Draco threw his arm over his eyes and groaned. He was baking. The sunblock charm was starting to wear off and he would be damned if he was going to be caught red or – heaven forbid – freckling, but he wand was all the way over there and his body just wasn't inclined to move. He was sunbathing pris un bain de soleil, not tanning bronza, there was a distinct difference. In French, at least. Perhaps now would be a good time to learn how to do a wandless accio.
His French was certainly getting a workout here in Morocco, after having little enough practice over the years since his favourite tutor had been let go and he had been going to Hogwarts. It had been stumbling at first, but like riding a broomstick, really. You never forgot.
It had been good to get out of England, he thought for the millionth time as he slowly dragged himself into a seated position and vacated his lounger in the sun for a shaded chair and poured himself a glass of lemon water from the pitcher. He was glad he'd stood up to his parents and left on the traditional Grand Tour around Europe alone. No matter how many times he repeated it to himself it he was still uneasy, but he would have been even more uneasy at home with his mother never letting him out of her sight and his father looking like he'd aged ten years. It wasn't as though he hadn't been spoiled before, but he could have told his father to leave the house and he might have just because Draco asked. Azkaban had broken him, Narcissa was barely holding him together, and no child liked knowing that their parents were not only mortal but in need of their care.
He was nineteen and he'd seen a war. He'd tortured people, been tortured in return, almost killed a few more, one of his best friends was dead, and his family was in ruins. He couldn't be expected to just lay around and pretend everything was normal and that he hadn't changed. So once they'd been absolved of any charges on the word of Harry Potter he'd left, clinging to a selfish way out that wouldn't do anyone else any harm for once.
No one would recognize him on the streets of Casablanca or Istanbul or Ansterdam. The tattoo on his arm was faded until it was almost unnoticeable to someone who wasn't looking for it, and he could flirt with girls and make up ever-increasingly absurd stories behind the scar on his chest. He sent his parents postcards and trinkets, but was always gone before anything could find its way back to him. He was getting outside of himself, outside the range of the deathly dark crevasses in his mind that were so easy to stumble into and not leave.
He could call it a pub, but it was unlike anything that would be called such a thing in London. Just a room, really, with some rickety tables and an awning with a bar that took up easily half the space. The front opened directly onto the street and so evenings he wandered down to sit and drink and let the cool night breezes lull him to sleep. He was pushing a week in the same hotel room, the familiar nod he got from the bartender told him it was time to move on soon. Though Draco had quickly come to learn that a nice large tip could cover most circumstances, no one seemed much to care around here who he was or whether he was old enough to be sitting in a bar by himself drinking in the evening. He paid his bill, he didn't make trouble, and that was enough. The place was a pleasant mix of locals and tourists from other nearby hotels, but he knew he would always stand out in a crowd. He had used to enjoy it more, the attention his bloodline got him, but sometimes it was only tiring, like a spotlight one could never turn off.
This time he was on the edge of his limit in drinks and though he'd been cold at first he was warming up to the engaging man sitting beside him at the bar. Arabic physicality had been startling at first to a British male who was even more than usually unused to physical affection, but it was relaxing after a while. And yet, even as he conversed in a polyglot of Arabic, French, and English, he got the feeling that this finely-dressed man was doing more than the usual. When he realized, he didn't let it show, but instead took a mental step back and asked himself – do I care? And a significant part of him – perhaps the most drunk part of him – said no. It wasn't as though he hadn't admired certain men before or had a few mutual handjobs in the Qudditch showers, but it was never supposed to turn into a thing. He had tradition on his side, of course, but as usual muggleborns had brought with them muggle thinking into Wizarding Britain's morality and it seemed like the kind of issue no one wanted to address. Leaving young men like Draco Malfoy on the fence when a handsome older man asks him if he would like to go for a short walk. Old enough to be his father, surely, but with a distinguished face and sparkling, intelligent eyes. The hesitation was only a moment on the outside and then Draco smiled, the kind of sharp-around-the-edges smile that meant "Fuck it, what's the worst that could happen?" The kind of smile that had so often precluded fun trouble in the past.
