Chapter Text
The worst thing about fighting a war, apart from the rampaging and torture and other unsightly things like dead bodies in family basements, was the aftermath of destruction and the massive piles of clean-up that entailed. It had been months after Harry Potter had decisively ended the war by killing the Dark Lord with his own curse, and there were still pockets of Dark or chaotic magic that needed clearing. The Ministry of Magic had been torn apart by a year under Death Eater rule: departments in shambles, officials that no one knew what to do with once Imperius curses were dispelled, and far far too many oppressed muggle-borns freed from holding cells and awaiting release lest they be shipped off to Azkaban by mistake.
The human element came first, naturally. Kingsley Shacklebolt acted as the interim Minister for Magic. He and his cohort ensured that Imperiused officials were separated from Death Eaters and their sympathizers, the way one might separate cotton from flax. Death Eaters were rounded up, put on trial, and convicted into Azkaban. Their properties were seized to compensate witches and wizards unjustly imprisoned for the sorry fate of being born magical to muggle parents. It took months, far longer than anyone was really comfortable with, but Shacklebolt’s interim regime was determined to avoid the mistakes of past Ministers.
And magical Britain was all the better for it.
A year into the clean-up and war reparations, it was as if nothing had happened: Hogwarts was quietly repaired in the months leading to the next term, Ministry departments were cleaned up, officials rounded up and interviewed to ensure they were right for their positions, and the Death Eater trials were put behind the magical population, as if the prisoners were nothing but a bad smell that no one wanted lingering in their space.
It was in this position that Draco found himself caught in the lingering remnants of war.
For the losing side, the war had never really ended. Sure, the trials ensured the worst of their lot were shipped off to Azkaban, never to catch a whiff of freedom in their natural lives. But there were those who had been caught in the web of their own poor choices, trapped by the circumstances of their birth, too weak to heed the siren call of the easy life of their youth only to have it snatched away as the war raged.
Draco Malfoy didn’t think he had been particularly slighted in his sentencing of five years of probation and a year of war reparations. If anything, most people agreed the Wizengamot courts had been too lenient on his cohort of Slytherin peers old enough to make a difference, but too ignorant to fight for what was right. Him, especially. He had been a Death Eater himself, after all, too stupid to recognize that his choices would lead to the inevitable destruction of everything he held dear: the status quo of the magical world.
So he hadn’t complained when they took his wand—not really his , of course. Potter had seen to it he wouldn’t have his wand when he grabbed it from his limp hand as Potter escaped from Malfoy Manor. Draco didn’t complain either when the hastily gathered tribunal ruled that he would spend his year of reparations in service to the very institutions his Death Eater cohort spat on during their reign of terror.
It was not a bad gig… or not entirely a bad gig. After a year of living in his beautiful house with the likes of Fenrir Greyback, Draco had become rather a dab hand at repair spells, cleaning spells, and spells that restored objects and rooms to the state of order they followed before the war. These were all the spells the shoddy Ministry wand he’d been assigned were capable of.
At least they didn’t take his magic. Or sentence him to Azkaban. He surely deserved at least that for the shit he’d done at the start of the war.
And so, he traveled by Floo daily, from the one regulated fireplace in Malfoy Manor to the Ministry, where he shed the shabby robes he had remaining in his Ministry-raided closet in favor of janitor robes. Then he headed into the Department of Mysteries, where he cleaned up the destroyed junk Potter and his friends left in their wake when fighting against the Death Eaters led by Draco’s own father (now languishing in Azkaban, ta ever so much). Had Lucius Malfoy been the one running the Ministry still, none of the ugliness would persist. But then, Draco’s father had a hand in creating this miserable chaos. He supposed it didn’t matter.
Everyone, of course, knew who he was as he traversed the halls of the Ministry. Draco’s skin itched with the judgmental stares he received, not only from passing Ministry workers, but from the other janitorial crew. While he knew this was his just desserts—one did not kick start the whole war by letting Death Eaters into Hogwarts without earning the ire of the entirety of his magical brethren—it still made his skin prickle. If he was half the hero Potter was, if his family had been on the right side of the war—the winning side of the war—no one would be looking at him this way.
