Dan was adopted. It had taken his mother but one concise sentence to explain. They found out they couldn't have children and had searched long and hard to find a child young enough to truly raise as their own. Dan had been two years old and they had fallen in love immediately.
Dan's mum cradled him to her chest. She was shaking. He couldn't see from this angle if the trembles were tears, but she wasn't sobbing.
He was motionless. He felt as if he had frozen. There was one question rocketing around the inside of his head and bouncing deafeningly off the walls of his skull: what does this mean? What did it mean for his future? Would it change the way he felt about his parents, if only subtly? Who really was he?
"My real- my biological parents?" He finally asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of the room.
Dan's dad, who had been pacing, finally sat down on his other side. "Social services told us that they had died in a car crash. It was a head on collision. You were in the back without a scratch. We often wondered if your magic might have helped you. Protected you from the debris and stuff. You know how we got all those books for muggle parents when we first went to Diagon Alley?"
Dan nodded.
"There was all sorts of stuff about dangerous situations being the first indicators of magic," Dan's dad carried on. "I assume you're going to ask if your parents were wizards. We don't know. I'm sorry. They had no information about them at all and none of the people we spoke to knew why, which would maybe suggest they were, but the books we read did mention that your ministry had a form of child services if we ever needed it. We thought it unlikely that they would dump a magical baby in an orphanage and not give any kind of warning to the parents who adopted it. But you know them better than us."
Dan found his words again. "I had a friend who was adopted. He was looked after by the ministry department until some witches wanted to adopt him. But I guess we don't keep track of everyone, if they died in a muggle place the ministry wouldn't have known. But, there was no other family?"
Dan's dad exchanged a look with his mum.
"No relatives that could take you in. At least, none that they could find."
"And?"
"What?"
"There's something else. Don't treat me like a child. Just spit it out, ok? It's ok. I'm ok." Dan's skin felt impossibly tight across his ribcage. There was a silence he wanted to tear through with his fingers.
"What is it?" He asked again, his voice high pitched.
"You have a brother." His mum whispered, her voice faint.
The penny dropping like a boulder in the ocean.
"I have a brother and you didn't tell me?!" Dan exploded. "No way. That's not fair. That's not fair." His chest was being crushed like a ton of marble had been dropped on it, while at the same time everything inside was swelling exponentially trying to burst out. "I've had a brother my whole life and you didn't tell me because you didn't want me to know I was adopted?! How? Why? That's not fair!" He was shaking now too, whether it was rage or distress he wasn't sure.
"The couple who adopted him made us swear we wouldn't!" Now, Dan's mum was crying. "He was a lot older. They didn't think he'd accept them as his parents if you two were hanging around and backing each other up. And they convinced us, we were so worried, you have to understand." Her whole body was convulsing with choking, hiccupping sobs and Dan clung to her instinctively. "We were weak and selfish and so scared that you wouldn't love us. Because he remembered your parents, he could tell you about them. To him they will always be his real parents, but with you we had a chance. I'm so sorry. You don't have to forgive us."
She gathered herself briefly. "We agreed that we'd tell you as soon as we thought you were ready, but if not then age ten. No later." She was forcing her words out between the ugly sobs and Dan's dad was reaching round Dan's back to rub her shoulder. His own eyes were sparkling with moisture and he was very still and very quiet. "But things got in the way," she continued, her voice barely a whisper. "And then suddenly you had your Hogwarts letter. That was so much for you to take in, we couldn't throw something else on top of that. You needed our support, as your parents. You needed to feel secure because you were going through such changes, you know?
"And then we barely saw you. We couldn't tell you by letter, but when you were home we wanted every minute spent together to be a happy one.
"And then, after that, we had to pull you out of school. We'd already let you down so much. Then you were back and unhappy and then, in contrast, you were suddenly so happy that we couldn't bear it. We didn't want to ruin your glory days. We'd never seen you so happy. We were making excuses."
"McGonagall wrote to you?" Dan asked quietly.
Dan's father nodded.
"That means they were probably wizards." Dan said. His tone was emotionless. He didn't know how he felt. It hadn't even begun to sink in, and for now he didn't really feel anything.
"We know," Dan's dad said slowly, "But not for definite. Your professor said that she hadn't looked into it any further than their school records, and would not do anything else unless you asked her to. In case you didn't want to know. But there was no reason for her to know you were adopted if they weren't."
"They were. That's why she wrote. I asked her a question, and she said she thought she knew the answer. She wouldn't have told you to tell me unless it had been the answer." Dan felt suddenly very cold and pulled both his parents closer.
