Disclaimer: What follows is a work of fan-fiction. It contains characters, situations and ideas that belong to J.K. Rowling. Any original characters are my own creations and not knowingly based on any persons living or dead, or the work of any other author. I neither own nor claim to own anything else. This story was not written for profit and no copyright infringement was intended.
Author's Note: The story that follows is set a little over twenty-three years after the events described in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Since this idea was conceived in November 2005, well before Deathly Hallows was released, it doesn't take into account the events of that book. The backstory here was based on my own ideas of what would happen.
AUGUREY SONG
"Its distinctive cry was once thought to be a death omen, but it is now known that the Augurey's cry foretells rain."
HP Lexicon entry on the Augurey or Irish Phoenix.
Chapter One
He Who Knows No History
"We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it."
(Lyndon B. Johnson)
The fifth glass of champagne looked more enticing than any of the four previous glasses, but I wondered whether I really ought to drink it. I turned towards Draco to protest that I couldn't, really, but when I saw his face, I realised that he was in a worse state than I was. It was hardly surprising; this was the third bottle we had cracked open, though we had had help with the first two.
"What're we celebrating again?" Draco was definitely drunk. His usual drawl was becoming perilously close to slurring. "Oh, yeah, drinking to the memory of bloody Harry Potter, may he rot in the hell he so richly deserves." He attempted to raise his glass, and instead fell out of his chair. Watching this spectacle, at once both amusing and alarming, I decided that the fifth glass had best remain undrunk. It wouldn't do if we were both incapable of standing – or even sitting – upright. Draco's crystal glass had shattered into thousands of tiny shards as he fell, but he did not notice that any more than the fine champagne soaking into his robes. He just sat sprawled, incoherently abusing his enemy of old.
Not that Harry and Draco had been enemies for some time. Had they still been at odds when the national hero died, nothing on earth would have induced Draco to raise a glass – let alone however many he had actually had – to the other man's memory. But it suited him sometimes, especially when he was drunk, to pretend that the old hatred still burnt bright; some kind of masochistic nostalgia, I supposed.
I cleared up the mess with a wave of my wand, but allowed Draco to continue to sit about untidily, muttering to himself. It was a sad and startlingly pathetic sight. For much of my twenties I had been confronted with a similar spectacle on a fairly regular basis, and seeing him the same now was not so much embarrassing as deeply painful. Thinking of those days, so long ago now, when we had last drowned our sorrows so dramatically, reminded me cruelly that we were no longer young.
But whatever the intervening years had done to me, they had been kind to Draco. He had aged gracefully, although it was surely an advantage to him that his hair was not black, as mine was, but the sort of pale white-blond perfect for concealing any hint of grey. His looks were the same as they had been when he was twenty, and his character was considerably improved. It was as if age and bitter experience had killed the spoilt brat he had been and left a more mature, if sardonic, man in his place.
His sarcastic tongue had occasionally caused people to compare him to Snape, our old Potions Master, and while it was certainly possible to do so, I doubted that Draco would have welcomed the comparison. There were certain similarities between them, to be sure. They had both suffered considerably, one way or another, at the hands of their families; they had both been branded with the Dark Mark and been treated with great suspicion because of it; neither had ever known, really, how to socialise normally, or how to treat other people as their equals.
The present Potions professor separated himself from the past one, however, in one important way. Whatever else Draco was, or had once been, he had never once acted as if the world somehow owed him something. He had never pretended to be hard done by, although gods knew his life had been hard enough. He did not take his own soul's agonies out on others. He was, thankfully, sensible enough to realise that, although it was over twenty years since the war that had blighted our world, there were still few whose lives had not in some way been affected by it, few indeed who had no scars, physical or psychological, from that last bitter conflict.
For all this sober maturity, however, Draco was the same as always when drunk. I looked at him, lying on the stone tiles of his own study, now grumbling about something I couldn't quite make out, and pitied him the hangover he was bound to have the following morning. It would be all the worse because he was no longer used to drinking such quantities of alcohol.
Something not unlike compassion stirred me now, for I leant down and helped him to his feet rather roughly and deposited him back into the chair from which he had fallen. He was heavier than he looked, heavier than he had ever been during our youthful revelry, and I took comfort in that fact, for here, if nowhere else, Draco Malfoy was showing his age.
