Chapter Text
1.
Draco saw his mother cry, and he wanted his father to die.
After all they’d been through, and Draco just wanted him to die.
What kind of a son wished that for his father? What kind of a person?
He had a sickness. It wasn’t his fault.
Knowing that didn’t make it any easier.
They knew Lucius had been getting bad. His mum had told Draco ages ago, right when he'd started university in the states. They knew it.
But there was a difference between knowing something and experiencing it.
They saw the signs. They knew he wasn’t himself. It was the sort of thing that had been building for years.
First he was withdrawn. He would sleep for ages, always tired. He would never get out of bed. They thought he was depressed. It would certainly make sense, considering. The threat of Azkaban and the Dementors. Being around the Dark Lord. Being wrong. Being shamed.
None of those, by themselves, would be easy to bear. Mixed together, that must have been what he was feeling. They couldn’t think of anything else.
A year went by, and he stopped talking. It was slow, but back and forth between the semesters Draco spent at college, Draco could see a difference. A big one. When his father looked at him before, his gaze was never blank. It was always full of something, whether it was pride, fear, worry, or anger. He always felt something. His eyes were often the only way to tell, raised with good Malfoy manners. He could school his expression into any mask he wanted, but his eyes always betrayed him.
Those eyes were empty when his father looked at him during that second year. Empty like a dead fish, mouth slack like he’d died mid-gasp trying to flop back into the water. When they talked to him, if they pressed him enough, they received a minute reaction for their trouble. A listless “no…”, a grunt, a shrug. As the snow melted and the hard ground was revealed, he stopped answering altogether.
Draco’s third year in college, his father started having tremors. Fits. Seizures, maybe. He would grab his thighs and quake, taking great heaving, wheezing breaths from in between clenched teeth. His empty eyes bulged out of their sockets, staring at nothing. He shook like an earthquake, rattling the china in the cabinet, the windows in their frames, the plates in their cupboard. Rattling their family’s already fragile and damaged sense of security.
They got bad enough that Narcissa was afraid she couldn’t take care of him just with the house elves. They tried to go to St Mungo’s, but the healers who were bitter and had seen the damage done in the war were uncaring. The ones who weren’t couldn’t figure out what had become of him. They speculated years of Dark Magic poisoned something in his mind, in his brain. Twisted it in such away to pervert it, make it dysfunctional, make it destructive.
There were no studies on the long lasting effects of a life devoted to Dark Magic, on the effects of whatever colluding so closely with a deluded half-human such as the Dark Lord entailed for his mental or physical well being. No studies on what to do when the presence of such toxic magic invaded a person’s mind, attacked their brain, and ruined it.
It was the not knowing that hurt the most. Knowing something was terribly, horribly wrong, and not knowing how to fix it. Having to stand and watch it happen.
Draco watched through all of the war. He had wanted to be done with it. But instead, here the fighting was again, and this time there was nothing to be done.
No one else could or would help him, and so they continued by themselves. It took its toll. Draco felt terrible for his mum when he had to leave for college at the start of the semester in his fourth year, but he was selfishly grateful for it, too. He couldn’t stand living in the Manor. Draco hated who he became while staying there and he hated that it reminded him of who he had become before, during the war. Draco hated it for the memories, the ghosts. Those which lived in the rooms, and that which lived in the dying, twitching creature that was his father.
His mother moved into a different bedroom. She couldn’t sleep with him having fits every few hours, rocking back and forth and hissing like the snake on his family’s ring through a locked jaw.
Draco was grateful she did this. If something had happened to her, he…Draco didn’t know. He didn’t know. He might have killed his father, if he had seen her hurt. He threatened to.
In front of his mother, he managed to keep his placid front up. Willing to serve his father, the useless sack of a human being he had become. But alone with him Draco was derisive, bitter, angry, spiteful. How dare he continue to put them through this torment when he had done more than enough to damage their family already. Lucius had led his family to destruction and now he was forcing them back again. Draco could not find the man he used to love in this person. He thought of him as something lesser. As a force, chaotic and uncaring and inhuman. And Draco hated him, a cold hatred that resided where his stomach used to be, a great void that covered the place in his heart his father used to have. He was so bitter. He was so angry.
After all that’s happened, now he abandons me?