"Why not?" he said out loud, brushing the man's shirt sleeve as he reached for his drink, pushing himself off the bar to stand in facing him. It took a little more effort than it should have to stand straight and not stumble, but his wand was tucked carefully up his sleeve and Draco Malfoy would be damned if he could be taken down by a muggle twice his age, even drunk. He made a bit of a production out of straightening his shirt (Egyptian cotton) and brushing the wrinkles out of his pants (linen), but the man wasn't even paying attention – he was frowning over Draco's shoulder.
"What?" he snapped, when no answer was forthcoming, hand on hip, suddenly aware he was doing an admirable imitation of his mother.
"J'ai pansé que j'ai vu quel-qu'un dans la porte qui a semble comme il t'ait connu. Mais il a disparu." [*]
All the alcohol seemed to disappear from Draco's bloodstream in a fire of adrenaline. His hand went for his wand and he turned as quickly as possible while still remaining casual, but when he scanned the doorway there was no-one he could recognize. Which didn't mean anything, of course. He turned back and asked, "You're sure?" The man shrugged in that easy rolling way and caught Draco's elbow gently. He moved like a snake, Draco realized detachedly as he put down enough money to pay for his drinks and they walked out the doorway arm-in-arm. He was still tense with paranoia and his heart was pounding in his ears, but he was well practised in putting on a careful public face. It was what he most learned from his entire sixth year of school, after all. There was still a healthy crowd on the street, going home with their families after a late dinner or out or knots of men chattering and gesticulating wildly after a football match. Draco was strange for being white and a foreigner, but this was a tourist area and rather liberal. All these comforting thoughts aside, he was anxious for the rest of the night and his kind solicitor only got distracted conversation, a kiss, and a quick grope for his troubles in an alleyway when they made their way back to Draco's hotel.
He'd given up on certain wards and alarms when he'd gotten further away from London, but now he threw them all up once he was inside and locked all the doors and closed the shutters besides. He'd managed to extract a description of the man who had seemed to be looking for him: dark, unruly hair, tanned skin, about the same age, and rather unfashionable glasses that covered piercing green eyes.
Draco Malfoy didn't know why Harry Potter was stalking him in Casablanca instead of doing whatever it was that conquering heroes did back in England but he had come to appreciate that wherever Harry Potter went disaster and pain were sure to follow.
[*] "I thought I saw someone who looked like they knew you. But they've vanished."
---
Draco Malfoy remembered being six and trying on his mother's make-up, imitating her long and elaborate morning dress routine, while she was out shopping. He'd often sat and watched her, talking over the day ahead of them as she powdered and creamed and coloured and plucked. It wasn't as though she wasn't beautiful without it on, but he'd read about strange African tribes that painted their faces and bodies with bright colours and stuck pins through their skin before going out to war so he understood.
He'd been learning Machiavelli since he was born without knowing the name of what he was learning and when he finally read iThe Prince/i, years later, it was like someone had reached out from the page and touched his soul. Kinship. Severus Snape had looked at him sharply when he'd asked about it, the kind of look that was a mix of surprise and pleasure, the kind of look that a young Draco had never seen before or after coming from him. He had then gone up to a shelf and taken down a small, leather-bound edition in the original Italian and when Draco opened it Property of Severus Snape was scrawled neatly in the Potions master's spidery handwriting on the inside cover, the ink almost faded to brown. He had a tutor hired to teach him Italian that summer. The next book Professor Snape gave him was a copy of Freidrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and the next summer he taught himself German, which was harder not being a Romantic language but the challenge only made him even more stubborn. It was nice to struggle with something he had an eventual chance of winning, even if it was just languages and strange muggle philosophers.
