Chapter Text
“What do you remember feeling when this was happening?” she asked me.
The look of comfort that the room exuded contrasted heavily with the sterility of St. Mungo’s halls and corridors. I’d never been to a muggle hospital, but I’d heard them described in books and even saw a few on the sparse television programmes I managed to sneak at Blaise’s. Of course, I had pretended to be repelled and affronted by the very concept of a telly and professed a deadly allergy to anything muggle related, but like many things during that time, it was really just an act.
I rubbed the tension out of the top of my head, searching for the words to describe whatever emotion I’d tried to disconnect myself from at the time and currently. Almost all of the therapists I’d had at St. Mungo’s and one muggle one I saw for a few sessions before I realised how ridiculous the entire concept had been, had encouraged me to make connections between what I had been feeling and my body, as if I’d been living separately from it for awhile. At first, I found their constant questions about my feelings and my body annoying, but then I realised I’d been clenching my jaws and my fists during the entire session, and spent the hour afterwards rubbing the soreness out of them.
“I don’t know… I guess I felt terrified?”
“You guess?”
I sighed, hoping to give some sort of pause. Room to breathe and think. “It’s just… I felt terrified all of the time. For me to feel a little bit more terrified well,.. it didn’t necessarily merit much focus.”
“But it merits focus now, don’t you think?”
I hadn’t taken the suggestion of therapy with any form of grace, but it was understandable given the circumstances. I remembered that day like it was yesterday and it kept coming back to me, that moment when I’d crossed everyone. I walked across that stone field into that rat bastard’s arms, staring into my mother’s blue eyes. I hadn’t forgot it, and neither had anyone else. Every single one of my classmates hated me without question, except Blaise. The ones who had been on the rat bastard’s sides hated me for trying to redeem myself and everyone else hated me for my walk of shame, the choice I had made back then to side with my parents who didn’t have the good sense to choose the right side themselves. But what the hell was I supposed to do?
I had tried dying my hair so that I didn’t look so much like my father. When I arrived at Blaise’s one even with slicked back black hair, he tried to suppress his laughter. As much as that hurt, it wasn’t anywhere near the threatening glares and the empty looks I’d got from just about everyone else, even my old teachers. McGonnagall pursed her lips every time I saw her in Diagon Alley and Slughorn had stopped taking my owls a long time ago. It was only after my own owl came back with a deep scar across her face and an apologetic note from him about how his owls had recently started getting aggressive that I decided it wasn’t worth risking the life of the only other live beings who didn’t seem repulsed by my presence.
Still, I had tried to do something to redeem myself, or at least that was how it looked to everyone else. The reality of the situation was that I was only in it for revenge. I wanted to pay some heavy dues toward any witch or wizard that fancied themselves the new rat bastard in time. I’d paid a few of my old family friends some visits and showed them how I appreciated their hand in my upbringing. I played dumb when I had brought in a few people hexed beyond what would be reasonable for apprehending a suspect, but very few people questioned it. I think they were just as mad at some of the scum as they were at me and, despite how well I did on my Auror exams and how hard I’d worked to pass the difficult training, I felt like if there was a dangerous mission, they usually sent me. For some reason, it felt less like they trusted I had real expertise in apprehending wannabe Death Eaters and instead hoped the mission was so difficult I didn’t return.
There was this secret hope I had that becoming an Auror would finally and definitively prove to everyone that I really wasn’t trying to pick up where my father had left off, but I still had contact with my parents and everyone knew that. My parents were just as cold as ever, if not more. My mother spoke to me, but even the sweetest of compliments she gave came couched in broken glass and my father consistently refused any owls or visitations in Azkaban. I still sent them, partly because I hoped he would one day come to his bloody senses, but also because I hoped that my enthusiastic letters about how I’d sent another one of his old friends to join him made him feel even more miserable locked in that hell hole.
But the constant disapproval of damn near everyone had finally cracked me. Having only Blaise to trust, and not even fully, started taking it’s toll. I started feeling my heart race like I was ready to spring unknowingly on another coward while I was just sitting on my desk. Sleeping started becoming a task in and of itself when I’d wake up screaming from seeing that bastard’s face everywhere. People started whispering at work when I fell asleep at my desk, woke up screaming his name, flipping my wand around, and cursing the desks around me. Now, I was not only known as a traitor and a scum, but a scum slowly growing mad. My superiors did nothing but chastise me for falling asleep, so I didn’t bother telling them about my heart racing and my breath getting short, even when it started happening every day. Finally, when I was out on a call, trying to apprehend some piece of dirt that had kidnapped and tortured the half blood daughter of a very prominent figure in the Ministry, the bastard spun around on his heel to curse me and managed to land a hit. Normally, I wasn’t so slow on my feet, but I’d hesitated. His blonde hair swing through the air and for a moment I found myself in the Manor, five years old, seeing my father swinging around in almost the same way and feeling my stomach drop. My throat seized up and I dropped my wand. The bastard hexed me to the ground, made off with it, and ended up using it to kill the girl.
