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“What are you doing here?” a stern, enraged voice echoed behind him. A girl. A furious girl with pure venom in her voice; so ill-fitting to the underlying sweetness of her typical tone.
Draco flinched as if he was being hit by a nasty curse and stepped away guiltily from the tombstone he was standing in front of.
***
The war was a devastating affair; a curse that took away lives, permanently scarred consciences, tore souls apart, and haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives.
No matter which side they were on.
To Draco, war was an eye-opening affair. For the entirety of his life, he believed the doctrines issued from the Dark Lord and his followers— his parents among them. Purebloods were superior to the rest of the magical people, his environment always told him. Having unadulterated blood was a sign of magical prowess, a fact that explained why magical people always strived to achieve it. Halfbloods were inferior, and Muggle-borns were just Mother Nature’s mistake, an anomaly that served as an example of why they didn’t actually belong in the wizarding society. The Malfoys, true to their heritage, never failed to make it known that they were better than everyone else, and their sole heir was no exception.
Of course, this was nothing but an illusion. Draco had to attend school and deal with all sorts of magical people. No matter how much he tried to deny it, he had to admit that some of his Pureblood peers weren’t necessarily skilled wizards–Crabbe and Goyle being prime examples of that–while people he always thought of as lesser, like that Granger Mudblood, excelled in almost everything and made him question just about everything.
(Sometimes, all he ever wanted was to pick the Mudblood’s brains, to know how she could be so good since she was a lesser witch, but he would never be allowed to stoop so low…)
Then, the Dark Lord returned in his full capacity, Draco’s parents swore their allegiance to him once again, and the boy was stripped of his innocence a bit too soon.
He would wonder about it later: did he really want to take the Dark Mark? Did he really want to be branded as a Death Eater? It probably wasn’t a conscious decision, but rather a decision based on his need to satisfy his parents. It was about keeping them safe as the insanity of the Dark Lord started manifesting so intensely, that even the most loyal of his followers began to be afraid of him.
By the time he started questioning the Dark Lord and his whole ideology, it was too late. Draco was already deep in the web of Voldemort, a prey that was almost willing to be sacrificed for the safety of his parents; a hostage that had to pretend enjoying his captivity, a murderer in the making. Then the actual war came, wreaking havoc and devastation. So much blood was spilled. So many important people were irrevocably lost and, while Draco survived this physically unharmed, his soul was damaged beyond repair. His parents went on trial with the rest of the Death Eaters, served their time in Azkaban, and Draco was only spared thanks to Snape’s memories saving him even from his grave.
That was how Draco’s rest of life started: with him unwilling to return to Hogwarts and face the scorn of his peers, despite Headmistress McGonagall’s insistence that he return to finish his education. For a long while, he remained secluded in his manor with his memories, not wanting to face the world again, until he was pulled out of his self-imposed jail by Hermione fucking Granger, of all people.
“Make amends with the world, if you really feel sorry about your role in the war,” she wrote to Draco, probably because she was informed by McGonagall that he wasn't going back to Hogwarts. “Ask for forgiveness, from both the dead and the living, then start your life on a clean slate.”
And Draco hated to admit it, but The Brightest Witch of Her Age was actually right. That was how he started visiting graves, almost half a year after the war: even though the dead couldn’t hear him (or so he believed), some apology was in order for his role in their deaths. The first grave Draco paid his respects to was, of course, Snape’s, and the most painful one to visit, as Draco saw a paternal figure in the stern, misunderstood man. Then, it was Dumbledore, whose murder weighed heavily on Draco’s conscience, even though he didn’t commit it in the end. Then, it was his cousin Tonks and Professor Lupin, the double tragedy of their demise not being lost on him. Tonks, after all, was family—a family member his narrow-minded parents refused to acknowledge, but a family member nonetheless. After Draco paid his respects and issued his—unneeded, for the dead cannot offer comfort and absolution—apologies, he went to the next grave.
Fred Weasley’s grave.
In another life, under different circumstances, Draco would have tried to befriend the Weasleys. The Weasleys were Purebloods as well, even though they were ridiculously poor, Gryffindor to the bone and adored everything Muggle. His family had a long-standing disdain for the Weasleys and everything they represented, but if he had to be honest, Draco admired the Weasley twins for their ingenuity and the gall they had to walk this earth with pride, without allowing their economic status to drag them down. As a young student, same as everyone else, Draco looked up to the famous tricksters. As a loyal Slytherin though, he could never express those sentiments aloud.
