The Storm, or

When December Blights Thy Brow

Chapter 28

"Who the basilisk's fangs are you?" Draco snarled. Dita thought perhaps he didn't precisely mean to snarl, but his voice was all hoarse and caught up in his throat.

"My name is Perdita Bonhomme. I'm here to find you, and I have found you."

"Find me? Don't you know I came out here so I wouldn't be found?"

"There are people who want you to be found. You know perfectly well that you don't exist alone."

"I want to! I'm not going home!"

"I'm not here to make you go home. I'm here to help you."

"Help? I don't need or want help." He really was snarling now.

"And that's why you've spent the last twenty-four hours delirious and screaming, because you don't need any help."

Draco clenched his teeth, having nothing to say to that. Then—"Twenty-four hours?"

"Give or take an hour. You're sick, and it's more in your mind than in your body."

"Then fix me and go away!"

"Can't go away. Trying to fix you," she said laconically. "The unfashionable way. Magic isn't going to do it, and I don't think you'd want it to if it could. Why else have you been wandering around all the Muggle areas of Europe, if not to run away from magic? But magic didn't cause your problems. Evil did, and evil exists everywhere."

"What have you been doing, stalking me?" He looked rather pathetic, lying shivering in his sleeping back and trying to give her the glare that had withered the hearts of many a younger student. Dita was impervious to glares.

"Yes, and even worse than that. I've been in your mind."

"No! Unless you're the greatest Legilimens who ever lived, you haven't!"

"I am not. You've been well-trained in Occlumency, haven't you?" (Lucia had explained it to her in a letter recently, making one section of his diary more clear.) "Your aunt was not kind to you in your training, but she was effective. You managed to hide a great deal from Voldemort."

He flinched at the name. "What are you?" he rasped at her. "How can you know these things?"

"You would be surprised to know what I really am. For now…call me your un-fairy godmother. You're stuck with me for however long this blizzard lasts. It's kind of a godsend, this blizzard. Now, Draco, stop arguing and let yourself sleep for once."

He flinched again as she touched his forehead, and then, against his own will, his eyes went shut under her gentle, stroking hand. She passed it over his pale hair, thinking how often she had done exactly the same thing for Lucia when she was sick, how exactly alike their hair was, how in this sudden peaceful repose Draco's hard, wild face became so much like his sister's in her repose. If Dita had any magic of her own about her, it was in her ability to soothe with a touch and to reconcile with an expression of her blue eyes. When Draco woke up, he would have already have accepted her presence without further struggle.

Further struggle ensued, but it was not with Dita's presence but with her steady attempts to prise her patient open and let his many layers of trauma, training, cowardice, and courage come to the light. The storm raged outside, but inside the storm was even stormier. Sometimes Dita imagined she heard shrieking voices on the wind; other times Draco's nightmares drowned out the storm.

"You've been trying to repress all this for six months," she said on the fourth day, when he had finished swearing at her in more languages than she knew a boy of eighteen was capable of. "Some things won't be repressed. You spent two years under the control of a person of pure evil. You spent most of one year in his day-by-day company, a prisoner in your own house, watching your parents being continually degraded, yourself being used like a tool for the torture of others. You never thought you had a conscience until then, did you? In a situation like that, I suppose a conscience would be as much a part of the torment as anything else. You, Draco Malfoy, scion of a great house, Pure-Blood, ruler of others—you hate yourself more than you ever hated Harry Potter."

He never swore at her again after that. He was too frightened of her. Probably no one had ever known him before.

On the fifth day, Dita nearly screamed in terror when a head popped out of the blue fire she made Draco keep going (without telling him she couldn't do it herself). She was exhausted and slightly on edge.

"You, Lady, are you still alive?"

She realized it was her translator, looking out of the fire with a flaming blue face. Unsure of whether Draco knew German or not, she swallowed her many questions. "Yes, entirely alive."

"We are told that owls come this way and are turned back by the storm. English owls."

"Oh, no. I expect that's my daughter. Can you get an owl sent to the Hogwarts School in England to Perdita Bonhomme's daughter to say I've found the person I came to find and we're both well?"

