Chapter 2
Well, by now, the jig must be up. Should I start these with Hello Diary? I feel like this isn't going to work, as I do not care. Oh well,
Dear Diary.
I'm currently looking death in the eyes yet again. Don't hold your breath, I haven't died yet. Whose idea was this conscious thought to diary thing? Remind me to sue.
The first time I killed something that wasn’t human, I was seventeen.
It had red eyes. It bled silver. And it laughed when I cast the Killing Curse.
Sometimes, I still hear it.
But not as much now—not since I started taking contracts. Hunting the dark. Ridding the world of things that slithered out from the cracks left behind by war, blood and prophecy.
I became very good at pretending that meant something.
After the war, I disappeared.
Not in the dramatic vanishing into a cloud of bats way Theo likes to tell it, but in the slow, rotting, soul-damp way that happens when no one wants you anywhere. The Ministry stripped me of my wand for two years. House arrest at the Manor. Weekly check-ins with some bored old wizard in an ugly tie who asked me if I “felt remorse yet.”
I didn’t.
Not because I wasn’t sorry. But because remorse implies you had a choice.
I didn’t choose the war. I was born into it. Bred for it. Polished and primped and posed like some fucking heirloom blade they kept in a velvet box until it was time to slit throats.
It was too late when I realised I didn’t want to be a weapon.
When they finally let me go, I didn’t stay.
I left the Manor. I left England. I left everything.
France. Spain. Hungary. I went where the magic was older than people. Where curses bled into stone. Where no one cared who I used to be, so long as I could help banish the thing in the well.
I met Theo again in Prague.
He was unshaven, manic, and wearing a fur coat two sizes too big. Told me a ghost in a brothel had cursed him and couldn’t drink water without hallucinating flamingos.
I said, “Same.”
We never went home after that.
Instead, we made a business: Nott & Malfoy: ParanormalSolutions. No one took us seriously until we handled a basilisk that got stuck in a sewer system beneath Florence. Then they really didn’t want to know us.
We live on the fringe now. Between the magical world and the monsters, it’s too scared to admit that it still crawls through its belly.
And somewhere along the way, I started sleeping again.
Until now.
Until her.
Granger stormed back into my life like a bloody exorcism in heels.
She looks different. Softer in the mouth, sharper in the eyes. She still talks like she swallowed a library, but now it’s with the weight of someone who’s seen too many obituaries on her desk.
She doesn’t trust me. Fair.
I don’t trust her either. But not because I think she’ll betray me.
Because she might see through me.
She might look at what I’ve become and realise it’s all theatre. The smirks, the sarcasm, the devil-may-care gunslinger act—none of it’s real. Just smoke around the hollow places. Keeps people out.
Keeps me safe.
Keeps the screaming thing inside my head quiet.
Until it doesn’t.
Time slows, sometimes, when you’re about to die.
People say that’s your life flashing before your eyes. It’s not. It’s your regrets.
And I have plenty.
Here comes the trial memory again. PTSD is a fickle thing.
My trial lasted twenty-one minutes.
Not because I was innocent. Not even because I was particularly good at pretending I was.
Because Kingsley Shacklebolt, newly named Minister, stood up in the Wizengamot chambers and said:
“Lucius Malfoy forced his son to be a Death Eater. Narcissa Malfoy saved Harry Potter’s life. Draco Malfoy was a boy. And war turns boys into weapons.”
And that was that.
Community service. Restricted magic for twenty-four months. Probation. No bloody person wanted to look me in the eye, except her.
Granger.
She sat near the back of the gallery, arms folded, chin high. Watching me like I was a riddle she hadn’t decided was worth solving.
She didn’t speak for me. Didn’t speak against me either.
Just watched.
I saw her again at my father’s funeral.
Lucius died the year after the war.
Not a dramatic death. Not vengeance or poison or duel. Just… stopped being. Dementor’s Kiss on a man already empty. He wasted away in his study, robes still pressed, cane by the fireplace. A single glass of wine at his side, untouched.
I found him.
Narcissa didn’t cry. She sat beside him on the velvet settee for six hours and then got up and made tea.
She left a week later.
Packed a single case. No fanfare. No dramatic announcement. Just turned to me and said, “I think I’d like to live by the sea for a while, darling.”
She lives in Cornwall now. Paints. Rents a small cottage with too many cats and a garden that refuses to die, no matter the season. She sends me letters I don’t answer, with pressed flowers and mundane updates:
The clematis is blooming early this year. You should visit.Do you still get night terrors, or has your Theo friend chased them off?
I don’t answer because I don’t know how to tell her that I haven’t had a nightmare in months—just long stretches of nothing.
That’s worse, somehow.
Sometimes I think I died in that war.
I’m just walking around inside my memory.
Let's get back to the story, there's plenty more monologues of self-deprecation and a certain golden girl to come
“Draco!” Hermione’s voice slices through my head like a blade.
The shadow is on us.
I raise my wand without thinking, instincts snapping into place. My smirk returns like a reflex, like armour.
“Right,” I say, bracing myself. “Let’s dance, you ugly bastard.”
The demon lunges.
And for a moment, just a sliver of breath in a rotting corridor with Granger at my side—I feel alive again.