Chapter Text
Who am I?
That was the question with which Professor Johnson, who taught the new subject required for all the eighth years, decided to start the class. According to her, before they could begin to reflect on the war, tolerance, and other questions around this subject, they all had to get to know themselves, discover the characteristics that made them different from everyone else, basically they had to analyze who they were.
Draco reread the question for the umpteenth time. How can two simple words be so complicated? The other fifteen eighth year students seemed to be having the same difficulties as he was--except for Granger, who was leaning over her parchment scribbling rapidly. She had ink on her cheek. Draco rolled his eyes at her and began to think.
Who was Draco? When he was little, he had been very proud of his identity. He was a wizard, and thus better than the rest of Great Britain and the world. He was capable of doing whatever he wished with only a mumbled phrase. Now, however, in the world after the war, he couldn’t even do magic freely--a silver bracelet that curled around his left wrist prevented it outside of the school schedule and from Hogwarts. Was he even a wizard anymore?
Before he had felt special to belong to a pureblood family. His blood--free from the stain of mixed blood---was better than the rest, including that of other witches and wizards. His blood granted him a special place in the world. But now....now he understood that that was something stupid, to base his own existance and the vaule in something so absurd came with absurd prejudices as well and in the end...in the end everything culminated in bloodshed, bodies and broken souls. Without the protection that his blood status offered him, he was only a boy scared of the horror surrounding him.
He clung to the last thing that he could. Above being a wizard and a pureblood, he was a Malfoy. The Malfoys were an ancient and powerful family, but that barely mattered to Draco. For him, to be a Malfoy meant exquisite meals at the dining room’s grand table, inventing stories with his mother in the garden, or playing Quidditch with her (a secret that did not leave the walls of the manor), following his father all around the house, talking about anything that crossed their minds.
He tried to angle himself so that Susan Bones, sitting at the desk to his side, couldn’t see the tears that ran down his cheeks. But he wasn’t sure he managed.
Nowadays, to be a Malfoy meant living in a cemetery of a once a beautiful house. It meant that the little stories he invented sounded out of place in the grim world of the gardens and his mother’s mind. It meant only communicating with his father in the letter that he was permitted to write once a month and knowing that the guards of Azkaban read it before giving it to him.
To be Draco Malfoy didn’t mean anything in the world after the war. To be himself was deplorable, it was an error. How was he going to answer Johnson’s question?
The words that the Prophet had used to describe him come to mind, their incendiary articles, criticising the decision of the Wizegamot to not send him to a cell in Azkaban.
Death Eater.
Assassin.
But he wasn’t that. The brand that darkened his left forearm was not the full truth: that Death Eater Draco had too much to hope for. He wasn’t an assassin either. He was many terrible things, but that no.
Carefully, with elegant and meticulous penmanship, Draco answered the question.
No one.