AN: REPOSTING. I THINK I GOT THE GRAMMAR AND FLOW FIXED AND THIS SHOULD READ BETTER.
Draco Malfoy was an average wizard.
That was not a particular ground breaking statement but in this case it wasn't a statement, it was a realization. A realization being made by that same wizard as he sat quietly at a table in his room at Malfoy Manor, or more realistically, Dark Lord Headquarters. He was waiting to die. The Dark Lord would know the truth and death would be his only reward.
The story of Draco's journey to average spans his entire 16 years but the story of his realization of that fact only encompassed a year and was much more interesting.
It started when he decided that he could strike a rather large blow in favor of Pureblood dominance and rule if he raped Ginny Weasley. Not only was she the youngest child of the worst and most pathetic of the Blood traitor families, she was the sister of his second most hated enemy and the love interest of the first. That she had grown to have one of the most gorgeous bodies in Hogwarts was just icing on what was to be a fabulous cake.
He found her in the library at the end of term by herself. Snickering to himself about the stupidity of her being allowed to travel the school by herself he drew his wand, walked up to her and said "Imperio". If he had been in front of her and paying attention he would have noticed a couple of things. Or perhaps not.
The first was that her eyes almost instantaneously cleared from the smoky darkness that is attributed to the use of the "mind control" unforgivable. The second and arguably more important for his personal safety and security, would have been the open pocket mirror that was sitting next to her open text book.
He noticed neither and so leaned next to her ear and said "You are a dirty slut. You will allow me to do anything I want to you and when I am done you will walk into the great hall say 'I'm a blood traitor and this is all I'm good for'. Do you hear me?"
He had less than a second to enjoy the image he had woven in his own mind before Ginny spun around and punched him in his face. He fell backwards to the ground and by the time he looked up again she had her wand pointed and inch from his eye. She was so angry that the tip of her wand was glowing red.
As he was trying to figure out what to do, he heard the third, and most ego destroying, of his nemeses. Her voice was beautiful and melodic and he hated that she was so beautiful and so smart and a muggleborn. "How many of us girls have to punch you in the face before you learn, Malfoy" she said and he suppressed the conflicting anger, humiliation and touch of desire she always inspired in him. It was easy with the still glowing wand in his face.
Then Ginny lowered her wand and ran into the arms of the golden trio. With the wand gone, his bravado and courage returned instantaneously and he rose to face them and make what he was sure would be a brilliant insult and threat. All his reclaimed bravery died when he saw the final member of the group. His day had completly tumbled down the crapper. Standing behind the four teens was a Black guy in Auror robes.
Apparently Ginny had been talking to Hermione when Draco tried to imperious her. She had thrown it off rather easily but after hearing the dreaded curse Hermione had rushed to get help. And the castle was luckily hosting a few Aurors including the Auror Captain, Kingsley Shacklebolt.
As he had predicted, the rest of his day went down the crapper. But for Draco it was more of an annoyance. He was not particularly worried. He was sure his father would get him out of this. Until then he definitely did not like being forced to sit in a cell at the ministry. It allowed him time to think and he was stuck trying to understand why his "obviously powerful" spell had failed. At the time he didn't realize that he was an average wizard trying to cast a spell on a very powerful witch.
Days went buy until one day, as Draco was pondering how he would get revenge for his failure and how his father would get revenge on the people in the Ministry that left him in a cell for five days; the door to his cell opened. "It's about bloody time…." He began but the rest of his statement died on his lips as instead of ministry personnel or his father, in walked the Hermione, Ron and Harry Potter. Their faces were calm but he could see the anger that lingered just below the surface. His one true ability was identifying that emotion.
Harry conjured a table while Ron created some chairs and a tea set and Hermione put a body bind on him. As his three guests took seats around the table, he was levitated to the fourth seat. Draco was embarrassed to be in this position but he wasn't worried. These people didn't have the nerve to kill him. He just added this indignity to the list of things he would one day avenge.
Harry began to speak and the calm tones he used actually worried Draco more than all the things they had done since entering his cell. Harry was known to be overly emotional and to act brashly and loudly. The calm person in front of him was more than a little unnerving.
"You are going to be released in a few hours" Harry began. "Your father has convinced his death eater buddies and few cowardly Wizengamot members to accept that you could not have really cast an unforgiveable because Ginny was not affected and that even though your words were crude, they represented a school issue not one that should involve government interference."
If any of Draco's muscles were currently under his own control, he would be smirking, instead he tried to convey all the insults and condescension he was feeling through his eyes. Ron saw it and just laughed at him. His smugness was cut with the redhead's words. "They refuse to admit that you are just a piss poor wizard who probably couldn't get that spell to work on a chocolate frog" Harry smiled at Ron's statement but Hermione actually snorted as she tried to hold in her laughter.
