Prologue
Three years had passed since the final battle, roads springing in every which way from the choices made by each individual survivor. Harry Potter's road led him to the only possible conclusion of his most extraordinary life: the pursuit of a stability and normalcy which almost certainly does not exist. A successful career in the Auror Corps of the Ministry of Magic stood directly in front of him, beside a certain ginger-headed wife, and a brood of ginger headed kids, all soon to come in every mind's eye. And though the eternally inevitable hero could find nothing wrong with this ideal image, in the very back of his mind – the quietly scheming, whispering voice of a serpent – he was hard pressed to find what exactly was right about it either. Shrugging it off those seemingly distant years ago, Harry Potter had decided that an intense passion for one's life and circumstances is a luxury afforded to a select few, least of all the Boy Who Lived Repeatedly.
And when Harry Potter had supposed that passion is a luxury, he was not far from the truth. However, the reality was that a great many people had a great many luxuries removed from their lives as a result of that fateful battle, three years prior; comfort and privacy, stability and sanity were all long-gone extravagances to those who found themselves opposite the victorious, or those who straddled a line too close to comfort for the Ministry of Magic. Draco Malfoy, afforded his physical freedom and his childhood home but very little else, had become a forgotten ghost of the past, remembered only through routine Auror searches and sporadic Ministry inquiries involving long hours under Veritaserum, questioned for crimes he did not commit. Long ago, the sole heir to the blackened Malfoy name just resigned to these proceedings. He knew that they were just trying to find a way to finally put him away in Azkaban and be done with the whole family altogether. His father had been one of the first of the Death Eaters tried and convicted, the Wizengamot all too aware of the consequences of letting him off the first time. His beautiful, aristocratic mother had been spared by her act of defiance against the Dark Lord, though everyone knew that it was truly the testimony of Harry Potter that had kept her from the prison. However, that defiance against the Dark Lord had landed her a fatal curse, complements of Rodolphus Lestrange and his devotion to a now-dead megalomaniac. She had died after two long days in Malfoy Manor, in the arms of her only child, sobbing for the only person he knew in his heart that he had ever loved and who had loved him in return.
The night that Draco Malfoy buried his mother, with only the company of his only two allies and friends left alive or outside of a prison cell – Blaise Zabini and Pansy Parkinson – he buried any desire to remain an active part of the worlds both wizarding and muggle. Living reclusively, the money his parents had left behind was more than sufficient to maintain the lifestyle he was raised in and utterly accustomed to. To Draco Lucius Malfoy, there was no reason to tackle the world he knew at his core that he had wronged – though he was loathe to admit it, his pride wounded by intact – and confront the guilt and ire ravaging his self-imposed solitude. The world, he had decided, was dead.