He couldn’t help the sourness of his thoughts as he sorted through the mess that was the Prophecy room, a place rife with residual magic that no one wanted anything to do with. Hence clean up fell on him, the ever reliable grunt. He’d put most of the surviving prophecies in order—for all that Draco was a snotty little prince growing up, he still knew how to tidy things up—but there was a blast zone between the overturned shelves where the residue was thick, unimaginably cloying. No matter how hard he blasted his magic-cleansing spells and poured his cleaning potions, he couldn’t scrub off the residual tendrils of dark magic in the stain. Sometimes, when he worked long past the time he should have clocked off, he heard the jumbled words from whatever prophecies had broken here: “… as the seventh month dies… power the Dark Lord knows not…” and “ …blood-borne dragonlight that burns in the dark…”
Considering the prophecy was about the Dark Lord, he probably should not have been surprised by how nasty the stain was. Draco only wished he had that sort of power… back when it mattered. Maybe then, he wouldn’t be stuck with this demeaning work.
The prophecy residue clung to him as he shed his janitor robes and changed back into his shabby day robes. The smell of Merryrot’s Potion of Never-Been had sunk into his pores until he couldn’t quite get rid of the smell of it, despite having changed out of his cleaning robes. The Malfoys had truly fallen out of favor, their wealth less than a fraction of what it was, what with the endless raids for dark artifacts conducted nearly every other week. But at least they still had their manor, quite unlike some of his friends who were also the children of Death Eaters. Pansy’s family estate had been blown sky-high when some unsuspecting young Auror tripped on a ward that hadn’t yet been dismantled. Greg didn’t even have a home to begin with: the Aurors had deemed his ancestral home too dangerous for the tattered remnants of his family to retain at the end of the war.
Draco walked the halls, stopping by the Time Room, where another such friend, Theodore Nott, also served probation, cleaning up the destroyed Time Turners and that massive sand clock that was once believed to hold the power of all Time. He didn’t know why the Unspeakables, who were supposed to work here, hadn’t cleaned anything up. The skirmishes that occurred here had been in fifth year and no one had bothered with it. Maybe they were still occupied with restoring the destroyed wards around various magical communities in the country. Everyone, it seemed, had put aside the research done in the deepest bowels of the Ministry in favor of enjoying the fresh air and sunshine without the threat of the Dark Lord hanging over them.
Theo, unlike Draco, would only serve three months. He wasn’t a marked Death Eater, after all. But while he hadn’t fought in the war, he had worked hard to smuggle his Death Eater father away from the Aurors after the war ended. Hence, while Theo didn’t have the miserable honor of becoming a full-time Ministry grunt, he was still consigned to this horrible manual labor of sweeping and mopping up the Department of Mysteries along with Draco.
Presently, Theo had abandoned his gloves, mop, and bucket in favor of holding something small and round and golden under the faint light streaming from the hallway.
“Is that…?” Draco didn’t quite dare ask. He and Theo weren’t exactly close—Theo’s family had never been rich or influential enough for Lucius Malfoy’s son to bother giving him the time of day back at Hogwarts—but they weren’t enemies either. And since they started their probation in the Department of Mysteries, they’d reached a certain equanimity that included butting into each other’s work whenever they found something remotely interesting.
Draco found lots of interesting things in the DoM. Lots and lots of things that should not have been left unattended for a pair of disenfranchised teenagers to deal with.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” Theo said, his skinny, spindly fingers fiddling with the knobs and buttons of the little pocket watch he held. “I found it wedged between the destroyed shelves. Have you seen one before, Draco?”
“If I had, I wouldn’t be elbows deep, mucking this place out with you.”
