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SEVEN OF WANDS
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His mother hates this, he knows.
His father’s imprisonment and the arrival of their new houseguests sit heavily on her shoulders, and when she speaks it’s only in stuttering half sentences. It’s made for an unsettlingly quiet summer. Her hands tremble minutely when she wordlessly smooths down the lapel of his finest dress robes, before they go to face their Lord. He takes her hands in his own and squeezes, smiling reassuringly down at her. He’s finally grown taller than her, this last school year.
Draco has just turned sixteen, and this is an honor:
The highest honor, his aunt had hissed, her rotten mouth breathing hot and close to his ear, her fingers digging viciously into his shoulders. His mother, following along beside them, had said nothing.
It’s a strange thing to be in his father’s study without his father. He feels his absence like a toothache, the proud-faced portraits of his ancestors watching on in silence. The Dark Lord had been waiting for them, seated in his father’s chair, and Draco and his mother and his aunt had all gone down to their knees before him.
“Ah, Bellatrix,” he sighs, “And my dear Malfoys.”
The Dark Lord stands then: and he’s tall, taller than Draco’s father, robed all in black, his inhuman face as pale as the full, risen moon. They stay on their knees.
The Dark Lord steps forward, his snake following him off the chair, its coils sliding heavily onto the floor. Draco barely stops himself from flinching, even as it winds its way between them, on its way to the hearth. The Dark Lord smiles, amused, his mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, his wine-red gaze slipping from his aunt, to his mother, to him. This is not the first time Draco has met the man, but it is the first time he’s felt the blade of his attention so keenly.
“Young Draco,” he says, coming to stand before him. “Look at me.”
Draco does. He waits.
“Draco, your father has shamed himself, and your mother, and you in his service to me. Mercifully, your Lord Voldemort is forgiving.”
The red of his eyes is rising up to drown him.
“Yes, my Lord,” Draco breathes. He is so, so grateful.
“I have a task for you, by which you can correct your father’s… oversight, and further my cause. Do you know what this task is, young Draco?”
Draco feels distant, dizzy, speaking as if from very far away.
“No, my Lord, only that I am eager to serve and honored to be an implement of your will.”
“Such pretty, practiced words,” he laughs, high and clear and awful. “Very well, let us put them to the test—Draco. Your wand, and your arm.”
Draco offers both up obediently. The Dark Lord takes his wand first, inspecting it idly, and then he takes Draco’s arm by the wrist. With a sharp movement of his own wand, he severs the sleeve of Draco’s robe, fabric falling away neatly. All that is left is his pale, bare forearm, his pulse hammering through blue veins. The Dark Lord’s nails dig into his skin, hauling him closer, setting the wand to skin.
“This will hurt,” he says as casually as a man like him can, and—oh—
It does.
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Later, the celebratory firewhisky his aunt had given him mixes with the bitter tang of iron in his mouth and loosens his bitten tongue, makes him turn to her and ask, “Does it stop hurting?”
She pauses, a decanter of elfwine half-held out over his mother’s glass. Her dark eyes are cold, her lip curling. Her knuckles go white.
His mother’s hand covers hers, guides the decanter back to the table. “Bella,” she says softly, imploringly, and then to him: “Draco. It’s late. Perhaps it’s time you went to bed.”
Draco swallows, sets his second glass down only half-drunk. “Of course,” he says, “Goodnight, Mother. Aunt.”
He returns to his rooms, walking with his shoulders straight, his head held high. The back of his neck prickles. He refuses to flinch at the pooling shadows in the halls, familiar shapes gone suddenly strange, the sound of scales sliding over stone in the dark. He is honored, he is chosen, he is safe. His wand is warm in his hand, a comforting and apologetic hum. The Mark on his claimed forearm hardly hurts at all, anymore.
“Lumos,” he whispers, watching the magic flare. There you are. He will not be a coward.
He shuts his door, and wards it locked.
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TWO OF SWORDS
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War, Draco learns, is no honor.
He's seen too much of its true violent face, lost whatever taste for it he might have once had somewhere in the muddle of his sixth year—between the bright, bitter joy of Potter’s nose bursting under his boot heel on the train and the increasing desperation of the long hours trying and failing to repair the vanishing cabinet and that last, awful denouement that was Dumbledore’s fall from the Astronomy Tower. Maybe the bloodlust bled out of him on a flooded bathroom floor.
There’s been a fundamental shift, sometime when he wasn’t looking: Hogwarts is a horror under the gleeful, guiding hands of the Carrow twins, which is his own fault, and home is no respite. That’s his fault too.
Draco is seventeen, a failure, and a proven coward. When the Snatchers come and his mother says “They say they’ve got Potter. Draco, come here,” his first thought is no.
Please, no.
Only, with Potter in hand, there's an end to the war—shouldn't he want that? Potter captured and very soon to be dead, an end to the war, his home his own again, the Dark Lord great and terrible and victorious—he wants that.