I had forgotten how exactly like a bad-tempered bear Draco could be after a heavy night's drinking, and the reintroduction was unwelcome, at best. He did not choose to leave his room until just before midday. He came out wearing nothing but a green dressing gown and a particularly fearsome scowl. He did not deign to speak until after he had gulped down half a cup of incredibly strong coffee, and when he did, it was all grunted monosyllables. Eventually, I said, in mock affront:
"Is this any way to treat a guest, Draco?"
He refused even to look shamefaced. "Don't care," he growled. "You're not a guest, anyway; you're a friend."
"That excuses it, does it?" I asked, raising one eyebrow in an almost unconscious parody of Draco himself.
"Yes," he said, simply, and began devouring cold toast. It was at this moment that the door opened and a much younger man stepped into the room, his green eyes apprehensive. Draco looked up. "Well, Dorado?"
His son just looked at him with a mixture of worry and disdain. "You were drinking last night," he said, at length.
"So I was," conceded Draco. "Weren't you? It was a very important occasion; a victory celebration, or some such rubbish." He stopped talking abruptly and glared at his coffee as if it had somehow offended him.
"I'm too young to drink," said Dorado, sniffing. "'And I wouldn't want to anyway. Not that I don't appreciate all the things that the Order – that you – did for us in the war, but I really don't think that all the dead heroes would consider you getting plastered in their memory particularly appropriate." The younger Malfoy had an earnest, pedantic way of speaking that was not unpleasant, but at the present moment grated ever so slightly on my tired and worn nerves.
"Always taking the moral high ground," groaned Draco. His grey eyes were bloodshot and ringed with black, and I could see that now was really not the time to be attempting to teach him any sort of lesson. "It's tradition to get blind drunk for the victory celebrations. Why, Harry Potter himself…"
"Found it necessary to drink himself into a stupor simply to escape the horrors of what his past had been," interrupted Dorado. "What excuse do you have?" I was mildly horrified. If I had attempted to speak so to my father, I would have been given a good clip round the ear. My father… it hurt less to think of him now, removed from him by so many years. He was dead, dead long ago in a battle I barely remembered. For all I knew, I could have killed him myself. I'd thought about that before, and I'd decided that it wasn't worth worrying about. He wasn't worth worrying about. He would have cut me down without compunction, and I was justified in doing the same. It wasn't as if we had ever been close anyway.
"Exactly the same one," said Draco, an uncharacteristically weary look on his face. "If his past was full of horrors, mine is no pleasure trip, I assure you." That was certainly true. He and I were the only two Slytherins from our year left. The war had claimed most, either directly, in battle, like Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy Parkinson, or obliquely, like Blaise, who had hanged himself after being forced by the Dark Lord to kill his own mother.
Dorado looked shocked and slightly wretched, but he was, in some ways at least, a true Malfoy, and he did not apologise. "Anyway, I don't think you ought to still drink so much at your age," he said, again rather irreverently. "What sort of example are you meant to be setting me?"
I spoke now, trying to keep my amusement out of my voice and failing utterly. "Perhaps you ought to lighten up, Dorado," I suggested, smiling. "Out of the two of you, you're the middle-aged man, and your father's the teenager."
He looked slightly pleased, as if I had complimented him. "Well, one of us needs to be mature," he said, scathingly. I thought this a little unfair, but then, it is normal for children to abuse their parents. And since Dorado had no mother, his father got a double helping of teenage scorn. He didn't seem to mind; in some ways, Draco was as indulgent towards his son as his father had been towards him.
"I protest against that," he said now, half-heartedly. "I am mature. Just because I don't treat life as seriously as you always do doesn't mean I'm being childish." Quite the contrary, I thought. It is those who have terrible things in their past who shun seriousness.
"If you say so," said Dorado, only partway convinced. "I'm going to do some studying now; I just thought I'd look in to see if you were alright. I heard some crashing noises last night." This last remark was directed more at me than at his father, but before I could reply, Draco had said:
"Studying again? Don't see why. It's a good few weeks till school yet."
"It'll be the start of the first N.E.W.T. year when I go back," said Dorado, disdainfully. It was impossible not to see why the boy was a Ravenclaw.
"You got very good O.W.L. results, didn't you?" I asked, more to relieve the tension in the room than anything else. He nodded enthusiastically.
"Yes; I got eight Os and two Es; I suppose I could've done better, if it wasn't for Quidditch."
Draco snorted. Sometimes he said that Dorado's skill and enthusiasm for Quidditch was the only thing that reassured him that this was, in fact, his son. "They're excellent results," he said now, shortly. "If I'd got that, I'd have been thrilled. And you're not going to stop playing Quidditch, are you?'
