Chapter Text
"Your mouth floats above my bed at night,
My own private moon."
When the War had run its course, 17-year-old Draco Malfoy came to know that he had never understood Death at all. For one, he had not comprehended the gaping pit Death left in its wake until he lost someone to it himself. He was furthermore wholly ignorant of the piece of you it cleaved away, once you took a life for the first time. But most of all, it wasn't until the War was over, until they had lost, until he had lost everything, that he learned that that Death was not, by far, the worst fate one could have.
Not until he had died inside a hundred, a thousand times over, had wished for death every making moment, and yet found himself alive in his own body, did he realize Death was, in fact, a Mercy.
He did know one thing, however. And that was that no mercy awaited a sinner like him.
6 Years Later -
Harry was just about to pour the dosage of lemongrass into the cauldron when he felt the Wards give out a shriek.
It wasn't an actual shriek, of course. He had initially spelled his wards to give out real bird sounds when they sensed an intruder, back when he was still getting the hang of Warding spells on this estate, but the sound drew unwanted attention. It was hard to explain to the gaggle of nosy Muggle villagers who lived at the base of the valley why they kept hearing the call of a peacock, nestled as they were out here in the Scottish Highlands. Now, thankfully, he was proficient enough to attune his magic, depleted as it was, to the Wards, so they could communicate directly to his mind whenever they sensed something unusual.
They had sensed something unusual just about now.
Sighing to himself in disappointment - he was close to finishing the first phase in decocting a batch of Ventulus Potion for the greenhouse - he gently put aside the vial he was holding, and rubbed his hands with a towel cloth. The room was slightly chilly, thanks to his having forgotten to close the windows again, and weak gray daylight filtered in. It was somehow always cloudy here, which was fine by him. It reminded him of England.
Putting on his overcoat from the coat hanger in the vestibule, he slipped into his outdoor slippers - he liked them over shoes, no matter how much Ron had laughed at them the last time he had visited - and opened the door to head outside. He felt his wand in the coat pocket, although from the disturbance, it had not been a real threat. Perhaps Ron's owl had somehow crashed into one of the big Birches near the hilltop. It would not be the first time. Nevertheless, he kept his wits about him, easing down the front steps and walking around the cottage.
This house was located on a bit of flat land right near the top of one of the high hills here, which meant that all around it were dangerous slopes covered in coniferous shrubbery. Or rather, it had been, before Harry had slowly but surely chipped away at most of it to plant his herbs. The Wards ran around a large perimeter circling the cottage, covering much of the mountain all the way to its snowy peak. And it was from the peak, strangely, that the disturbance call had come.
Harry tensed, his hand around the wand tightening. No owls flew that high, and the only owls he received were the monthly ones from Ron and Hermione anyway. No, this was not a normal disturbance.
Wishing he had instead worn his shoes now, he spelled a quick adjungio on his feet before beginning the short climb. The spell gave increased grip to his feet, and had saved his life a couple of times back when he had first moved here. Wand in hand, he gradually drew closer to the location. Just what kind of intruder was it?
There, just ahead, he could see a sort of fissure in the snow, as if something had crashed into it. But this was right at the hilltop, and even though spring was near, the entire area was bathed in white.
Fluctio, he silently cast, sending out a spell that checked for any other enchantments present. There was nothing. Perhaps it really was an animal. He was now at the very edge of the depression, and bracing himself, he peered in.
And stopped. Looked again.
A man was lying there, his body bent at an unnatural angle. Which would have alarmed Harry first, had it not been for a more pressing fact: the man was naked, face down so Harry could only see his pale back, which was lined with lacerations. The cuts seemed to have been new, because a bit of snow around him was already stained red with blood.
Blood.
Realizing the man was gravely injured spurred him into action, and with a flick of his wand, he gently levitated his body back out of the pit. For some reason, he saw that as the snow fell away from the body when it gradually lifted, the head remained covered in it.
No, the man’s hair was as white as the snow itself.
This seemed to stir a certain recollection in him, but it was faint, and the situation was terrible enough that it could wait. He had not interacted with another human for so long, had gotten used to his solitude, really, and now there was a corpse right outside his house.
Putting the body down to the ground, a cautious distance between them, he carefully stepped closer, looking at the man with more care. Yes, it was a man alright, if the broad built of the back hadn’t made it clear. His back was crisscrossed with a myriad variety of bruises and cuts, some healed, some bleeding, and most of which - he now smelled the putrid stench - had festered and rotted. His gaze swept from the shoulder blades, one of which was torn open - Merlin, he could see the bone jutting out - lower towards the spine, its outline visible through the skin, bloodied and battered, and further down towards the back of his waist. And there was also…there was more blood, a bit lower, flowing towards his weirdly positioned legs, and Harry could tell, even as he averted his eyes immediately, that that blood was not from a wound like the others.
