Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Wizards

[starfishstar]

Fandom: Harry Potter

Summary: Dean Thomas survived a year on the run from Voldemort, only to find that the hardest part is reconnecting with his Muggle family now that it’s all over.

Characters: Dean Thomas, original character (Felicity, Dean's sister)

Words: 3,200

Notes: Beta: emily_in_the_glass.


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Dean turned his steps into the neighbourhood park, heading for the small football pitch at the far side. He could see up ahead that his sister’s training hadn’t yet wrapped up, but he didn’t mind if he had to wait a bit.

Besides, he’d always liked this park. Dean had so many memories of playing here when he was small, running and climbing trees with other children from the neighbourhood. Even after all the years at Hogwarts, these London streets and this little park were still the places that felt most real to him.

Dean reached the pitch and leaned against a bit of fence along the sideline. His eyes landed immediately on his sister: Felicity was playing as an attacking midfielder, and seemed to be everywhere at once. She was either coiled energy waiting to spring, or she was a line of motion shooting down the pitch, her long, thin plaits flying out behind her. With Felicity, there was never any in-between.

It sometimes seemed to Dean that Felicity was more of an eldest sibling than Dean himself had ever been: throwing herself into the world, fierce in defence of the younger ones. But it made sense, really. He’d left home for good at age eleven, and she’d been the oldest one ever since.

Dean watched Felicity complete a long, arcing pass to one of her teammates, then punch the air when the other girl scored a goal straight off of her pass. Dean grinned. That was his sister through and through. He could still picture Felicity as she’d been at five or six, crowing from the top of a rickety fort she’d built out of kitchen chairs, until their mum rushed in and ordered her down.

The trainer’s whistle blew, and the girls jogged to the edge of the pitch for a last few words of advice. Then they dispersed, laughing and calling out last comments to each other. Dean crossed to where Felicity was sitting on the grass, changing out of her football boots. She looked up and gave him a less than enthusiastic nod.

“Have a good training?” Dean asked.

“Uh-huh.” Felicity bounced to her feet and flicked her long plaits over her shoulder, then leaned down to scoop up her boots and shove them into her sports bag.

“I’ll carry your bag if you like,” Dean offered.

Felicity rolled her eyes at him. “I think I can handle it.”

She slung the bag over her shoulder, and they started towards the street.

Felicity had protested, that morning, when their mother asked Dean to fetch his sister from football. (“Mum! I’m fourteen! I don’t need a chaperone!”) She still looked mortified by her brother’s presence, as the other girls set off walking home singly or in groups of friends.

But Dean appreciated that their mum did this, when he visited home: created little opportunities for Dean to interact with each of his siblings one to one.

Dean had been so young when he’d left for Hogwarts, and his brothers and sisters had been younger still. He’d never really got out of the habit of thinking of them all in one lump, as ‘the little ones’. And he’d spent so little time with them, first being away at Hogwarts, and even less now that he’d started an apprenticeship in Wales. And not at all in the year between, the year of the war.

Those years of distance, though, also meant that he had no idea what to talk to his sister about. He tried again. “Did you have a good time today?”

“Yeah.” Felicity’s tone was expressive in its very lack of expression.

“Er… do you have a lot of friends on your team?”

“Uh-huh. Most of the team go to my school.”

Well, this was going nowhere. Maybe a different tack. “Are you still a West Ham fan?”

That got a flicker of interest. “Yeah. Are you?”

Dean laughed. “Are you kidding? You think that could ever change?”

“Well, I don’t know. You’re –” Felicity broke off and glanced around to make sure no one could hear them. They were walking up the street now, tall blocks of flats on either side. “You’re a wizard. I figured you must like different stuff now.”

Felicity was the only one of the little ones who knew the secret. Dean’s parents understood about the Statute of Secrecy, and they worried the kids might accidentally let something slip in public if they knew. So the rest of the family believed Dean had simply gone away to boarding school on an academic scholarship. And now that he was out of school, they thought he was apprenticing in Wales with a machine-builder, not a master swordsmith.

