Daddy's Favorite

My hands never shake. Never, ever, not ever. It's one of the things I take great pride in. I, Mundungus Fletcher, have hands that DO NOT shake. They did not shake when I was a first year in Gryffindor Tower; painting flobberworms to look like poisonous snakes to then slip into Slytherins' bookbags. They did not shake when I was called on the carpet in front of McGonagall or the Headmaster on a near weekly basis. They did not shake on any of the times, too many to count, when I was called before Magical Law Enforcement to give them an accounting of some alleged scheme. They have never shaken on the two occasions I have been questioned by Aurors for involvement with Dark Magic.

I have to admit it was particularly hard to remain steady on those last two episodes. Not out of fear, but out of rage. I am many things, but I have never had dealings with dark magic, and I never will. After all, those dark Shite eaters killed my sister, Zea, the only one of my family who loved me. And they killed her husband, Andrew, the only man other than Albus to ever give a damn about me.

Albus. He is the other one who almost made my hands shake. He's a piece of work, he is. Oh he seems like a right duffer, all twinkly and distant and addled, but get him riled up and he turns into a walking lightning bolt. Make that Jupiter, ready to throw his lightning bolt at anybody who doesn't jump fast and happy to obey!

Jupiter, now there's a reference most people would be surprised to hear old Dung Fletcher come up with. I take a sip of my firewhiskey and settle down, staring at the table in the corner of the Three Broomsticks. Madam Rosmerta, bless her soul, sensed something was wrong the minute I came through the door and plopped the bottled down in front of me.

Yeah, old Dung has depth's most people would be surprised at. Quite the compost heap, he is!

I laugh without any mirth and take another drink.

They might have kissed the boy.

Where in world did that come from? I pour myself a double and slam it back. A lot of things might happen. What's important is what does happen. The boy's fine. Well, I'm sure he's a little shaken up. I'm sorry about that. I really, really am. I'm sorry. Why does everybody have to make such a fuss?

Jupiter, I think, trying to cut off that unpleasant line of thought. A reference surprising for me. Of course, most people who know me didn't know my father. He worked for the Ministry, in the same office as Arthur Weasley, in fact. He had a great advantage though, being muggle born himself. His father had been a professor of Latin and Greek at... some school or the other. In any case, Dad always had contempt for the way wizards approached Latin - as a way of casting spells instead of a language of literature and philosophy and religion and law. "Like using a fine wine to water the garden," he'd say, sniffing through that big nose of his. He insisted we, my sisters and I, learn Latin and Greek the right way. By the time we were six he was reading to us at night from Ovid and Vergil, spiced with Thucydides and Xenophon with the occasional dive into Seneca and Aristophanes when he felt puckish.

It wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds. In fact I remember being astonished during my first year at Hogwarts when I answered an off-the-cuff remark from the Headmaster with a line from Sophocles (in Greek), only for the rest of the Gryffindor table to stare blankly while Albus roared with laughter. When I related that to my father during Christmas break he astonished me even more by observing that in my grandfather's day any well-educated muggle would have joined the headmaster in laughter while the wizards would still have looked around blankly. "Wizards," he said in another of his stock sayings, "are such a boorish lot!"

It really became something of an in-joke, particularly between Zea and me. We had only to start a particular conjugation, such as the famous "Amo, amas..." and we would burst into laughter at a remembered joke. My other sister, Sativa, never got these references. But then Sativa had the mind of a flobberworm and the personality of a basilisk anyway.

They might have KISSED the boy!

Yes, they might have but they did not!

Doesn't anyone understand that I didn't mean the boy any harm? If I had known dementors were coming I never would have left! I may be a bad citizen, but to deliberately leave a boy to face dementors alone - that is the act of a bad person. The way Molly is going on you would think I had turned tail and run at the first whiff of the dementors! And Albus...

I can't think about that.

Honestly, I meant to be right back! We had watched the boy all summer and nothing had happened! And it really was a sweet deal!

Well, I thought it was a sweet deal, anyway. It turns out the cauldrons are flawed, all of them have dangerously thin castings around the lower seals (they got past customs due to a loophole in the law about the quality of imported cauldrons). A muggle wouldn't even use one of them for a cooking pot! I'll probably have to sell them for scrap at a major loss.

Somebody at the Ministry really should pay attention to details like the thickness of cauldron bottoms. I mean, those things could be dangerous!

Anyway, it's typical of my luck - or lack thereof. Somehow I have a wonderful ability to come up with schemes, and a disastrous record at actually making them into fact. I always talk to the wrong person, show up at the wrong time, buy the wrong lot of "found" cauldrons, whatever.

Even my pranks never came off all that well. Never one to challenge the Marauders, was Dung Fletcher. Nor up to the standard of the Weasley twins, either. Fine boys, those two, I think they'll do just great for themselves. They've got luck. You have to have luck.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Jupiter. There are a lot of legends about Jupiter, you know. Most of them involved women. Horny old bastard, Jupiter was. Chasing after women in the shape of bulls or swans or waterfalls made out of gold. He was a clever rascal, all right. But there was one time he fell in love from afar with someone who wasn't a woman. A beautiful boy named Ganymede. He loved him so much that he swept down in the form of an eagle and carried him off to Olympus. There the boy lived as cupbearer to the King of the Gods. Was he lucky or not, Ganymede, beloved of Jupiter? I don't know.

Interestingly enough, of all Jupiter's loves; Ganymede was the only one that Juno, Queen of the Gods, dared not touch. Was it because she felt no threat from him? Or was it because she knew that the love Jupiter bore his cupbearer was different from all his others - stronger, more powerful, more deadly. Yes, it would have gone ill indeed with anyone, even a goddess, who dared to harm Ganymede.