Theo ignored his mutinous mumbling, uninterested as ever in his complaints. Theo did not believe in bemoaning his fate; only in how he could get away from it. “What if this is what helps us get away from this daily drudgery?”
Draco frowned as he huddled close to study the pocket watch. Theo’s eyes were riveted to the little knobs, hand fidgeting as if they had invited his fingers to turn them.
“Theo, I don’t think Time is really the sort of thing you want to mess with.”
Theo frowned back at him. He didn’t look like he wanted to mess with it either, but he couldn’t seem to keep his fingers from fiddling with the knobs and buttons of the little pocket watch. Draco would have left him to his curiosity, but the device suddenly clicked sharply, decisively. As if Theo’s absent fumbling and their combined wistfulness for days long past committed them into a grave and purposeful error.
“Wait, Theo, no—!” Draco grabbed the Time Turner from Theo just as Theo’s blue eyes widened. The dark room shimmered around them, thick magic curling like tendrils of smoke around their skin, mixing and melding with the spells and potions residue swirling around their shabby robes and their magic-restricted wands.
Draco had a moment to think it might not have been his brightest moment grabbing the Time Turner from Theo, not when he reeked of residue magic from the Prophecy Room, but it was too late.
The world spun around them. The last thing Draco remembered was Theo’s horrified scream.
He wasn’t sure what he expected when he next opened his eyes, but it certainly wasn’t the burnished gold cornices of his parents’ bedroom. Draco had not been in his parents’ bedroom since before he started at Hogwarts, a rule enforced, in particular, by his mother, who never failed to remind Lucius that Draco had a whole wing to himself so that he didn’t encroach on space meant exclusively for the lord and lady of the manor.
Draco wasn’t sure why he was there now. Lucius had gone to Azkaban, but Mother had not relaxed her rules around the manor, especially after it had been invaded by the boorish men that the Dark Lord employed as his Death Eaters.
He tried to get up, hoping to sneak out before his mother found him lying on his parents’ marital bed, of all places, but his limbs would not cooperate. At first he thought it had to do with the ridiculously tight cloth swathed all over himself, but then his father’s voice cut through the silence.
“Are you certain this will be enough to protect him, Cissa?”
Draco stilled his flailing at the sound of Lucius’ voice, quiet and deep, not possessed of that gravelly quaver that characterized Lucius after the Dark Lord had broken him out of Azkaban—Draco’s reward for letting the Death Eaters into Hogwarts. How was his father there in the manor? And why did he sound so different? Draco knew that Shacklebolt had done away with the Dementors in Azkaban, but this sounded nothing like the father that Draco remembered. This Lucius sounded… young. Uncertain. Lucius had never sounded anything less than cool and self-assured, not even when they had been disgraced after his failure to retrieve whatever the Dark Lord had sent him to retrieve in Draco’s fifth year.
“It’s a full seven weeks before the end of July, Lucius.” That was mother’s voice, and Draco couldn’t quite believe it either. Mother’s voice was soft and oddly girlish when Narcissa Malfoy had never been anything but stately and regal.
Draco tried to turn his head once more, following the direction of his mother’s voice, but found that in addition to the tight cloth binding him into position, he had terrible control of his body. Something shifted next to him, and he felt a warmth he couldn’t place until a pale hand, smooth and delicate, flicked a lock of his hair from his forehead. His mother’s hand.
“Wasn’t that what Severus said? ‘ Born as the seventh month dies’? ” Narcissa scoffed. Draco had a dim memory of the verse she recited, some fragment from when he’d been cleaning the Prophecy Room. “Surely, now the Dark Lord will turn his eyes from our son?”
A frustrated sigh. The sound of footsteps crossing the room.
Draco tried turning his head in that direction, knowing it was his father there, but when Lucius’ face swam into view, he startled. It was like seeing his own face mirrored back to him. Lucius looked young, barely into his twenties. His long hair—normally neatly tied at his nape—hung loose around his thin, pointy, unlined face. He looked exactly how Draco remembered his reflection as he passed a mirror that morning on his way to the one fireplace that worked as a Floo.