But he had yet to learn all this, the words long-ago written for the thoughts and feelings he had about life and how to move through it. He was just a very young boy playing at adult things because he was bored and curious. He should have heard her coming, he was old enough to know that punishments were more often for being caught than for doing wrong things, but he was slow and had underestimated the amount of time it would take to put everything back in order so that it would look like no one had been there. When she stopped in the doorway he saw her furious look in the mirror and turned, suddenly frightened. She was too angry for Not Touching Other People's Things and her perfectly manicured nails dug into his wrist when she dragged him off the stool and called for a house elf in a snapping tone. He was thrust into Denby's waiting hands, who was ordered to clean him up and not give him any supper. When he stood impassively as the house elf scrubbed away the lipstick and the eyeshadow he allowed himself to admit that he had seen that flicker of fear in her eyes, though he couldn't understand why. Nevertheless, he never did it again.
It wasn't until years later that he knew, years of testing limits and gained experience. Her fear had been that of Things Which Are Not Done, the Things We Don't Talk About. He learnt that that what one did in the privacy of one's own home was a very firm line not to be crossed except in gossip, and gossip was what made a wizard who they were. He also learnt, in the usual roundabout word-of-mouth spoken-behind-hands way, that extramarital sex between men was an old pureblooded wizarding tradition. A book in the family library told him that it dated back to the Greeks, to the Emperor Hadrian's reign in Rome, even if it had fallen out of favour in public society. So long as someone inferior served in the passive role it was certainly Tolerated, but now with all the ancient pureblooded families dwindling away no one wanted even a whisper of such activities to make it into society. No modern woman was going to stand for her husband having a man on the side. Marriage and continuing the family line was crucial and unquestionable. Especially for the last scion of the most noble and ancient houses of Black and Malfoy.
It didn't bother him that much in the long run, male or female, especially when the acts in question were a quick handjob or blowjob in an empty classroom after hours. Girls were easier, so it was the local choice for the majority of his explorations into the vague and troubling world of romance and sex. But the relatively playful games of youth passed very quickly into games of life and death and there was no time, no safety, no peace for that. Sex and sexuality ceased to be an issue and instead Draco read Sun Tzu in three different translations.
---
He was next in Florence, where he roamed the halls of art, strolled scenic paths, and was thrown out of a church. He missed the easy availability of hashish, but after his little scare in Casablanca he wasn't ready to give up his barely-contained paranoia just yet. Leave it to Potter to ruin what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation in one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It wasn't until he was in Venice that the Boy Who Lived showed himself face to face.
It was clever, really, within a very limited scope of clever. There was no room to run in a city built on water, where the magical community blended in with the muggles and mostly consisted of rooms that weren't there on floors that couldn't be reached unless you knew where and how to look. There were crowds on every street. So it wasn't so strange to have someone bump shoulders as he wound his way through the shoppers and the street vendors. Automatically reaching for his wallet and his wand, he turned his head to glare and then froze – that's when Potter grabbed him by the arm and steered him forcibly to a nearby alleyway out of the crush of bodies and out of the sunlight. Draco shook himself free as soon as there was room to do so and touched his wand out the bottom of his sleeve.
"What are you doing here?" he hissed, taunt and furious. "Why are you following me?"
Green eyes watched him with a taunting look that only made it worse. He had to remind himself that ino/i, he couldn't just kill Harry Potter and dump his body in the canal, he himself would be dead by the next day. Potter shrugged in a too-casual way that was designed to provoke and Draco's jaw clenched tight enough to make his head ache.
"Just wanted to find out what you were up to."
"I'm on. Vacation."
There was a kind of greedy look in Harry's eyes that Draco didn't recognize, as if he had actually been looking forward to this, the bite and anger. Draco hadn't and paradoxically this only made him more angry.
"You didn't really think we'd let a known former Death Eater out of the country without tracking them, do you?"