"What question?" His dad asked.
"It's, okay well I told you I'm in Slytherin house yeah? Well, the founder of that house was, racist I guess." Dan was speaking slowly as he tried to formulate sentences. "He believed that true magic was passed down through generations of magical families. That it couldn't come from muggles, not really good proper magic at least. So there's this, um, spell that decides what house you're in – it's not a person – and it put me in Slytherin. But that didn't add up because he, the racist guy, would never have picked a muggleborn for his house. Does that make sense?"
"I guess so," his dad said with a sniff. "Christ. I can't believe we didn't tell you earlier. What kind of people are we?"
"You're my parents." Dan said simply.
His mum wailed suddenly like a banshee and it took Dan and his dad a good five minutes to calm her down.
"I mean it, though," Dan said, his voice muffled as his mum cradled him again. "You're my parents. This is just like, god I really don't know, finding out that I was kidnapped when I was younger and taken on some wild adventure and now I have to decide if I'm going to find out what happened and stuff. Your parents are whoever love you and raise you and whoever you turn to when you need someone. That's you. It always will be. Not even a question about it, you're not my adoptive parents or my legal guardians or whatever you're my actual real life parents and I love you so much even if you were procrastinating idiots about telling me this."
His mum sobbed by way of an answer. Then she spoke. "Don't say that yet. Not yet. Wait until you know everything and we've found out everything. We were so selfish, Dan. We wanted a child so bad."
"How old is my brother?" Dan asked. What did she mean?
"He was ten when we met him." Dan's dad said softly.
"What's his name?"
"Jack."
The word hurt more than it should have. Dan had a brother called Jack, a living, breathing brother somewhere in the world who was suddenly and abruptly the only flesh and bone relation Dan had.
"He'll know about my parents."
Dan's mum shivered violently, but his dad nodded. "I know. But the people who adopted him wouldn't give us their contact details. They knew you'd want to find them, to find Jack. And they knew he'd want to find you." His voice was very calm and it scared Dan.
"We had to pull you from his arms. He was screaming." Dan's dad carried on, his skin very pale and his lip starting to tremble. "They, his adoptive parents, told him he wouldn't see you again ever. They said it was the only way you'd be happy, that he had to let you go, but he didn't share that view. You were all he had. His parents had just died. We have never forgiven ourselves. They wouldn't even tell us their names, but maybe we could have found them if we'd looked. We didn't look. To do that we'd have to accept what we'd done.
"To understand this fully, you have to know that they had made it clear that they were taking Jack and they would not let him find you. That was unnegotiable. Regardless of what we did they were going to rip him from you. It seemed then, it that moment, that it really was the kindest thing to raise you not knowing. Because until you both were older you probably wouldn't be able to find each other."
"They could have adopted us both." Dan said, and it was now his turn to be still.
"We'd got there first. We were on the list for a toddler or younger." His mum's eyes were closed as she spoke.
"Well, you could have taken him too."
"We hadn't applied for an older child. They had."
"But social services won't split up siblings if they have a choice."
When no one replied, Dan spoke again.
"I would have known from the start if I'd had him. I wouldn't have been yours."
"It wasn't just that," his mum wailed. "They wanted him so bad. It was so easy to be selfish. We could almost convince ourselves it was the right thing to do. We didn't really have the money for two children, it was the best way to give you both a good life and it would make them happy too."
Dan kneaded his eye sockets. He had been overwhelmed by just one sentence of information, but it had just kept coming.
"So you could have let them have me too and waited for someone else." Dan's voice was very strained.
"They, we," Dan's mum took a deep breath. "They were strange. Uptight. Uncaring, or at least, to us. We'd already met you by that point. You were so sweet and beautiful. And they weren't. We couldn't. We couldn't."
Another silence. The longest yet. Dan didn't particularly want to break it, but his parents were waiting.
"I don't hate you." He said finally. "I love you and it might not have been such a bad thing that you waited so long, because I am old enough to just about understand why you did it even if I can't be selfless enough to accept it as right. Not just yet, at least. I know why you waited. I'm really tired. Is there anything for dinner? I'm going to have a bath and go to bed and not do any thinking until tomorrow."
~
There was something that didn't add up. No, there were several things. While a magical baby could feasibly end up in a muggle orphanage, his ten year old brother could not. If his parents had been wizards, Jack would have been brought up in the wizarding world. He would never have let muggles adopt him. Not least because he wouldn't have known the muggle world and social services would have surely taken him to a psychiatrist for spouting rubbish about magic and flying broomsticks and dragons. Not least because he would have gone to Hogwarts the next year.