Draco couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. He wanted to hurt him. He wanted to throw away his wand and hit him, knuckles to cheekbone. He wanted to go to the safe where they kept his father’s wand, taken and stowed away once they realized he hadn’t cast a spell in over six months, and use it against him. He wanted his father to suffer as he was making Draco suffer. As he was making Narcissa suffer. But he didn’t.
Draco helped his mother take care of him. They sat at the table and Narcissa and Draco made polite conversation while they tried to ignore Lucius shaking so violently and bent at such a vicious angle that his elegant cheekbone very nearly rubbed through his dinner. They tried to get used to the hissing noises that echoed through the hallways, tried to get used to the tinkling and shatter of broken dishware, china, windows, mirrors.
It wasn’t something they could ever get used to.
But his mum told him she was fine. Acknowledging it made it more real, and so they didn’t talk about it. They pretended everything was normal. They carried on with their lives. Draco returned to America for his fourth year of study. And that was when his father tried to kill his mother.
-*-
Draco called the only person he could think of. The only person who could help them. The only person who Draco knew without a doubt would help his mother, because of what she’d told him in the Floo, her tear-streaked face desperate and jarring to see. Draco had only seen his mother cry once before, after the trials, when her son was liberated from any and all punishment.
Saint Potter was the only one who Draco knew would help them. Not because they were deserving of it, but because he owed his mother a Life Debt. And even then he didn’t believe him until he saw the bruises on her neck, the ones he asked her to show him without glamour, please.
He was a trained Auror. He would know what to do. He would be able to do something more than just keeping him locked up in the dungeons as Draco had insisted, furious and terrified and screaming at the house elves the moment he had stepped out of the floo.
Draco made sure they made his father comfortable, but Draco didn’t go see him himself. He told himself it was because he was angry at him. And he was, seething with it, so irate he was seeing red. But he was also very, very scared. And it was that fear that truly kept him away. Fear of seeing his father, fear of seeing what he would do to him. If he tried to kill his wife in a psychotic rage, whom he adored, what would he do to his son, too weak to win the war, of whom he was ashamed?
Draco healed the marks on his mother’s neck after that. Though he was studying healing, he needed much more education before he could actually perform anything other than the most rudimentary of spells. Minor bruises and scrapes were fine, but his mum’s voice was still hoarse when she spoke, and the sound made him wince whenever he heard it.
Draco escorted him—the one, the Savior, Saint Potter—to the dungeons. He didn’t want his mum to have to go.
“Hello,” Harry said to him warily as he greeted him at the door, looking the same as usual with his wild hair, square jaw, and spectacles. He looked better, actually, than Draco remembered him. Apparently the years after the war had treated him well.
Draco nodded tersely in return. He had no energy for pleasantries, no brainpower for insults. If Potter was here, he was to help them, and that was that. Draco did not like asking for his help. He did not like it at all. But he liked even less the thought of his mother being injured again.
Draco would protect her. Even if it meant swallowing every ounce of pride he had, Draco would protect her. He would do anything to make sure she was safe. Every time he doubted it, her crumpled, defeated expression streaked through the back of his eyelids, and his conviction was solidified.
When he began descending the staircase to the dungeons, Potter hesitated. A number of indiscernible emotions flitted across his face, and Draco could tell he was reliving memories from a war passed not long enough ago.
“Life debt,” Draco softly reminded him. He was their only hope. He couldn’t have him running off now.
Harry stared at him very intensely, thick brows drawn down like in all his photos in the papers. Eventually, he nodded.
Lucius was asleep, his back to them, covered in lavish, plush blankets. He was sleeping on an extra mattress, curtains and tapestries strung around the cell to keep the draft out, small bulbs of light strung around the ceiling of the small square so he could see. The house elves were smart enough not to give him any cutlery. What food he ate, when he ate at all, he ate with his hands. It seemed barbaric and insensitive, but Draco and Narcissa were afraid of giving him something that could be used against them.
“He doesn’t look very threatening,” Harry said doubtfully, a line forming between his eyebrows.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Draco spat at him venomously. After so many people doubting them at the hospital, so many of his professors not understanding his distress, and so many of his acquaintances saying the wrong thing, trying to reach out for help again—and to such a degrading source—made him even more snappish and irritable than usual.
“I can put wards on the cell,” Harry relented eventually, after a period of reluctant silence and biting his lip to hold in a retort. “To make sure he doesn’t hurt you, your mother, or one of the elves when you’re trying to interact with him.”
Draco nodded stiffly. He couldn’t bring himself to thank him.
The ward’s alarm went off two days later.