“I hope so, Cissa,” said this strange, young version of his father. “I can’t deny that it would have been much better if he had never been born—not now, not in these times anyway, but…” He sighed again. Draco’s eyes widened as his father’s tender hands cupped his cheeks. “He looks so much like me, Cissa.”
His mother’s face joined his father’s. Like Lucius, Narcissa Malfoy’s face was bereft of the careworn lines that had made their home on her flawless skin during the war. She looked tired, her cheeks pale and wan and her movements listless, but she was young. Nothing of the tired matriarch haunted her clear blue eyes, the woman who wanted nothing more than the survival of her son.
“He’s so tiny, Lucius,” she said. “The smallest miracle. Even if we had to force him out of my body nearly two months before he was due, he will always be our miracle.” The wonder-filled smile that touched her perfectly formed lips was something Draco had never seen before. “He’s the dragon that will fill our dark days ahead with much light and happiness.”
“Draco Lucius,” his father said, and his voice was so soft, so tender, it brought tears to Draco’s eyes. “The Dragon Lightbringer.”
He’d never heard his parents speak of him in such a manner, like he was something to be revered. He knew his parents loved him—adored him even. They had lavished attention and their immense wealth on Draco, ensuring he had an upbringing where he would want for nothing. And yet he had never heard them speak of him so fondly.
He opened his mouth to call out to them, but the only sound that left his mouth was an incomprehensible gurgle. Lucius’ eyes widened in delight. Suddenly, Draco was airborne, plucked from his mother’s side and cradled in his father’s arms.
“My son!”
Draco opened his mouth to protest that he was too old for his father to spin him around in his arms, except all he managed were more gurgles, more noises that meant nothing.
…Wait a minute. Cradled in his father’s arms…?
Draco swiveled his eyes from his father’s pointy chin so he could look down at himself. He was swathed in the softest cotton blankets, but his flailing had loosened the fabric from where it was tucked neatly against him. His left arm, the one bearing the remnants of his Dark Mark, had broken free. He exerted his utmost effort to bring his hand to his face. His limbs, his entire body, refused to cooperate with any order he gave it, but at last he succeeded with a modicum of control as a tiny, pale and chubby little hand slammed down onto his mouth, teeny-tiny little fingers clenched into a fist. His eyes watered, the little nails on his little fingers like razors against his toothless mouth.
And then Draco realized the enormity of the situation he had fallen into.
… Shit.
One thing about being a baby—not just any baby, but one born seven weeks premature—was that it was difficult to keep a handle on his thoughts, to keep his mindsmart and rational in keeping with the eighteen-year-old that actually lived in this frail little blob of fat and soft bones. Draco kept drifting, losing the thread of consciousness and thought from one minute to the next. It was hardly surprising, considering his brain had not reached a level of maturity where he should be able to form conscious thought at all.
And so he could not quite keep track of his own memories or the passage of time, or even, Merlin forbid, the awareness of his own bodily functions that would prevent him from pissing or shitting his own diapers. Small discomforts that he had learned to live with during the Dark Lord’s reign of terror in Malfoy Manor became irritants that took on a life or death urgency. Hunger became something he could not abide by, and he would bawl and wail until his tired and perpetually worried mother shoved his face into her tit—a terrifying endeavor the first time it happened, before he realized he had no sustenance forthcoming if he did not drink his mother’s milk. Even the feel of his bottom sticking into his nappies when he’d pissed too much for the diapers to hold felt like a world-ending crisis.
But the worst indignity was how much his memory and awareness swirled from moment to moment. One moment he was being passed from one smiling face to the next as his father held him over a marble basin and a vicar pronounced his given name, declaring that he would have his cousin Regulus for a godfather and his Aunt Bellatrix for a godmother. The next moment, he was somewhere else entirely, being rocked by a house elf in a miserable tea cosy, Dobby whispering frantically for him to sleep, as his father and mother were hosting the Dark Lord in the parlor.
