Chapter Text
The war didn’t end with Voldemort's death. The war didn’t end when Order members took control of the Ministry or when formerly Imperius’d Aurors regained their faculties and arrested those responsible. The war did not end when rogue Death Eaters were hunted down, the war did not end when they were put on trial and sent to meet bleak fates. It didn’t end when Harry Potter went on a media blitz to announce that it had.
The war didn’t end when Death Eater families were made to pay reparations that bankrupted them and make public apologies that humiliated them. It didn’t end when many of the pureblood families fled Britain because not being a Death Eater did not protect them the way not being an Order member condemned them.
The war didn’t end when Lucius Malfoy was sentenced to the Dementor’s Kiss, and it did not end when his sobbing wife, saved by Harry Potter’s testimony, found herself wandless, locked away for life in a French chateau after the Ministry confiscated and subsequently burned down Malfoy manor. Her son would be made to spend two years in Azkaban before joining her, and the war was alive in Narcissa Malfoy’s heart every sleepless night since.
Don’t misunderstand; the war did end, piece by piece, one broken soul at a time. First there were funerals, and some people found peace. Then the rebuilding of Hogwarts, and some people found purpose. The restructuring of the Ministry followed, and some people found ambition. A new generation of children was born, and some people found joy.
For Draco Malfoy, the war did not end.
Every day and every night sitting on the floor of a tiny, dirty cell, he relived it again and again, da capo al fine, from the first time he heard his father casually drop the word mudblood to the end, when Harry Potter killed the Dark Lord with an expelliarmus and his family was torn apart.
He did not have friends in Azkaban. His mothers actions may have saved her, but they had doomed Draco to nothing more than a blood traitor in the eyes of the few Death Eaters and snatchers that made it out of their trials unkissed. If asked what was worse - the chicanery of the day time when the prisoners were made to walk around an empty grey yard by wizard guards that pretended to be blind to his plight, or the nights curled on the floor in his cell, attempting to wring warmth he didn’t feel out of his own body for comfort as the Dementors walked the halls - he would have tossed a coin.
Again and again and again to the point of madness his mind warped and bent, the days bled together. “Eight! I knew we should have sent him to Durmstrang, Cissa, can you believe they let eight mudbloods in this year?,” his father said in his head, “Thankfully Salazar’s will protects Slytherin House from accepting mudbloods,” his mother whispered to him on Platform 9 ¾, “No one asked your opinion, you filthy little mudblood!,” he yelled at Potter’s sidekick, and like dominoes one after another the memories fall and fall until he is again watching his father lock away his fear as a Dementor bends down to press its inhuman lips to his, watching his own face in the dirty mirror of Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom close up in much the same way before he turns and the agony of a sectumsempra tears him open.
Draco Malfoy was aware that he was going insane; self-preservation was his natural inclination, of course he was aware that he hadn’t been adding notches to his wall in Merlin knows how many days. When he’d first been shoved into this cell he’d found it comforting to see the marks previous prisoners had left. Ten, twenty, the highest he’d found was 129 days hidden underneath the uncomfortable metal cot he’d abandoned for the stone floor within his first week.
Now he found them eerie. Markers of when their makers had taken leave of their senses. He’d been determined to beat 129, but he didn’t remember how to count anymore so he couldn’t check if he had. Whether he closed or opened his eyes, all he ever saw and heard were endless replays of the one thousand and one ways he had woven his own noose.
Legilimency is a tricky art. Near impossible to perform without a wand. In contrast, Occlumency is easy. Natural as breathing for Draco, who had learned to compartmentalize before he’d ever heard the word.
In the beginning, he’d taken every memory that gave him hope and joy and put them in a big, iron box in his mind. A heavy lid, an unbreakable lock. He’d thought that the Dementors would leave him alone if they couldn’t find something to feed on in him. A futile endeavor, a childish attempt. But still, still, that mental box was a life line, because it allowed him to ration out the pain and the fear.
Whenever he felt like he couldn’t bear it anymore, when the shove of an inmate became the memory of his aunt Bella’s crucio raging through him, he slipped a guilty hand into his box and took out a piece of himself. He traded the memory of his first time flying on a broom for three nights of being able to breathe despite the Dementors, but eventually the shine dulled and the cold crept back into his bones.
When a sadistic guard had taken to walking him past the empty shell that was left of his father every day on the way to the yard, he’d taken out the memory of Lucius smiling at Narcissa, in the summer just before Hogwarts, telling her that she’d given him the most wonderful gift with the birth of their son, words that Draco hadn’t been meant to hear but had kept like a secret ever since, now he used it like a shield. But shields take blows, they dent, they scratch, and eventually there was nothing but the taste of blood left in his mouth as he watched his father wither away and die.
