In Wiltshire county, far from prying eyes, and safely protected by many layers of spells, there is a hidden lake. The lake, and the manor nestled safely on its shores, had been so well protected that it would be impossible to locate it on any map. To the muggles who sometimes visited the area it might as well not have existed. Once the manor had been stately and grand, the home of countless powerful wizards.
Now though the manor was falling into disrepair. The vast sprawling lawn and gardens were growing rampantly over the walks. Sickly looking crawling vines, some of which appeared to have teeth were overtaking the walls, in some places reaching to the roof. The walls themselves gave a sad report of the status of the house, the paint was peeling away, the wood weathered by wind; it seemed as though the spells, which had once preserved it, were giving way, now that the house was empty. And surely it must be empty for there were no signs of life, no lights in any windows, or smells of cooking from the kitchen. An unearthly calm lay over the area.
A calm which was shattered, briefly, by a loud popping sound and the sudden appearance of Draco Malfoy in the over grown gardens. He studied his childhood home with a feeling of great trepidation. Never had he imagined that his home, the place that had always been his sanctuary could ever be changed. And yet it had. Here it stood untended and wild, after only a few years it had fallen before the forces of time and nature.
As well it appeared that his mother was not here as he had hoped. Not that he had truly expected to find her here, unharmed and awaiting his return, but on some deep level, he had hoped. He made his way through the tangled lawn, twice having to jump to avoid a spray of needles fired at him by a twisler bush. Finally gaining the porch he had to duck under the vines of the snapping nosfer vine. Tendrils of the vine had snaked their way across the door and it took several tries before he remembered a spell that would work correctly to clear them.
The inside of the house was even more dismal than the outside. Dark and gray there were no lights, and the vines sprawling across the window kept the sunlight from entering.
Draco used a lumos spell and began to take stock of the manor. Inches of dust lay over everything. In the corner the planetary clock had stopped, without it's constant whirring tip sound the house seemed unusually empty. Bits of debris were scattered about across the floor, lending further to the desolation of the place that had once been so full of life. He toured the house, pausing for a moment in each room.
In each room he remembered what had been, even as he saw the desolation that had come.
He saw himself, sitting at the long table between his parents, laughing as his father railed at the house elf for dropping a dish, and flicking his peas at the miserable creature when his parents were not looking.
He saw the spider webs that draped profusely over the branches of the silver candlesticks sitting on the table.
"Quit wasting your peas son." Those days had seemed so much simpler.
In his father's study he saw himself sitting cross-legged on the floor, working confidently on a new spell. His mother sat on a divan by the window, reading a book on carnivorous garden plants, while his father sat at the desk reading what the Prophet's follow up reports to the debacle at the World Quiditch Cup. His mother gave a sudden twinge and rubbed a spot on her arm with a gasp.
He saw the rows of books that lined the study, some of them ruined by rain that had leaked in through the broken windows, others weathered and worn by the wind and mists that had blown in.
"Mother, are you alright?"
"Yes dear, just a mosquito bite. Why don't you go play in the garden?"
"But…"
"Do as your mother says," his father cut him off, before he had even finished his complaint.
He had risen sulkily and pulled the door closed shut behind him, but not all the way.
"Lucius, that's the second time since the tournament. What do you think it means?
"I don't think it means anything Cissy, one of our old comrades has figured to have a joke on us. When I discover who, I'll think of a nasty curse and bounce it of their heads a few time, and that will be the end of it.
Draco turned, deciding that perhaps he would rather pack his trunk for school, than go out into the garden; his mother's new plant had already tried to bite him twice.
Draco paused on the threshold of the drawing room. He could make out the faint line of the trap door in the floor. No he could not face this room, not yet.
He knelt on the floor of the trap door and vowed…
With a shudder he wrenched himself away. It was then, as he passed back through the entrance hall, that he noticed someone had covered the furniture with dustcovers. He smiled slightly, at the same time wondering who would have done such a thing.
He made his way up the stairs towards his own room. Everything was the way he had left it, although shabby from the dirt. He went to the wardrobe, hoping to find something more to his style of clothing than the ill-fitting robe provided at Azkaban, but glancing at the clothes inside, he realized that none of them would fit him anymore. He was broader of shoulder and across the hips than he had been, and taller. He had filled out; ironic as it seemed, he had grown, in Azkaban.
After a moments hesitation he crossed the hall to his parent's room. He would have to wear something of his fathers. The idea was foreign to him.
He had not been in his parents' room since he was a very young child, it was perhaps the one part of the house he seldom entered, or had cause to. Like the rest of the house it was dimly lit and filthy. He opened the wardrobe and was surprised when his mother stepped out.
She looked just as she had the day he had last seen her. In his shock he stumbled over the words of a greeting, but before he had managed to say anything a dark hand grabbed her from the depths of the wardrobe and pulled her back, while a knife appeared in the thing's other dark hand and slit her throat mercilessly, letting her body drop to the floor.
