Promises to Keep

Draco had the same nightmare a large percentage of the time. It had nothing to do with

the day he'd been injured, although ironically in the dream he was running. In the dream the war was lost, and everyone he loved was dead, and someone or something pursued him with all the fury of the hounds of hell. In the dream he was always a step too slow, or he stumbled, or sometimes he gave up--but it always ended when he turned, back against the wall, to face the thing behind him, only to realize there was nothing there.

He always woke from it drenched in sweat, all of his muscles aching as if he really had been running. Sometimes even the muscles he was missing hurt. The therapist at the hospital had explained that this was not uncommon, and that it would go away on its own, or it wouldn't. He knew that even if the phantom pain in his legs faded, the agony of his right hand--fingers clenched tight around a wand that no longer existed--never would. It was the mornings after he'd had the nightmare that he wondered which loss was worse.

He had six nights in a row of more or less uninterrupted sleep in Snape's house, before he had the nightmare he'd hoped was gone for good. In the morning he dragged himself blearily out of bed and into the shower, and almost fell asleep sitting on his stool. He pulled on the last of his clean clothes and rolled himself into the kitchen. He and Snape had worked out a more or less equal division of labor, in which Snape cooked and paid the bills and played chauffeur and Draco did everything else.

He set the table with Snape's mother's heavy, tarnished silver and linen napkins, preserved by magic as the house itself was preserved. Snape was still upstairs, but probably not asleep. Draco could hear him pacing at night sometimes, walking the confines of his room as he must have walked the cell in Azkaban. The biggest advantage of having Snape as a housemate was that he was completely willing to let Draco make his own mistakes and learn for himself what he was and was not capable of doing. Draco's mother would have been horrified to see him slinging the plates like Bludgers, preservation spell or no.

But Draco could not help wondering just how much of Snape's laissez-faire attitude was trust, and how much was indifference. He had had the same policy at Hogwarts, and been largely successful; he had involved himself in Slytherin House's affairs only rarely, and only when lives were in danger. Draco had been his only failure in almost twenty years, the only one of his students to precipitate a disaster so vast not even Snape could save him from it.

He had finished with the table. Now he pushed his way over to the draining board and began to put away the previous night's dishes. Snape, who was never anything but punctual, was now officially late. Draco kept going, wondering if something was wrong, and what he'd do if it were. He was just beginning to panic when he heard something scratch at the kitchen door, the way a house elf begging for admission might. He had a brief moment of hope: maybe it was a house elf, coming to make his breakfast. It seemed unlikely.

After a brief struggle he got the door open for what was probably the first time in thirty years or so--Snape did not seem like the type to have neighbors stopping by for a cup of tea. There was a cat sitting on the step. It sauntered past him and leapt onto the table, where it sat licking itself and staring at him. Draco turned laboriously to face it and stared back. The cat was the color of clotted cream, with gray-brown stripes on its head and legs and tail, and the bluest eyes he'd ever seen. It was clearly a special, magical beast, and to judge by its air of self-possession, a powerful and dangerous one.

"His name is Lucifer," Snape said from the vicinity of Draco's right shoulder. Draco only barely stopped himself from squeaking. He had forgotten altogether about Snape's ability to creep up on one. The cat regarded Snape with intense interest. Snape looked back at it with cool disregard. "It wants breakfast and a bath, Draco. What do we have that a cat might eat?"

Draco steered himself to the refrigerator. "There isn't any milk," he said after a moment. "Do you think it--he--might like canned tuna? We could get some cat food for him later."

"I suspect that the tuna will be acceptable," Snape agreed. He picked the cat up and set it on the floor. "He's been on his own for too long; he's forgotten those few manners he had."

"So he was your pet?" Draco demanded. "Forgive me for saying so, but you don't exactly seem like a cat person." He had to admit that he was a little disappointed. Now that he looked closely, Lucifer was clearly only a cat with interesting markings, too small even to be part Kneazle. Still, he might be company when Snape was sulking.

This won one of Snape's rare smiles. "More like I was his pet. He didn't exactly ask permission before he moved in. It looks as if he's been living rough, doesn't it? Scrounging from trash cans and that sort of thing." He handed Draco a saucer as he spoke. Draco had gotten the lid off the tin using the opener--a small personal victory--and now he dumped the tuna on the saucer and leaned down to put it on the floor for Lucifer.

The cat brushed past Snape, sniffing delicately at Draco's chair before he settled, purring, on the tuna. Draco stroked his thin, knobby back and felt guilty. It was his fault Snape had been gone so long, his fault Lucifer was half-starved. Snape had probably given his pet up for dead. Under his hand, Lucifer began to purr, and Draco felt his eyes fill up with tears he had to blink away.

As wonderful as it was to have Snape treat him as a person and not as a cripple, it had its downside. No one but Snape would have expected Draco to give the cat a bath. But Snape went blithely to the shops to stock up on cat food, leaving Draco to fight for his life. When he finished, Lucifer looked more like a wet, angry rat than a cat, and Draco was equally wet and bleeding from scratches on his chin and his arms. He dried the cat as best he could and let it go. It sprang away from him, growling, and disappeared up the stairs. Draco wished it joy of whatever it found there. He mopped half-heartedly at the soaked floor, toweled off his hair, and changed into a dry shirt.

It was almost time for lunch, which meant that he'd spent the whole morning on the cat. Yet another day was half over: if he lived only ninety more years, than that would mean he'd managed to get through another--he gave up on doing the fraction in his head. It would come out to something depressingly small anyway. He was replacing in their approximate piles the books of Snape's he'd finished reading when the front door opened and Snape came in with his arms full of carrier bags.

This was unexpected enough; Draco hadn't realized he was still out. It seemed unlikely he'd spent the last hour and a half shopping for cat food and, apparently, liquor. It seemed even more unlikely that Remus Lupin and Harry Potter had just happened to be in the neighborhood, shopping for lottery tickets and lime flavored Coke and oranges, or whatever excuse they'd used. Snape's expression was a priceless mix of disbelief and frozen misery, Potter looked embarrassed, and Lupin was smiling like a man who'd ruined everyone else's day and didn't even have the grace to realize it.

"So you have a cat," he said, and Snape grimaced.

"Yes, Lupin, I have a cat," he answered. Draco bit his tongue and kept himself from smirking, but he could see that Potter hadn't had as much foresight. Snape dropped his bags on the nearest chair and turned on him with a ferocious frown that was still no more than a ghost of the ones he'd been infamous for. It still wiped the smile off of Potter's face. "I also have a headache. If you'll all excuse me." He turned and went upstairs, not quite stomping. Draco thought that this retreat was all too similar to Lucifer's. This time he did smile.

Since Snape had left him to play the gracious host, Draco offered his guests lunch. He wasn't sure what to do when they accepted. After the canned spaghetti incident, Snape had forbidden him to use the cooker and the hotbox. The only thing left was sandwiches. Draco spread peanut butter and jam on half a dozen slices of bread, wondering as he did so whether werewolves were strictly carnivorous. He had forgotten to cut the crusts off before he put the filling in, but he decided they were good enough for Potter and Lupin.

He turned to put the plates on the table and discovered that Potter was fluttering uselessly behind him. "I can handle this," he snapped. "It's my legs that went missing, not my hands or my brain."

To his amazement, Potter actually blushed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean--I'll just go get Remus, shall I, he's looking at Snape's books."

Draco filled water glasses from the tap and pretended not to feel guilty. It had had to be said, even if it could have been said more tactfully. But lunch was spectacularly awkward, even for someone who'd once shared a meal with Lord Voldemort, Aunt Bella and a man with the table manners of a rat. Neither Potter nor Lupin seemed disposed to linger, which raised the question of why they'd come at all.

Draco saw them out, and barely kept Potter from apologizing again. When he went back to the kitchen to start on the dishes--now feeling even more like a house elf--he found that Lucifer had licked them all clean. "Where were you earlier?" he demanded, putting a handful of dry cat food in one of Snape's china saucers. "I could have used a little help with the entertaining." Lucifer finished eating and began licking himself. He looked smug, as well he might. Not only was he well fed, and clean, and sheltered, but Draco was talking to him as if he were a person and not a cat. It would have been embarrassing, if Draco had not been too glad of the company to care.