"'We'? Who's 'we', Potter? Last I heard you weren't running the country yet. You're not even an Auror, what right do you have to stalk me in or outside of England?" he snapped, and only natural contrariness kept him from going straight for physical violence. Despair was creeping back over him of the kind he had worked so hard to avoid. Could this never just be over? Could he never just be left alone to live his own life and be his own person? He felt like an animal cornered. But the other boy – man now – seemed not to have an answer for that and so Draco snorted and gave him the haughtiest disgusted look he could summon.
"I owe you for my life and my wand, Potter, but if you're going to be this pathetic you don't deserve to hold that debt."
And for once in his life walked away.
Once he was back in his hotel room and had put back up all the wards he drank himself into oblivion, but still dreamt in screams of pain and running through darkened hallways. Harry Potter's fault, always his fault. It was his name he cursed when he was puking up the contents of his stomach in the toilet the next morning.
Late in the afternoon, just as Draco was debating over risking going out to dinner, a snowy owl, amazingly incongruent in the Viennese sunshine, dropped a note onto his desk and waited patiently for a reply. Draco recognized the owl and cast a few hex-revealing charms before opening the folded-over paper to see an invitation to dinner in Potter's round, childish handwriting. He paused for a moment, but he knew his answer from the moment he saw the owl coming in the window.
No. Go away.
It wouldn't work, but he was not playing Harry Potter's games any more. Let him take out his frustrations on someone else.
---
To his eternal surprise, it did work, and he gradually was able to relax back into his travelling routine without worrying of yet another jolt from the past. He didn't know why Potter had given up the chase, perhaps he'd been asked to become Minister for Magic or something ridiculous like that, but he also didn't care. He was running short on galleons when he left Greece so he only spent a few days in Turkey and then found a long-distance portkey to Hungary and then Germany and then back to France, the circuit complete. That was when he sent the letter to his parents to tell them he was coming home. His mother replied effusively, but he could tell there was something she was holding back. When he got home he found out what – his father had gone off the deep end. The combination of his stint in Azkaban and their social rejection from all decent wizarding circles had left him crooked and broken. He had taken to alternately sitting around the garden in his dressing gown, unshaven and unwashed, and destroying priceless heirlooms in fits of rage.
The first night he was back his father looked right through him, unseeing, as if he hadn't known he was gone. The second night his father threw a full teacup at his mother and Draco Malfoy pulled his wand on his father for the first time in his entire life, trembling with anger of his own. It was enough to shock Lucius into dumbness and the house-elves took him to his room and sedated him with a sleeping potion. Meanwhile, the new head of the house sat down in the parlour, held his head in his hands, and hated Harry Potter with every fibre of his being. The third night, he contacted the family lawyers.
---
He assumed they were wizards at first. After all, how could a muggle create such a mix of noises and lights out of thin air? But he figured it out soon enough by listening and watching – it was electrical, the stuff he had vaguely known that muggles believed permeated the universe and powered their everyday objects. A different kind of magic, then, and surprised himself by thinking it. Draco Malfoy giving the muggles credit for being maybe greater than animals – but then, the world had gone upside down a long time ago.
In Italy magic was treated no differently from any of the other cultures that were forced to integrate with the ancient Roman society. Wizards were Italians before they were magical or muggle or squib. There were even witches and wizards wearing religious robes just as there were young students of the Accademia who wore the latest muggle fashions and went out to the disco on weekends.
He didn't do anything so plebeian as dance, at first, just stood by the bar and let the music in the dark envelop him like something palpable in the air. It was better than thinking. It was better than wandering the streets alone. The first few times someone asked him to dance he refused, he wasn't about to make a fool of himself in public, but eventually the anonymity of the crowd and the drinks won him over. She had beautiful olive skin and was scarcely wearing anything at all, really. It seemed like sex standing up, his shirt sticking to his skin, sweat beading itchy on the back of his neck, and at least his experience with waltz has left him with the ability to follow a beat. She laughed at him and he smiled back with bad intentions, imitating the man standing behind her.