Management wasn’t happy. Not only that I’d failed my mission but that I’d admitted to accidentally messing it up. They were probably even more angry that I only got hexed, instead of completely killed. The case made big news and my face had been plastered all over The Prophet. Rita Skeeter, who had been hounding me day in and day out to tell my tragic tale of misbegotten wishes of power and family struggles, had finally given up on a sympathetic portrayal and had coined the name “The Boy Who Failed” just for me. People started writing into the Ministry, asking them what exactly they were doing sending an ex and obviously crazed Death Eater out on priority cases and they started to sing my praises a little, but not before demanding I take some “sick leave” for half a year and see a specialist at St. Mungo’s for my mental maladies.
After a few therapists who could barely hide their contempt for me as I strolled into their office to tell them my darkest secrets, I’d tried a muggle therapist. I didn’t even get five minutes into the session before I realised that there was really no adequate way to explain my life to a muggle. Maybe I could have made up some lies but I knew too little about the muggle world to know what would be convincing. And the last thing I wanted was to end up in a muggle institution for talking about owls and wizards and wands.
But Blaise had found this one for me. He’d been working on repairing some of the damage that the rat bastard caused within pure blood families. So many of us had gone along with it because of a few of our family members that felt insistent on pure blood supremacy. As it happens, very few of us actually supported the bastard, but once he’d snaked his way into our families and captured the minds and hearts of the people we loved, none of us felt we had a choice. And the amount of heavy silence that had weighed on us all made it impossible for most of us to talk to each other alone. We had no idea who would be watched, heard, and then killed.
Petra Poliakoff had gone to Durmstrang and didn’t have any chance of actually hating me, seeing as how she was a few decades older. Being in a pureblood family, she had felt the same sort of heavy weight I had, except without the sense of urgency. She was the only therapist at St. Mungo’s who was pureblood and Blaise felt like she was probably the only one to understand. She’d been counselling some ex-Death Eaters and was the only therapist from St. Mungo’s that agreed to take visits to Azkaban, after she had heavily lobbied for the right to address the mental health needs of the prisoners there. Very few people felt sympathetic towards Azakban prisoners and even myself, with my father trapped there, had difficulties finding myself caring about the state of his mind. But Petra felt like the existence of Azakaban itself was a basic violation of human rights, even dropping the word “torture” to describe the state there. She lobbied the Ministry to get Azkaban reformed or shut down completely, but her pleas often fell on deaf ears. Still, Blaise had a point. If she could feel sympathetic for individuals in Azkaban, she had to be able to feel some sympathy towards me.
And Blaise was right. Petra understood a lot without me having to explicitly say so. She understood my difficulties in ways no one even tried to and since I started seeing her, the nightmares stopped. The Ministry refused to let me back into work until my six month “rest” was complete, despite both Petra and I’s pleas that I was ready to return and that work actually helped take my mind off of things and helped with the social isolation I felt, but, as you can imagine, the Ministry had little in the way of sympathy for my condition. Considering I felt lucky at least to have my job, I didn’t press the issue. And despite being in better mental health than I had been for weeks, Petra continued to press me.
“I know it merits focus, Petra. I just.. I feel like I can’t give you the right answers. You want to know all of what I was feeling but it’s hard for me to remember everything. Mostly because I’ve tried so hard to forget.”
“I know, Draco,” she said, resting the clipboard on her lap, “But that’s part of the problem. You’re trying so hard to forget all of this instead of addressing it, experiencing it, and moving on. That’s why everything’s cropping up. These attacks you’re having at work, the flashbacks. I’m trying to help you find a pattern. There aren’t any right answers here. I don’t want you to feel like I’m grading you.”
Petra smiled and put her hand on mine. I’d been rubbing the spaces in between my knuckles without thinking.
“I just want you to tell me what happened. We’ll worry about what it all means later. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, trying to loosen up my shoulders and sit back in the chair, “Where should we start?”