He received letters from his mother; the guards made it a sport to burn them where he could see. Draco wrapped himself in the memory of her hand in his as she showed him the roses she raised with love so fierce they might well be his siblings like a blanket, but the edges frayed and the fabric became threadbare until the image of the rose garden burned in the Ministry acquisition dug accusing fingers into his throat.
When Rowle slammed his fist into Draco’s stomach in the yard, grabbed his throat like a ragdoll and scraped his face against cold, unrelenting stone under the watchless gaze of a guard, Draco made bandages of how he was going to get out, return to see his mother, hold her hand again in a new rose garden, and how Rowle was here for life and would soon never touch him again. But he bled through the bandages, they tore when he was kicked to the dirt, bandages didn’t fix the hand Rowle crushed into bone shards, and they didn’t stop him from eventually remembering that his mother had always loved her husband more than her son or her roses.
Two years were 730 individual days and by the time they ended the only thing left inside Draco Lucius Malfoy was the big, iron box itself, lid heavy, lock unbreakable.
++
They released him from one prison into another.
Aurors dragged him from Azkaban to a holding cell in a building on the mainland, and from there through the floo into the Ministry atrium and directly into a flurry of reporters.
He looked wretched. Dirty, dishevelled, torn clothes, everything from his improperly healed crushed hand, to his faded Dark Mark and the Azkaban number tattooed on his neck visible and forever immortalised in the Daily Prophet: “Death Eater Draco Malfoy Released!”
Draco found a burning intensity fixed on him; his wild eyes met the gaze of a witch and for a moment, the cacophony of sounds and the blinding flashes of cameras couldn’t touch him, it was just her, staring at him like she’d personally signed the paperwork to send him to Azkaban and both regretted and didn’t regret it.
It was only when Harry Potter, messy hair showing off the forehead scar, came to stand next to her with a concerned look that Draco recognized her as Granger and averted his eyes.
He looked at the floor as the Minister made a speech, let the rough hands of Aurors drag him back to the floo, remained impassively blank as those Aurors explained to him that the chateau had been disconnected from the floo network and that they’d have to apparate the rest of the way.
Draco felt absolutely nothing at all anymore, not even when he came to stand before an abandoned looking house and was left completely alone for the first time in more than two years to walk up the path through the dead and withered grounds the moment the ornate gate slammed shut behind him.
He’d spent summers with his family here before. Once, the blood wards had been an embrace of protection and a welcome home. Now, they had been torn out and replaced by the magic suppressing cold prison of Ministry issued wards; neither he nor his mother were allowed even a wandless accio. The indignity should make you feel bitterness, he thought, but even that came dimly like someone had said it through a locked door.
He found his mother in the kitchen; a place he had never before seen Narcissa Malfoy. She sat, uncharacteristically slumped over the counter, on a chair suspiciously reminiscent of a bar stool, a piece of furniture she had once called ‘the slow death of a woman’s dignity’. She was barefoot, he noted, when she rose abruptly to greet him, and much shorter without the high heels she wore in his every memory of her. Maybe he’d just grown tall despite the best efforts of the prison cooks.
“Mother,” Draco said, stiffly, and quieter than intended, after clearing his throat four times. His voice didn’t seem to want to work, and neither did hers as she stared at him, green eyes filling with tears.
“Draco,” she finally managed, no more than an incredulous breath, before she strode over and wrapped him in her arms. She was so thin, so fragile, so godsdamn short. He’d had to crane his neck to see her face once, and now it was buried in his chest.
“When you didn’t reply to my letters - I didn’t know if you - I couldn’t hope,” his mother whispered, straining herself to hug him harder. Her bones must be hollow like a bird’s, he thought, and then, this should worry you, but it didn’t for the same reason that the dead gardens hadn’t torn his heart apart. He’d already traded his memories of love and care for his mother to survive Azkaban, they were lost to him now, food for Dementors.
“And what of Lucius?,” she asked, her voice finally regaining firmness. His mother held him at arm’s length and studied his face like he’d have miraculous news for her; his throat closed up.
“You saw him,” Draco managed to croak. The good memories had lost their shine, but the razor edges of the bad ones never dulled; from the corner of his vision he saw a snatch of memory replaying the moment his father had been Kissed. That was the last time Narcissa had seen her husband.
Impatiently she stepped back and waved him off. “But after? You saw him there, didn’t you?”
All at once Draco knew what she was asking, and it was so absurd he could’ve laughed if he’d still been able to produce the sound. Her son had returned to her from Azkaban and the first thing, the very first thing she wanted to know was if the living corpse of her husband was deceased yet. Lucius Malfoy had died the moment that Dementor pressed his lips to his, they’d both been there, both been required to be there.
