no longer Won-tolla, the Outlier, for he had a Pack now — and he was the alpha of that Pack, for he had been the one who brought them together.
"The alpha wolf, then, watched over his Pack and loved them. He could not breed himself, though that is the alpha’s right, for he had been ill as a cub and could not beget cubs of his own. So instead, he gave his Packmates permission to bear cubs." Hermione giggled, as she always did at this point of the story, and Remus tapped her neck admonishingly as he always did. "The result was a little girl-cub, healthy and beautiful, and all the Pack loved her as they loved the other cubs.
"And then one day the Pack met another Pack, a Pack with strange ways. The true way of the Pack is to shun the hunters and fight them, but this Pack had allied itself with the hunters, and would have pulled down our Pack and delivered them to the hunters. But the alpha female of that Pack rose up and said it would not be so, and she fought her alpha male and defeated him, and brought him to the hunters instead, for the hunters did not care which wolf it was they hunted, only that it was a wolf.
"That alpha female left a cub behind her, a frightened and lonely boy-cub who had never known the ways of a true Pack, only the twisted ways of his strange and unnatural Pack, and asked our Pack to take him as one of their own, in return for her delivering them from the hunters. They agreed gladly, for not only did this save them, but it also saved the innocent cub, who had done no wrong. They taught him the ways of the Pack and treated him as a littermate to the others, and in time he grew to be no different than they."
Remus looked up as their train came chuffing in. "And so the Pack lived, and thrived, and the cubs grew strong and brave, and even when the hunters came and captured and separated them, the Pack found one another again. For the strength of the Pack is the wolf..."
"And the strength of the wolf is the Pack," recited Hermione drowsily, sitting up. "Is this our train?"
"Yes." Remus covered Hermione’s ears as the brakes squealed on. "We’ll be taking it a short ways, then changing, and with any luck, our beta female and the first boy-cub will be on the one we change to. Will you like seeing them again?"
Hermione nodded eagerly.
"Remember, the boy might not know you," Remus cautioned as they boarded the train. "And I’m afraid I’m not willing to try doing with him what I did with you. I don’t know the exact specifications of that spell, and because of what it is, if I did it wrong, I could make it worse instead of better."
Hermione nodded again. "I understand. I’ll be careful about what I say. I promise."
"Thank you, Kitten. Then, later this evening, we’ll rendezvous with a certain older sister wolf and her boy-cub..."
Older sister wolf indeed.
And how exactly is that derogatory?
If you have to ask, you’ll never understand.
Probably true. Are you aboard?
All aboard and shipshape — as much as that’s possible on a train. Danger gave Remus a glimpse of their car and Draco’s face, looking rather oddly Weasleyish, but unmistakably, at least to the eyes of the alpha, his cub.
Excellent. Let us know where you’ll meet us, and give my love to Draco.
And mine to Hermione, and Harry and Letha when you see them. Danger blew him a mental kiss and closed the connection.
"When are we getting the baby cub?" asked Hermione as the train began to move.
"She’s less urgent at the moment, sweetheart, since she’s with a family we trust." Remus had filled Hermione in on everyone’s whereabouts as they traveled, explaining fully about Harry, not without a pang — but if Hermione didn’t know the truth, she would either figure it out or imagine something worse.
Though I don’t know what could be much worse than that for him.
"But we will get her soon. Probably tomorrow, after we all have a night to rest up from today."
xXxXx
Neville looked up from the potted lavender plants and noticed Meghan bent over a different plant. Its inch-long, straight leaves stuck out on all sides of its tall, rather thick stems, and it didn’t have flowers on it now, but he knew when it did they would be a delicate blue.
She was stroking the leaves and whispering something. Curious, he moved closer.
"Rosemary," Meghan murmured. "That’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember." She closed her eyes. "I remember the Den," she said like a prayer. "I remember Dadfoot and Mama Letha and Moony and Danger. I remember Harry and Draco and Neenie. I won’t forget them, so they won’t forget me. And they will come for me."
Neville turned away, feeling terrible, as if he was intruding on something private.