His parents had let Felicity know the truth when she started secondary school. In the wake of the revelation that her brother could do real-life magic, she’d gone through a phase of being awestruck around Dean, then a phase of being disdainful, and now his magic seemed to have faded into the general background noise of the many things that Felicity found uninteresting about her older brother on principle.

“Yeah,” Dean said, “there are wizarding sports I follow now, too. But footie is forever, right?” And he opened his jacket to show her the little claret-and-yellow West Ham patch he’d ironed onto the inside, where wizards wouldn’t be forever asking him what it was, but he could still feel that he kept his old loyalties near.

“Oh my God, you are such a dork,” Felicity said, but she was laughing. She skipped a little, between one step and the next; Felicity always moved as if she were still playing sport, like she was always about to break into a run.

Dean lengthened his stride to keep up. “What about your friends at school, are they football fans?”

Felicity shrugged, still keeping up her easy, loping pace. “Yeah, mostly.”

“What other kinds of things do you and your friends like to do?”

Felicity looked over at him like he was asking the most idiotic questions. “I don’t know, normal stuff. Listen to music. Play video games.”

Dean felt it again, that chasm between himself and the rest of his family. He didn’t know how to begin explaining to his sister that so many of the things that seemed so normal to her might as well no longer exist for him. Most wizards didn’t even understand what a television was; forget about PlayStation or Nintendo.

He turned his head to consider his sister as they walked. Felicity was only five years younger than Dean. If she went to Hogwarts – if she were a witch – she would be nearly halfway through her magical education by now, about to start her fourth year.

Dean thought of everything he and his friends had coped with in their fourth year: the excitement of the Triwizard Tournament, the high drama of who was asking whom to the Yule Ball – and then the devastation of Cedric Diggory’s death, upending everything they thought they knew. His sister was almost the same age Dean had been then, when the war crashed in on him and his friends at Hogwarts.

“What?” Felicity demanded.

Dean hadn’t realised how long he’d been staring. “Er… nothing, sorry.” But he hated this, having to skirt around anything real when he talked to his family. Was he going to spend his whole life avoiding the topics that mattered? So he said, “I was just thinking how different my school must have been to yours.”

That sounded wrong as soon he said it, like he was trying to widen the gap between them instead of bridging it.

Felicity scrunched up her eyebrows. He fully expected her to reject the whole topic, brush away this hint of her brother’s oddness in favour of some other conversation that would make more sense. But instead she asked, an odd tension in her voice, “So what did you do for fun, then? At your wizarding school?”

It was the first time she’d asked him anything directly about his years at Hogwarts.

So Dean began cautiously. “I still drew all the time. Maybe you remember how I loved to draw when I was a kid?”

Felicity nodded, as she bobbed along beside him, her bag bouncing against her shoulder. “Yeah, obviously. You drew all the time.”

A little bolder, Dean went on, “So, I still did stuff like that, things I used to do. But there are also wizarding games, like Gobstones or wizarding chess. And of course there’s Quidditch. Quidditch is brilliant: you play on a pitch, same as football, but everybody can fly. They use brooms with special charms on them, and there are three different types of ball –”

“Flying football, seriously?” Felicity interrupted. When Dean looked at his sister in surprise, her eyebrows had knitted tightly together, like they always did when she was upset. “Because everything’s better with them, isn’t it? You can’t just play chess, it’s got to be wizarding chess. And football’s not good enough, it’s got to be flying football.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dean protested. “Quidditch isn’t better than football, it’s just different, because –”

Felicity stopped dead on the pavement, her bag thwacking against her back. “How can you still talk about this wizard stuff like it’s so great? They almost got you killed in their stupid war, yeah? That’s how great wizards are!”

Dean had stopped walking too. He said quietly, “I didn’t realise you knew about the war.”