“He’s dead. His corpse stopped breathing,” Draco said, voice harsh and raw, partially in resignation, in hurt, partially in anger at himself for losing his sanity and hallucinating a Dementor rising behind his mother and almost lovingly placing a kiss on her neck like he’d seen his father do before.
Narcissa made a mournful sound like a small, wounded animal, but Draco just turned and walked away. The room he had stayed in as a child was dusty, and the clothes in the wardrobe didn’t fit him anymore, but the water in his ensuite bathroom was scaldingly hot and he scrubbed his skin raw under it like he could remove the past two years along with the grime coating him.
++
Time passed. Time had no choice but to pass. Draco learned that there was only one house elf who had remained with them. Mipsy, who had raised his mother and left House Black to go with her when Narcissa had married, unfailingly loyal yet unable to do more than marginally slow the decay of the chateau around them.
“They were freed by the Ministry, that Granger mudblood is at fault no doubt,” his mother had said. “Want us to pay them now.”
“Then just pay them, mother,” Draco had said, and that is how he learned that their vaults had been emptied, spent on repairing Diagon Alley, and repaying victims of the war. Rebuilding their houses, reimbursing them in cold, golden galleons for the people that had been lost somewhere between the fleeing and the dying. One galleon at a time bled away every time ‘mudblood’ spilled from his parents’ lips.
He drifted like a ghost through empty rooms, the furniture sold off so Narcissa could afford to feed herself. And now, him. When he’d first been thrown into Azkaban he’d dreamed of a feast, scant months later he would have settled for a hot meal, towards the end he’d not been sane enough to remember what food that wasn’t thin grey gruel tasted like. These days he nibbled on the edge of a piece of toast with jam for hours, like the flavour and texture was too overwhelming for him to process.
Narcissa was avoiding him. He wasn’t certain if it was because she couldn’t bear to look at him or because she couldn’t bear for him to look at her. It didn’t matter, in the end. The heat of summer turned to the chill of autumn and Draco did the same thing he always did; watch an endless loop of horrible things replay whether his eyes were open or closed. Without the Dementors or other inmates to steal his strength, the nightmares twisted in new ways, becoming indistinguishable from real, bleeding into his vision until he was lying on the floor of his room with Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort himself on either side, digging their taloned fingers through his guts.
One day, at breakfast in the dining room because his mother monopolized the kitchen, Narcissa interrupted his solitude with a wrapped present placed on the table before him.
“Your birthday present, my dragon,” she murmured, voice thick with tears. She talked to Mipsy often, he’d hear her voice drifting through the house, but Draco first had to relearn how to move his jaw to speak. Narcissa waited patiently.
“It isn’t my birthday,” he finally managed. He’d spent that in Azkaban. It had been July by the time his verdict was made and he was sent to hell; no credit for time spent in a grey cell underneath the Ministry, so it had also been July by the time he’d been released into Narcissa’s tender neglect.
“There was paperwork,” Narcissa said, a spark of the woman she’d been coming back for a second, straightening her spine and giving her expression an annoyed edge.
Draco unwrapped the present. It was a formality of course, because there isn’t a way a broom can be wrapped that doesn’t make it immediately obvious that it is, in fact, a broom. His fingers caressed the handle, found the scratches he’d left there over the years like a North Star. It was his. From Hogwarts. From a lifetime ago.
“I made arrangements with the DMLE, you can fly it over the grounds. Not much higher than the tree line because of the wards but…,” she trailed off, and Draco remembered that this was the kind of moment that’s meant to warm your heart. Tease a smile from a person. Of course, he was no longer a person, he was a pensieve endlessly replaying regret and pain. But his mother had tried, and so he tried too, meeting her eyes and contorting his face into what he thinks might look like joy.
He must’ve misjudged, because she broke out in tears.
++
The broom stayed on his unused desk, where Mipsy would throw it - and him - sad glances as she swept the dust from his room every Friday, unfailingly loyal, despite how she avoided him otherwise.
Autumn passed, Halloween going unremarked. Winter found their house barren of joy. On Christmas Eve, then, finally, Draco’s eyes settled on the broom with intent. It was a horrible day that had started with his mother crying at breakfast, continued with the realization that they were running out of things to sell, and ended with a snow storm felling a tree straight into the neglected greenhouse, scattering frozen chunks of glass everywhere.
It wasn’t safe to go outside in this weather, or at this time of night, which only made it more enticing to him. He didn’t dress warmly, he didn’t tell his mother or Mipsy where he was going. Draco simply took the broom out of its grave on his desk, and leapt out of his second floor window in a maneuver that would’ve had Madam Hooch taking sixty points from Slytherin.
The wind was biting, the visibility was zero and his hands froze into clumsy icicles immediately, but when Draco breathed in, for the first time in many years it didn’t feel like he was simply reluctantly buying himself a stay of execution.
