Celestial Being

There was a difference between reading about historic events and experiencing them. For example, Draco studied many famous battles as a child. All the best tutors ensured he memorized the key generals, battle strategy, and logistical support. Knights taught Draco swordplay and hand to hand combat. Then, between one day and the next, invaders reached the castle. It wasn’t that it was bloodier than Draco expected, just that Draco was surprised by the exact shade blood took on when it was splashed upon his home’s walls. He had been surprised by how warm it was, when it flowed out of his own body. He had been surprised by how he had spent so many days during the war imagining the pain of being wounded in combat, but the imagination fell far short of the agony of being cut open.

Watching the entire household fall victim to a plague he’d been tutored on as a child was very much like that.

The household was lucky, in the sense that the Tonks’ were not an ancient and noble house and therefore most of the staff were young. They came from the north with Andromeda after the war, taking a chance on a new life of comparative prosperity, especially if you were a young family looking to set up somewhere that your children and grandchildren could stay on at if they were so inclined to do the good, honest work that the Tonks’ would offer.

Which is how Draco found himself the caretaker of four young, very sick children. Teddy wasn’t the youngest of them. That was a babe, not even a year old, who stayed close to her mother, who was sick as well. Draco tended each of them, and the four other women in the next room, with the same gravity he brought to his studies on warcraft. Angie, bless her, was sick but not severely, and no matter Draco’s chiding she would not stay in bed. She watched over the women so Draco could focus on the children, distracting them with Teddy’s colorful books or large collection of stuffed animals. Together they made sure the families could spend what energy they did have together.

When the fevers started to spike, they worked together to apply damp wash clothes and coaxed individual patients to keep sipping water.

When a fever wouldn’t go down, or the patient became incoherent, they’d stop each other from panicking. Or, in the case of a child, panic together but keep it inside where only an adult could find it, if they looked another adult in the eye.

Draco found himself drawing bath after bath. He filled tubs with lukewarm water and Angie would help him move patients into the water to rest and hopefully lower their temperature. They tried to preserve modesty, but honestly at that point the women didn’t care.

Draco sang nursery rhymes until his throat hurt, anything to calm the children. He was singing when he heard Angie’s sobs.

To the end of his days, Draco would regret that Angie was the one to discover when her mother was dead. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you could talk yourself out of blaming yourself for, even if all the reason in the world said it wasn’t your fault. In some universe there must be some Draco that could have talked Angie into doing less and letting Draco carry the weight for her. In that universe, Draco would have found Fannie unresponsive in her bed, and he probably would have known just the right thing to say to console her daughter.

This Draco was rubber tongued and sleep deprived. He had no words. He just pulled Angie away from her mother’s body, all the way out of the room and in the hall. Then he held her there as she cried, squeezing tight at the slightest hint that she might pull away, until she finally gave in and collapsed on him. He held her until she ran out of sobs, then he took her to a different, dust covered room, long abandoned from disuse. But there were covers on the bed and Draco tucked her into it. Then he went to find his mother.

Of course Narcissa had a plan for bodies. She explained it so matter-of-factly that Draco worried she was unwell.

It wasn’t like him to inquire, but he thought he should. “How are you, mother?” he asked.

Narcissa smiled at him and patted his hand, exactly the same as always. “I’m fine, thank you dear,” she said, in exactly the same tone as always. Yet her fidgeting gave her away.

“How is Aunt Andromeda?” Draco tried a different tact.

Narcissa’s lips creased then. “Not well, I’m afraid.” She stared at the long-dead flowers on the side table between them.

“I’m sorry,” Draco said, mustering up some actual sympathy when all he felt was tired. He closed his eyes and leaned back to rest his head. Without looking at her overly-controlled face he found he could be more sincere. “I’m so sorry.”

Silence sounds ominous when you know bad things are coming.

“Draco…” his mother began before trailing off.

“Hmm?” Draco prompted her to continue.

“What if there was a way to help them?”

Draco opened his eyes slowly but otherwise stayed perfectly still when he looked at his mother. There was no emotion on her face. “If there is, now would be the time.”

His mother looked at him now, with one of those adult stares that said more than it should. Draco worried they were starting to make more sense. “King Voldermort knew a cure,” she whispered.

Draco was sitting straight up as soon as she said the dead king’s name. His eyes flickered to each entrance to the room, confirming it was impossible anyone else heard. Then he looked back at his mother. “How can that be?”

His mother’s fidgeting was picking at the skin around her nails, so hard it would leave marks. She looked from the flowers to Draco’s face, then back to the flowers. Draco watched his mother gulp. “He practiced alchemy,” she said. “Dark alchemy.”

Draco gasped. Where alchemists believed you could transform one form to another, dark alchemists sought to make living what was dead. “You can’t mean, you wouldn’t…”

His mother looked helpless. Her words were hardly coherent, “I didn’t, not until… when the baby died…” she stared at Draco with saucer round eyes. “You were sick and he said he could cure you,” she said fervently, “and it worked!”