“Uh, yeah. Mum and Dad told me. Only after everything was over, of course, but they did finally get around to mentioning it. That there was a war between different wizards, and they were rounding up people like you.”

“Oh, Felicity,” Dean said. He could hear the fear in her voice, behind the anger. He’d had no idea that all this time she’d been worrying about a war she vaguely knew about and only half understood.

“Don’t oh, Felicity me,” she snapped, and started walking again, even faster. “You never tell me anything, but I found out about it anyway. Don’t act like I’m some stupid kid.”

Dean had to jog a few paces to catch up with her. “You weren’t supposed to know, Fel. It was too dangerous for you to know. Even Mum and Dad, I only told them the least of it. Just that things weren’t safe and I needed to disappear for a while, and they shouldn’t try to contact me. My last year of school, Mum and Dad probably told you I couldn’t come home during the holidays because I was studying abroad, but that wasn’t true. I had to go on the run because of the war.”

“Yeah,” Felicity said, still striding fast and staring ahead, not looking at him. “I figured that out for myself, thanks.”

“You did?”

She whirled on him. “Because I’m not stupid! First Mum and Dad tell me, oh by the way, Dean can do magic and he goes to a secret school for wizards and we never told you, and then you disappear and weird stuff is happening all over the country and Mum and Dad look totally freaked out all the time, yeah I figured out you weren’t really doing a year abroad in France!”

“I’m sorry,” Dean said helplessly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you anything.”

What a terrible year it had been. What was supposed to be his triumphant final year of magical schooling, he’d spent on the run instead, knowing that the only way to protect his family was to stay away from them. Knowing that because they weren’t wizards, they didn’t even know how afraid they should be.

“Oh, I don’t care,” Felicity spat out, striding ahead. “Who cares. We’re just your boring old not-magic family, who cares what we think?”

“I care.”

“You?” Felicity tossed her head in a teenager’s masterful dismissal. “You hardly come back here anymore. You don’t care what we think.”

“I do.” Dean stopped still and could only hope she would stop, too, and listen. “Felicity, I do care. A lot.”

She didn’t say anything, but she did stop, a few feet ahead of him. Her shoulders were hunched and her whole body leaned forward, like she was ready to run at any moment. She looked suddenly so grown up, standing there. Someone he hardly recognised at all.

“Fel,” Dean said, feeling so much love for his sister, this beloved stranger. “I know I’m part of another world now, but this is still where I’m from. This will always be where I’m from. And you’ll always be my sister.”

“Oh, ugh,” Felicity said, apparently as disturbed by this expression of emotion as by any of the rest of it.

At least she no longer sounded angry. Dean pressed his advantage as a he took a couple of steps forward. “You’ll always be my little baby sister, no matter how old you get. My itty-bitty little sweet baby sister.”

“Ugh!” Felicity repeated. But to his relief, Dean saw one corner of her mouth twitching up, despite herself.

He caught up to her. Grudgingly, she started walking again, matching his pace. “C’mon,” Dean said, “Ask me anything about magic, or Hogwarts, or about the war. I don’t mind, and I don’t have to hide anymore. What do you want to know about?”

She didn’t look at him for a while, but he could tell she was thinking, so he didn’t interrupt. He just walked and took in the familiar sights. There was the newsagent’s on the corner, even the signs in its windows unchanged from when Dean was small. They were nearly home now; this was the nearest shop, the one where their mum often sent one or more of the kids to fetch some last-minute grocery item.

Finally Felicity said, “How much danger were you in, really? Was it bad?”

How much ought he to tell his little sister about that year, about the constant terror and the endless running? Why should she have to know about things like that?

But he could see her fear and anger at having been left in the dark. And Felicity was nearly as old as Dean had been when Cedric Diggory was killed. He should accord her the respect of treating her like the age she was.

“It was bad,” he said slowly. It still felt strange to talk about that year. The wizarding world talked about the final battle, the victory. It didn’t talk about the long days of living in terror, not knowing where to run, not knowing where Harry was or how to help him fight. “At first I thought I’d still be able to go back to school that year, but then the Ministry was taken over by Death Eaters – they’re the ones who wanted to round up people from non-wizarding families, saying we must have stolen our magic instead of being born with it.”

Dean still wondered sometimes about his biological dad, whether maybe he’d been a wizard, and Dean himself was half-blood without knowing it. But in the end, did it matter? Dean was from a Muggle family and proud of it.

“So what did you do?” Felicity’s steps had slowed as they got closer to home, like she didn’t want the conversation to end.

“I ran,” Dean said. “I couldn’t go back to school, and I couldn’t come home. So I just started hiding wherever I could.”

“That’s so scary,” Felicity said softly.

“It was,” Dean agreed. Felicity didn’t look at him, but he could see how wide her eyes were as she stared ahead up the street. “I was lucky, though. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I was. Even when things were at their worst, I met such good people, Fel. That was the amazing thing. We looked out for each other as much as we could, and they kept me safe. There was this one man, Ted Tonks –” Even now, it was hard to say Ted’s name without grief and gratitude closing up his throat. Dean swallowed and tried again. “Ted saved me so many times. He had a daughter, and he hated that couldn’t be there to look after her. So he looked after me like I was his own kid.”

“All that was happening to you, and I didn’t know about any of it,” Felicity said. She’d finally turned to look at him, and she didn’t look angry anymore, just sad.

Dean thought of apologising again, but what good would that do? Instead, he reached over to squeeze his sister’s shoulder. “I wish it could have been different,” he said. “I hope you can believe that.”

“Yeah,” Felicity said. She walked a few more paces, her bag bouncing evenly against her shoulder with each step. Then she burst out, “You don’t get to do that again, okay? You can’t leave me out of everything.”

“I won’t,” Dean said. “I promise you that.” He wasn’t quite sure how he would manage to keep that promise, keep his sister informed about his life from across the distance that separated their two worlds, but he knew he would do it. Once he’d promised it, he would always do it.

“You’re not allowed to disappear like that again,” Felicity demanded. “You have to tell us what’s happening. Or maybe not the little kids, maybe not even Mum and Dad if you don’t want to, but you have to tell me. If you don’t tell me anything, then I’m always going to be imagining it’s the worst possible thing.”

Dean looked at his little sister, her chin held high and fierce. “I promise,” he said. “I won’t leave you out. I’ll let you know about my life as much as I can.”

“Good,” she said. “You’d better.”

“But that means you have to keep in touch, too. I want to know about the things you’re doing.”

Felicity cocked her head, considering. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair.”

Dean laughed, because she’d said it like it was a very weighty pronouncement.

Maybe it was.

“Hey, Fel,” he said on impulse. “Do you want to visit me sometime in Wales? If Mum and Dad say it’s okay?”

“Uh, yeah. Of course. Do you think they’d say yes?”

“I’ll butter them up for a while, then I’ll ask right before I go back there in August.” He gave his sister a wink, and she rolled her eyes at him. Felicity had informed him many times that he had a face that wasn’t made for winking.

“You really, really promise?” she asked. “Don’t say it and then back out.”

“I won’t back out,” Dean said. He reached out and squeezed his sister’s hand. To his surprise, she let him. And even, for a second, squeezed back.

Then she tossed her head and said, “Race you!” Before Dean could say a thing, Felicity took off running across that last short distance to their building, her sports bag bouncing wildly against her back and her long plaits flying.

Dean laughed and broke into a run, following his sister home.


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End notes:

The post-Hogwarts career I’ve created for Dean first appeared in my Ginny-centric story Chambers, and also in Dean’s section of Twenty Years On.

And Dean’s connection to Ted Tonks is explored, via a visit he pays to Andromeda Tonks, in Never Too Late to Say Thank You.

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(Continue to the fourth and final fic in the series, about Neville: I WAS ONCE AS YOU ARE NOW)

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