It winded Dan like a blow to the stomach. If Jack was a wizard, he would have left Hogwarts the year Dan joined. How must that have felt? How could Jack bear knowing his wizard brother was growing up unaware of the existence of magic or even his parents and brother? More and more Dan was wondering if he was indeed muggleborn after all, and that his muggle brother was living somewhere in the muggle world with his adoptive parents.
But why was he put in Slytherin? And why did McGonagall think his question would be answered by the knowledge that he was adopted?
His bed was the most uncomfortable thing he had ever tried to sleep in. He rolled over and over, his hair sticking to his scalp. He'd really been lying to himself if he'd thought he'd be able to forget about it and just slip into blissful unconsciousness for a while.
Presumably, his parents had had a house and some possessions and some money. Where was that? How had none of that been found and sorted out and left to Dan and Jack? Why was their death so anonymous? Did their friends and family ever find out what had happened to them and their two sons? What if they'd had a dog who had starved to death locked in the house waiting for them to come home?
Dan's brain was whizzing around a racetrack without following a course, instead flying off in random directions as thought after thought stuck another tiny dagger into his skull. Perhaps that's why Jack's parents had been so keen to adopt him, perhaps they wanted the house and the money and had conned Dan's own parents out of it after realising how blinded they were by their love and need for a baby.
Every theory was wilder than the last. What if one of his parents was a squib, presumably with some Slytherin and pureblood family, and had lied to the other and lived as a muggle? How did Slytherin feel about squibs? Dan wasn't sure, but he certainly didn't seem like the most tolerant and accepting of blokes. Love, then. Perhaps one of his parents was indeed magical but had fallen so in love with the other that they'd abandoned the wizarding world and concealed their abilities. That wasn't unheard of. And that would mean Jack was most likely a wizard. That he'd gone to Hogwarts knowing that he was only a year away from finding his little brother.
The thought made Dan's chest ache. He had been the luckier of the two in blissful ignorance. Whatever the truth, Jack knew about Dan and what's more he knew that Dan may never find out about him.
Suddenly, Dan recalled the phone call he'd made home from the Quidditch grounds. His mother had been upset, she'd known she'd be telling Dan when he got home, but hadn't she said something else? There's some post for you. Dan had assumed it would be his book list from the school, but now he thought about it that usually came much later. And McGonagall had said that she would write to him.
Dan leapt out of bed, shrugging on his dressing gown and tiptoeing past his parent's door (avoiding the squeaky floorboard). It was impossible to tread quietly down the stairs however but he gave it a good shot and fumbled for the light in the hallway.
There was a letter in the little wooden stand by the phone. The envelope was thick and cream-coloured and Dan recognised the corner of the wax seal just visible above the carved elephant that held it in place. Dan's parents must have forgotten to remind him about it.
He tore the envelope open with fingers trembling so violently they threatened to tear the letter inside as well. Opening out the parchment, he sat on the bottom step to read, his heart pounding loudly in his chest.
Dear Mr. Howell,
I hope you will forgive me for writing to your parents before you, but after speaking to them on the telephone they have informed me that you are holidaying in Scandinavia so will not find out until the reading of this letter.
Your parents have similarly assured me that they will have spoken to you themselves by this point. Therefore, I am writing mainly to inform you of the process I carried out in order to answer the question you approached me with during your fourth year practical examination. As I'm sure you are aware, we examine the circumstances of students applying for financial aid in order to clarify that they are indeed in need of our assistance to continue their studies and that the claim is not fraudulent. I dealt with elements of your claim directly, hence my belief that I may be have been able to answer your question immediately, but opted to ensure that I was correct before doing so.
I am aware of the delicate nature of your situation. In many cases happiness can be found in ignorance, therefore I sought only to directly answer your question. Similarly, my correspondence with your parents was limited to informing them that you had asked a question I couldn't answer without informing you that you were adopted, and consequently recommending to them that it may be time to impart this knowledge. I did not tell them the information that follows.
You asked why the sorting hat had placed a muggleborn in Slytherin. In response, I checked our blood status records and can confirm that you are recorded as pureblood.
I hope this satisfies your qualms towards your suitability for the house, but I am aware I have raised far more questions than I have answered. I would advise you to think very carefully before perusing this any further. It is a very personal decision that may vastly impact upon your life as you have known it, and it is not one that should be taken lightly. However, if there is anything I can assist you with please do not hesitate to contact me.
I hope this letter finds you well and look forward to joining you again in your academic journey in September.
Minerva McGonagall
Deputy Headmistress
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry