Chapter Text
I never thought this would happen again. Walking through the halls of Hogwarts- not as a prisoner, not as the enemy, not even as the martyr marching to his suicide, but as a student. How my parents pulled it off I’m not sure. We weren’t exactly angels during the war, and, honestly, that’s the only thing that’s concerning me this school year. To hell with grades, to hell with crushes, to hell with houses. I want other things now. The first time I walked these halls, I wanted more than anything, to be looked at. Because I was a Malfoy. The next prodigal son being raised to adopt his parents’ empire. This time I keep my head down.
I chose my classes carefully, hoping to rebuild by reputation. Start over. Break stereotypes. Change or whatever. They let me back in, so I must not be considered any kind of threat, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be invited to all the parties and crap. My parents made a mistake. I made a mistake. So maybe they won’t be able to forgive me. I can move on from that. Like I said, I want other things now.
When we walk into the great hall, separate from the other students because we don’t have houses anymore (which is a good idea, in theory, but everyone remembers where people came from), it’s almost as if we’re first years, wanting to float upwards and disappear into the fake night. At least, I feel that way. Harry Potter doesn’t. I know he doesn’t. Not when he saved the school, and the world, from You-Know-Who and gets to be that hero type. Screw him and all of his little friends. They’re welcomed back with open arms, the professors probably waiting until class to adorn them with wreaths and crowns.
The four house tables are hushed as we walk past them to our own, smaller, table. We are the faces from the Daily Prophet. The names repeated by younger siblings at the dinner table. We are the beasts and the heroes that will fade into history, alive and changing before their eyes. We are also dead tired with the fame.
After the Battle of Hogwarts, newspapers from around the world wanted to take photographs of the wizarding world’s golden boy, the golden boy’s golden friends, and the childhood bully who threw him his wand in the last second. So yeah, I almost killed Dumbledore and You-Know-Who’s mark is tattooed permanently on my arm, but I made amends with my eleven year old past so I should be allowed around the children. Whatever. I’m just here to finish off my education and earn back some of the Malfoy respect. It doesn’t have to be a lot, necessarily, I know things like that only come with time, but this seems like my best opportunity for people to see me as a child, still a student at Hogwarts, conflicted but choosing the right thing. It’s unlike me to believe in my direct reputation, but my father thwarted it and I became prey to his legacy. I would have to earn my own spot in the Malfoy family, whether this spot is one of the Dark Lord supporter who infiltrated Hogwarts for the final time before ending it whilst taking down the ultimate hero of the century, or a spot for a kid who finally found himself and got enough of a spine to break away from his pressuring family, is entirely up to the people around me. I may kill myself just because of the “Golden” Trio’s arrogance about winning the war.
We sit at a table separate from the rest of the student, which I honestly didn’t expect seeing that Dumbledore and all of his unnecessary dramatics are gone. But here we are, being paraded around like were still objects of fame, even within the school that should house the legend itself. You can see it on the faces of the people around me, tight eyes staring blankly into different corners of the room. Corners that had the blood bleached from their stone walls. I fight not to look at the floor. There’s nothing here for me.
“Thank you, brave eighth year students, for sacrificing your innocence to save the world, and sacrificing your pride when you returned to us.” Nice. The eighth-years don’t have pride. Thanks McGonagall. “We constructed a new wing for your purposes. If the boys would follow Professor Flitwick to your dormitory and if the girls would follow me presiding the feast. Please enjoy the food, plentiful thanks to our wonderful staff of house elves.” She raises her hand in a salute and the tables overload themselves with food. The atmosphere changes abruptly. Everyone at the table was haunted by the bare tables, remembering their time sitting on top of one nursing a cut down the arm, yet these tables had implemented many a meal of happiness before they served up such dust and ash.
My first feast at Hogwarts is one I look back on with my hand over my eyes. I was such a prat back then, bragging to by new Slytherin friends that a Hogwarts feast was something quite like a casual lunch at the Malfoy Manor. Except lunch at the Manor was nothing like Hogwarts. I would eat with my parents, talking about school, the family, the Prophet, but nothing like the things we talked about a Hogwarts: professors, rumors, the craziest dares we’ve pulled off, the most bizarre Quidditch wins, girls, boys. Not everyone liked talking about the same things, but if they wanted to change the subject they just did or they talked to someone else. There were enough people at a single table that at least fifteen conversations were going on at once. I missed that. But something was definitely different at this feast. The table was lacking of one house.
There’s something about apple-bread pudding that has always been endearing. Something about the fact that it was so absent on Hogwarts tables, seeming to only appear in front of me. I asked Blaise about it once, when we were talking about how we were going to convince his parents to not be mad about his flick with a Muggle girl. I told him that it would have absolutely done any parents in, it was so good, but he hadn’t recalled ever eating it. I was personally offended about this and waited until the Halloween feast to get him to try some (I had tried to bribe the house elves to make me some, but I didn’t know what to offer them so they just reassured me that it would be present at the next feast). Blaise had tried some and told me that it tasted nothing like apples or any of the spices that grandmothers usually used with apples. He hadn’t hated it, but he told me there was something wrong with me for calling apple-bread pudding. I glared at him and then ate the rest off of his plate. For some disgusting reason, I did take personal offense to his attitude towards the dessert. It was my special thing, my favorite food from the feasts, and he didn’t even have the decency to eat the rest off of his plate? Not that it was his fault, really, but I felt almost guilty for showing him something that he didn’t particularly enjoy. My therapist said that it has something to do with my insuperiority complex. My therapist being myself. I told myself that. So my insuperiority complex said that I can’t eat apple-bread pudding anymore because I should punish myself for liking something that Blaise doesn’t. Isn’t that messed up? Yes, Draco, that’s very messed up and you should eat something because you like to eat it, not because someone else likes it. Why thank you for that insightful knowledge, Mr. Therapist.
That’s how I feel today, ignoring the other people at the table, people that I have virtually grown up with (though in truth ‘grown up with’ really means ‘loved to torment’). I should try and talk with them- it says something that I managed to get back into the school at all- but they’re all so good and haughty and I respect their right to be elitist. So many Slytherins turned their back on morality in the past few years, myself being among the worst at Hogwarts, but it's not like the ‘good’ side wouldn’t be completely willing to forgive. With time, is all. It’s probably not the best political move to be ignoring everyone at the feast, making myself an island unto myself before the geography of the year is even mapped, but I’m too tired to try anything else. I lose myself to leaning the side of my chin on my fist and staring longingly at the apple-bread pudding.
“Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts. My name is Professor Byrne,” says a rather young man standing up at the front of the room. He wears a grey vest buttoned over a cream shirt, grey slacks, and shoes so scuffed they could be grey themselves. He reminds me vaguely of the late Professor Lupin.
“Good morning, Professor Byrne,” the class echoes in tone so pathetic that I almost believe that we’re the traumatized teenagers I see in the back pages of the Daily Prophet.
Byrne smiles with closed lips and looks out into the class. He makes eye contact with a fair number of students, so many that I lean down to get a spare piece of parchment out of my bag. Not the best idea for a professor to be staring straight into my soul on day one.
“Today we’ll be talking about ghosts,” Byrne starts, eyes full of intent, “and why there aren’t any from the Battle of Hogwarts.”
No. Merlin, no. You can’t say that to a room of people who were actually there. I straighten my spine and almost clear my throat, a bubble of air getting stuck in my chest preventing me from doing so. Given the smirk on Byrne’s face I might believe that he is another temporary professor staying only long enough to do Potter in. Do any of us in. But those days are behind us. So far behind us that we now have to talk about them in Hogwarts courses.
I take a second to survey the damage Byrne has already done to his students. What an idiot, hired only because our last defense teacher was killed in a war that caused every single person in this room pain. How did he even become a teacher? He can barely handle the general condolences of an average person. A group of girls and boys sitting in the front of the room, Hufflepuffs maybe, are looking at their shoes or their fingernails or the buckle on their bookbag. A Slytherin girl in the back, Blaise’s girlfriend at some point or another, is tying and untying her hair with a yellow band. Granger and Weasley eye each other and Potter wearily, but Granger’s hand is perched on the edge of her desk as if she genuinely wants to know why there were no ghosts. If I’m being honest, I want to know too.
I give Granger two seconds to ask her question before I blurt out, “With the number of casualties that there were,” I pause as several people around me blanch, “shouldn’t there be at least, what, two or three ghosts? Statistically?” Damn you, Draco. I guess you just made the decision that you want the broken, suicidal Draco future.
A few people are glaring at me, some others looking on with gazes so pitying I want to kill someone just to prove that my side has plenty of benefits, but Byrne just stares, no pity or hate in his gaze. Does he even know what’s happened in the past few years?
“That’s exactly the reason we’re having this lecture, Draco.” Oh we’re using first names. Okay, Martin. John? Billy? Billy Byrne. I would trade my entire soul to make that his name.
I scowl at him expectantly, highly tempted to see if anyone else, namely Granger, was interested in the lecture. He stares at me a moment longer, there’s been fourteen minutes of staring in the fifteen minute lesson that we’ve had so far, and then turns to the board and writes, Life .
“Now this,” he taps his wand against the board, “life, is the main thing that ghosts lack.” We all look at him like he’s a troll that walked into the classroom and decided to teach. “Look it up, that’s the actual definition of ghost that McNeirum Deluss wrote in his journal nine centuries ago. A being devoid of life and life alone. It seems like a pretty good deal, right? To have everything except life? You’d get to see your friends again, your family. Get to see all the places you wanted to before you died. But I think that Deluss wasn’t entirely correct, or rather, we interpret what he meant entirely wrong. Life is too big a thing to be devoid of: they’re ghosts because there is only the faintest whisper of life left within them, a ghosting of life.
So what happens when they keep this little bit of life, even though they were meant to die? They have to take a little bit of death with them, bring a little death back into the world.”
“If that’s true, then why aren’t there any ghosts? There was certainly enough death in the world.” Hufflepuff McHuffle certainly didn’t get enough brain cells.
“Did you see any life being given on that battlefield? In exchange?” the Slytherin girl holds her head high, like she just gave him the answer to where magic came from.
I snort, “Yeah. Us.” Her smile turns into a near sneer as she opens her mouth to retort.
Byrne holds up a hand. “Draco is actually one hundred percent right.” I give him a look that I hope says ‘of course I am’ but I think really says ‘I was just joking?’. “Well, he’s not technically right, but he’s getting at what I’m trying to tell you. So many people died that day, but not you guys. Maybe some of you were just more talented than others, or more lucky, or you had more things to hide behind, but you’re here. Which is a little bit like a giving of life, isn’t it?”
“Professor, are you implying that death and life are intertwined? That within this battlefield, and others in theory, people died so that others could live?” One guess as to who said that. “That death was entered into the world on purpose so that some people could make it out alive?”
“I wouldn’t say on purpose, exactly. But, I do believe that some aspect of your living has to do with the amount of death already entered into the world.”
“So you’re saying that we got our lives because someone else gave theirs?” No way am I believing any of this.
“It happened to me.” Harry’s voice holds so much power now that his four words act like a ruler slapped against each student’s wrists. We sit in silence for a moment, even Byrne.
“Maybe it’s not scientifically true, Draco, or even logically true, but there is something to be said for the idea of it. That’s the assignment: find your ghost. The part of you that brought a little bit of death into the world.”
“But Professor,” Granger sounds confused when I thought she’d be panicked. Oh, no, an assignment with unclear instructions! How ever will I be able to be top of the class now ? “How are we going to know who our ghost is?”
“Like I said, your ghost isn’t someone who can be explained logically. It’s an idea, a feeling. There is no wrong answer as long as you provide me with your reason.” This would be the easiest assignment to blow off ever. I could just pick someone, not focus on them too much, and claim that I felt that their death reflected the moment when I realized that I was on the wrong side of the war and that I didn’t want what my parents wanted anymore. That way I’m a sweetly mourning, rebellious teenager who finally found his heroic side.
I tilt my chin up with a definite smugness to it, and at this exact moment, Byrne decides to scan the classroom again. This time, he meets my eyes, brows shifting when he reads the look on my face. I think he’s going to say something to the class about effort and how this is for our own good, but he just nods and continues to scan.
“You can find you ghost by asking people, which is probably easiest, looking through the Ministry’s written records of the casualties, or by watching the memories of both the living and the deceased. Dumbledore gifted his pensive to the school, and Professor Flitwick had the foresight to extract memories the day of the battle. Please, though, as a warning, this is by far the hardest way to research and will feel like reliving the battle again- without being able to do anything. Take caution when considering this option.” Who was going to choose that option? It’s bad enough regretting how little I did without having to see where I could have really helped. But I see Potter eyeing the Pensieve as Weasley and Granger chatter into either of his ears, probably trying to talk him out of it. If Potter is going to do it, then I’m going to do it too.