Draco seethed that a pathetic Weasley would dare to insult him and burned with rage and hatred that a "mudblood" would be allowed to laugh at him. After enjoying their joke the three teens did something that both confused and terrified Draco Malfoy; they had a tea party. They drank tea and ate biscuits and told stories about their time at Hogwarts. Most of the stories revolved around the many times Draco had tried to attack them both physically and verbally and how much fun it was to watch him constantly fail.
As Draco listened to them he became more and more angry; not because they were laughing at him but because he had reached his first realization on the journey to accepting that he was just an average wizard. They were right. Draco Malfoy had not once succeeded at getting the best of them. They crushed the memory of the one victory he had over them by informing him that not only had Buckbeak survived but he hadn't run away, in fact he was in the care of the Potter family elves and had even sired more hyppogriffs for the Potter stables.
Draco fumed that he had not just demanded that he be given the Hypogriff in their third year. They were actually very prized within the magical community and having one in his personal stable would have made for a much more satisfying conclusion. But hindsight being what it was, he could only continue to fume at the missed opportunities.
After finishing their tea and storytelling, the tea set was vanished and Hermione turned and looked Draco in the eye and said "Draco, you are going to die." The calm assurance with which she said that finally completely erased the confusion he had been constantly feeling since they entered and left him terrified.
"We have decided that you are too far gone to be saved but since you haven't actually done anything to anybody, at all, we decided to let death take its time to claim you as you continue to make dumb decisions that begs for it." Ron continued with the same matter of fact voice. Draco actually averted his eye because of the look of total disgust on Ron face. He knew that look as well. It was one that screamed that he was pathetic and not worth the person's time or effort.
"However, you should know that we've decided that we can't continue to let death eaters live. Whenever we catch a death eater we will pump them full of veritaserum and then execute them" Harry took up the explanation. It went back to Ron who happily explained "We have already caught and disposed of six. Four nobodies, Greyback and your aunt Bella. We got Greyback's pack too."
Draco was in shock. This couldn't be true. As he was trying to decide whether they were lying or not Harry picked up the story with a small chuckle. "Tommy boy was really mad about that. We sent her head back with her emergency port key and he blew his top. I actually felt his anger and that is saying a lot if you knew how strong my occlumency shields are. Ron figured that he would answer by releasing the werewolves for revenge and he was right. We were ready though. Wiped all of them out with silver spears and aconite powder."
"So now we come to you, lucky number seven. Like Hermione said we aren't going to kill you but we are pretty sure you are going to die because you're stupid. By the time your realize this, it will be too late. Ron has a graph, but you won't get it." At this point Draco's refusal to accept things that went against the way he was raised re-asserted itself and he decided they were messing with him. Then the uncomfortable conversation turned into a nightmare.
"You see" Harry went on, ignoring the turmoil Draco's weakly protected mind was spewing out and marveling at the blonde's ability to purposely ignore the truth in front of him to maintain the illusion of pureblood superiority. "We can't actually let you go unpunished for trying to rape my girlfriend and we can't let you escape justice for the attempted rape of Hermione's best friend and, with his temper, we definitely can't let you escape punishment for the attempted rape of Ron's sister" Draco knew that they were talking about the same person but understood they were making a point. "At first we thought we would snap your wand, but it is in custody and we realized you could just take daddy's money and buy a new one so we put our heads together and decided to take your wand hand instead"
The next 30 seconds were the most horrific of Draco's life. It seemed to have taken them forever to pull his arm unto the table, pull out a silver knife and shop his hand off at the wrist. The pain was immense and he is sure the blade was cursed because every day since he felt phantom pain in the stump and any time he would later try to push his magic through his arm into the wand the tried to attach to his stump, the wound would open up and start bleeding again.
After chopping off his hand Hermione picked it up and dropped it into the bag she was carrying. Ron waved his wand and cast a week battle field healing spell that slowed the flow of blood but didn't stop it and had the added benefit of making his sump heal in the most grotesque way possible. Harry then cast a spell on the room and began to chant.
At the end of the chanting Draco looked up in surprise at the empty room. He had a bloody stump for a right hand and a piece of paper in his left hand. He looked at the paper and read "Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and Harry Potter came into my cell to inform me about the war and chop my right hand off for crimes against Ginny Weasley." As soon as he finished reading the paper burst into flames and all the memories came flooding back. It was like having to relive the whole episode again. Something that would happen in his nightmares for the rest of his short life.