The grounds weren’t overly large, and the trees whose height he had to stick to weren’t overly tall, but the feeling of gliding through the air like a bird was the same. This feeling, this triumph of man over gravity, this had been the first time he’d thought himself better than any Muggle could ever hope to be. That line of thought jolted something in Draco and he fumbled a turn. Just before he could right himself again, a brown blur crashed into his chest, taking both of them down in a heap.
Swearing, shaking snow out of his hair, and oh, Salazar, the feeling of snow sliding easily into his weather-inappropriate shirt’s collar and down his back had him shaking immediately. Draco thought he might’ve been hurt but his ability to judge the pain he was in had been dulled. At least his broom seemed fine, and he breathed out in relief. The brown blur turned out to be a barn owl, a Ministry wax sealed letter on its leg, and Draco swore again. This was exactly what they needed right now - for him to be accused of deliberately undermining official Ministry business by diverting their owls.
He scooped the dazed owl off the ground with one arm, grabbed his broom with the hand of that same arm, and made the unpleasant trek from where he’d fallen back into the house, passing the shattered greenhouse on his way.
The kitchen was the most livable part of the chateau, and it was there that he took the owl. He expected his mother to be there, Narcissa had developed fierce insomnia that she attempted to cure with various herbal teas, but he supposed it might be late enough that even she had gone to bed. More curiously, Mipsy, who lived in the kitchen, was missing as well.
Draco put the bird gently on the counter, unburdened it of its letter despite its weak protests, and looked through the cabinets for a box. He’d had detention in the owlery at Hogwarts before; they placed disoriented or concussed birds in dark boxes. Draco wasn’t sure how that was meant to help, but understanding things isn’t necessary for them to be true. He cut air holes into a properly sized cardboard box, and placed the bird inside.
Right. So now that the Ministry couldn’t accuse him of killing their owl, his next problem was the letter. Narcissa had an owl of her own, a large tawny one that would doubtlessly peck his hands bloody for daring to send her into a snow storm.
He resolved to go to bed for now, inexplicably overcome with a horrible exhaustion. Suddenly, Mipsy was there and he just had enough time to think why was she outside?, before the world tilted on its axis.
++
Narcissa and Mipsy both fussed over him like breaking his arm and nearly bleeding out in their kitchen was a life-threatening experience. Honestly, Draco hadn’t even felt it through the haze of insanity, hadn’t even noticed the blood dripping down his arm because he’d been busy averting his eyes from any corner where he might glimpse the ghost of his dead-eyed father watching him.
A disgruntled healer from St Mungo’s even made a personal house visit after Narcissa threw a fit with the Auror who visited them every week to make sure they hadn’t raised an army of Death Eater inferi somewhere on the dilapidated property.
The owl recovered under his mother’s care, much faster than Draco did, despite the Skele-Gro forced down his throat. Narcissa took away the broom until he had been ‘sufficiently restored’ which both of them understood to mean more than just his broken arm.
He wasn’t even that sad about it, he’d known he would lose the broom from the moment it had been placed before him. He lost everything that brought him joy, eventually. His hands weren’t meant to hold onto anything more than nightmares of his Professor being eaten alive on the dining table in a manor that didn’t exist anymore.
Then, one day and one week after the Owl Incident, it came back, another letter affixed to its leg. Draco stared at it, attempting to connect the appearance of an owl to an unpleasant memory he was sure his madness would soon conjure up for him.
The owl stayed real despite his best attempts, and gave an annoyed huff before shaking its leg at him. In a trance, he accepted the letter, but the owl did not leave. A reply, then. With shaky fingers Draco tore open the envelope to reveal a short note without letterhead. The writing wasn’t in ink, but in a strange light blue that left indents on the supple paper.
To my unknown benefactor,
I’m grateful that you’ve taken care of my owl. She’s my own, her name is Veracity. Spare her a piece of bacon if you have some, will you? She’s quite cross with me for sending her off to France again. It wasn’t my intention to send her through that snow storm, Prof. Dr. Dr. Liverston hadn’t told me she’d decided to spend her holiday abroad, and well, as you can see…
It felt rude not to acknowledge the service you did me, however belated, so thank you. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to repay you.
And Happy New Year!,
an Unspeakable that works too much
He’d been left handed, once, before Azkaban. Now, he wrote with his right, unshattered hand, in a font that would make his childhood calligraphy teacher call for him to be sent back to prison post-haste.
Unspeakable,
you misunderstood. I am no benefactor, it wasn’t the snow storm that took your owl down, it was me. Accidentally, I hasten to add. And it was my mother that took care of Veracity. There’s no bacon in the house.
You owe me nothing, don’t send your owl again.
Draco considered signing it, then simply didn’t bother, and threw the outraged owl out his window, unfed.