"I can get word to the Owlery in Oradea."

"Thank you. I'm very grateful."

The head disappeared, and she pressed her hand to her heart to try to still its thumping.

"You have a kid at Hogwarts?"

She turned to look at Draco, who was sitting back with his arms crossed, his hair tumbling forward about his face and shoulders. It was the first time he'd shown any interest in her life. "Yes, my daughter."

"What House?"

"Slytherin."

He was surprised at that.

"What did you expect, Gryffindor?"

"Hufflepuff."

She realized that had been something in the way of a joke and laughed. "No, sorry to disappoint."

"I never heard of a Bonhomme girl in Slytherin."

"Well, you wouldn't. It's her first year."

"Lucky her."

"Something more than luck, I think."

"What's she like?"

She stared at him in surprise, then realized he was probably sick of thinking and talking about himself.

"She's very powerful. Much more so than she knows. But then, I suppose any child of her father's would have to be. But she's not like him in much else. She's bright and inquisitive and sensitive, too intelligent for her own good, maybe, quite tender-hearted, fascinated by everything. She made her own wand once, out of holly. She might become a wand-maker. Or a history teacher. Or anything in the wide world she wants."

"She doesn't sound much like a Slytherin."

"That's only because you don't know what Slytherins are capable of."

"Does she have a name?"

She glanced at him. "Lucia. I named her after her father."

"What—Lucius?" He gave a hard laugh. "That's my father's name."

"So I've been told. I met him once, you know, nearly seventeen years ago now. He was not terribly much older than you then. You look exceedingly like him." He really did, she thought with a wrench inside. Very much, in his current state, as that shell-shocked, terrified, still-arrogant Lucius Malfoy had looked as a young man not yet thirty.

"Did he send you to find me?"

"Oh, no. He would never ask for my help. Anyway, I've never seen him since then. It turns out I've done well to keep well away from him."

"That's what I intend to do," Draco muttered.

"You can't. He's your father. He loves you."

"He doesn't. He doesn't love anyone but himself."

"Do you even realize what he did for you?"

"What are you talking about? What did he ever do other than to enslave me to—" He looked terrified of saying the name but finally did so defiantly. "—to Voldemort?"

"He abandoned Voldemort to save you. He abandoned what he considered the greatest power in the world to search for you and keep you from harm. He had no idea that Voldemort would lose the battle and be destroyed. He only cared to find you."

Draco was silent.

"Your father is a selfish man, Draco, and you've learned to despise that in him. But so are you. He is a hard man, and a weak one. And so are you. You hate that. He's a cruel man who abuses the power given to him by his family position and his magical talent, and you have learned how terrible a thing those traits are. But you've done exactly the same. There's little in your father that he hasn't passed on to you. But you are beginning to hope for a change, and if you can change, he can too."

There was no sound from Draco. She looked at him and found him sitting with his eyes closed. He pretended to be asleep for a long time. She took the opportunity to get some real sleep.

Some time later Dita was awakened by a sound that cave had not yet heard. It had heard plenty of screaming, plenty of cursing, plenty of arguing, and a very small amount of quiet conversation, but it had never yet heard Draco sobbing with his head down on his arms.

Dita got up and sat deliberately next to him, drew his head down to her shoulder, and held him as if he were her own Lucia, distraught over some childish bullying or her own inability to make a minor charm work. Lucia's distresses had been small things compared to Draco's, but he held her mother tight around the waist and cried exactly like she used to.

It was all quiet later. The long storm had finally abated, but the magically-protected entrance was packed with snow. I suppose we can always Apparate out, Dita thought, but she didn't mention it to Draco. Who knew how long he intended to stay here.

Suddenly Draco started to his feet. "They're coming!" he cried.

"Who?" She strained to hear what he had heard.

"The vampires. They've been playing with me for weeks. They knew I wanted to get bitten, so they refused and only taunted me. Now that I—I don't want to anymore, they've come. They'll like you," he said sharply.

Now she could hear the voices on the wind where there was no wind. She realized she had never really believed they actually did exist. "What do we do?" she cried, and she could see he was as terrified as she was.

"I don't know!" he shouted at her.