Draco dropped to his knees in horror, staring blankly as a crimson flow of blood poured from the deep gash, mixing with the dust on the floor to become an ugly red mud, as she tried to draw a deep gurgling breath.
As the mudded mess spread further towards him Draco's disjointed mind grasped at the scene. There were no footprints in the dust. She was dying, his mother was dying! Her blood was mixing with the dirt. Her blood was to precious to mix with common dirt. There should have been footprints. Why was he worrying about footprints when his mother was dying. How did the healing spell go, it sounded like a song? How did she get in there without leaving footprints?
Draco suddenly snapped the fragments together to form a solid conclusion. He uttered a single word in a broken whisper as he recognized the truth.
"Boggart."
He wondered vaguely how he was supposed to make something like this funny. He took a deep breath and tried to calm his swirling emotions. He pointed his wand at the boggart and uttered the spell, "Ridikkulus," wrapping an image into the spell. He had not been able to think of a way to make the current situation humorous, so he attempted to shift it altogether.
To his surprise it worked. The image of his dead mother was replaced by the image of Rufus Scrimgour broomsurfing in an old nightgown. The sight almost doubled him over with laughter. He laughed long after the boggart had vanished into a cloud of smoke.
"That nuthouse may have cracked me after all," he announced to the empty house when he finally managed to regain his composure. He rummaged in the wardrobe until he found a set of robes that was not too damaged by time and returned to his room, where he spread it out and used his wand to repair the places where it had frayed. It was likely to be out of style by now, but in all reality that mattered little. He went into his bathroom and used a scourgify spell to clean out his bath. He had to do it five times before the spell managed to lift away all the dirt. Pleased with the result he decided on a whim to clean the rest of the small room before he bathed.
Even with magic it was an hour before the room was finished to his satisfaction. It was with a sigh of relief and a feeling of accomplishment that he sank into the deep water of his bath. The bath could have passed for a small muggle swimming pool, and was set down in the tile. It filled magically with hot water and Draco could choose from one of the five taps which kind of foam he liked. After he had become a prefect he had sometimes wondered if his bathroom had not been modeled after the prefects bathroom at Hogwarts.
The warm water felt wonderful, the first true bath he had had since his incarceration, and he allowed the water to wash away years of accumulated dirt. It was perhaps the most refreshing thing he had experienced in his entire life. He used the foam to wash his hair, scrubbing and rinsing repeatedly until he felt clean. He stepped out of the bath feeling as though he were clean for the first time in his life.
He wrapped a fluffy towel around him and went over to the counter and the wide mirror, studying himself. Noting all the changes that had taken place in him over the years. His body was still lean and small, but he had filled out and no longer looked like a boy. His hair had grown unchecked in Azkaban, reaching nearly to his knees. A pale thin scar ran the length of his face, down his chin and across his chest. The remnant of a fight that had taken place in another bathroom. The wounds had been treated immediately and had healed so faintly that they almost could not be seen. Their brethren had not.
He swept aside his long hair as he turned, looking over his shoulder and examining the marks across his back. Wide ugly marks of lighter skin, raised slightly above the rest marked his back in a crossing pattern. It seemed a miracle that he had not died from the spell. How many times had he been hit, three, four, before he was left for dead? He could not remember for sure.
He let his hair fall back and grimaced at it. In addition to being extraordinarily long it was rough and tangled. He picked his wand up from the counter and studied his unruly hair. He intended to cut it, but perhaps not as short as he had worn it before. After several moments of thought he mouthed a spell and several inches of hair fell to the floor, as if shorn by scissors. He repeated the process until all the roughness and split ends were gone and what remained were long smooth tresses. He was surprised to find that it still reached close to his waist. He studied it indecisively for several moments and decided he liked it.
He dressed in his father's revamped robes, and set about putting his room in proper order. He used his wand to gather all the dust from the room, and deposit it on the dustcover placed over his bed. He pulled the edges up and sealed them, trapping the dirt inside. He used a send spell to banish it to the rubbish heap outside.
It took another hour of spell work to scrub out the ingrained dirt and banish it as well. He was beginning to wish devoutly that he had a house elf to help him, but he doubted seriously that he would be able to acquire one. After a third hour of cleaning Draco was beginning to feel as though his room were appropriately his again, and paused to find something to eat. It was approaching dusk.
There was nothing at all edible in the kitchen. He scoured it twice before giving up. He was beginning to wonder if he would need to apparate to a wizarding establishment for supper, but he had no gold with him which would make that difficult, when he remembered that there were fruit trees in the back garden.
The back garden was as unruly as the rest, and the trees were growing somewhat wild, but he managed to find a few small apples and a peach. Not usually the best repast, but definitely better than anything he had eaten in years.
Sated and tired, the last thought on his mind as he collapsed to sleep on his magically cleaned sheets, was that he was home.