(Merlin, Draco couldn’t do something as simple as go into the twins’ shop and buy all the whimsical things his childish heart craved. He had riches, fame, and social status, but he never had something as simple as the leisure to just go and be silly, for once. To have fun by using one of the fascinating Weasley prank products and share a laugh or two with his peers.)
The twins were one of the worst tragedies of the war, Draco thought. Two halves of a soul irrevocably split up from death. A young man that would forever stay young, and another man that would grow old lacking an ear and half of his soul. So, he went to the grave when he was sure people wouldn’t see him around, and what was supposed to be a single visit, turned out to be a recurring phenomenon.
***
“I asked you something. What are you doing here?” the girl asked again, and Draco turned around to face a vaguely familiar form. A girl with black, braided hair. She was tall and imposing, and her arms were crossed in front of her cloak-covered chest.
Draco’s mind helpfully supplied an image of the same girl, dressed in the Gryffindor Quidditch uniform and arguing with the captain of both her and Draco’s teams on different occasions. He couldn’t reconcile that image with the image of the woman that stood before him now, looking haggard and haunted.
After a moment of silence, Draco remembered her name: Angelina Johnson.
He considered not answering her. He considered turning to leave without a word. But she wouldn’t have it.
“Haven’t you done enough, traitor? Fred is already dead, so what more do you want? Did you come to gloat for what your people did to him?” she cried out, her voice distinctly marred by a deep, unyielding grief. Draco looked at her in shock as she started crying, unable to keep her emotions at bay.
Typical Gryffindor.
Her words, though…How many times had he heard the same? The few times Draco dared to go out in public after the war, he’d heard the same words behind his back. Most people wouldn’t utter them out loud to him, but he knew they all wanted to throw their scorn for him in his face.
Honestly, he understood their sentiment perfectly.
“I came to apologise, Johnson, okay?” he said quietly, feeling the weight of his conscience pressing on his chest like lead. “There’s no need to tell me all those things, I’ll just go quietly—”
But at that moment, Draco noticed that Angelina was barely able to stand on her feet. She was swaying a bit, and she had to hold onto the tombstone for support. Unconsciously, he stepped forward to lend a hand—spawn of Death Eaters regardless, he was still a man that was taught good manners—and the very moment he held onto her arm, he realised something odd.
The young woman was making heavy use of concealment charms.
“Johnson, what—” he started saying, but his words died on his lips when the young woman undid the concealment charms and Draco realised that she was, in fact, heavily pregnant.
“Your people killed my best friend. My teammate, my favourite person. My lover,” she said, and her voice cracked slightly. “Fred–Fred was such a kind, valiant man.”
During another stage of his life, Draco would have found something acidic to answer with. He would have actively tried to hurt Angelina, to prove that no one can talk a Malfoy down. But now, he stayed silent, listening to the woman’s accusing words, steadily turning into a quieter lament. He stayed there, looking at her altered body, so different from the lithe, athletic form he remembered from the matches they played against, not daring to contradict her, thinking about how much he deserved that.
Then, his thoughts turned to another baby that wouldn’t know a mother or a father; his nephew, Teddy, and he felt something cold clutching tightly at his heart in the thought. There would be a whole generation of children who would grow up without parents…and partially, he felt it was his fault, too. Maybe the blood of those people wasn’t actually on him, but it really felt like it some days.
“I’m sorry…” is all Draco managed to say, biting down the arrogance he once held, and he saw Angelica’s temper immediately deflate. He remembered that temper from the Quidditch field: She was always the first to jump into the fray, alongside the twins. He had seen her defend her teammates, but also defend the female players of the opposing teams as well. She looked scary to Draco when he was in his first year as a player—not that he would ever admit it out loud—but her quick temper seemed to leave her just as quickly.
“I know you didn’t kill him, and I shouldn’t pin this on you, Malfoy,” she then said, her hand reaching out to cradle her abdomen in a protective gesture as if she was afraid to let her body uncovered in the presence of the youngest Malfoy. “We all saw Professor Snape’s memories after he died, we heard about you through them.”
At the mention of Snape, another wave of guilt, another pang of grief clutched at Draco’s heart. “Yes, I know,” he croaked. “He truly tried to save my soul, not that he succeeded much in it.”