Forcing down the sick feeling in his throat, he looked around once more to check the surroundings.
He must have collided with the mountain at a high speed, the impact hurtling him deep into the ice cover. And yet, he noticed with a jolt, yet, there was the slightest of motions in the body. Harry watched, awed, that the man was somehow still breathing. Whoever this was had really, really wanted to live if he was still alive. He bent down, brushing away the snow from the man’s head, even as a vague pounding was building in his ears.
He gently cradled the man’s head, careful not to exacerbate any other wounds - he was sure these weren’t the only ones- and brushed away the strands of silver hair from the face.
The pounding had developed into a full headache now, and he could feel his body getting flushed and hot. As if in anticipation. In terror.
And yes, now he could see this man clearly, near lifeless yet somehow laboriously breathing.
Broken. Unnaturally bent. Bleeding. Breathing.
Draco Malfoy had crashed through his wards.
Something exciting was happening at the House.
Pigwidgeon the owl had come racing through the forest after the annoying raven had told him about the new guest at the House. The raven had said that Master had a new friend now, so Master wouldn’t require Pigwidgeon anymore.
What nonsense!
The raven was very rude, all these forest animals were; they just didn’t understand the important duties an owl had to fulfil! He couldn't spend all his day amongst the branches finding bugs like them - no Pigwidgeon had stuff to do, such as twittering about in Master’s laboratory, banging his beak against the kitchen window for food (Master often forgot to feed him on time if he was working), cleaning out all the pesty worms from Master’s gardens. One time, Master even asked him to bring a certain bushel of berries from the forest, for his work! He had been so excited, he had eaten half of them on his way. Master had given a weird smile then, and did not ask him to bring any more stuff for some reason. Why, he had even - as he had haughtily told all the other birds once last winter - he had even delivered letters upon a time!
This had elicited a squawk even from the barmy old magpie who lived in one of the big birch trees, and generally ignored the other birds. After that, the other owls had started including him in their daily flights, which was nice, because otherwise the strong winds at their new home would sometimes carry his small body with them.
He dearly missed the castle, but at least this place was better than the big city. Ugh! In any case, he had been Master’s only friend for a while. Master had become very quiet in the past few years, he had, and apart from Master’s two nice friends, who last came to visit months ago, no one else bothered them at this new house. Master spent all his time in the big room brewing potions, or reading books in the garden, or tending to his plants, and he so rarely even wrote letters that Pigwidgeon had quite forgotten a lot of the addresses. Sometimes he even talked to Pigwidgeon when he seemed a bit sad, but Pigwidgeon was only an owl, after all, so it was not like he could understand. But he loved to twitter back just the same, and fly round and round over his head. That always made Master smile!
But now, a friend had come! One day, the noisy raven told Pigwidgeon he had seen Master carrying a man inside the house! And the man was naked! Pigwidgeon did not really understand what that word meant, but judging by the sound of it, it was something big. So he had flown to the house to see, landing on the upper bedroom’s window, and yes, indeed! There was a strange man there. Only he had looked very sick to Pigwidgeon. His Master looked much healthier in comparison, he had thought proudly.
Ever since then, Master had become even busier. He woke up early, made food for the man, fed him, and then he would strangely draw the blinds and close the windows, which mightily offended Pigwidgeon. Hmmph! But afterwards, the man would always look a bit cleaner, so he figured Master was cleaning him. He had no idea how humans cleaned themselves.
Then Master would retreat downstairs and begin brewing this and that. He seemed extremely motivated and would not even stop to eat. Which meant Pigwidgeon did not get to eat either, and then he would noisily beat the kitchen sill until Master remembered. This went day after day, until a whole week had passed, and yet the man did not wake up once! Pigwidgeon wondered how someone could sleep so much.
The following days passed in such a haze that Harry himself could not recall why or when he had decided to do whatever he was doing.
He had done everything right. Gone back to Hogwarts to graduate, studied to become an Auror, actually became one, and then hated it. The idea of being involved in that world, witnessing more dark magic and pain and death - no, he’d found he could not stomach it.
And so he had left everything behind. Packed his bags and left, moved to this house in the middle of nowhere. He’d had enough money in Gringotts to buy it, an old house that no one wanted anyway, and on the very first day back, he had spent the whole day, and night, digging patches in what would become his garden, until he retched all over the turned soil.
