Chapter 25
The important thing to understand is that I hate myself.
I hated myself for a long time. It was the sort of hate that bubbled up in you and made it easy for you to hate other things. Loathing felt natural when everything else felt wrong.
I figure Azkaban is the sort of place where hate would be rewarded. You could nurture your hate there, watch it grow. If it got too much, they wouldn’t be anyone who stopped me from ending things.
The ministry official waiting in the room for me dressed sharp but had a file of paperwork tied together with twine. He kept casting a spell to untie and retie it every time he needed anything. The first document was my rejected form. He had to pull out a set of glasses from a side pocket to read it, mouthing the words out as he went. I couldn’t see his lips under a bushy, poorly groomed beard, but I knew what it said. Draco Malfoy resigns from the DMLE, the Minister of Magic denies the request, pending a hearing happening now. He set the form aside and swished his wand again to pull forth a massive pile of pages that had to be taller than the file they’d sprung from. The pages flew out and began stacking themselves up at his elbow.
The ministry was the master of concocting levels of hell, which is why the official was now droning on as he read from the large stack of papers, which was apparently a legal history on war criminal sentencing. You’d be surprised to know I rubbed at my temples as he spoke and did not listen.
For most of my adult life I never listened to anyone. People like to bark orders at me but I’d long ago forgotten how to be talked to and then respond. My aunt had taught me how to wall myself off from feelings people could use against me. She’d taught me to hide my heart and my mind and be less than human so I would never have to obey. Isolation was an old hurt I hated, but it had been safe. Was safe.
The batty old man put down whatever he’d been reading to reexamine my original form. It was odd, he said. The official tilted the glasses further down his nose to better peer. The timing of my request was quite odd. At least there was plenty of paperwork to sort through. Enough work to sort out the time. Thank goodness, eh? Now, remind him what my job was again? It says… file clerk?
My first line of defense had always been never answering their questions. My father taught me that, the power of holding yourself superior to all others. Entitlement had made him bitter as power was stripped from him bit by bit until his final internment in an Azkaban cell. I shifted in my seat as the official twitched his wand, sending papers into increasingly haphazard piles. What would Azkaban do to me? Did I still have any spirit to crush?
The official frowned before summing three more forms from the file. He put his glasses away, then reached into his inner pocket to pull out a different set. He shoved these right up against his eyes as he read the new pages. Auror McRoy listed you as a file clerk, Auror Potter listed you as a file clerk, and Auror Weasley listed you as… how odd. It says consultant?
This really wasn’t the place to start, but who the fuck was Auror McRoy? The official was rattling on about official documentation from my supervisors but if I cared to talk I’d swear up and down I’d never laid eyes on this person. Some stranger who had been responsible for shoving me off to do busy work until I died. Unbelievable. Of course I had to leave. I was making the right choice. I could keep my unruly spirit anywhere. This was the right choice.
The official blinked at me through the magnified glasses, making his eyes resemble some terrifying rodent. Consultant. Why hadn’t Auror Weasley listed a classification? That really does affect one’s compensation. Maybe he put it in one of his quarterly reports. More papers were summoned to be peered at. Glasses once again swapped out for a new purple-tinged set that balanced out the deep yellowing of the records.
Why did he need so much paperwork? Was he trying to rattle me? Make me forget what I was doing here? I clung to memories of things I hated. Marinated my heart in the memories of everything I despised. This place was evil and I couldn't forget it. I reached for all the things I’d found here to be bitter over, all the hexes and jeers and cuts along my skin, but I think my hands were shaking and I couldn’t stop my toes from tapping out their nerves. I should have quit eons ago. I should have quit when hate was the only thing that coursed through me and I had no reason to be afraid.
The official sniffed at me and my mullish silence, irritably casting again to pull out supplemental forms to read through for guidance I would not, could not provide.
What he needed was Weasley, who’d have an answer to his question and likely the paperwork to back it up. Weasley, with his ancestral feud with my family that sparked instant distrust as a child, even before I fanned the flames of hatred with my prejudice and bigotry. Weasley, who I’d tried to kill, and who never once lashed out at me once I was under his heel. Weasley, who just last night asked me to give him a chance to help me instead of throwing my life away in a place that would tear me apart. He needed Weasley, not me.
The official shifted papers around on table until he pulled out some piece of legislation with DRAFT written over the top of it in big block print. Something in the legislation referenced “in good standing,” and the official paused to summon yet another stack of papers from the twined bundle. This stack was quite thick. The official took it page by page, reading each complaint ever leveled against me in my ten years of servitude. The constant refrain of “unsubstantiated” was vexing because it just meant they hadn’t even bothered to take good notes.
I hated it here. I’d given them so much, so much more than they ever expected from me, but I’d given it anyway. And I know, I know I didn’t deserve anything for my efforts. I know this was punishment because if I’d had my way all of these people would be dead and their precious ministry would be bricked up from the lowest floors down deep into the earth right up to their glorious atrium. I didn’t deserve for them to care enough to fill out all the forms and record the ways they found me in bad standing, for whatever reason it mattered now.
But along the way I fucked up. At some point I’d begun to want more than I deserved. When the official started reading quarterly reports, Potter’s words on an old man's lips, I hated how I craved it. He called me brilliant. He called me indispensable. Unbeknownst to me, he’d scrounged up data and wrote a half decent report all on his own providing evidence that my methods led to breakthroughs in cases. He went so far as to scold the senior aurors for not providing me more support. More than once, more than a dozen times, he commented on my unstable health. His harshest words were for the conditions they kept me in, and how no one seemed to care should something happen to me. I didn’t know it was his recommendation that the senior aurors let me transfer to somewhere more habitable. Apparently he threatened to quit when they rejected the first request.
