Work Text:
Draco found the memories in the Room of Requirement, resting conveniently beside a pensieve that hadn’t been used for decades. Within them, he found a boy, hardly older than himself, lost and falling down a path that too many had followed since.
The mess in his office some years later reflected the fractured nature of the memories – scenes that played out one after the other with no real rhyme or reason, all of them depicting Tom Riddle the way he’d once been. And the more Draco watched, the deeper into madness he fell, unable to look away from quiet breakfasts in the Great Hall and lonesome walks through the forest. Draco alternated between flipping through coffee stained notebooks and stepping over broken potion bottles as he dove into the pensieve again, searching for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Tom walked through the snow at dusk, his breath floating through the air with the snow and his hands shoved in his pockets. The green and silver scarf around his neck was tied as tight as the noose closing around Draco’s heart.
He loved this boy. This boy with a sense of humor which had died long before Draco met him as something else, whose nose was red from the cold, his green eyes begging for someone to rescue him from himself. And as they stepped further into the forest, Draco watched as Tom paused to lay his bare palm flat against a snowdrift, holding it there long after his hand had stopped shaking. When he lifted it again, a blue-grey orb hovered just above his nearly frost-bitten hand.
Slow is the quicksand/ Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand
Draco knew the prophecy well. The sister to that long-lost orb sat square in the middle of his desk in his office, conveniently waiting to be found long after the Dark Lord had fallen.
Statues crumble if they’re made to wait/ You’ve sealed your fate
A twig snapped somewhere in the distance – a deer having grown curious of Tom’s slow progression through the woods. And as Tom turned to face the sound, to face Draco, the air around him became as violent as the worst kind of snowstorm. The memory was over; and as Tom reached out his hand, Draco screamed his name, trying to throw himself closer to Tom as if that might make the memory last a little longer. For a moment, Tom cocked his head to the side as if he might have heard him.
But Draco came-to sprawled across the floor of his office, the pensieve and the memory within it looming above him like the worst kind of master.
Closer. He was getting closer.
Draco pulled himself to his feet and turned back to his desk, reaching first for a leather bound diary with a hole stabbed through the middle. Beside it rested the others: a cup smashed in half, a diadem missing most of its crystals, a locket that had taken him far too long to find, and a ring whose gemstone had cracked square down the middle. A snake’s head, preserved in a jar, watched on from the bookshelf across the room. And a vial of Potter’s blood sat beside the jar, taunting him.
“Take it,” the Savior had mocked him on his last day at the Ministry. “And best of luck to you.”
He’d only handed it over because he knew Draco’s efforts would be in vain. The slight tension in his mouth, the furrow of his brows – he’d thought Draco had gone mad, refusing the few galleons Draco had left in an act of friendship that had no hope of bringing back the man Draco loved.
No. Not just the man Draco loved – the other half of his soul, whom he’d so carelessly led to a fate worse than death because he’d been too blind to realize it could all have been stopped if only he hadn’t crumbled beneath the pressure.
Draco’s fingers shook as he reached for a beaten and bruised book whose title had long faded from use. He went to his work station, throwing open cabinets and searching for ingredients he hadn’t yet tried, encouraged by the memory of Longbottom’s smile that hadn’t met his eyes the day he dropped them off.
“It’ll be okay,” he’d said, taking the sickles from Draco’s calloused palm.
As Draco lit the fire beneath his cauldron and thought of the unmarked grave in his backyard, he needed it to be true.
Some called it a curse. Others called it delusion. But Draco didn’t care what words they used to describe the loss of his other half. He simply needed this to work – he needed to change the prophecy.