Chapter Text
After the war, Draco ran away. Not immediately, of course. He went back to the Manor with his parents and there they waited. They didn’t talk much. He heard his parents yelling from downstairs but they fell silent the moment he entered the room. His father was sleeping in a guest bedroom. It didn’t matter much to him.
The house felt wrong somehow. The crawling revulsion that had been with him since Voldemort moved in had not left. His childhood home – never the friendliest of places, but familiar, beloved, and his – had been infected, corrupted. The echoes of Death Eaters sat in the dining room. Blood long since cleaned from the floors still seemed sticky under his feet. He wanted to get out.
Nobody left the grounds. Draco took long walks as far as the fence line but never beyond. It was summer but he seemed to always be cold. He wasn’t well. He barely ate – and there wasn’t much in the way of food left in the house anyway. He couldn’t sleep. In his fractured dreams, he heard Vinny screaming.
The Daily Prophet was still delivered daily. Bless the press and their unstoppable lack of morals. They wouldn’t cut off a paying customer no matter what their reputation was. The owls still arrived, and the family silently passed the newspaper around, taking it all in.
Voldemort was dead. Shacklebolt was the new Minister. The Aurors would be rounding up known allies of the Dark Lord as soon as possible. Hogwarts would be reopening in September, mostly-rebuilt but undergoing extensive restoration. McGonagall was the new Headmistress.
“I wonder who will replace her as Head of Gryffindor House,” his mother asked, in an attempt at a casual tone.
Neither of them answered but Draco wondered all the same. They would need a new Transfiguration teacher too. He had always been good at Transfiguration. Not as good as he was at Potions but still, good. Pity he was too young, too underqualified to apply.
Pity he was a war criminal.
Harry Potter was not talking to reporters but insiders said he was recovered from any injury. A distant nephew of Ollivander’s, who had been abroad for decades, was returning to try and help him rebuild his shop. St Mungo’s was starting to release survivors who had been in intensive care back to their families, each one greeted in the hospital lobby by flashing cameras and clamours for them to contribute a column on their experiences to the Sunday issue.
Lists of the injured. Lists of the missing. Lists of the dead. Lists of muggleborns released from prison after their papers were reviewed. Lists of suspected criminals still on the run – Draco knew every one of their names, could picture them out there, felt sick to his stomach with grief. Talks of a memorial: a memorial for muggles and muggleborns slain; a memorial for children killed or tortured at Hogwarts; a memorial for those who died in the final battle; a memorial for those who died before.
Reports, in the back pages of the Prophet that Draco poured over in private, of children who would no longer be returning to Hogwarts next year. Students who had been tortured, students who had been imprisoned, students who had stayed for the battle when they should have been sent far away. Some were looking to transfer – to Beauxbatons, to Durmstrang, to Illvermony. Some were to be home-schooled. A group of Irish witches had got together to establish a new wizarding school, for Irish and international students, that would put emphasis on the traditional magic of the region and be free of the sordid, elitist history of Hogwarts.
Draco didn’t cry for himself or for the dead, not often, not when he was awake, but he cried a little for the kids who would never recover, who would never know Hogwarts as home, who would never learn all that they could learn. He cried just a little for the end of something beautiful – a little twisted, a little terrible, but beautiful all the same.
Everyday, the lists were updated. Bodies weren’t often found but the missing were confirmed dead, or were found, or emerged from deep hiding. The injured died quietly in St Mungo’s. Draco cut every single list from the paper, folded it up and stowed it safely away. He read them over and over, searching for familiar names, feeling each one like a twist on the knife that seemed permanently lodged in his throat.
Reports of arrests. Draco was glad they were caught. He wished they were free. He wanted…something. Something he was not articulate enough to describe. Sometimes he sat near the Manor gates and waited for the Aurors to arrive.
Eventually, arrive they did. They were not faces Draco recognised – young, bruised, a little hollow around the eyes. A lot of rapid promotions in the past few weeks, if he was any judge. A lot of empty shoes to fill.
His father tried to resist, a little. Not the arrest, no, he was long ago resigned to that, but the handcuffs. His mother did not fight. She greeted the Aurors for all the world as though she had invited them over for dinner. Her eyes sought Draco’s across the room but he refused to meet them. He went silently. He did almost everything silently these days.
*
They did not send prisoners awaiting trial to Azkaban anymore. There wasn’t room. They put them in old offices down in the subbasements of the Ministry, converted now with locks on the doors and the furniture removed. There was a lot of talk about reforming the prison system completely now that the dementors were so controversial but for now that was mostly just talk.