Five minutes later the door opened and his father walked in to get his son and was met by the carnage that was his son's cell. The next 48 hours was hell on Draco Malfoy. First after getting his stump fully healed he was informed that because of the method and time since the attack there would be no medical fix. "Maybe, if we had missing hand" the doctor had told him but he knew that wasn't going to happen. Then after explaining to yet another doctor that he knew who had done this to him and who had his missing appendage but could not communicate that information in any way, it was revealed that his memory of the event had been place under a Fidelis Charm.
The next six months for Draco was intense. The war was not going well for his side as they were losing death eaters faster than they could recruit them. Now that Harry and his friends were executing all captured Deatheaters and using their emergency portkeys to send their heads back, recruitment had dried up. The swing in the tide had also cause more wizards to fight back when attacked.
The veritaserum confessions were being sent to the press and the Wizengamot was in chaos. Some members wanted Harry and his friends arrested even thought there was no actual proof they were responsible. Some members wanted to deputize them and still others were terrified because of what might happen if someone caught the distinctive tattoo they had on their own arms. With the brutal methods being employed, the last group seemed to be shrinking every week.
Draco's response was to work harder. After discovering the uselessness of his right arm he had trained himself to use his left hand. Revenge is a great motivator and while he would never be able to cast as well as with his missing dominant hand he re-achieved proficiency with his wand. His first mission once he had completed his retraining was to find the "mudblood's" parents.
He knew it would be suicide to challenge the golden trio with his weaker magic when they had already taken out Bellatrix and the Lestrange brothers; three of the Dark Lords most powerful followers, so he decided to attack the unprotected belly. He should have been suspicious that they were so easy to find but he was blinded by his quest for vengeance and his misguided belief in his own intelligence. He kicked in the door and screamed "crucio" His spell flew over someone's head and splash against a wall.
So weak was the spell that it didn't even scorch the paper. It would have delivered unimaginable pain if it had hit someone but that was more a product of the spell and not the caster. The stronger the wizard the greater the pain, but any wizard casting that spell will cause blinding pain. That's why it's unforgivable.
"Expelliarmus" The voice was calm but Draco's wand felt like it would rip is remaining hand off to get away from him. By the time Draco's senses returned to him he noticed that the room had three people in it. He looked into the smirking faces of the three people he hated most in the world and activated his emergency portkey. It deposited him in his bedroom where he raged for three hours. He ripped down the curtains, overturned his desk and ripped into the books in his personal library. When he had finished he looked around at the devastation, collapsed against a wall and fell asleep.
He woke up to the familiar sensation of a full body bind. At first he thought it was the expected nightmare of his time in the cell when he lost his hand but the familiar colors of his room and the feel of his broken bed across his foot brought him to full alarm. Then his alarm turned to horror as his bedroom door opened and in walked the golden trio.
As calm as they did it the first time they conjured the same table and the same chairs and the same tea set. They levitated him into the fourth chair and began a conversation about how they knew he was too stupid to lay low and that he would be too cowardly to attack them directly. They told him that they had a bet that the clues that lead to Hermione's parent's house were too obvious for anyone to believe, but Ron told them that he knew how dumb purebloods could be and now Hermione and Harry owed him a galleon.
There are no words for what Draco was feeling. He was sitting in the most protected stronghold that the pureblood movement had. The Dark Lord himself, was downstairs and here in his room sat Harry bloody Potter. And he was calmly having tea and biscuits with his friends. As his left hand was chopped off in the same manner as his right for attempting an unforgivable on a muggle the realization hit him.
He was an average wizard and he was sitting in front of greatness. That the three most powerful magic users of his generation was a muggleborn, a half-blood and a pure blood should have led to further realizations but as he was sure he would be dead before the next sunset his mind was preoccupied.
They were not going to kill him. His emergency portkey had delivered them right into the Dark Lords sanctuary and both they and he knew that the price for that would be a painful death. He hoped that they had come to finish the war and kill the Dark Lord thus saving him, unintentionally, from death but no, that was not the plan. They knew how easy it was for the death eaters to re-establish themselves after the first war and intended to kill them all before handling the Dark Lord. There would be a new wizarding world when they were done. One of justice and equality. One that had no place for the bigotry and corruption that the wizarding nobility represented.
They did cast a Fidelis, but it was only to hide the fact that Hermione had created a device that captured the Dark Lords magic that was everywhere in the house. With it they would be able to find him wherever he was so that when the time came he could not flee from his death. And then they left
Draco Malfoy was an average wizard.
That is not a particular ground breaking statement but in this case it isn't a statement, it's a realization. A realization being made by that same wizard as he sat quietly at a table in his room at Malfoy Manor, or more realistically, Dark Lord Headquarters waiting to die. The Dark Lord would know the truth and death would be his only reward.