Whoops, there went a little firewhiskey on the table. The bottle must have a crack around the rim. Yes, that's it. Because my hands don't shake. They DO NOT shake.

Face it Dung, you would have been glad to have a mere lightning bolt hurled at you tonight.

I had steeled myself to see the anger in Albus' eyes. I really had. You have to understand. When you've seen as much anger as I have, it's easy to get used to. I even imagined, rather accurately, what those blue eyes would look like, dark as if clouded by thunderheads. I had also expected the disappointment. Heaven knows I got that from my father and Sativa often enough. After a while I don't think they wore any other expression. Albus' was worse, but disappointment is disappointment, and like I said, I'm used to it.

But I didn't expect what he said. No, I did not expect that at all.

There is more whiskey on the table. That crack in the bottle must really be bad.

As soon as we got the boy bundled back into the house, I waited around while Old Lady Figg cursed me and whacked me over the head with cat food tins. It didn't take long for reinforcements to arrive. None other than Kingsley Shacklebolt, who gave me that "Auror" look. I hate that look. It says "You have done something for which I cannot punish you at the moment but doom is on your trail." I didn't need that look to tell me doom was on my trail.

Anyway, I took a deep breath and apparated to Grimmauld Place. I opened the door, walked into the hall, and immediately found myself introduced to a wall face first. I had the bad luck (of course) to step directly into the path of Sirius Black, who proceeded to bounce me against the paneling several times while screaming several very unflattering observations at the top of his lungs. That harpy picture joined in, of course. I hadn't heard such a chorus since the last time I was with my sister Sativa's family.

Finally, Remus Lupin managed to pull Black off (I swear the man was literally frothing at the mouth) only to clear the way for Molly Weasley, who backed me into a chair in the hallway and proceeded to give me a lecture for twenty-five minutes without drawing a breath. I took it without protest. By that time I was in a state of mild shock.

Toward the end of Molly's lecture I saw we had an audience. The twins, her youngest two kids, and that Granger girl were all on the stairs, watching and listening and looking at me like I had just killed their pet puffskein. Honestly, the boy was fine!

He might have been kissed.

But he was not!

And then Albus came in. He had Arthur Weasley on his heels, but Merlin himself could have been behind Albus and no one would have seen him. The man was projecting a cloud of power that a muggle could have sensed five miles away. The picture shut up, Molly shut up, and I think the kids probably stopped breathing. I know I did.

I stood up, because for some obscure reason I thought it would be better if I was standing. He walked up to me and fixed me with his eyes. His eyes held anger, and disappointment, and power, and - something else. I told myself it could not be what I thought it was. No, not Albus. Albus would never have that in his eyes.

More whiskey on the table. DAMN!

And then he spoke. He spoke and he said - something I didn't quite catch.

Don't lie, Dung. You did catch it.

Yes, I did. I caught it as clearly as I saw how he was holding his wand, pointed straight at my heart. And as clearly as I saw what was in his eyes.

Hatred. Albus had hatred in his eyes.

I had done what Juno dared not. I had threatened Ganymede, and all the power of Jupiter was bent against me.

And then he spoke. He spoke a syllable, that - that was the worst thing I have ever heard.

"Cru..."

And then he stopped. He stopped and I saw, I saw, the pure effort it took him to bite the word in half. To stop himself before he completed the word.

Crucio.

OK, damnit, my hands are shaking.

And now I sit here, trembling and fearful and trying desperately to get drunk. Now I realize what almost happened.

Because you see, it isn't the curse itself that's the worst part. Oh no. The thought of that is bad enough, surely. I may have been a Gryffindor, but I don't relish the thought of the Cruciatus Curse.

No, the worst part is that I know what the word means. Thanks to my pedantic father.

Thanks, Dad.

And Albus knows, too. That was the meaning of the hatred in his eyes.

Crucio. A term out of Latin vocabulary found in Tacitus and other writers of the Republican and early Imperial period. A term denoting general torture, often used to mean torture on the rack. The ultimate root of "excruciate."

But it has another meaning. Oh, yes. And Albus and I may well be the only living wizards in Britain who know it, except perhaps for the odd Ravenclaw or maybe a muggleborn like my father with a classics professor in the family.

Crucio. A term from Roman Law of the Late Republican and Classic Imperial periods. A sentence imposed by a Roman judge in the case of treason.

Any child in the Roman Empire shivered at the sound of that word. Because it was a fearsome thing. When a traitor was convicted in the courts of Rome, the judge would rise, wrap his purple-lined garment about himself, and speak one word, both a sentence and a command.

Crucio.

Crucify him.

Crucio. The word used to command the crucifixion of traitors. Crucio. The word that found its way into medieval Latin as a religious and ecclesiastical term. A word for the worst death possible.

Crucio. May you die the most painful death imaginable. May all the sins of the world be hung on you. May whatever gods there be turn their faces from you. May you be exiled forever into the outer dark, there to scream in agony for all eternity.

Crucio. The word that medieval priests spat at excommunicates as they were driven from the churches with whips.

Crucio. The word of ultimate hatred.

My hands are shaking so badly that I cannot even bring the glass to my mouth.

Albus will forgive me. He will give me another chance. That is the nature of Albus Dumbledore.

But he won't forget. And neither will I.

I found out what happens when you endanger Ganymede. It has three syllables. Crucio.

And something tells me that if the boy had been kissed tonight, no force in the entire universe would have stopped Jupiter from pronouncing them all.