It was a bright and mildly breezy Tuesday afternoon when Draco Malfoy realised he no longer cared.
He supposed he'd known it for a while – how long exactly, he could not be sure – but hadn't wanted to admit it to himself. He wasn't entirely sure why; what had he been hoping for exactly? That life would somehow go back to the way it once was?
When the war had ended, he had still been a boy. He knew this because, for a brief period, he had lived with the expectation that all that had happened would disappear into the past and life – his proper life – would carry on from where it left off. But it hadn't. He'd supposed later that it hadn't really been an expectation at all, but rather a hope – a stupid, childish hope – because that was what kept him going during the period after.
That period was over now. He was the same person, but he was also different. He'd stopped allowing himself to hope, because it was not going to happen.
There was a very big difference between how he felt now and how he had felt when the war had first ended. He remembered clear as day the morning of the 2nd May 1998. It was the longest morning of his life and yet, at the same time, it had all gone by in a daze.
He remembered the deafening buzz of hundreds of voices of hundreds of survivors. The screams of relief and of grief. The chatter of hundreds of people whose futures stretched out before them but who, just for that moment, could revel in the glory of timelessness. He remembered the unity of the occasion. A unity he and his family had watched from afar.
He remembered the utter solitude of that distance. A solitude that had lasted long after order had returned to the world, when the newly reformed Ministry had stepped up as leaders one again, when those remaining in the Hall had departed to their corners of the world to carry on with the lives they had put on hold, when the villains were rounded up and the heroes were honoured. When life had gone on.
And the next few years had drifted past in what seemed like roughly the same timeframe as that morning.
His family's name had been cleared – legally, at least. It was obvious before anyone had even given it thought that the Malfoys would not belong to this new world as they had done to the world that came before.
If Draco had thought his home life would change once the war had ended, he was both right and wrong.
Lucius Malfoy was not an impressive man any more. It simply couldn't be denied. He was no longer welcome in a Ministry that no longer shared his values. Despite this, Draco's father had been no more than discouraged by the war's outcome, as far as Draco could tell anyway. While his world had crumbled and all he believed in had sunk into the abyss left behind, Lucius Malfoy had slithered into the new dawn with his tail between his legs, just as he had done at the end of the previous Wizarding war, and just as he would do until the day he died.
But Draco, for all his doting and for all his affection, knew now what his father was. Lucius Malfoy was a broken man. He was a broken man who would never – possibly could never – admit to it. Lucius Malfoy was a man who would never redeem himself in a world to which he had been exposed for what he really was, and he would see this as the world's failing instead of his own. He was an uncovered goat who still thought himself a chimera. And Draco had slowly learned to live with the painful revelation that his father was human.
On Draco's part, life at Malfoy Manor had become like a very extended school holiday, just without the company of his father's now disbanded colleagues. There was little need for him to go out and even less desire. Instead, he had had an awful lot of time to think and an awful lot of time to feel, and he hadn't liked doing either at all. He was a different person to who he had been before and yet, somehow, as the world trudged on around him, he remained exactly where he was.
His mother was the strong one, which he had discovered while the Dark Lord had taken over his home. Narcissa Malfoy, despite all she had witnessed and all she had been through herself, carried on with life as though they'd had nothing worse than an aggressive bout of Dragon Pox. Life for Narcissa was hard but never impossible and certainly never worthless. It was because of Narcissa that the three of them had all walked free – or as free as eternally distrusted folk would ever be. It was Narcissa who had woken the family up on the morning of the 3rd of May and had continued to live as normally as she could manage ever since, and who had encouraged her husband and son to do so too.
Time went by and life carried on. Hobbies became distractions which became habits. The throbbing ache of grief, the memory of terror and the guilt never lessened but did become easier to ignore. Draco had regained the ability to compartmentalise his thoughts and to numb those he didn't like. The problem was that there were an awful lot of them.
Though the war may be won, the dark times were far from over.