Once he was with his mother in a house utterly unfamiliar to him as an imperious woman looked down at him in his pram. She smelled of primroses and myrrh, but her hands felt like claws as she traced pale, spindly fingers over his forehead.
“You did well bringing him into the world before his time, Cissa,” the woman proclaimed. “With that miserable swine of a son of mine absconded for Dumbledore’s ilk, and Regulus far too young to marry, Draco will be the first of a new generation to preside over the noble and most ancient House of Black.”
“Do you think it wise that I named Bella his godmother, Auntie?” Narcissa’s voice filled with trepidation even as she strove to be genteel in her manner. “Mother and Father are dead, and I fear the escalating violence will sweep Lucius in, leaving my son and I unprotected.”
“Bella knows better than to betray a child of the House of Black,” the woman scoffed. Clearly, Draco thought before his mental faculties fled him, she did not know her niece was a madwoman who would stop at nothing in service to the Dark Lord. “Besides, he is a child born to our family. The Dark Lord would do well to keep his greedy eyes from the House of Black. He has Orion and Regulus left in his fold. He has no cause to harm your child.”
“But Uncle Alphard—”
“Alphard was an idiot and a half. He died because he would not bend to the Dark Lord’s cause.”
Draco had to wonder what kind of naive fools his mother’s family had been if they believed the Dark Lord would not kill his own people if he stood to gain from their deaths. He knew. He’d heard the outcome of the trials, when Potter recounted how the Dark Lord had his snake kill Professor Snape. He wished he wasn’t some infant sniveling in his pram, that he could warn his parents of the oncoming danger; but as he could control neither his speech nor his bowel movements, there was nothing to be done but suffer in his terrible predicament of being born during the turbulence of the first war.
Another time, he was at home in his father’s study, lying against his father’s chest, caught on the brink of wakefulness and slumber as he listened to Lucius’ calm, steady heartbeat. The roar of the Floo heralded the arrival of the man—boy, really—he’d come to recognize as his cousin, Regulus. The one who had been named his godfather.
“Narcissa is with Bella, Regulus.” Lucius did not move from the indolent posture he had adopted with Draco lying on his chest in his chair in the master study.
“I didn’t come here for Cissy, Lucius,” Regulus replied, his voice high and panicky—a teenage boy fearful for his life. If Draco had the wherewithal to remember his older self more clearly, he would have thought that Regulus Black sounded remarkably like himself in seventh year when Hogwarts had been in the thrall of the Carrows. “I came here for you! You have to know that those gifts the Dark Lord has given us—”
Lucius moved so suddenly that Draco jarred out of his pleasant sleepy state. “Don’t speak of anything!” he hissed. “There are eyes and ears like you would not know in this manor, Regulus. You must take care—”
“Lucius, I barely escaped with my life!” Regulus cried. His voice edged on hysteria, completely at odds with how Draco had seen every other Black he and his mother had visited. “If Kreacher hadn’t pulled me out of there, I would not have survived! The Inferi—”
He cut himself off.Draco imagined he shuddered at whatever horror he had faced.
“And that’s why you must remain silent,” Lucius said. “Never speak of it to me, Regulus. I do not want my family in danger!”
“Oh, like you don’t want it to be known that Draco is one of three children of prophecy?” Regulus’ voice was cutting. “You think inducing Cissy to give birth a month early releases Draco from the prophecy Snape overheard? Open your eyes, Lucius! He’s going to kill your son once he learns that Draco was due not in June but—”
“Silence!” Lucius cried. “Dobby! Take Draco back to his nursery. I fear I must speak of what discretion means to a boy who has clearly forgotten what he learned in Slytherin.”
Draco wanted to pitch a protest; he tried to indicate that he didn’t want to be parted from his father by clinging onto him, determined to learn more from his conversation with Regulus. But Dobby appeared then, milk bottle in his tiny hand, and the smell of elevenses snatched whatever attention Draco had for the conversation. Suddenly, he was all too eager to be whisked away to suckle on sweet, sweet sustenance.