She wants to go home.
But I kind of hoped she could stay.
I like her.
And now I’m mean, because I want to keep her from doing what she wants to do, just to make me happy...
He felt even worse now.
xXxXx
Sirius lay in front of the fireplace in Gryffindor Tower, reluctantly allowing a bunch of cooing girls (the original two had multiplied to about six) to pet him, rub his belly, and scratch behind his ears. Not that he didn’t appreciate the attention, but he rather wished they’d go away. He was a man — or, at the moment, a dog — on a mission.
Fred and George Weasley were Gryffindors. They were also the current owners of a very useful item. Sirius had come to retrieve that item — it couldn’t really be called stealing, he argued to himself, since he was one of the item’s original owners and manufacturers. But he couldn’t very well go up to the dorms with the girls hanging over him like this.
Fortunately, one of them suddenly recalled that they had class, and all of them frantically scurried for the portrait hole, completely forgetting Sirius.
Perfect.
He got up, stretched, yawned, and started sniffing around, to make sure he wouldn’t be surprised by any stray students. The boys’ staircase smelled clear, with no scents less than about an hour old. Up he went, stopping at each landing to see if he could get a whiff of two scents almost, but not entirely, indistinguishable — twins.
The first and second floors yielded nothing. The third — well, it wasn’t twins, but it was something, Sirius thought, intrigued by one of the scents he was catching. It was familiar, but in a distant way, as if he hadn’t smelled it for a long time. Animal, small well-fed animal, with just the faintest overtone of human...
Sirius froze, the answer crashing in on him.
No. No. This is not possible. This cannot be happening.
But it was.
Very cautiously, he pawed the door open and slipped inside.
It looked like any other room inhabited by five or six fourteen-year-old boys — messy. Except for one part of it. One bed was scrupulously made, one wardrobe filled with neatly folded clothes, one nightstand shining clean. And on that nightstand sat a cage. And in that cage...
Good. He’s asleep.
Sirius needed only the briefest of looks to confirm what his nose had already told him. Quickly, he turned and left the room.
I need someone with a wand. Someone who trusts me. And someone I can get to easily.
He snorted, the dog’s way of chuckling. Narrows it down quite a bit, doesn’t it?
Only one person in the castle right now who fits that description...
xXxXx
Minerva McGonagall was sitting at her desk grading papers when she heard a scratch on her door.
"Come in!" she called.
The handle turned, and in came not a student, but an enormous, bear-like black dog.
"And just what are you doing here?" demanded Minerva, not quite as displeased or surprised as she sounded — she had suspected something was up. Albus had been looking altogether too pleased with himself when he had left to "assist" the Ministry in their second frantic search for an escaped Sirius Black. He’s been so discouraged by not being able to help them — but Vilias has been watching him like a griffin, I think he may suspect where Albus’ true sympathies lie...
The dog pushed the door closed with its back paw and changed forms. "Are you aware you have a murderer living in Gryffindor Tower?" asked Sirius Black without preamble.
Minerva gaped at him. "What?"
"Peter Pettigrew. A fourth year boy has him as a pet. A very neat fourth year boy."
"Percy Weasley," said Minerva without having to think about it. "You’re certain?"
"I’d bet my life on it. Or Harry’s." Sirius growled slightly. "But since I don’t have my wand at the moment, there’s not too much I can do about it. Except inform the appropriate authority. Which I have now done."
"Indeed you have." The shock had worn off, and Minerva was now furious. How dare he live under the protection of this school’s roof — in my Tower, no less? This will not be tolerated! "I shall return," she said grimly, standing up. "Unless you’d care to come with me?"
Sirius looked tempted, but shook his head. "If he wakes up and sees me, or smells me, he’ll know something’s up and try to run. I was lucky he didn’t wake up when I was there the first time. I don’t want to take chances."
And that is something I never thought I would hear you say, young man. Marriage and fatherhood have been very good for you. "Very well. I will be back soon."
Almost purring to herself with the thrill of the hunt, Minerva left her office, closing the door behind her.