Naturally there was nothing half as emotional in Weasley’s reports. They were short, crisp things, with the barest facts that somehow still extolled my virtues.
The old man set aside the papers outlining my entire life and slowly checked off “in good standing” on the form in front of him. Bureaucracy above all else.
My leg was jiggling now, so hard did I tap me feet. My hands were fisted and shoved up into my arm pits. This didn’t change anything. So what if they’d grown attached. I wasn’t attached. Certainly not more attached to these people than I was to my… what? Pride? Dignity? Self respect? Self loathing? What was it I was clinging to? Freedom, I think. Free will, at least. I don’t know. I hated it here. I hated the people who kept me here. I hated how sometimes I forgot to hate things and I tricked myself into thinking life was bearable. It wasn’t bearable. Not even these people who put nice words down on paper made it bearable.
Oh fuck oh no for some reason this knobhead had my original charging documents and was now reading through my entire list of crimes. How could I not hate myself? I’d told them I would do it all again, and the official didn’t so much as blink when he read my words back to me. Of course I would do it again. I’d done it all for mostly the right reasons. Family and honor. My father had escaped one war just to charge back into a second, making all the same mistakes twice. I always had wanted to be just like him. I was a horrible, selfish, insecure, useless person and everyone knows it. That’s why… that’s why…
The official swapped back to his original glasses to read a carefully typed letter provided by the newly minted Senior Auror Weasley. He was a senior auror now, so it shouldn’t have been too unexpected for him to make outlandish claims. Like I was a good person. Like sending me to Azkaban would be morally and ethically wrong.
It wasn’t exactly a revelation to consider that if I sent myself to Azkaban I would never again see any of the people who were too stupid not to hate me. The knots of my stomach twisted tighter and I thought I would be sick right onto the table with all its official forms. I was breathing too hard, too fast, choking on the air that didn’t want to reach my lungs. Panicking.
Azkaban or DMLE. Azkaban or hell. I’d known from the start that the only reason I stayed in this wretched place was I was a weakling and a coward and Azkaban would be too damn hard. For some reason Azkaban wasn’t what felt hard, now.
Hard… Hard was listening to this onerous man say words I always found a way to run from before. Hard was believing any piece of them. It wasn’t like anyone actually was willing to follow through. It’s not like Weasley would really ruin the rest of his career by making his first political fight as a senior auror about saving a Death Eater. It’s not like Potter meant it, when he said he’d quit over my conditions. It’s not like they’d ever be able to prove they meant any of this. It would be too damn hard to go back and know for sure.
I hung my head and cupped my hands over my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen.
What I knew, what I’d learned, from these last ten years, more than ten years if I let myself think about it, was that if you hated yourself enough then nothing anyone said or did or thought even mattered. I could be in control of my life and smother it. Wasn’t it easier to just accept being alone was inevitable? That was downright smart. Efficient. Safe. One correct path to walk down, with the bonus of knowing how everything would end. Azkaban would be only pain, but it was a simple pain.
Nothing like the pain that other people could offer, if you let them. Sure, they said they wanted to help me, but could I really believe that despite all of the horrible things I did that made clear I was unworthy, there could be someone who saw more in me? Would I ever actually sign up to endure letting people stop me again the next time my certainty spiked and I knew for a fact I shouldn’t even exist? It’s not like I’d ever force myself to put thoughts into words and tell them to their face that I wanted them, I needed them, but more than that, I needed them to help me? That would be excruciatingly, undeniably, impossibly hard.
By Circe, why would I ever choose to do something that hard?
I licked my lips. My fingers twitched against my ears. My legs jiggled with nerves and anticipation.
Going to Azkaban would be like killing myself, and there was nothing wrong with that.
Nothing… nothing wrong…
Only…
There was the very slight chance that I did not want to die. I had, before, but I slipped up and let too much of my hatred go.
There were people here. People who… people who… it was too big a risk to say they cared. Too big a risk, too wide a vulnerability, to go back to them and say I changed my mind. To trust them to need me as much as I would need them. Too much misery hanging in the balance if it all went belly up. An untenable, irrational, unbearable amount of risk. Too much to ask of anyone to hold me together when I wasn’t strong enough to go it alone.
I chewed on my lip and considered cutting the ministry official off and demanding he end whatever this was immediately before I lost the nerve to make what certainly wouldn’t be the worst decision of my life. I had to have enough hate left in me that it was exactly what I needed to do.
I needed to choose me. A safe, miserable, short, terrifying, certain life for me.
But I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do it.
Salazar save me. I had every reason to give up on myself and all the people asking me to trust them, but I didn’t want to. I shook with terror and heartache and the possibility that whatever came next would be worse than anything that happened yet, but I wasn’t going to quit.
What the fuck do I do now?
I was pulled from my thoughts by a hinge that opened a small hole in the wall. A message whistled in the wind as it whisked towards us. The official caught it at the exact moment it popped into the room. Deftly he untied the twine around it and rolled out the scroll, nodding as if he long expected what it had to say. He plucked up a quill and signed the document he’d been working on for me in a long, curly script.
Still reeling from my inner turmoil that the official had studiously ignored, I didn’t understand what I was looking at when he passed it over an official memo with the minister’s own seal. I hardly noticed him fold up and tuck his glasses away. I didn’t understand his words, when the official stated that this morning the Wizamagot adopted the Decennial Reformation Act Correcting Over-sentencing.
Having faithfully completed ten years of service, and a whole heap of the official’s meticulous paperwork, I was free.