Tales from the River House
A Lesson in Hiding
By copperbadge
AU. When Sirius and Remus go looking for Peter Pettigrew, they make a wrong turn and someone else finds him first. Eight years later, Sirius owns a book store and Remus manages it for him. When Harry stumbles into the store and they find out the truth, they decide it's time to be Stealing Harry. (SB/RL slash relationship in later chapters.)
A LESSON IN HIDING
It would be a fallacy to say that the Malfoy ancestral home was obsessively clean; in the upstairs levels of the mansion, dust covered the white sheets, which covered all the furniture. The kitchen
and the small suite of rooms occupied by Narcissa and her son, however, were cleaned on a daily basis by the house-elves, giving them an almost sterile, scrubbed appearance.
Draco privately thought that the cleaning had driven a number of them nuts, since one could only polish freshly-polished silver so many times, but they were on the whole a good sort; they never
narked on him without being told to by his mum -- and at that point, as she was the mistress of the house, it was unavoidable that they should tell the truth, so he never blamed them. They often
brought him sweets or biscuits on the sly to make up for it; an entire black market trade in marzipan went on in the Malfoy household, as it was Draco's favourite, and there was a complicated chain
of communication used to bring it into his hands.
Despite the house-elves' best efforts, Draco was a small, thin child, which in his mind was a good thing: it meant he could squeeze himself into the shadows of the hallway pilaster-columns, behind
flowerpots, through small holes in the garden hedges. Smallness was essential to Draco's existence, because the smaller you were, the better you could hide from Narcissa.
Considered objectively -- and Draco did a lot of objective considering -- Narcissa was not a bad mother. She kept him reasonably well-fed, clean, and neatly dressed. He had two excellent if somewhat
dull tutors. But he knew she wasn't like other mums. Other mums didn't scream in the hallways when something wasn't precisely as they wanted it. Other mums had people to tea. Other mums didn't curse
their husband's name on a regular basis. Other mums took their own sons out to Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade or to museums and libraries. He knew they did. He'd read books.
Draco never went out unless his tutors took him. He knew Narcissa did go out, because he saw her leaving and returning, but she never acknowledged him unless she could help it, or unless he'd done
something wrong, so taking him on trips or to go shopping was utterly out of the question.
When he was younger, Draco occasionally did something wrong simply to make sure she still knew he existed. Usually he realised the foolhardiness of this about three minutes after he'd done it. It was
one of the many reasons Draco had identified and prepared several hiding places in every room of the house, for when Narcissa began screaming.
He also had places into which he couldn't fit -- or, after a growth spurt in his ninth year, could no longer fit -- and he used those to hide his belongings. They were things he didn't want Narcissa
to see, or anything she might take away from him. There was an envelope of newspaper clippings, about nothing in particular, just interesting stories he'd saved; a funny-shaped bottle he'd nicked
from the kitchen; a picture of his father he'd found while exploring the upper rooms one day, when he'd cajoled one of the house-elves into unlocking the door at the top of the stairs, which led to
the rest of the house.
The problem was the photograph, he thought, as he gazed down at Narcissa, tearing the kitchen apart. If she'd found any of the other things, she would have been furious that he was bringing filthy
rubbish into the house, but finding a photograph of Lucius had put her into a screaming rage.
Draco kept carefully out of view, not just of his mother but of the house-elves, so that they couldn't tell on him if she demanded to know where he was. He'd discovered the high cross-beams in the
shadowy ceiling a while ago, and knew he couldn't be seen if he kept to the south end of the room.
Clearly this called for some fast thinking. She was going to ask the house-elves, and then she was going to find all the places he kept stuff. He couldn't let that happen. This wasn't childish
caprice; this was defending his territory.
He slipped off the upper-beams and down onto the lower ones; from there he dangled by his fingers, until he got a toe-hold on the edge of the hatch that passed between the kitchen and the dining
room. He slipped through it, landing lightly, and made for the hallway, arriving there a split second before Narcissa did. She shrieked when she saw him, and the full wrath of his mother descended on
his head.
"Keeping this in our house!" she screamed, shaking him by his arm. "How dare you defy me! This for your deceit!" she added, ripping the photograph in half. Draco felt something inside him crumble,
but if he was to save himself and his sanity, he knew he couldn't show it. There would be other photographs, and he had memorised every line and shadow of his father's face in that one, every
expression and movement the magical photo showed.
