This chapter is short, I know, and I hadn't intended to update today. I had a bunch of other stuff to go in this chapter, but if I had put it all in without breaking up the scenes, then it would be really long. Plus, I figured you guys would like to have an update before another couple of weeks go by, like last time. Thanks so much for all of your reviews! You guys rock.
Disclaimer: I own the Harry Potter books. Wait, let me rephrase that. I own the Harry Potter books. That still doesn't sound right, does it? Well, let me try again. I own the Harry Potter books. Clarification: I didn't write the Harry Potter books, but I do own a copy of them.
Chapter 4: Interim
I would like to discuss with you the matter of a boy, a boy named Aidan Grant…
Draco froze, his insides reeling. He swallowed and forced himself to look up at Dumbledore, forced a calm look onto his face. But one glance at Dumbledore and Draco's eyes darted away, looking anywhere but at the calm, perceptive way in which Dumbledore was watching him.
He knows, Draco thought wildly. He knows. I can see it in his eyes.
"Draco, look at me," Dumbledore said softly.
Draco didn't change his gaze, but continued staring at the floor. If he looked up, there was no way Dumbledore wouldn't see his fear.
"I just want to talk to you about him," continued Dumbledore. "And we can't have a conversation if you are currently giving your attention to the floor."
Sighing, Draco slowly raised his face, his eyes landing on Dumbledore reluctantly. Instead of the accusation or anger he had expected to see surfacing, Draco saw that Dumbledore was still merely quiet. Not confused or sad or curious, but quiet. Calm. Understanding. That didn't stop Draco from wanting to jump out of a window, though. Anywhere else would be better than here, than wherever this conversation might lead.
"I'm not going to accuse you, Draco, nor am I going to toss you into prison, so you can stop looking so worried." Dumbledore smiled at Draco softly. "I just want to talk to you."
"Leave him," came a hard voice from behind Draco. Draco whipped around and saw Lord Voldemort standing at the top of the stairs. "He is Draco's. Let him be."
Wincing at the memory, Draco asked harshly, "What's there to talk about?" He cleared his throat, looking away uncomfortably.
"Well," stated Dumbledore, "I know that you did not want to do what you did. Am I correct?"
Draco nodded his head stiffly, still staring at the wall. How did Dumbledore find out? Draco had been positive that nobody else had been around the Grant house that night. So how did he know? And more importantly, what was he going to do with Draco?
"How do you even know about this?" Draco asked, half of him wanting an answer, the other half wishing there was no need for an answer.
"I had you followed," Dumbledore said simply. "Over Christmas."
"Why?" Draco asked. Anger was starting to build in him. So Dumbledore hadn't trusted him from the beginning?
"I knew," said Dumbledore, "that you would play a large part in the war. Your father is Voldemort's right-hand man, and you are his son. That makes you somewhat special. The only thing is, I didn't know whose side you would be on, and I was doing all I could to find out."
"So you had me followed?" Draco asked incredulously. "How long has that been going on?"
"That was the one and only time I had you followed, Draco," Dumbledore answered. "I began to consider seriously last summer the possibility that you were not like your father. Your actions at school last year only gave me hope. I knew that Lucius had been visiting you in the castle, as I have told you, and I knew something was up. I couldn't risk you being alone with him, out of my supervision, for so long."
"So you tagged along after me all over Christmas? You watched everything?"
Dumbledore hesitated before he spoke. "Not I, myself. Someone else went."
Stiffening, his eyes widening, Draco stared at Dumbledore. "Somebody else knows about this?" he asked hoarsely. His mouth had gone dry. "Who?"
"Severus Snape," Dumbledore said. "If anyone was to understand your situation, it would be him. If anyone were to be caught, he would have the greatest chance of surviving, given his position. If you were to one day find out that I had you followed, I had hoped that Severus would be the one person you'd accept. He will not tell anybody, Draco. He himself has secrets, has things he is ashamed of. He will not judge you."
Draco was silent, many emotions running through him. The fact that there was someone else out there who knew what he had done was disconcerting. However, Dumbledore was right about one thing. If Draco could have picked one person to see what Draco had done, it would have been Severus Snape. Over the years at Hogwarts, Snape had been the one professor that Draco liked, that he felt understood him. Relief, mixed with anger at Dumbledore's having him followed, twisted Draco's tongue, forced him to remain silent.
"You heard the Master," Lucius said quietly. "Go. Kill the boy."
"How I make sense of what you did," Dumbledore stated slowly, "is that sometimes we do things that are neither honorable nor wise." His eyes creased in thought. "We do them…we do them because we feel we have no choice."
Draco's eyes slowly traveled once more to the floor as he listened to the man speak.
"When we feel we have no choice or say in the matter at hand, we forsake our basic human right of making our own decisions. By staying silent, we give up our voice, and with it, our freedom." Dumbledore glanced at Draco, saw the steely sorrow on the young man's face. "Part of what separates us from the Death Eaters, Draco," he continued, pushing his glasses back up his nose, "is that we, the Order, keep that voice. It is true that some Death Eaters choose to follow Voldemort, but once they hold out their arm, they also hold out their soul. Once they become branded and follow him, they no longer make their own decisions, even though Voldemort would sometimes have them believe that. Voldemort lets none of his followers make their own decision, Draco. He controls them all. And that…that is what separates us."
Draco raised his left hand to his face, blocking the rain from his sight. Lighting again touched down, this time not far from the house. The thunder cracked the sky and Draco felt the vibration deep within his chest. He raised his wand high.
Draco swallowed the lump in his throat and forced himself to look back up at Dumbledore, was surprised to feel tears pooling in his eyes. "I didn't want to do it," Draco whispered. "I didn't want to, but he was there, and my father was there, and I couldn't…I couldn't – I-I couldn't stand up to them."
His face contorting with the regret and sorrow, Draco shook his head. "I just – I just stood there, let them take me there to that house. And when they told me what I had to do, when he asked me if I was a coward, I told him that I wasn't." Draco shook his head again, staring at Dumbledore's desk blindly through the tears he refused to release. "I said, 'I'm no coward,' but now that I think about it, fear was what made me do it in the first place." He swallowed thickly. "It was because I was too scared to stand up to them, both of them, that I let them push me into it."
"Kill him!" shouted Lucius angrily. "Do it!"
Draco could hardly hear his father over the roaring of the wind and rain, which Draco noticed was slowly turning to ice with the drop in temperature, but he was able to hear clear enough. One look back at the boy told him what he had to do.
"Forgive me," whispered Draco, his lip trembling and tears forming in his eyes. "Forgive me."
"Avada Kedavara!"
Draco blinked as he looked up, ignoring the tear that escaped his eyes. "So I guess I'm no better than the Death Eaters. I let them make my decision."
Dumbledore watched Draco silently for a moment, his face contemplative. He slowly began to speak. "Draco, from what I understand, what you went through that night was a test. It wasn't a creditable or innocent test on their part," he sighed. "Its purpose was for Voldemort to see if you truly wanted to join him, to serve him. He wanted to see how well prepared you were to fight and kill innocent people just for the sake of it. However, he underestimated you."
Draco looked up, hardly daring to believe Dumbledore.
"Voldemort assumed you possessed the hate that is in your father's heart. He was wrong," Dumbledore said quietly. "You have no more hate in your heart than any other man, Draco. Men hate any number of things, and you just so happen to hate Voldemort and your father. For your entire life, you may have felt that hate, but that night made you fully aware of it for the first time."
Draco felt like the life was being sucked out of him. His breath came in short, desperate gasps, trying to get back something precious he had just lost. Draco looked to his father and saw, for once in his life, what might have been pride. Lucius opened his mouth to say something and he placed his hand on Draco's shoulder, but Draco jerked away as if he'd been burned. His eyes traveled to his father's face, to Voldemort's, and then back to his hands
His wand.
Draco stared at his quivering hands, at the wand he held in them. With a revolting feeling, he tried to let go of his wand, to drop it and leave it behind, but his hands didn't seem to want to move. They were clenched around his wand in a death grip. Draco tried to loosen them, but it seemed his hands had made up their mind to keep his wand.
"Don't misunderstand me, Draco," Dumbledore said. "I am not approving or commending your actions, merely rationalizing them," he sighed, "finding what good did come of them."
Draco snorted harshly. "No good came of what I did."
Slowly, Dumbledore nodded, his eyes full of sadness. "That statement, Draco, is a testament that good did come. You realized just what exactly your father did, who he was, and you realized that you didn't want to be that man. It was the catalyst that caused you to revolt against him completely, and it is what led you to where you are today."
Draco shrugged halfheartedly, knowing that what Dumbledore spoke was true. If it hadn't been for that night, Draco might have continued obeying his father, might have never gathered the courage to save his mother, might never have joined the Order. The knowledge that taking another human's life was the thing to bring him to that realization was sickening, however, and Draco wished that as a child he hadn't been so blind to his father's evil ways, that he had decided to challenge his father earlier in his life.
