Chapter Text
Draco stares up at his water-stained ceiling, twirling his new wand in between his fingers. It feels heavier, more purposeful than the number of wands he'd used lately. This one carries none of the burden of the war, other than what Draco carries within himself.
This one feels like the liberation of a new pair of shackles. It represents an uncertain future fraught with expectations. Draco keenly feels the full force of everything this wand stands for. He will be bound to its fate as much as it is bound to his - and there is no turning back now.
When he had walked into Ollivander's today, just as Ollivander was training some young, bright-eyed buck, with a St. Mungo's official letter in his hand, the world had fallen still. Ollivander had given a cursory glance at the note with his watery, glassy gaze, almost seeming to anticipate what it said before he read it. He hummed thoughtfully and gave a pointed stare at Draco, who had begun to sweat.
Draco's wand hand was trembling at his side, still stinging slightly from earlier when the snap of a different wand had lashed at him, leaving it to shake in a dull throb of pain.
He had patted his young apprentice on the back, who was staring at Draco with the slightest hint of recognition but mostly curiosity, before heading to the reconstructed shelves holding all new manner of wands. When he returned, he had only one box with him. Draco handed him a handful of Galleons and a letter he had written himself, among friends, which entailed all the ways Draco had wronged Ollivander, and every manner of apology for his sins. Draco then took the box, which felt heavy under the greater gravity of everything Draco wished he could have said out loud, and walked out.
He didn't even bother apparating. He just took his time on the Tube, holding the box limply between his hands and staring at nothing. Every breath felt like a battle, every blink like fighting to see through sludge. The broken elevator didn't even daunt him. He just took each labouring step to his flat as though he deserved it. He did. He deserved more than that.
Even with doubt, shame, and self-directed anger slowing each step, and the energy spent on trying to breathe deliberately, Draco made it to his door.
He only opened the box when he had stepped inside the flat, where Greg, Blaise, and Pansy waited for him impatiently. As they stood over him at the dining table, they fell silent as he pried open the box and stared at the wand, inert on its cushion. There was a little paper tag on it, attached with a string, which Pansy idellicately snatched before Draco could read it.
She read it for them: "Hawthorn, 11 1/2 inches, phoenix feather - for those overcoming great troubles and learning great lessons. Useful in the pursuit of the healing arts only if so chosen. Oh, Draco, did you ask for this? How could Ollivander give you this wand! It's just like your last wand, and Potter stole it off you! Didn't he read your letters?"
"Pansy, don't bother. It's not like Mungo's could force Ollivander's hand if he wanted to be difficult." Blaise was still peering at the untouched wand.
"He didn't have to read the letter to know. This is my choice, Pansy. He just reminded me that I'll have to earn my place more so than anyone else, and that my wand will be the first thing I have to get to trust me."
Draco took a deep breath and gently picked up the wand with one hand, the other tracing the swirling knots in the wood. The wand seemed to hum in his hand, although it did not shoot out sparks like his first had. This one seemed to lie in wait, as if it would hardly go ahead and do the work itself. It was familiar and comfortable in his hand. It felt and weighed like an echo of his first wand - similar length and shape, same wood.
This one, though - this one carried a heat to it. Just holding it made his mouth taste like ash. This wand was opinionated, not easily swayed, and powerful. Must be the phoenix feather's influence compared to the unicorn hair.
Greg placed his hand gently on Draco's shoulder and gave it a quick squeeze. Draco thought back to the very first spell he had done with his Mother's wand as a child. The simple incantation had her laughing and clapping in a rare show of unadulterated emotion.
His throat felt thick, his tongue heavy and dull. He wouldn't be able to say any spell like this. Instead, he thought of the simple joy of seeing the spell work, and being held in his Mother's lap, face peppered with kisses as she told him how proud she was.
He projected as loudly as he could in his own mind, Lumos. Slowly, a feeble and wavering light emerged from his wand. It grew slowly in strength and almost twinkled. He held back his tears and gave a watery smile to Greg at his shoulder while Pansy grinned at him and Blaise nodded.
They had all gone around the flat, watching Draco try, and in some cases, fail with simple household spells. His previous wand he'd snapped in the St. Mungo's Training Admissions office with barely a care.
That wand had already barely worked for him, considering it had been a spare he could hardly remember picking up. Almost as if to blame him for its failure to work, it had given one last little hex to Draco's hand, which Pansy had soothed for him.
Now, as he lies in the pale glow from the city outside his little window, a warm breeze pushing past the dingy curtains that came with the flat, he thinks back to what had brought this wand to his hands in the first place.
Draco had moved into a Muggle hovel far away from his own home and the cool, vacant stare of his Mother to reduce the probationary surveillance period he was so mercifully gifted after Potter's brilliantly eloquent testimony.
"Draco and Narcissa Malfoy were no doubt on the wrong side, but when it mattered, their actions cost Voldemort dearly and gave us the chance to succeed. They aren't heroes. They're just people who did what was right when it mattered. That should count for something."
Truly brilliant testimony, although Draco could hardly recall it considering that in the week after the trial, after he had been brought to an empty manor - which hadn't even been scrubbed of the blood stains - he had drunk what had remained of the liquor cabinet.
His assigned auror trainee, who acted as his Probationary Officer, got so green around the gills at the sight of the inevitable consequence of an all-liquid diet of mild, if delicious poison that the Department for Magical Law Enforcement had to replace him. The grisly old auror with a permanent scowl on his face only shot Draco disapproving looks every time Draco weakly and quite badly scourgified his own sick.
After a week had passed, Auror Greenberg was only assigned to morning and evening check-ins, where he passed a rather muggle clipboard and ballpoint pen to the ever inebriated Draco to write what he had been up to.