Dorado looked at his father as if the man had gone mad. "Of course not," he said, scornfully, and swept out, no doubt heading back to his room to hide away with a book. Draco looked at the door as it swung shut behind his son, and sighed, deeply. It was the sigh of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Harry Potter had sighed so in the later months of the war.
"Look at him," said Draco, asking the impossible as always. "He's so innocent. I wasn't when I was his age." Nor had I been. Nor, really, had anyone been back then. "And that could all be destroyed." He waved his toast at the copy of the Daily Prophet that lay on the table between us. I had read it cover to cover earlier in the morning while waiting for my friend to make an appearance. It was currently closed, and the front page image was a large, black-and-white photograph of Zacharias Smith.
He certainly looked the worse for his forty years of life. His sunken eyes spoke of intense weariness and he was incredibly thin. He had never been to Azkaban; he was not known as the Ministry's greatest failure since Sirius Black for nothing; but life on the run had not been kind to him. He was the reason – or at least, he was part of the reason – why the world was becoming unstable again. It was barely twenty years since we had rid ourselves of Riddle – would the madness never cease?
"We've got the same situation all over again," I said, softly.
Draco shrugged. "We bring all this on ourselves, you know," he said, sadly. "But how many more times must it happen before we realise that?'
There was some truth in what he said. If it were not for prejudices inherent – and often encouraged – in the wizarding world, madmen like Smith would never get anywhere. Their particular brand of homicidal insanity only appealed to the ordinary people that followed them because the followers themselves chose to believe that they were superior to the rest of creation.
"Will we ever?" I asked now. I did not like to be pessimistic, but sometimes it was unavoidable, even sensible. "I mean, it's not as if this lot are even original. We're repeating our mistakes almost exactly."
"History repeats itself," breathed Draco. "The first time is a tragedy, the second is farce."
"What about the third, and fourth, and fifth, then?" I asked, irritated. Now was no time to be quoting Marx.
Draco's shoulders sagged. "I don't know," he admitted. "Wizards seem to have plumbed depths of stupidity that Muggle philosophers cannot fathom." This was so unlike Draco that I just stared at him. He was not normally fatalistic, nor so derogatory about wizard-kind. He did not usually look so defeated, nor did he like to say that he did not know anything.
"Some of the old prejudices must surely die this time," he said, after a moment. "Look at Smith; a Hufflepuff as the chief lieutenant of a crazed Dark Lord. As far as I know, that's never happened before. The Death Eaters were mainly Slytherin, but Viper's lot come from all over." Were it not all so terribly serious, I might have laughed at the melodramatic, clichéd name that Smith's master had chosen to give himself. He seemed to suffer from something that had never afflicted Lord Voldemort – lack of imagination.
"The whole Slytherins-are-evil mindset died a while ago," I said, reflectively. "But treacherous Hufflepuffs? No one would ever have imagined such a thing. No one would have believed that Smith would turn, when we were back at school. I wouldn't believe it now, if I didn't know that it was the truth."
"I never believed," Draco said, very quietly, "that this would happen again. When I helped fight Riddle, I never imagined that my own son's schooldays would be overshadowed by evil as mine were. Although Dorado will never have to make such hard choices as I had to." He looked, for that one moment, very old indeed. He was only forty, but for an instant he looked as old as the world itself. It was a frightening expression to see in such familiar eyes.
"He might," I said, darkly, and from the look in Draco's eyes I knew he had understood my meaning.
"You don't think that," he said, quickly – too quickly.
"No," I admitted. "I don't think that. But then, I didn't think that a Hufflepuff could be a traitor, either."
He looked at me sharply, and there was pain, terrible pain, in his eyes. I tried to imagine a similar look in the cold eyes of Lucius Malfoy, contemplating his son's treachery, but I failed. Whatever else Draco was, he was not his father. The two were nothing alike – had never been alike – save in looks.
"Don't say that," he said, and his voice was infected with a hint of pleading. "It could never be true. Never! I know the mind of my own son."
No doubt my own father had never suspected that I would not follow him into the service of the Dark Lord. No doubt Draco's father would never have imagined that his son would rebel. We might think of Smith as a traitor, but there were men alive who still thought of us as such. Breaking faith with evil is disloyal just as much as betraying good. Many people could not see that. I did, and so, whether he would admit it or not, did Draco. How could we not?