“How?” Draco demanded, but then almost immediately he amended, “What does it matter, he’s dead and can’t help us.”

Whatever dam had been inside Narcissa had broke and now she spilled out everything she had held in. “When I was little, Great Uncle Acturus was an alchemist. He is the one who taught Xeno, and at the same time he taught me.”

“You? An alchemist?” Draco couldn’t imagine it.

Narcissa blushed but carried on. “When I was little. I stopped, of course, when I was out in society, and when I married your father. However, Lord Voldermort, as he was then, knew at once I recognized the craft.”

“He taught you the cure!” Draco realized. Then another realization, “is that why you helped him?”

“He taught us the cure, and that was one of many ways he proved himself an ally to our family.” Narcissa squeezed Draco’s hands again. “He saved your life, Draco, and I will always be thankful to him for that.”

Draco couldn’t spend time on those sorts of thoughts and not lose himself to it. He focused on what mattered, “If you can make it, why don’t you?”

Narcissa pulled away, steeling herself with a deep breath. “It’s made from a poisonous flower, and with the wrong dosage it is deadly.” This is what she had been afraid to share. The hope of a cure, with the risk of killing the patients in the process.

“Mother, if you’re looking for me to advise you to be cautious then we’re truly out of our depth here,” was all Draco could say. “You must make it at once.”

Henbane, foxglove, nightshade, at some point Narcissa had apparently planted an entire garden of poisons hidden amongst the flowers she spent so much time on. Draco had taken one look at his mother’s empty eyes when she told him and decided now was not the time to ask why. He was terribly afraid she might tell him, and he wouldn’t be able to handle it.

In any case, she did start on the cure at once.

The next twenty-four hours were among the longest of Draco’s life, and he had counted down the seconds of the sunrise that killed his father. Between checking on patients and cheering up babies, Draco hung his head between his knees and struggled to breath.

Teddy was coughing. Then, worse, Teddy was silent. Draco hovered in fear watching his chest rise and fall to make sure he was still breathing.

Angie was back and tried to send Draco to rest but Draco shrugged her off and sat between the children to guard them through the night until medicine would come.

It came in a vial, perilously small.

“Give Teddy only one drop every twelve hours,” Narcissa commanded.

“What about the others?” Draco asked.

Narcissa’s stern expression allowed no argument. “There is not enough for the others.”

Draco could have argued, but his mother’s lips were thin and the skin was tight around the corners of her eyes. She’d worked herself to exhaustion, just as Draco had.

So Draco took the vial and left. Then he lingered in the kitchen, staring at the vial, shaking it a little and watching the milky white liquid shift in its casing. It would have to be enough. He hesitated before choosing three bottles to fill halfway with warm water, then added a drop of the medicine to each one. Then he made a large pot of tea and warmed up some broth, and took it all upstairs together. He sat with each of the smallest children, gently encouraging them to drink their water as he had every day they’d been sick, carefully monitoring that they drank every drop.

For the next three days Draco couldn’t remember sleeping. It was light, then it was dark, and maybe sometimes he opened his eyes and found he was laying on the floor. Then he’d push himself back up and keep working.

Until this morning, when Draco trudged down the stairs on his own. He kept walking forward once he’d reached the bottom, until he was up against a wall to bang his head against. In one hand he held an empty vial, in the other was one of Teddy’s older teddy bears that Draco had given to the oldest of the children. Martha, who he thought was big enough that he needn't risk spreading the medicine too thin. Draco thunked his head against the wall again, regretting every choice he had ever made that had brought him to this point in his life.

There was a louder thunking noise nearby. Draco tilted his head towards the manor door. The thunking came again.

Draco stumbled to the entryway. He fumbled with the locks, his hands uncoordinated due to lack of sleep and his stubborn refusal to drop what he carried. Finally, he pulled the deadbolts aside and heaved the door open.

There, in the morning sun, was an equally frantic and frazzled man.

“Oh, it’s just you,” Draco said, turning his back on the king so he could return to the wall and collapse against it. The king let himself into the manor as Draco slowly slid along the wall to the floor.

Of course, the king was glowering at Draco. All the king ever did was glower. “What are you doing, sitting on the floor?” he asked, all accusation.

Draco looked at the ceiling instead of at the man he loathed. “I think I’ll take a rest now,” Draco said.

“There’s no time for resting! You must tell me at once where Andromeda is, I’ve brought a cure!” Sure enough, the king was pulling forward a satchel, and from it a much larger vial than Draco had been given with a liquid just as milky white.

Something in Draco broke and like a madman he began to laugh. Hysterical laughter that shocked the king into stepping back. Once he started, though, Draco couldn’t stop. He laughed until he was choking on the air. He hid his despondent face behind the stuffed bear that for a week belonged to the girl the king came too late to save.