Draco had his cell to himself. There was no Daily Prophet now. He saw nobody but the guard who brought him meals twice a day. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He longed, on some level, to send an owl or two. Something in him ached for Greg, for Blaise, for Pansy, bless her heart. He had no idea if it would be allowed and he didn’t dare ask.
Blaise would be well out of it by now. He had always been contemptuous of Voldemort, though whether that was bravado had been hard to tell. Pansy, perhaps, he did not really want to talk to. He wanted to see her, wanted her to be near him, but what he wanted wasn’t reality. He had no idea how she was responding to the changes, whether her bigotry was as strong as ever. It had always been stronger, clearer, than Draco’s own. She had soothed his own anxieties over it all. No, he didn’t want to talk to her. Some part of him wanted to hold her, wanted to laugh with her, wanted to see her eyes spark as she made some cutting remark about the guard, but he wasn’t ready yet. He didn’t dare.
Goyle was the one he wanted to see. Needed to see. If anyone could understand, it was Greg. They had not parted on good terms but, then, wasn’t that what their friendship was made of anyway? Greg had been there. Greg would dream about Vinny too, dream of the fire and the screams.
He was probably in another cell somewhere down the same corridor. Draco hadn’t seen his arrest mentioned in the paper but it was bound to have happened. Greg wasn’t smart enough to evade capture, even if he wanted to. Draco did not know whether he would want to. They hadn’t spoken since the fire. He didn’t know anything anymore.
Draco spent weeks in the holding cell. He had no visitors. One day, the guard came in with his breakfast and told him that his father had been sent to Azkaban last night. Draco did not reply. He did not feel even a twinge of grief. All those years desperate for his father’s approval and now all he had for the man was contempt.
It was weeks more, he thought, before the guard gave him more news, but he had lost all sense of time. He hadn’t bothered to keep a record of the days. His mother had been convicted. She had three years in prison ahead of her, followed by community service. She was not going to Azkaban but to the new prison they were building somewhere off the coast of Wales, which was to be a little easier, a little less grim, a little more rehabilitative. Draco’s heart broke for her. He clung to the small mercy.
She was not a good mother, she was not a good person, but she loved him and she tried. Unlike his father, she tried so hard to do what was right. It was simply that she had never had any idea what that was. The only thing she had been sure of, completely sure of, was that taking care of her son was the right and moral choice. She had been wrong, but it meant everything to him that she had believed it so sincerely.
Maybe she would stand a chance. Maybe they would treat her well, give her a chance. Maybe when she emerged from prison, she would get the opportunities she needed. Aunt Andromeda had never completely cut ties with her, not like she had with Aunt Bellatrix. Maybe she would lower herself to help.
Draco was clearly nobody’s priority. From what little he could gather, the trials were endless. Juries cycled in and out, bigger and more complex than ever before. The judges had endless conferences. Witnesses clogged up the Ministry lobby, arriving in droves with their summons in their pockets and their hands twitching.
Lawyers had stopped by a few times to see him. Draco had not said a word to them but they had talked at length. They offered him deals, they made him promises. If he would testify against his parents, against his friends, against suspected Death Eaters, against Snatchers and supporters and anyone else they could name… But Draco didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the words yet. He didn’t know how to betray his whole life. There had to be a way. There was a right thing to do somewhere in here, but he couldn’t find it.
He missed Severus. He missed him so much it hurt. His godfather would have slapped him for this, would have said something so cruel and cutting that it sliced through the ennui and reminded him who he was. He would have brought sense back into the world. He would have made it all so clear. He knew what it was to sell out your friends, your cause, your everything. He knew what it cost.
Severus was dead. Draco was on his own for this one.
*
The time for his trial arrived at last. They must have made their way through all the urgent cases. He should have been frightened but he was numb. He dressed himself neatly, combed his hair, made himself presentable. That was his mother talking in the back of his mind. He mustn’t look scruffy on the witness stand, mustn’t look deranged. That would be Letting The Side Down.
The world outside his cell seemed almost unreal as he was escorted in chains down tiled corridors. There were so many people rushing by. Every courtroom in the building must be in use. Witnesses sat in anxious rows. Draco felt their eyes on him as he passed but he didn’t recognise any of them. Maybe he knew them. He could barely see them.
