Chapter Text
The Never-Ending Summer
He doesn’t scream when the spell hits. He’s long past screaming. The war is red and iron-tasting, soaked into the cracks of the castle stone. The Dark Lord is dead, but it didn’t matter. Harry’s gone. The Weasleys are in pieces. And Draco is the last of his line, wand trembling in a hand slick with someone else’s blood. He’d killed three Death Eaters to get to this corridor. He’d kill three more to escape it. But time isn’t a corridor. Time is a knife. And when the spell lands—white-hot and ancient, spoken in a tongue he never learned but somehow understands, it doesn’t burn. It peels. Strips his name from the bloodied wreck of his body and folds it backwards, like parchment. The last thing he sees is the wreckage of the Great Hall through a hole in the ceiling. He sees stars, not the ones the enchanted sky used to show, but real ones.
He dies with his eyes open.
Draco Malfoy wakes up on the Hogwarts Express. It’s raining against the windows. Not the jagged storm-rain of battle. Just summer rain. Soft and dumb. The kind that taps the glass like it’s asking to be let in.
He’s small.
That’s the first thing he notices. His knees don’t reach the edge of the bench. His sleeves hang past his wrists. His voice, when he lets out a startled breath, is high and light.
Twelve, he thinks. No he counts again. The second year just ended. He’s going home for the summer.
That means—Eleven weeks until everything begins again.
Except it doesn’t. Not yet. Not for anyone else. Just him. He will go back to the place he died and pretend.
Across from him, Blaise Zabini is talking about Quidditch. Draco watches his mouth move, but the words slide off him like oil. Crabbe is picking something out of his teeth. Goyle has a frog in his pocket. Pansy is snorting at a joke she hasn’t told yet.
They’re all dead, he thinks. Not now, but they will be . And he’s the only one who remembers.
He gets home and throws up in the upstairs bathroom of Malfoy Manor.
Not because he’s sick, but because it’s too clean. The mirrors are uncracked. The carpets were unburned. The chandelier still hangs in the entryway like a jewel, untouched by fire or flying rubble.
His mother is alive.
She calls his name from the drawing room in that clear, unruined voice.“Draco, darling, are you feeling alright?” He presses a hand to his mouth and stares at himself in the mirror. His face is soft. Pale. Terribly innocent. He looks like someone worth saving.
He remembers her dying in his arms, whispering his name over and over like a spell.
“Fine,” he croaks. His voice cracks on the word.
The days stretch out like the shadow of something waiting to fall.
Draco wakes before dawn most mornings, chest tight, breath shallow. At first, he just stares at the ceiling. Listens to the house breathe. Feels the quiet pulse of his heart and wonders when the blood will start screaming again.
He’s scared of forgetting.
This world is soft. Unbroken. Almost kind. He knows how easily it could lull him into sleep.
So he recites the dead.
Every morning.
Fred dies first. Then Remus. Then Tonks. Then Goyle. Then Snape. Then…
It becomes a ritual. A prayer. A wall between him and the lie of safety.
He does not forget.
But after a week, the silence becomes unbearable. So he opens the door to the old study. It’s forbidden, technically. The Lords of the manor warded it ever since the war against Grindelwald, long before Draco was born. But Draco remembers the runes. Remembers how to twist his magic like a key.
The lock breaks on the third try. The room smells of parchment and secrets. He makes it his cathedral.
He starts with healing spells.
Broken fingers. Torn muscle. Blood clotting. The things that kept people alive for five more minutes. He practices on mice at first. Then himself.Slices shallow cuts across his arm, just to close them again. They heal faster each time. He stops flinching. Then it’s shields. Silent casting. Advanced wandless redirects.Defensive spells that bend and wrap like silk. The kind of magic meant to protect others, but he practices them alone. Because there is no one else to protect.
By mid-July, he’s working on darker things.
He remembers every spell that ever turned the tide. Every curse that burned through robes and ribs alike. He doesn’t want to use them again. But he can’t afford to forget. One night, he casts a blood-binding hex into the soil behind the stables just to see if he still can. The earth screams. His wand shakes. He doesn’t sleep that night.
But the next morning, he does it again.
He learns to silence his casting. He learns to brew faster than the books allow. He reads by wandlight until his vision blurs.
He’s twelve. And he’s building an armory.
His mother starts to notice.
“You’ve hardly come down for lunch. “I’m studying. “You’re always studying.”
He looks up from a book on counter-hexes for demonic possession and nods.“I don’t want to be weak.” She pauses in the doorway. Her face is half-worried, half-something else—maybe pride.“You’re not,” she says softly.
He doesn’t believe her.
He makes a list of names.
Pettigrew. Sirius Black. Remus Lupin. Harry Potter. Dumbledore. Voldemort. Snape. Himself. He stares at it every night and wonders who’s already lying. He knows Sirius isn’t guilty. Knows what Pettigrew did, how the rat is hiding in plain sight. He remembers Lupin’s face the day he died, tired and kind and broken.
He wonders if it’s madness, carrying the truth in a world that hasn’t earned it yet. He wonders if he’s still allowed to be twelve.
He stops writing to his friends. He avoids invitations. He forgets how to laugh.
Sometimes he sees his reflection in the window and doesn’t recognize it. Other times, he sees a version of himself he hopes never returns: bloodied, bitter, kneeling in the rubble of a castle that never saved him. The letter arrives. Standard parchment. Year Three supplies.Nothing about the dementors. But he knows they’re coming. He remembers the train halting, the cold, the soul-sucking blackness.
He remembers watching Harry collapse, and how he laughed the first time—because that’s what children do when they don’t understand death yet.
This time, he won’t laugh. This time, he’s ready.
The night before he boards the train, he carves a rune into the underside of his wand. Not for power. For memory. It hurts. He lets it.
His mother kisses his temple and hands him his trunk.“Third year,” she says. “You’re growing so fast.”
He stares at her for a long time.“You have no idea.”
On the train, he doesn’t sit with anyone. Not yet.
He watches the countryside blur and thinks of rats hiding in robes, of werewolves in cardigans, of gods playing games with children’s bones.
He is small. But he is not helpless.
He is twelve. But he is not blind.
He is back. And this time, he’ll be ready.