"Sorry, mum," he whispered, when she released him. She shook the pieces of the torn image in his face.
"Disobedient, wicked boy!" she shouted. "The house-elves say you've hidden things all over! In every room!"
"Dobby cannot disobey the mistress, Master Draco!" Dobby wailed, in the background.
"A conspiracy! Under my nose! Well, this stops now." Narcissa fixed him with a hateful glare. "Either you can tell me yourself and save a whipping, or I'll ask the house-elves. And you know they
won't lie for you, Draco."
Draco studied his shoes. "I'll tell you," he said softly. She jerked him into the dining room.
"Under the table," he murmured, and she found a packet of sweets underneath the table, attached with tape. "Behind the planter." A book he'd particularly liked, stashed where he himself could still
fit, in case he got bored while hiding. "That's all here."
Narcissa shot a swift glance at the house-elves, which were now following them around like peculiar chicks after a hen. "Is he lying?" she demanded. They shook their heads woefully.
They continued on through every room in the house: kitchen, den, bathroom, schoolroom, bedroom, even Narcissa's work-room, where she kept her correspondences and files he wasn't allowed to see,
though he never hid anything there. He showed her the trick cabinet in the kitchen, the loose floorboard in his bedroom, the hidden ledge on the inside of the schoolroom closet, the cranny in the
candelabra that you couldn't see except from below. She didn't bother with the sheet-covered rooms, except the library, since as far as she knew they were all under lock and key the house-elf Mendy
kept in the pocket of her tea-towel dress.
When they finally returned to the corridor, Draco was trembling, and Narcissa had left behind a trail of destroyed treasures that the house-elves had quietly and efficiently cleaned up as they went,
terror and pity in their eyes.
"That's every room," she said, and Draco suppressed a small breath of relief. "You are a wicked, deceitful child, and you will be punished, Draco. Go to your room. You," she said, turning to the
house-elves, "assisted him in this trickery. All of you are to boil your hands."
"Don't -- it's not their fault," Draco said, but Narcissa gripped him by the arm and thrust him into his bedroom, slamming the door after her. Draco stared at the door, wondering if he could even try
to help the house-elves, but he knew it was hopeless.
There wasn't a trace of any of his hiding places. The loose floorboard had been fixed permanently to its fellows with a flick of Narcissa's wand, and the draperies on the bed removed. The bed itself
had been lowered to the floor, so that there was no space underneath it. And that wasn't even his punishment. His punishment was still to come.
Draco knelt and slid his hand across the formerly-loose floorboard. He felt like crying, but he was too tired to bother. Instead, he slumped back against the footboard of the bed and closed his
eyes.
The ruse had worked.
Complete honesty had its place, after all.
Well. Complete honesty after a fashion.
Draco knew that he looked at the world differently than other people did; it had earned him strange looks from his mother and her rare visitors, in the past, and his tutors were constantly trying to
understand how he came up with some of the ideas he did. He'd finally stopped voicing them, because clearly they only caused trouble. He had been writing them down, and had kept them where they would
be safe -- Narcissa had not found his private book, not yet.
Every room in the house, she'd said, but she hadn't even asked him about the hallway.
Nobody ever thought about hallways properly, really.
And in fact the hiding places in the hallway were not all that difficult to discern. Behind a curtain that hid an old ancestral painting that nobody ever looked at, there were a few books he loved
dearly; and then, near the stairs that led up to the locked door --
He was sure his mum must know about the cupboard under the stairs; there were strange trunks stored in it, and someone had to have put them there. True, the door was disguised as a panel, but it
wasn't all that well hidden. That was why he'd chosen it. And tucked just inside the door, between a trunk reading HOGWARTS - L. A. MALFOY on it and the wall, he kept his private book, and three
little toy soldiers he'd found, which he thought might have been his father's. Certainly Narcissa didn't approve of such things.
If they think you've given them everything, he thought, if they think they've crushed you, they won't ask you for the one thing you've kept back.
He'd creep out of his bedroom tonight, unless Narcissa locked him in, and remember to write that in his private book.