He had seen so much of it - so much of death and loss and grief, and now even the thought of using magic like that sickened him. And so the World also forgot Harry Potter, moved on from him. He built wards, layer after layer, spell after spell, barring everyone who was not a native dweller away. The outer ones stretched for kilometres in every direction now, guarding, repelling, enclosing, sealing. The Muggles did not know, of course, of the protection they had been given, why the vegetation grew better, why their livestock lived longer, even as the world around them fell apart. They saw the news, the unexplained killings. Nothing was safer than the Highlands, muttered everyone.
Harry had heard none of it.
He had convinced Ron and Hermione to stay back in London, to stay for the careers that they had worked hard for - and slowly they had risen so much in rank that visiting him had become difficult for them. They wrote to him regularly, telling him about their lives in London - their owl was the only one allowed to pass through the wards - and he never told them that since their last visit, he had sealed the wards even further.
He had heard some vague mutterings of new political disturbances a while after he had moved, now years ago, of another War brewing, of strange occurrences, and yet he had realised that he did not care. Perhaps it had already begun, a darker shade of magic threatening to swallow up all of them. The Harry Potter the world knew, the Hero, the Boy-Who-Lived, he had died that day during the battle of Hogwarts. And now he was done with it all. He had left the past behind. He had earned it.
And now Draco Malfoy had turned up at his estate. And he was…he had been...
Harry had not seen him since the War, since the Trial where he had testified for him and let him go. He had worked so hard to leave it all behind.
But perhaps there was a cost to him turning a blind eye, closing himself off to the world, because nothing he knew, nothing he remembered, could explain what had caused this.
He brought Malfoy back to the manor, wrapped in a quilt he had summoned up there. It was all he could do to place him on the empty table in his kitchen before he ran to the toilet and vomited up his breakfast. Those wounds…the rotting flesh….
His healer mind - the default mode under which it functioned now - moved his body on its own, as he prepared an antiseptic potion. He had nowhere to treat a person - the most he did was create draughts he sometimes sent to Hermione or sold to the nearby villagers, so the table had to do. Malfoy was still laboriously breathing, and Harry hurriedly closed all the windows, swearing under his breath. He lit the teak and pine incense in the corner, and dipping the washcloth in the potion, moved closer to the table. In the background, three other cauldrons boiled over the fire while stirring themselves, and he enchanted the tabletop to take the texture of a bed.
And now….he moved closer to Malfoy, eyes once again going to that face, which looked tortured even in sleep. Thousands of memories came flooding back…their duels, their arguments, how he would call Hermione a Mudblood, report Hagrid and get him in trouble, mock his parents’ deaths…what he had done in sixth year, the Vanishing cupboard…Narcissa…Bellatrix….Dobby…. The weight of the past Harry thought he had left behind hit him so forcefully in his gut that, for a moment, he had to steady himself against the table.
It shocked him, how intense a hatred he felt then, the most powerful emotion he’d felt in years. But when he looked at Malfoy again, he saw his torn, mutilated body, the shoulder bone visible in the gash….
The gory scene in front of him snapped him back to the present, and he forced his hands to steady as he began sprinkling the healing potion over his back. That Malfoy let out such an intense, anguished scream even while he was barely alive, horrified him so much that his hands started shaking. Focus, he told himself. You are a healer, Harry.
And yet nothing could assuage him. He slowly cleared the small, fresh wounds, not daring to even touch the rotten areas - those would have to be cut away - as Malfoy continued to let out bloodcurdling screams. He had never imagined such sounds could come out in his proud voice, and yet, even through these shouts of pain, Harry could tell that Malfoy no longer sounded the same. Something had damaged his throat.
Something was off entirely.
He willed himself to move lower, taking deep, calming breaths as he forced himself to look - he had to see - the red, singed skin around the buttocks. And the blood he could see leaking down to the legs, even though Malfoy had constricted so much in pain that his clenched body hid his private parts from Harry. But Harry could see - there were no wounds here. Which meant…it meant this blood was…
He turned around and threw up in the sink.
The medicinal draughts were ready, and he stumbled towards the cauldron as a vial floated to its mouth and filled itself. He would…he would feed the first dose to Malfoy and take him to the guest bedroom, and then he would see tomorrow. Yes, he told himself, turning around, this takes time, tomorrow -
The vial fell from his frozen hand, shattering with a muffled sound.
He was sure he was staring, but also not really seeing. Or thinking.
But as he had turned, and his gaze had fallen back on Malfoy’s back, he had seen it.
There, hidden beneath the blood and torn flesh, now visible on his neck.
The reason why Harry’s Wards had not given a big alarm that accompanied a magical presence. Why he had felt no threat. Why the air around Malfoy seemed different…less alive. It was a circular mark, pitch black in color, with a red diamond drawn in its center.
The Daerg Quadratum. Outlawed about a thousand years ago. Punishable by death.
Malfoy had been Branded. Enslaved. Which meant….which meant that..
...Malfoy had lost his magic.