On and on these half-heard, half-remembered conversations went. Draco couldn’t string a thread of any of it into a logical conclusion, because his useless baby’s mind wasn’t capable of more than observing and listening to these snippets of terrified voices. But really, he shouldn’t have wracked his little baby’s brain so much for what it all meant.
After all, in his previous life, he’d been Draco Malfoy, a disgraced former Death Eater who had grown up hearing the legend of the Boy Who Lived.
It all came to a head one fateful night.
Draco knew not the passage of time, only that he was no longer a sniveling babe who couldn’t even control his limbs enough to behold his own fat little fist. Now he could crawl, maybe even walk a little. His father had gifted him with a toy broom that had him terrorizing the house elves when he swept off the porch to chase the albino peacocks that were his father’s pride and joy.
But he was not out in the gardens now. Mother had him tucked in his nursery crib, reading him his favorite bedtime story: The Tale of the Three Brothers. Dobby had been sent away to languish in the kitchens, cleaning up after the massive All Hallows Eve banquet his parents hosted for their Death Eater and sympathizer friends.
Draco had not been trotted out for the guests to simper and coo over. He was never trotted out for anyone save the few members of the Black family who came calling. It filled him with a strange sense of trepidation. He had vague memories of his childhood, his real childhood, when his parents brought him out at every opportunity, delighted for their friends and associates to marvel at the precocious child they brought into the world. It was why Draco had been the undisputed prince of the Slytherin dorms when he started at Hogwarts. Each of his peers, and even the older Slytherins, had been taught from very young that none could match the offspring of a Malfoy and a Black; that Draco was magical royalty, fit to be coddled and told he was the best.
It was why he recoiled so hard when Harry Potter ignored his overtures of friendship. He had never once in his young life been so summarily rejected.
Now, in this strange new life where he was forced to relive his childhood, he wondered why his parents did not see fit to brag to the world at large that their child was the pinnacle of magic, the culmination of the two purest bloodlines in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. He wondered if it had anything to do with the strange conversations he’d overheard between his mother and her aunt; between his father and Regulus Black, a man Draco had not even known was his godfather.
There were too many unusual coincidences, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether any of this had happened in his real childhood. Whether any of this held any meaning.
He was about to get answers, ones he did not like.
Something odd happened that had his mother’s voice fading into a thready nothingness. The air in his nursery seemed to shimmer, the world grinding to a halt, like the collective breath of wizardkind hitched, stuck in one suspended moment of anticipation.
“Lucius?” his mother called through the open door of the nursery. “The wards…”
His father appeared in the doorway, his long hair unusually disheveled. There were shadows in his young face, his cool eyes hooded and dark with foreboding.
“He is here, Cissa! Quickly! Take Draco away to your parents, to your cousins… It matters not! I will speak to the Dark Lord alone.”
She did not comply. One did not simply order a Black about, especially a Black woman of Narcissa Malfoy’s character.
“How did he know, Lucius? Did you—”
His father grabbed his mother by the shoulders, shoving her in the direction of Draco’s crib. “I didn’t! Draco is my son, too, Cissa! I would never… it’s your sister! It must be! She’s the one constantly sniffing after the Dark Lord’s hem–”
“Leave Bella out of this, Lucius.” Narcissa’s voice was dangerous even as it filled with trepidation.
The wards gave a mournful wail around them as foreign magic strove to overwhelm them.
“It doesn’t matter who betrayed us, Cissa! If he is here now, if what your cousin says is true… you must get Draco to safety! I can reason with the Dark Lord! I can—”
“You are not Bellatrix, Lucius,” his mother argued, though she plucked Draco out of his nest of blankets and held him tightly to her breast. “He will not listen to you no matter how much you plead and beg! Please! Come away with us! We can leave for Grandfather’s estate! Arcturus will protect us there—”
“Arcturus is Marked too!” Lucius cried, his voice rising in frustration. “Do not presume anywhere is safe for us. We have deceived him, Cissa! We knew he was looking for the children of the prophecy and we sought to hide our own child from him! Please do not be stubborn! The wards at the main door will only hold for so long and I—”
“Lucius.”