"So what do I do now?" Draco asked.
Dumbledore sighed. "You can never take back what you did, but you can acknowledge the sacrifice Aidan and his family made for you, and you can take advantage of that. But first, you have to forgive yourself."
"How can I forgive myself?" Draco inquired angrily. "I killed him! I didn't stop Voldemort or my father! I just stood there while he killed a man, a woman, and a little girl, and when they told me to kill the boy, I did it! There's no forgiveness for that…"
"You're wrong, Draco," Dumbledore said, his own voice hinting at anger. "If you keep holding this inside yourself and keep hating yourself, you are only mocking what their deaths were for. Their deaths gave you freedom, not only from your father, but from yourself. Keeping this regret trapped inside will only bring that captivity back. It will start from the inside and work its way through you until you no longer even recognize yourself. If you are be your own man, you need to let it go," he finished softly.
"And how do I do that?" Draco asked sorrowfully, shaking his head. "I've tried ever since that night to let it go, but I can't. Do you think I liked seeing his eyes every time I closed mine? Seeing his light fade away? Seeing his body fall into the mud as I just stood over him? Killed him? How do I possibly let something like that go?"
"Go to him."
"What are you talking about?" Draco asked, rubbing his eyes with weariness. "They're dead."
"Go to their graves. It is what you need to do if you wish to ever be free from this," Dumbledore said.
Draco was silent, shrugged helplessly. He didn't want to do what Dumbledore was asking him to do; as much as it shamed him to admit it, going to their graves frightened him. Seeing them again, even if it was just seeing the headstones above their bodies, would be too much.
"I can't…"
"Yes you can, Draco," Dumbledore said fiercely. "It is for your own sense of self. If you do not, you will hold this memory inside you forever and will let it influence you. Don't get me wrong; I don't want you to ever forget what you did. I just need you to put it behind you, learn from it, and move on."
"Why aren't you turning me in to Azkaban?" Draco changed the subject. "I killed someone. Doesn't that mean I go to prison?"
Dumbledore sighed heavily and was quiet for a long moment before he answered Draco. "The way I see it, when you killed Aidan, you were not thinking rationally. That does not excuse you, though it will give you some credit later on. Also, it will help that you did not kill him out of hate or revenge. Being pressured into it is not excusable either, though," he sighed again. "The situation is unfortunate, though their remains some hope. Turning yourself in now would accomplish nothing. Your father thinks you dead anyway, and revealing yourself would not be wise; not even the Azkaban prison would keep him or Voldemort from killing you if they wanted to badly enough. So to turn you in would be to kill you, and we certainly can't have that." Dumbledore attempted a weak smile, but it fell flat with another sigh. Draco himself just watched Dumbledore, finding nothing to smile about.
"There is a time to come clean, but now is not it," Dumbledore said. "For now, nobody other than myself and Professor Snape will know of this incident, unless you choose to tell somebody. After the war is over, and after Voldemort is defeated, then I hope that you will do the right thing. The Wizengamot will be much more sympathetic towards your situation if they know that you did not really wish to kill the boy. Stating that would get you nowhere now; they would think you simply wished to get out of Azkaban. But if they know that you have served the Order, helped to get rid of Voldemort, and turned yourself in to justice, they will see that you really are a fine man; and perhaps they will not stick to the usual life sentence in Azkaban for use of an Unforgivable Curse."
"So in other words," Draco sighed, "I just have to hope that they forgive me for using an…Unforgivable Curse. How ironic."
Dumbledore laughed. "Seeing your humor return is a good sign. But I must insist that you go to see their graves."
The levity of the situation disappeared. Draco shook his head, but now on his face was a look of consideration. Nothing too bad could come of going to them, could it? Other than a renewed self-hate, all Draco would gain, according to Dumbledore, was a freedom that he needed to survive. And if that was the case, why not oblige an old man?
"Alright," Draco agreed, shaking his head. "What do I have to do?"
"It's simple, really," Dumbledore said. "They were buried in their yard; their graves are marked. As I understand, the muggles never found out the cause of death, so all who were involved in the case were obliviated. Therefore, there should be no resistance to your visiting their home."
"And how do I get there?" Draco asked. "I could Apparate, but –"
"About that," cut in Dumbledore, "I would prefer for you to go naturally. That is, without magic."
"Why?"