A month in at the manor, after his Mother had been assigned to a long-term care facility in France, using the last of the private funds Narcissa had kept under her maiden name, Draco gave in and took the deal Greenberg had offered him.
"Move into a Muggle neighbourhood, abide by the Statute of Secrecy, learn about Muggles in the meantime, and these check-ins will become more infrequent and last less. You might even be able to clean up this pity party of yours."
So Greenberg had handed him this square white paper sheet, which Draco now knows had been printed, with a list of available flats being leased in Muggle London. Greenberg had even helped him by dumping his skinny pale arse on the doorstep of a Muggleborn Financial Advisor for Wizards and Magical Kind.
Apparently, she was one of the four accountants in England who handled the exchange of Wizarding money into Muggle money without being under Goblin authority.
The Goblins had blacklisted the Malfoys from their services after Griphook's death had been reported during the war. It wasn't like the Malfoys had much money left for the Goblins to hoard away, regardless. Draco took the money the DMLE had left him after reparations and had converted it almost entirely to cash.
The Financial Advisor, a one Miss Lydia Martin, took pity on him and helped him choose the cheapest flat that wasn't about to come crashing down on his head. She even went ahead to broker a deal between the DMLE representatives managing some of the other surveilled war criminals to bring down their rent by having them live together.
Martin had turned consiratorially to him and said she was able to make the deal because none of the assigned Aurors wanted to waste their time watching a bunch of scum ruin their lives, and having more of them live together saved them time.
Draco didn't spare a thought for whether or not she also thought he and his ilk were scum. She'd be well within her rights to believe so, especially considering she was helping him pro bono at the behest of Greenberg. Draco didn't even ask who he had been assigned to live with. He just packed up what was left in the manor of his clothing; which luckily was more or less acceptable to Muggle sensibilities, if ill-fitting now that he was living in squander with no employment to speak of.
When he arrived, he was met with a mid-bender Pansy Parkinson propped up by an ever-well-dressed Blaise Zabini, who was scolding Greg Goyle into putting down an ill-appropriate teak coffee table. Draco simply stood at the threshold of the scene, dropped his bag, slammed the door, and went down the six flights of stairs to head to the nearest bar. He tossed down a crumpled handful of bills, and the barkeep just handed him a double.
He stayed there until he was sure any further hallucinations of his school friends would be brought on by boring Muggle whisky.
When he made it back to the flat, Pansy was presumably in one of the bedrooms with the door shut while Zabini drank a glass of wine and played Wizarding chess with Goyle. They both turned to look coolly at Draco when he stumbled in - at least Zabini did, Goyle just looked like Goyle.
"Draco." Zabini's gaze lingered on the undone collar of Draco's sweat and drink-stained shirt, the creases on his slacks, and the scuffed look of his shoes. His eyes finally settled on Draco's unshaven face and overgrown hair that hung limp and greasy over his eyes. "How the mighty have fallen. Where is that vanity and ego I admired so in our school days, Draco? Where is that glossy sheen of the Malfoy pride?"
"Fuck off, Zabini." Draco spat those words out, or tried to. They came out more muttered and slurred than anything, and even with a half-hearted glare at Zabini, Zabini didn't waste a beat and clicked his tongue twice, shaking his head as he smoothly moved his knight to capture Goyle's queen.
"It's Blaise now that there is no difference in status between us. Rather, I do believe myself to be one of the only ones here with any privilege remaining, considering I'm here of my own volition and not as rubbish the DMLE has deemed unimportant enough to toss to Muggle London. Why, I hardly believe you are classified as a threat now, Draco. Just a pitiful mess."
Zabini abandoned the game and stood up, striding confidently across the scratched vinyl floor beneath them. He towered over Draco like this. When they were students, Draco always had the height advantage, but now, thin and sickly as he was, Zabini's dark skin glowed, and his posture dwarfed Draco's slumped one.
Even his clean, if less ornate, clothing, freshly pressed and impeccable, made Draco feel little more than a pile of threstral shite beneath the wheel of a carriage. Draco yearned for what he lost in a sick, detached way.
There was no Malfoy name to lord over Zabini now. He couldn't even stand at his tallest to sneer impetuously at him. Not that Zabini had ever been bothered by Draco's ill-fated attempts at domination. He'd always slung a cool glance and dismissed the issue before Draco became further upset.
After Draco had grown out of his childish tantrums and the wretched darkness had settled into his skin, Zabini had been almost a comfort with his indifference.
No anxious hovering from Goyle, or malicious and brutish language from Crabbe. No simpering platitudes from Pansy, or cold avoidance from Nott. No, Zabini remained ever the same. As unchanging as the deep blue of the Great Lake.
Now, Draco would only have his first name, as ironic as it was, between them. Dragon indeed. More like a gutted, rotting snake at the mercy of a cunning eagle. Zabini would have made a highly successful, brilliant Ravenclaw if he hadn't been so cutthroat and conniving. All the better for Draco, now that Zabini was apparently in charge of the household. Less thinking for Draco to do, anyhow.
"There is no point in discussing this tonight, Draco. Greg, please do me a favour and help the little heir to his chambers. I'll endeavour to clean up the filth he's managed to drag in with him. Tomorrow morning, Heir Mafloy, I expect to speak with you about what I expect from this household moving forward." Zabini gestured to the unidentifiable sticky residue left on the floor in Draco's footprints, and shooed Goyle into action.
Goyle picked himself up and lumbered quite swiftly to where Draco stood, and Draco let himself be held up by Goyle's familiar and solid frame. His eyes slipped closed, and the short walk to his made bed seemed to slip away from his mind like a dream. His last thought before he hit the low-thread-count (but thankfully, cotton) sheets was whether or not he owed Zabini for making his bed.