Draco recognized the timber of the Dark Lord’s voice, though it sounded different—the Dark Lord Draco had witnessed in his previous life had been resurrected with Potter’s blood and whatever else had gone into that putrid potion that had wrought his horrifying snake-like body. And while the Dark Lord’s tone was measured and calm, even Draco, with his baby’s ears and half-addled brain, recognized the displeasure that coated that deep, commanding voice.
His footsteps seemed to echo in the hushed corridors of the manor. He was no longer at the front door, but inside the house. Draco knew it was but a matter of time before he showed up at the nursery.
He was not wrong.
His father stumbled backwards into the room. A tall, dark, and imposing figure glided in after him.
Draco had not known what the Dark Lord looked like before Potter had first vanquished him as a child. He knew very little of the Dark Lord’s life during the first war, only that he had been a wizard in his prime, quite a charming one, his features only faintly distorted by the breadth of his experience with the Dark Arts.
The man that entered the nursery now was all of that. He was taller than Lucius, broader and more imposing, his dark hair curled into a neat coif over timeless patrician features. But there was something odd, something terrifying about his cold handsomeness, as if his features had been burned or melted with acid, despite the smoothness of his skin. His fine black robes hung on muscular shoulders, nothing like the skeletal form Draco remembered. He was a dark god swooping down to wreak havoc in this quiescent world Draco had fallen into, and his pale hand gripping his wand told Draco there would be hell to pay for whatever infraction his parents had committed against this fallen god.
“Lucius, Lucius,” the Dark Lord tutted, striding towards Draco’s father, who scrambled backwards and nearly collided with his wife and child. “I had not expected you would hide your offspring from me. Imagine, I had to hear from someone else that your wife had birthed such a wonder into our world.” He reached a hand out, beckoning the frantic couple to present Draco to him.
Narcissa did not move save to tighten her arms almost painfully around Draco. Lucius was frozen in his fear. That was nothing new.
“My lord, we would have,” Narcissa said. As Draco gazed up at his mother’s face, he saw the fearlessness that only a woman of the House of Black would bear against the Dark Lord. She did not avert her eyes. She did not cower. “You were… preoccupied. We thought it beyond your interest to coo over a mere child when your grand plans encompass so much more of our world.”
“Ah, but that’s where you are wrong, Narcissa.” A dark amusement tinged the terrifying tone of the Dark Lord’s voice. “How could I not be pleased when a child is born to one of my greatest lieutenants? Surely, you would not have deprived me of the chance to congratulate you in your joy? But alas, it seems my felicitations have come over a year too late.”
Lucius found his voice as he shoved his wife behind him. “My lord, Draco is not the same as the Potter and Longbottom children. He was born in June—”
“You disappoint me, Lucius,” the Dark Lord interrupted. “I thought you, of all among your brethren, would be cannier than to attempt to circumvent a prophecy. Or did you think I would not discover that your wife was due at the end of July? That you had her birth prematurely? Worry not—the other children are being dealt with as we speak. But the child in your wife’s arms belongs to me.”
“My lord, Draco is not—!”
“Silence!”
The world of Malfoy Manor hushed at the command in the Dark Lord’s voice. Draco could see his father, unbearably tense in the effort not to quake in his boots.
“You test my patience, Lucius. Even now, you withhold your child from me, when you have pledged your magic and your blood to me.”
“I did not pledge my flesh, my lord.” Lucius sounded almost sullen in his declaration. “Please, Draco fits none of the words Snape has reported—”
The Dark Lord laughed. Draco thought that sibilant laughter would haunt his nightmares for years to come.
