Chapter 20
2002
Draco is not provided the details but he is among the few that gets to hear the news of Rodolphus' painful and slow execution.
The Dark Lord had ordered Tiberius to bite him and had him thrown in the dungeons, with anti-magic shackles on his ankles.
This means Rodolphus cannot heal himself, and neither can Draco.
"Uncle," Draco says, kneeling beside his cot, "What happened?"
What could have happened that made the Dark Lord angry enough to execute his most powerful second-in-command?
"Years of service..." Rodolphus laughs, wry and bitter. "and this is the thanks I get?"
"What made him so angry? I don't understand. Tell me what happened!"
"I don't have much time."
Rodolphus touches Draco's face.
His uncle has never been an emotional man. Quite the opposite, in fact. But in his eyes, there is something now.
Draco has never been under the illusion that his uncle cared for him in any true way, no matter how much he owes him for all he has learned. For a moment, however, he almost believes it -- some deprived, starving thing inside of him.
"My dear boy... my beautiful masterpiece."
Rodolphus' face is washed of colour, dark circles sinking his eyes in with the sickness of snake venom. He stares up at Draco, admiring him like one would a handiwork. His hand lowers, gripping Draco's collar and tugging him down. He follows. He has learned that there has never been any choice but to oblige, when it comes to his uncle.
"Decem," Rodolphus murmurs into his ear, and continues to murmur these random latin words. "Umquam, Nostrum, Septem..."
Draco's brows twitch, furrowed in bemusement. He understands the words, but when he tries to find a pattern or connection among them, he cannot. All he can do is chalk it down to the delirium of a sick and dying man.
"...Vomica, Saturo, Familia..."
The edges of his mind seem to grow faded, the wisps of details of the moment escaping from his memory.
"...Inanis. Novo..."
By the next second, he cannot remember what had occurred in the moment before, that there was even a moment before this at all.
Rodolphus grabs Draco's jaw hard and whispers, "I hope you destroy him."
The words appear to have come out of nowhere. He doesn't understand.
"Him who, uncle?"
"Your father," Rodolphus' feeble voice wisps out, "he died not because of his injuries so much as neglect. He had lived for hours after, you see. But Voldemort... he ordered that Lucius be left there to die, as his final punishment for his failure. As for your mother... It was my skill that allowed for what happened to her... but that, too, was essentially by Voldemort's will and hand."
Draco's fingers clench harder around the edge of the cot, where they are curled for purchase and support while his uncle holds him by the collar to speak his dying words. He blanks his mind forcefully against the memories; compartmentalization. Occlumency.
"I don't understand what you're trying to say, uncle."
"You will, some day. I promise."
What his uncle is saying is that he should blame the Dark Lord for these occurrences. But it makes no sense to him.
It has always come back to Potter; these things. If it weren't for Potter's part in these events, none of these things would have ever happened.
Rodolphus' last breaths end with the strange and confusing words:
"When you remember... I hope you destroy them all... even if it won't for me..."
"I hope to hear their screams from hell."
***
Weeks later, Draco stands in front of the mirror, gripping the sink as a migraine split through his head.
The migraine was slow-growing, each day worse than the next.
For a split-second, something breaks inside his mind.
And through the peek of that crack is a horrible kind of panic and terror, as if he can feel a presence violently weaving through his mind. Draco's hand grips his head, fisting tightly around his hair.
"Get out of my head," he gasps out.
Just as quick, the peek closes shut, his mind gone silent, and the last moment lost entirely to him; only the throbbing pain of his migraine.
He can only remember what he said, the phantom echo of his voice in the tiled room. He cannot remember who he was speaking to, or what it was about, or what it was he felt that made him sound so terrified and desperate.
Draco lifts his eyes. He blinks, confused, his brows tight. He thinks he must be going insane.
What is happening to him?
What is this?
***
One of the things Draco has prided himself on since he was a child was his ability to reason and question. It was inevitable that he should learn to do so, growing up in the rigid environment he had with Severus Snape as a godfather and constant presence, teaching him flexibility in his thinking and how to have a mind of his own.
Draco is a part of the Death-Eaters not so much because he believes wholly in their cause, but simply because he had nowhere else to go. Because he didn't quite care so much about anything - didn't care about where he ended up, about the world going to hell right in front of his eyes while he stood and watched from the top floor through large panes of glass windows, a glass of scotch in hand.
The first crack came after weeks, when the slow-building megacognitive awareness began. He was not quite seeing things clearly, even if he didn't know in what ways. He began to notice the gaps in his understanding, the haziness around many of his memories, how the details of the moment had escaped him so often and he was always left with the sense that he had missed something, lost time without knowing.
A growing clarity made his thinking expand wider, quicker. He began to notice the limitations of his perception around the core memories of his life.
There is a fog in his mind that he was not aware of for years. It's as if this fog is beginning to finally lift.
His logic and reasoning speak even against the height of his emotions of pain and anger and confusion, the urge to retreat into ignorance, to turn back into the familiarity of the perception that there was a single person who had ruined his life, and that Draco's purpose had been to bring him to his death at the Dark Lord's hand, and that this purpose has been served.
I need you to think about it all. I need you to try to understand and make sense of everything they've told you, everything you know. I need you to question things --
Draco prided himself in his ability to reason and question.
So when did he lose it?
The more clarity he regains, the more his thinking expands. The more it expands, the more he begins to see how his thoughts move in very narrow paths, locked onto particular perspectives and conclusions with no origin of thought process to trace them back to.
He loathed Harry Potter with every fiber of his being. But why?
Or more specifically, why did he fault him for all the things that happened to Draco, but no one else who was involved?
He believed Potter had been a liar who did not care for him, who had only ever pretended to. Potter believed he was too pure for someone like Draco.
But why?
Draco was so loyal to the Dark Lord.
But why?
He did not exactly believe in the cause. It was just that all he had left was his uncle and Severus from his family, so he stayed wherever they were. There is nowhere else for him to go in this world. Nowhere he belonged.
Another reason was because of the shared agenda they had against Harry Potter.
He cared for his mother. He was enraged at Potter and at himself and at the world itself for what happened to her.
But he did not visit her once.
He was too busy, he tries to justify. Being second-in-command is time-consuming work.
It was painful to remember; to think of seeing her again.
The truth is that this cognitive dissonance never occurred to him in the first place.
It just never occurred to him that he should go see her. He was too busy chasing after Potter, working for the Death-Eaters, to even think of it.
He visited the grave of the man he abhorred above all things every week, but not his own mother. How bizarre is that?
He could not remember, he realised suddenly. He could not remember or understand where it all began. It just did and it never occurred to him to wonder what his reasons were.
Why is the rest of his life so difficult to remember?
He can only remember the years before he was nineteen cognitively, in distant images, in blurry facts. The colors of their experiences are so faded now, so dim.
It feels like that was somebody else's life. In a way, it was. It was hard to comprehend or recall just why he had loved Harry Potter so much, why he had been central to so much of his life.
It was hard, and then slowly, so very slowly...
It wasn't.
It made him angry, when he realised the hatred he held - the most intense thing he had left to feel - was loosening its grasp on his heart.
(Underneath this anger was something else; a fragile, trembling thing that made him want to grapple on to it. In hindsight, perhaps he had known where this would all end.
His hatred was now the only thing protecting him; an armour.
And his armour was falling apart.)
Every week, he found himself standing over Potter's grave.
At first, it was an outlet; cathartic, expressions of his gladness that he was dead. However, that was a half-lie, of sorts. The vengeful part of him was glad, certainly. But it was boring without him. Potter, if nothing else, did give him a challenge to look forward to every day. It was thrilling. Draco worked for the Dark Lord, but it was tedious work he did not care about so much.
Now...
Now he couldn't explain it to anyone, why he was here.
The rage and hatred has drained out of him, and his heart is empty. There is nothing left to express. Yet, he still comes here, every week.
"It's boring," Draco tells Potter. His grave is neglected, weeds growing around it. No one he once loved can visit. "It's all so very boring."
It's all very boring without you.
***
Months later, Draco finds himself in St. Mungos.
"Narcissa Malfoy," he asks at the reception. "I want to see her."
"Y-yes sir," the wizard says. His voice is trembling, subdued.
All throughout the walk in the corridors, Draco can feel eyes on him. People shrink and hunch in on themselves as he passes them, too near. They firmly fix their eyes to the ground, to the papers they're reading, or dart them away entirely. They shuffle closer to their loved ones. He notices the tremors in their bodies. Everything goes utterly silent as soon as he enters a room.
"Here, sir," the mediwitch says. Her head is bowed.
"I trust she has been well taken care of?"
"Of course! Absolutely. Knowing she was... your mother... we made sure."
Draco nods. He breathes. He pushes the door open.
Narcissa is frail and thin, sitting on her bed. She is hunched over, head tilted. Her face is ashen and her eyes are sunken, now too big for her face.
Draco hasn't seen in years.
Perhaps it is best that he didn't.
When Narcissa raises her eyes and sees him, she freezes entirely. For long seconds, all she does is stare at him, wide-eyed. Her breaths hitch. She begins to shake, as she scrambles backward into the corner of her bed.
The entire room is then overtaken by a blood-curdling, high scream. The mediwitch runs forward, gently grabbing her shoulders to try and calm her down.
All the while, Draco stands frozen himself in the doorway, his hands at his side twitching. All the muscles in his body are locked, tense.
The mediwitch's eyes are on him too, wide-eyed darts towards him with a subdued kind of terror, a new understanding.
Why had he come here?
How did he even dare?
Did he forget, that it was his hands that held the wand when they did this to her?
Did he not see it coming, when it was his face his mother remembered behind the wand that Crucioed her for hours and hours on end into madness.
Still, he came here, in pathetic and foolish hopes that this would not be her reaction. That she would recognise him as her son.
"Okay," Draco whispers, raising his trembling palms to her, "Okay... I'll leave now, mother." He steps back, slowly. "I'll leave."
He turns and does not look back, the screams dying into whimpers, echoing from behind.
***
The final crack that breaks every open is that all his old memories start to grow clearer to him.
They become as colourful as the way it felt back then, once again.
The leaves crackle under his oxford where Draco stops in front of the grave.
HARRY POTTER
(1980 - 1999)
He stares at it until his eyes burn from the blow of the wind.
Draco falls more than lowers to the ground on his knees.
He does not cry. That is how hollow he has come. He does not cry, only touches the edge of the soil by his knee, tentatively. He sits there for what must be hours as the memories came over him, like waves.
Two small boys running through the grounds in the sunshine, holding hands. Childish laughter. Lying on the grass upside down. Golden fireflies of magic in the air, and soft hair between his fingers, the weight of a black haired head on his lap. The comfort of sharing beds. Harry's fingers around his. Harry's smile into his mouth. His green eyes laughing into his.
He sits there for hours as he remembers. As everything, finally, becomes clear.