Doesn't he?
Only—over the Christmas holidays he went digging through the Manor's vast attics, high strung and on high alert for Snatchers or snakes, jumping at shadows, and found a dusty old wireless set. He spirited it down to his rooms, and he found himself fiddling with it. It had been broken, but barely. It had been the easiest thing in the world to fix it.
And then he found himself tuning in: the war's worst kept secret, the Light’s resistance radio, treason to even speak the name of in his house let alone—whatever it is that Draco is doing.
Listening, only listening. Only in the small, dead hours of the night, only behind wards woven so thick and tight they made his teeth ache, only for a few stolen scraps of tinny broadcasted words and the promise: he's still running, he's not caught yet.
“Well, Draco? Is it? Is it Harry Potter?”
And now: here he is, caught. Draco knows him, even with his face grotesquely swollen, his hair overgrown and wild, clothes hanging off his always-too-skinny frame. Draco knows him, and yet—
“I can’t—” his tongue feels clumsy, “I can’t be sure.”
His father is carrying on, saying that if, if, if they are the ones to deliver Potter to the Dark Lord all would be forgiven, all that is wrong could be made well, and yes. Yes, Draco knows. All would be forgiven, and Potter would be dead, and the war would end—
Only. Draco knows better now. He has seen the Dark Lord, has lived with him in his home, has seen his father and his mother and himself tortured for the sake of his amusement, has seen him kill, constantly, without care or cause or compunction. Whatever kind of man he might have been in the past, the monster that he is now is not the kind to end wars once he has waged them.
And Potter would be dead.
So he says, again, “I don’t know.”
He's a coward, and yet.
It's almost a relief when his former house elf drops the chandelier on them, the bright pain of flying shattered crystal distracting him from the nauseous churning of his gut, the building ache in his Mark. It's almost a relief when Potter, his face his own once more, rushes at him, his uncanny green eyes flashing.
Draco thinks oh, and there you are.
Potter takes the wands from Draco’s unresisting hand, then he and the elf disapparate with a crack that breaks the world, and Draco—bleeding, a coward, his forearm burning up with a madman’s rage—only wishes he’d taken the rest of him too.
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THE HERMIT
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Draco is eighteen. The Dark Lord is dead, and it’s high, late summer in Wiltshire.
The war is over, and he’s been officially deemed a coward, but not a killer. A frightened, coerced child, not a criminal, so said Harry Potter himself at his hearing one day in mid-June, after Draco had spent it and most of the month of May before it shivering in a Ministry holding cell.
His blunt, earnest testimony had spared Draco and his mother the swift return to Azkaban that his father enjoyed, and he supposes he’s grateful. He’s certainly tried to find a way to say so, in the countless letters he’s tried and failed to pen, since then. Mostly he’s just tired.
He and his mother are confined to the Manor and its grounds, but they aren't alone—there's a steady stream of cursebreakers and curators and solicitors and aurors coming and going, all bent towards the great grinding wheel of reparations, which seems to mostly end up looking like stripping the Malfoy estate of any and everything of value, dismantling curses and centuries-old tainted magic as they go.
Draco’s been helping.
His efforts started a bit funny—only a few days after his hearing and subsequent confinement—with him finding himself in his father’s study, once again without his father. He proceeded to smash all the contents of the liquor cabinet, various decanters of expensive firewhisky and scotch and elfwine, upon the parquet wood flooring. Then he had to clean up after himself, crawling around on his hands and knees carefully picking up glass, mopping up the alcohol, the windows thrown open to air the fumes.
Bill Weasley (who is, of course, the head of the Gringott’s cursebreaking team assigned to clear the Manor) found him like that. Already mortified, Draco then fumbled his way through a painful but entirely sincere apology, and he begged to be allowed to help.
“You don’t even have a wand,” Weasley had said, eventually.
“... No,” Draco had agreed, shortly. The last he’d seen of his wand was in Harry Potter’s hand, deflecting Voldemort’s last killing curse back at him. “But there must still be things I can do.”
And as it turned out, there were.
It would be quicker, easier, to burn it all down and start fresh. The kind of darkness this place has seen, it’s sunk in deep.
But alongside the darkness, the nightmares, the blatant evil rot—he was a largely happy child, here. He was loved here. His mother’s roses are still blooming in the garden. It’s home, and so he’ll do this the hard way: wandless, sweating, earning his calluses, breaking his back.
It’s better work than haunting his own house like he’s already a ghost. Better than staying up late sitting at his desk, quill dripping ink onto a blank page, wordless, though he avoids that less reliably.
“You're good at this,” Bill Weasley says, sounding a little surprised, after a handful of weeks watching him work.