"You killed a muggle. I think that you should travel to see them their way, the muggle way. It…is fitting."
Draco was silent for a moment, letting the thought sink in; then he nodded. "Fine." What did it matter if he traveled without magic? What were a few extra hours? "When do I leave?"
"As soon as possible," answered Dumbledore. "Actually, your train leaves in a little over an hour, so we must hurry." He stood from his chair.
Draco, his nerves leaping at the prospect of going so soon, stood as well. "What happened to me not being allowed out of this place?"
"That would have been changing soon, anyway," Dumbledore said, "if you are to be joining Harry and Ron on their search. Now will be as good a time as any to get reacquainted with the sights and sounds of the outdoors. However, since you will be traveling in plain sight of everybody, I will disguise you slightly, just enough so that you won't be recognized."
Dumbledore moved from around the desk and pulled out his wand. After murmuring a few words, he smiled at Draco, apparently satisfied. Draco didn't feel any different. "There," Dumbledore sighed. "I think you'll now find yourself adequately anonymous."
Draco looked around for a mirror but found none. "What's different?" he asked, feeling his hair and face; it all felt normal.
"Oh, not much," Dumbledore said, looking over Draco. "Your hair has darkened, your eyes have turned blue, and your face has gained some more color, but it will all wear off when you set foot back inside this house. And now, Draco," he said, motioning towards the door, "you are free to leave Grimauld Place. Here are your train ticket, directions to the train station, information on your train route, and directions on how to get to the Grant house."
Dumbledore opened the door and Draco stepped into the hallway. "But Sir," Draco began, hesitating. "What – what do I do, exactly?"
"Whatever feels natural," Dumbledore replied, his eyes revealing the empathy he tried to keep from his voice. "You may come back using any means you wish since it is the journey there that matters most."
Draco nodded, started to turn away.
"And Draco," Dumbledore called after him. Draco turned.
"Yes?"
"Take this time as an opportunity to dwell on what you did," Dumbledore said, his face serious. "I do not believe that you will succumb to evil again, but learn from your mistake. Live for this day and what you may bring to it, and always hope for tomorrow. No matter what you've done in your life that you are ashamed of, know that there are people here who care about you."
Draco nodded slowly. "Yes, Sir," he said, his voice soft. He took his time turning around, let each step fall gently as he walked through the hallway.
Dumbledore watched him go, his heart aching for the young man. So much had happened in Draco's life; there was so much pain that could have been avoided. And yet Dumbledore knew that Draco would not be the man he was today if it had not been for his childhood. Harsh times would come for them all, and it was not the first time Dumbledore would wish that he could go back in time, go back so that maybe the future wouldn't appear so bleak.
Sighing, he turned around to head back into his office, only to see Minerva McGonagall walking towards him.
"Good afternoon, Minerva," he smiled at her.
"Hello, Albus," McGonagall replied. "Was that Draco Malfoy I saw turning the corner just now?"
"It was," Dumbledore acknowledged, glancing over his shoulder where Draco had disappeared.
"So I take it you talked to him about joining Potter and Weasley on their search, then?"
"Yes, I did."
"Do you really think it wise, Albus?" McGonagall asked with a frown. "Those boys have been at each other's throats for seven years. Surely sending them out on such an important mission unsupervised will only end in disaster, won't it?"
"Minerva," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling, "I think you underestimate Mr. Malfoy. He has changed since we knew him in school, and it is for the better. This shall be a bonding experience for the three of them, and even if they never come to like each other, they will respect each other."
"Well," McGonagall said, shrugging her shoulders, "I suppose you know best. I just hope that they'll all make it back in one piece."
"I have little doubt that they will, Minerva."
"Well then, if you are done with that meeting," she continued, "I came to remind you that we are due back at Hogwarts to meet with the new Defense teacher."
"Oh, I had not forgotten about that," Dumbledore smiled. "I'm curious to meet this new one."
"Do you think this one will last longer than the others?" McGonagall asked hopefully as she and Dumbledore walked down the hallway.
Dumbledore smiled to himself. "I suppose we'll just have to wait and see."
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A/N: The italicized sentences (minus the one at the very beginning of the chapter) were all from This Is Who You Are in the scene where Draco killed Aidan, just in case you were wondering what those were. Anyhow, I'm sorry for such a boring chapter. This one didn't even mention Ginny's name, I don't think. If all goes according to my little schedule, you should see her in the next chapter. Thanks for putting up with this one. Remember to review!
Lauren
