Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond looks across the table at Addie McConnell, who is reading the menu with downcast eyes, scanning the selections and frowning. She looks up finally, and says, inconsequentially, that she quite likes this place.

It's neither one nor the other, not London or Paris or yet Disneyland, betwixt and between, a shadow gate to somewhere else, though mostly it's the world on the other side of the patrons' opened novels. There's a pub in London, not far from King's Cross…

Mary knows about that pub, because Jackie mentioned it in passing once, but she lets Addie continue.

It's the gate to the other world, the one that Addie inhabits, the one into which she was born. That world intersects with her own, the daylight world, in curious places and various ways. There's an omnibus that traverses the towns of Great Britain in alphabetical order, there's a train that runs from London to a place in the Scottish mountains that's not really a place, there's an invisible railway station, and a magical platform at King's Cross…

Mary says, at length, the thing that a sensible person would say: "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because it's not approved, you know."

Mary isn't sure what she means.

"What we're doing."

"Is it a matter of two women? Jackie's Aunt Amelia didn't have a problem with that."

"Well, Jackie was a Squib, so there wasn't a question of the Line, really. It's that I'm a witch…"

"… and I'm one of the others." She doesn't like the sound of that word: muggle. It has overtones of stupidity, and stubborn attachment to ignorance, and thuggishness. Brutally she adds, "And you're Jackie's bodyguard. Or were. And now you're one of the patients at my clinic."

Addie nods, barely flinching. "They told me there was nothing I could have done. It was Lestrange, after all." She says, "It's not approved, usually, but Kingsley told me that he thought quite highly of you. Hermione Granger said the same."

"The Sergeant."

Addie's face is blank with incomprehension for a moment, and then she begins to laugh. "Oh, that's funny. She is, isn't she?" She asks, almost flirtatiously, "So what nicknames do you have for the rest of us?"

She tells the names, the ones she's told before and the others: the Black Widow, the Rock Star (which requires a lengthy aside on the history of rock-n-roll in the British Isles and America), the Sergeant of course, the Widow's son… She tells the fantastical thought she had, seeing those two names in the register: Percy Weasley and Narcissa Malfoy.

Addie bursts out laughing. "Oh, my. That would be a match. I would pay to watch that courtship."

The Army of Lovers.

At that, Addie's face falls, and she looks as if she's going to cry. She's remembering her friend, Mary knows, the friend who possibly was more than a friend…

… and Jackie's Aunt Amelia, who was one of her heroes: Amelia with her monocle and her redingote and her boots, old-fashioned cavalry boots…

No. Not cavalry boots, but a very specific sort of boot you wore when flying. No, not as in aviatrix but as in witch, witch riding a broomstick.

"An army of lovers cannot fail," Mary repeats, very softly, but Addie hears her nonetheless, and reaches across the table to take her hand.

"That's what the old man said, they told me," she says. "'The power he knows not.'"

Mary doesn't need to be told who he was: the ferocious generalissimo of the opposing forces, the dictator-mage who mobilized the secret army that branded the skull-and-snake tattoo like a burn mark on the skinny arm of the Widow's son; who mobilized the Widow's husband, the torturer with the face of ice; who called forth the windstorms not seen in a hundred years, who sank the British Isles in a cold torpor of depression and fear that even they… the muggles … could feel.

The witches and wizards have been at war, contesting the ground across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with extraordinary forces…

… no different from us, she thought, who can summon the forces of the atom, crack open the grey-metal skin of a warhead to hatch an earthbound sun over an enemy city.

"And yet we're only human," she says, stubbornly. The details in those files are no different, at heart, than those of the ordinary patients: the nightmares, the unexplained fury and tears, the lack of concentration. Across the border, there's a whole generation of schoolchildren who cannot concentrate well enough to take their qualifying exams.

A whole hidden world, so well hidden and for so long, that their stock no longer brings forth viable offspring (she remembers the cold fury and grief of black-haired Pansy, the ex-fiancee of the Widow's son).

Addie nods. "I think they're rethinking the rules, just now." She looks down. "There are the ones who leave, you know… I had three sisters I never met. Squibs all, like your Jackie."

"What happened to them?"

"Some families foster them out. Arthur and Molly Weasley had a Squib son, they say, and her second cousin is one too. Adrian Prewett. He's a chartered accountant." She looks down. "And they say that the Malfoys bury theirs in that white rose garden at their Manor." She says, "The McConnells foster theirs out, or that's what they gave me to understand at the Ministry. Kingsley told me that he'd help me find them." She adds, "I hope they're as happy as your Jackie was."

ooo

The last of the late-summer evening is fading over the formal gardens as Draco pours himself a glass of firewhiskey and stands to drink it, feeling like an impersonation of his father. He can't shake that feeling, any time he is standing where his father would stand. His mother is late coming back from her visit to Azkaban, and he knows that it's irrational to worry; after all, she's ringed about with the heaviest security that wizarding Britain can bring to bear.

Even though the Dementors no longer claim the island fortress as their domain, it still is not customary to permit visitors to remain overnight.

His mother is late coming back from Azkaban, with his baby sister.

The air is caressingly warm, but he's chilled to the bone, and the firewhiskey doesn't touch it. He's worried about his baby sister, who (if Pansy and her Healer are right) might well be a Squib.