“I’d be better if I had a wand,” Draco grumbles, mopping sweat off his brow, applying himself more aggressively to the particular patch of floor he's been sanding. Something dark and sticky had pooled and stained there, and he doesn’t care to speculate about the provenance of the substance further except for how to get it out. “But luckily, it’s my fucking house. The wards cooperate, mostly.”
“Hmm,” is all Weasley says before returning to his spellwork, so Draco carries on without comment too.
Draco can always feel the eyes on him, and sometimes senses Weasley biting his tongue, but it’s a fine enough routine, hard work without conversation. Weasley directs his team of breakers, and he directs Draco, and they work through the Manor room by room. They pass the summer this way.
And then halfway through clearing a gallery in the East Wing, with October fast approaching, Weasley says casually, "You know, you're not what I expected.”
An unsurprising flash of bitterness jolts through him. He swallows it down, forces a grin. "Well. As you’ve seen, I am making earnest efforts to reform my wicked, cowardly ways."
“No, I mean--” Weasley holsters his wand, folds his arms across his chest. “Harry told me he asked you to write to him after everything, before your hearing.”
“… did he,” Draco says, wary, shifting under the scrutiny.
“He told me you said you would. I’d’ve thought you would have done it by now.”
Draco gapes at him.
As a matter of fact Draco had not told Potter that he would write to him.
It had gone like this—Potter had taken him by the wrist mere minutes before Draco went before the Wizengamot for the hearing that very well might send him to a cold rock in the north Atlantic and he had said will you write to me? After all this? Reckon we’ve got more things to say to one another, and Draco had said What?
And Potter had nodded like that was anything at all, and Draco had been dragged out into the courtroom, and Potter got up in front of everyone and called him young, foolish, naive, a schoolyard bully, yes, but gutless when it came to actions of consequence, and ultimately inculpable of the charges set by the court.
And so, like a misbehaving child, Draco had been sent home.
What was there to say, after that? Draco had tried, tried as soon as he had access to parchment, quill, and ink, but no words came. They’d been knocked clean out of him.
Weasley’s still looking at him.
“How do you know I haven’t?” Draco asks, deliberately light, aware he let the silence drag too long. Predictably, Weasley snorts.
“C’mon, you know I’ve got a tab on your wards for the work here, and you’ve sent no owls out, no Floo calls, nothing. Why? What’s stopping you?” He sounds genuinely curious. His eyes are gentle, his face open.
Draco flushes, his shoulders hiking up with tension, and turns away from him abruptly.
He says, clipped, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m a coward - you know it, Potter certainly knows it—”
Draco flinches hard, whirling around, his back hitting the wall. Weasley’s hand drops off his shoulder, palm up apologetically. “Sorry. You're not a coward. I don't think so, and Harry doesn't either.”
Draco gapes, again. Stammers, eventually, “You– what? Yes, I, of course he does—"
“Doesn't. Cross my heart.”
"How do you know?" Draco asks, aware of and hating the way his voice is going high and sharp. There’s a bubble of something hot building up pressure inside him, making his hands shake. Pain throbs through his forearm, which doesn’t make sense at all. The snake-faced bastard is dead, and the Mark is a colorless thing that hasn’t so much as twitched since Potter struck him down in May. His breathing is coming fast. Coward.
"Draco, he told me," Weasley says, infuriatingly steady.
It bursts out of him, a jagged shout: "He told the whole bloody Wizengamot what he thought of me!"
Weasley just shrugs, like it’s easy. He says, “Harry said what he had to say to keep you out of Azkaban. You’ve never deserved that.”
Draco swallows. Breathes. Clenches and unclenches his fists, willing the trembling of his fingers to still. The Mark is still there, he knows, a scar underneath his shirtsleeve. He doesn’t want to look at it, even to reassure himself that it's only a dead thing now. Instead he studies the new calluses on his palms, his fingers, wishes he knew how his wand would feel against them, wishes he could lean once more on the comforting bloom of magic he’d felt the first time he held that hawthorn wood at eleven.
“Why…” he says, eventually, small, “Why would he do that?”
Weasley still hasn’t taken his eyes off him, his expression inscrutable now. “I think you should finish that letter, Malfoy.”
Draco stares. Nods, slowly. “Yeah. Okay.”
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In the end he still doesn’t quite know what to say. He settles with scrawling a few quick words in a shaky hand onto his last scrap of unruined parchment and sends the owl away with it on the wrong side of midnight. He watches it winging off into the night, swaying, abruptly drained of all his nervous energy, and stumbles to his bed. He falls asleep fully clothed on top of his covers, and does not dream.
The Manor wards wake him, however many hours later. Not too many, judging by the weak morning sunlight spilling in through his open window. A new arrival on the grounds, the warm resonating bloom tells him. New, but not unfamiliar.
Oh, he thinks, there you are.
He goes, disheveled and blinking sleep from his eyes—and Harry Potter meets him like that, halfway up the drive: with Draco’s hawthorn wand in his outstretched hand.