“Do not treat me like your foolish peers, Lucius! The dragon light-bringer! These are the words of the prophecy! Do you not see how stupidly you have fallen into its trap, in your hubris to maintain your unctuous family traditions? Hand the child to me now, and you and your wife will be spared.”
Narcissa’s hand darted to the sleeve of Lucius' robe. “No, please, Lucius! He’s your son!”
“My lord, I—I cannot—”
The way the Dark Lord uttered that fateful spell was almost bored. Lazy. But the flash of green light from his wand would haunt Draco forever.
“ Avada kedavra .”
Lucius was dead before he hit the ground. Narcissa shuddered as she watched her husband fall, her arms convulsive, painful around the rolls of baby fat on Draco’s little body.
“You killed him,” she said, and the disbelief in her breath was palpable. The air shimmered once more, Narcissa invoking the dark, powerful magic of the Black blood that ran in her veins. “You killed him when you were the one to give him to me.”
“I gave him to you, Narcissa, and I can take him away. Hand over the child now.”
Narcissa’s fingers were talons around Draco’s body, her nails digging into the fabric of his clothes. “He is mine! You can’t take him! He is mine! My flesh! My blood! You cannot—”
“Do not be foolish, child,” the Dark Lord interrupted impatiently, his wand trained on Draco’s mother. “That child is no more yours than was your foolish husband. You have him because I allowed you to have him. Now hand the boy to me and I will spare your life.”
“You will touch Draco over my dead body!” Narcissa shrieked. She had no wand; it sat on the bedside table next to Draco’s crib. But a Black needed no wand to call upon her magic, and here she called on the blood of her ancestors flowing in her veins, flowing in Draco’s veins. “You foolish, insipid man! You think because my family bows and kisses your robes that you have cowed us? I am a Black and a Black cowers before no one!”
The next words she uttered were unfamiliar to Draco. They were not Latin, not English, not French or any of the languages of magic he’d learned at Hogwarts or at his parents' knees. But it was magic, magic older than time itself, magic beyond the telling, blood and flesh and that quintessence that made a witch more than a mortal vessel for the eldritch powers that lurked in a Black’s veins.
The Dark Lord did not understand her either, for his hand firmed on his wand as he cast a dark Severing Curse. It ripped across Narcissa’s back as she turned away from the spell, screaming in agony as she fell.
Draco wailed as he was crushed under his dying mother’s body. He struggled futilely to dislodge himself from her grasp. But her hand only tightened convulsively as she gripped his chubby arm, her blue eyes wild from unending pain as the Dark Lord cast the Severing Curse once more.
“You are mine, Draco,” she whispered. Her cracked voice dripped malice and possession and the madness that belonged only to a Black of the bluest blood. Draco could feel her blood spattering his face, staining his clothes, bathing him in sanguine warmth. “You are mine and your father’s. Remember that.”
And then she was gone, the Dark Lord’s booted foot kicking her body aside.
Draco stared back at the man. Now he understood his fate. Now he knew what magic had wrought when he grabbed that malfunctioning Time Turner from Theo’s grasp. Now he knew the fate that had not befallen him in his previous life, his original life. The spell residue of those ruined prophecies, the magic of Merryrot’s Potion of Never-Been tainting his skin… his vague desire to live the life that Potter enjoyed…
It was not a life at all now that Potter’s fate turned upon him.
“Die, child.” Lord Voldemort cast the spell that would snuff out Draco’s miserable existence: “ Avada kedavra. ”
The burst of green flashed like lightning before his eyes. The smell of ozone, a telltale sign of dark magic, filled the air, waging a cloying war against the residue of Narcissa Malfoy’s magic. Slamming a battering ram against Draco’s own innate power, he struggled in a futile fight against the one spell that he could never hope to block.
His eyes drifted shut. He could not even bring himself to scream in terror.
And yet someone, somewhere far away, screamed all the same, a cry of impotent rage as the powder keg of magic exploded in the Malfoy Manor nursery.
And then there was nothing.