The burning in his sinuses gives him a reason for the tears welling up in his eyes, as he remembers Madam Granger talking about her shock at Hermione's early wild magic. She casually assumed that he'd have that challenge as well… because Hypatia would be a formidable witch.

She might not, after all.

His mother has gone to visit his father. She is permitted this, as he is not, because she does not bear the Mark. Pansy spoke truly; he'd bragged on it, lying sprawled like a pasha, his head in her lap and her cool, soothing fingers stroking his hair.

He knows it's useless to claw at his left forearm, much as his fingers itch to do that.

ooo

It's two glasses of firewhiskey later that he finally feels warm, and there's the reassuring crack of Apparition as his mother appears just below the terrace, accompanied by the usual two Aurors. She smiles and bows to them as if they were two beaux who had been paying her attentions at a ball, and not the bodyguards appointed by the Ministry because absolutely everyone hates the Malfoy family: if it's not the ones like McConnell who lost relatives to his father's Death Eater career, then it's the families of his father's colleagues who, like Pansy, have lost more than he has and blame their erstwhile leader for the defeat of Voldemort.

She glides up the steps of the terrace with her soundless tread, Hypatia nestled against her breast, sound asleep. A baby who can sleep through Apparition when she's tired enough—that's his baby sister. A real witch, no matter what his malicious ex-girlfriend might hint.

She smiles at him. "Draco, dear, I didn't expect you to wait up for me."

He leans in and gives her a ceremonial kiss on the cheek, and she wrinkles her nose. "You've been drinking."

"Only a glass or two," he says, "and I'll remind you I've been of age for two years."

Nonetheless, she lets him take Hypatia into his arms, and smiles as he kisses the baby through the corona of pale fine hair that obscures her scalp. She says, "Your father is in good spirits, considering." She shakes her long hair back, as if shedding a ghostly veil. "He's pleased at your sister's progress."

He says, "I saw Pansy Parkinson today."

She turns, drawing her cloak about her. "Oh."

"She says that she sent letters, at the time of the trials."

He'd forgotten, of course, that his mother can turn to white marble like this, which is to say the cool, pale, immovable pillar against which one can throw all one's forces without effect. Or perhaps he remembered, and that's why he's had two glasses of firewhiskey, no, three. The first was only prologue.

"She bore a child, she says. A child that ought to have been a Malfoy child."

Narcissa says, "I spoke with the Healer about that."

"Which one? The one at St. Mungo's who delivered the baby?"

"No. Dr. Burgess gave me … a referral." She looks at him now for the first time, and in the faint light from the house, her eyes are bright and cold as the stars just showing in the young evening. "I know about what happened to that baby. She wrote about that, too."

"You never let me have the letters."

"It wouldn't do, not during the trials, and it certainly won't do now." She adds, "Never mind what your father would have thought on the matter; things have changed. We don't have much time. Scarcely less than a generation."

She seats herself, majestically, in one of the chairs on the terrace. "I don't think it prudent to attempt any longer to perpetuate the Malfoys as a Pureblood line." Her face is all marble serenity, but her fingers are twining around each other in her lap, a restive Black mannerism (though when Bellatrix would do that, it was only a momentary twitch before she'd reach for her wand). "Your Aunt Andromeda had words with me on the question, as well. She said it was long since time to tell you."

He cradles Hypatia against his chest and wraps his cloak around them both, to shield her from the evening chill, though really, there's no shelter from the ice-water creeping through his veins. Absent any Dementors whatsoever, his heart feels as if it's frozen in his chest, and he's breathing the atmosphere of some other planet, some poisonous miasma that freezes his lungs.

He says, "Pansy said she wouldn't have me if I were the last wizard on earth."

As if she had not heard him, she continues, "You asked me once when you were five, if you could have a little brother or sister." She says, "I believe it was after the Greengrass girls were here… and you were enchanted with little Astoria."

"I have a sister now," he says, feeling the irony of it. In place of the baby Pansy bore for him, the child he unknowingly abandoned, he has his little sister, who may be a Squib.

"There were five others before you." Utterly still, now, except for the long fingers wrapping around each other, like pale spiders or the hands of the restless dead. She sits a little straighter, raises her head, with that pale lovely hair falling down her back. "Three Squibs, one stillborn, and one who lived four hours and had seven fingers on each hand."

She adds, with a smile that's bitter and sardonic as a death's-head, "If it weren't completely out of the question socially, I'd open negotiations with Miss Granger's parents."

He frowns. "She's all but betrothed to Longbottom. There's no question of a marriage contract, and her parents would tell you that you were living in the Middle Ages. And she's Muggle-born."

"That's the point, Draco. None of the Muggle-borns would have us, not to mention the Half-bloods…" She adds, "Andromeda's late husband's brother has a daughter of marriageable age. Perhaps we should introduce you. It's the nearest we have to a family connection."

Draco frowns, mentally traversing the family tree. "Ted Tonks. Muggle-born. But he didn't have a brother."

"Not a brother who was a wizard."

ooo

Author's note: For the history of the Weasleys' Squib child, see 'The red haired boy' by Arielmoonstar, on my Favorites.