By the time he entered the chamber, his vision was swimming. The row upon row of faces, hundreds of secretaries, scribes, judges, officials, jury members, spectators, massed into one. Draco kept his gaze ahead, unfocused. He didn’t dare examine. He didn’t dare see. He heard the murmurs but no words were audible. Maybe they were talking loudly. Maybe he had forgotten how to listen.
They chained him to the chair. He knew they would but still his stomach flipped. He forced himself to stay still, not to fight. His hand twitched for his wand, but of course there was no wand. That was long gone, like every other good thing.
“Draco Lucius Malfoy?”
He cleared his throat. His voice stuck in his teeth. “Yes.”
The trial began. They asked a lot of questions. He did his best to answer them. He was as honest as he knew how to be but the words resisted him. They asked about the Dark Lord and he could scarcely speak his name. They asked about the murder of Professor Burbage and the memory hit him with full force. He nearly threw up. He couldn’t speak of it. They asked about his parents, about his friends, about his role in the Battle of Hogwarts, as they were now calling it. They asked him about Dumbledore’s death and he scarcely heard them.
It took hours. He didn’t know how much he confessed. In his memories, it was like a dream. He knew he talked, remembered in some way babbling, words spilling out of him, about the meetings at Malfoy Manor, about who attended, about things Voldemort had said or done. He stumbled. He halted. He was struck dumb.
At last, they let him rest. They went to get lunch, to drink butterbeers and discuss the case. Draco was taken, stumbling, back to his cell. He lay on the bed with his eyes closed and clanging in his brain. Those blurred, unknowable faces swirled in front of him, their voices ringing loud. He scratched roughly at his wrist with bitten-down fingernails, scratched until it bled.
After the lunch break, reinstated in his restraints, Draco had nothing to do but listen whilst witnesses were called and his crimes laid out before him in excruciating detail. Ollivander gave his account of his time in the cellar with quiet precision. Draco couldn’t bear to look at him, to see him so frail and sickly. He remembered the efficiency, the energy of the man who had sold him his wand, his precious blackthorn wand, when he was a boy and it hurt him. They called Griphook, they called a Snatcher who had apparently turned evidence in exchange for clemency, they called Katie Bell, poor thing, and the shame started creeping in behind his walls of apathy.
They called Pansy Parkinson and Draco finally looked up into a face he fully recognised. He could never mistake it. Snub-nosed, hard-jawed Pansy. He had kissed that thin, smirking mouth more times than he could count. He had run his hands through that meticulously-styled hair and laughed when she hit him for messing it up. He had buried his face into the hollow of her pale neck, had pressed himself close to her. He had cried into her shoulder before now. He had been as intimate and as vulnerable with her as he knew how to be.
She was the love of his life. She was his friend.
Pansy took the witness stand with a pious smile, a lowered head. He had seen it all before. It was the innocent look she pulled out to get out of detentions, to claim an incident had been all another student’s fault. She had a gift for it. He had used it to his advantage more than once.
She did not look at him.
Before the court, Pansy laid out plain everything Draco had ever told her about the Death Eaters. Every late night conversation, everything shared in confidence, every secret he had impressed her with. She told them all about how proudly he showed off his new Dark Mark, about his commitment to the cause, about the vile things he had said. She told it with an air of horror, of disgust, as though she hadn’t said the same, as though she hadn’t egged him on, as though she hadn’t pressed her lips against the Dark Mark and kissed it.
She stripped him raw. Every word she spoke flayed his heart. The ennui was broken alright, shattered to pieces. He wanted to scream and cry and break things. He wanted to burn. He wanted to run and hide. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted, and all the while the grief and the guilt tore at him with iron claws somewhere deep inside. Pansy did not stop talking until she had taken every piece of him apart.
Draco did not hear her being dismissed. He did not hear who was called next. Her voice was ringing too loudly in his ears. He had loved her. He still loved her. Bold, brash, fearless Pansy, with her sharp tongue and her twisted sense of humour. Pansy who had stuck by him all the while, whom he had known as a child, who he had danced with and played with. His first kiss, his first love, his first everything. She had been brilliant. She was brilliant.
Perhaps he should have known. Perhaps he should have expected it. He remembered her softness with a fondness that ached like a bruise. He remembered lying together in the dell behind Malfoy Manor that one summer, half-undressed, his fingers working through her hair. She was so vulnerable behind all the confidence, behind the viciousness. She was scared of something. Pansy might have cared about him, but not enough to risk herself. Perhaps he should have always expected her to sell him for her own skin.
“Harry James Potter,” said the witness on the stand.
Draco looked up sharply into the tired eyes of the Boy Who Lived.