Within a week he managed to find the biggest, the best, the hardest, the fastest of the discotheques and went out every night, coming back to the hotel only when the sun was coming up and the crowds dispersed, sometimes with someone and sometimes without. He didn't even bother finding out if they were muggles or not beforehand, sometimes male sometimes female – not that he thought of them as anything other than a release and a distraction. He'd never see them again after they leave his hotel room.
Rome was too hot in the summertime, even hotter than Casablanca had been, but he slept through the hottest parts of the day until it was time to move on again.
---
Draco was in Amsterdam just in the first leg of his trip when he looked in the mirror and realized how long his hair was getting. Later in the day he went into a magical barber shop and when the man asked how much he wanted taken off he surprised himself by asking just for a trim. It would still be longer than it had been the last time he had gotten it cut, slightly over the top of his ears and getting into his eyes, but with a little pomade it wouldn't look bad. He'd always wanted longer hair like his father's, but never wanted to go through the midlength awkward stage or charm it. Maybe now was a good time. No one would recognize him here, after all. As much as he was raised to be always conscious of the opinions of others, the opinions of the people he would see for days or weeks at a time and then never again were very little in the grand scheme of things. It was a liberating thought.
---
Predictably, all anyone in London was talking about upon Draco's return was Harry Potter. Small children played The Order versus the Death Eaters and fought over who got to play the lead role. Witches swooned over interviews and photographs of him in magazines. The lightning-bolt scar had become a symbol for everything from protective amulets to self-heating kettles. It was all rather disgusting, mostly because he knew that Potter himself had nothing to do with it and likely was off somewhere complaining about it.
But underneath the awe and glamour there were rumours passing from lip to ear in the less savoury areas of society, where the nods Draco got were no more friendly but significantly more respectful. Rumours that the great wizarding saviour hadn't actually been seen for months, that he'd started a fight with a Swedish diplomatic aide, that he'd proposed to the Weasley girl and then put the wedding off indefinitely. Some of the stories were obviously malicious lies, told by those who had come out the wrong side of a war, but the undercurrent was always the same – Potter was wild and dangerous in a world that only wanted to go back to the way things were Before.
Left to himself, Draco had no doubts that Potter would self-destruct with all that frustration and nowhere to put it. All he had to do was wait him out.
---
They were not a very good family, their lineage too mixed and tangled to be mapped, unlike the old pureblooded families who are taught their histories interwoven with the politics of the world from an early age. They were, however, very wealthy. His mother made the first overtures as was customary and they were amenable, but Daphne was not. Draco could remember how she'd avoided him in their final year and wasn't very surprised. He was surprised, though, when the go-ahead was given for her younger sister to begin courtship. She was only two years younger than them, stranger matches had been made, but he got the feeling she was doing it just to piss off her older sister. No that he really disapproved of that sentiment either. Pansy expressed shock and indignation on his behalf at the refusal, but that was mostly because she knew he hated seeing her pity. That she would stick by him even then surprised him a little, but she'd always been a good friend. He wouldn't have minded marrying her once, and she'd certainly wanted it very much, but now she would have a lot of work ahead of her finding a better marriage of her own among the less tarnished of the war's survivors. Last he spoke to her she was actually considering a cousin of Zabini's seven years their senior.
Witches and wizards would live about two centuries with good luck. Yet within the first twenty years of his life Draco had felt as though he'd already experienced far too much of life. As a child he had learnt how to quell his emotions and treat every relationship like a battle. He had been only sixteen when he'd received the Dark Mark and he'd had to fight for his and his family's lives. He'd realized what life under the Dark Lord truly meant. In his seventeenth year he was torturing and imprisoning people almost daily, living with a band of bloodthirsty madmen while his childhood home was torn apart from the inside out. He, in turn, was tortured while his father and mother made to watch when his loyalties wavered.
He'd had his eighteenth birthday at home and then left for Europe, hoping to leave all this behind. Before he was twenty he was engaged to be married. Only a hundred and eighty years to go.