“You know, it could have been worse,” she said, and Draco momentarily both admired and hated that Gryffindor optimism, so ill-fitting when the woman was standing over her lover’s grave, cradling Fred’s—yet unborn—baby. How could she say those words? How could she retain even a modicum of optimism?
“If there’s one thing Fred taught me,” she said quietly as if sensing the unuttered thoughts Draco had. “is that we have to find that little ray of sunshine that’s left in our lives and make something out of it.”
“But…Is there really any sunshine?” Draco asked, looking at the tombstone. “Weasley is gone, along with so many people, so why do you take those words at face value?”
She only shrugged, and her hands cradled more protectively at her growing belly. “He’s gone, yes, but at least he stood strong until the end. And after all, I owe it to him to keep on living and make sure this little man in here knows his father was a really great man.”
***
What Draco thought would be a one-time incident actually carried on several times. He didn’t expect to return to Fred Weasley’s grave; yet, he did. He visited again, and during one of those visits, he saw Angelina again.
This time, she didn’t show aggression towards him. On the contrary, they both stood silent at the grave, each lost in their own thoughts until Draco broke the silence.
“I actually didn’t hate the Weasleys, you know,” he confessed, and he could almost see his father sneering at him. “In retrospect, they weren’t so awful. Especially Fred and George. Does George still run the shop?”
Angelica sighed. “For the first months, he considered closing the shop for good. He couldn’t handle this wild grief he felt,” she said, shaking her head as if she was trying to make all the awful thoughts go away. “But now he decided it would be disrespectful to Fred’s memory if he stopped running the shop they created together, thank Merlin.”
They exchanged a few more words, mostly about Draco’s old classmates. Angelina filled him in on everyone’s lives, and before Draco got ready to finish this particular visit, she stopped him.
“It’s good to hang out with the fallen, Malfoy, but I think it’s time for you to consider things more practically. See what you can do for the living,” she said, and Draco couldn’t resist the quip.
“Were you always so wise, Johnson?”
“I was a friend to both the twins, I had to be wise,” she only said in response.
***
Draco visited the grave a few more times, mostly because it somehow felt comforting. It brought him less sorrow than visiting Snape’s or Tonks’s grave. He didn’t meet the young woman again, but an idea started forming in him after the things she told him: See what you can do for those still living.
Thanks to Snape’s tutelage, he had an affinity for potion-making, so he decided to do something with that particular skill. He had noticed Angelina’s fatigue: a common occurrence in women towards the end of their pregnancy. The Malfoy family library had some impressive tomes on the subject, so he used them and made a potion to grant Angelina more energy: one that wasn’t dangerous for consumption during pregnancy. He labeled the vial with all the ingredients he used so she could cross-test it, and then he warded it against tampering. He attached a note to it, explaining in detail what it was and how it could help her, and left it concealed in Weasley’s grave, so she could take it during her next visit.
He didn’t imagine that it would be received with gratitude; however, the next time Draco went to the grave, he saw that the vial was missing. Another visit later, and there was a small package waiting for him there, with the Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes logo printed on it. Inside, he found a few Patented Daydream Charms, along with a little handwritten note.
This was the essence of Fred Weasley: He always gave us reasons to dream.
Thank you for the vial, it helped me a lot. Now you can extend this part of you to the world.
—A. Johnson
***
Draco met Angelina Johnson again almost a decade later. She was now called Angelina Weasley, nee Johnson, and she was wife to George Weasley. She seemed to be doing well, Draco noticed upon seeing her; she was hugging a little girl who looked a lot like her, while an older boy, who looked very much like Weasley, was talking animatedly with George.
Draco had taken the woman’s words into account. After a while, he decided to follow Snape’s legacy and became a potioneer that worked exclusively for St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Despite all the guilt that still ate at him, he had found his own way of redeeming himself. Then, unexpectedly for someone like him, he found love, married, and made a family of his own. And this day, he was ushering his own young son into the shop to buy a Pygmy Puff for the boy, as well as a few boxes of Patented Daydream Charms for himself. Essentially, Draco was offering to his own child something his father never gave to him: the innocent joy this store held.
Angelina and Draco looked at each other over the counter of the store. They smiled at each other, nodded, and then Draco left his Patented Daydream Charm boxes on the counter to be packaged.
“Did you find what you were looking for, Malfoy?” she asked, and Draco realised that she wasn’t asking about the products he was about to buy.
“I did, thank you,” he only said in confirmation.
But it was more than enough.