There is a trigger warning associated with this chapter. For those who want to make an informed decision before reading, it's listed in the chapter end notes.

Chapter 36

Draco appeared in the Manor ballroom upon being summoned. He never entered the room anymore if he could help it, feeling a reflexive rush of horror just by passing by. Even the way sound carried up to the high ceiling shook him after having heard so many screams, oftentimes his own, bouncing off the walls. The dining room, the ballroom… if he survived this war, he wondered how many rooms in his own house he wouldn't be able to use anymore.

At least the drawing room hadn't been tainted. He enjoyed reading there.

Draco surveyed his surroundings. The Dark Lord was waiting with Aunt Bella, his parents, Yaxley and – he repressed a shudder of revulsion – Alecto Carrow. Shouldn't she be at Hogwarts?

He eyed his parents. His mother whispered something to his father, who nodded. Draco couldn't determine what was going on, but it seemed everyone was waiting for something to happen. Their expressions revealed nothing, which did nothing to allay Draco's anxiety.

Vince and Greg walked into the ballroom with their parents shortly after. His old classmates strode in with a measure of bravado. Draco remembered his excitement and anticipation the first time he had been summoned with the Dark Mark. He was young and wanted to prove he was capable if only given the chance. Vince and Greg would eventually learn to dread being called, as he did. It always meant pain. Or death. Or both.

The cold silence in the ballroom transformed their confident swagger into a more cautious gait. He met the eyes of his old classmates and they glanced back at him nervously, a question on their wary faces. What was happening? Draco didn't know either.

The Dark Lord focused his red eyes on Vince and Greg, who couldn't hold his gaze and stared down at the floor. He shifted his glare to Draco, who looked back, impassive, as the terror within him spread up and down his spine. The Dark Lord's lips turned upwards slightly, and he spoke to Yaxley, inhuman eyes never leaving Draco.

"Corban, explain to our younger recruits the problem you have presented to me."

Yaxley cleared his throat and stepped forward. "My lord, the dungeons here are too crowded after the safe house raid."

Draco agreed. He didn't know the status of the other prison cells the Dark Lord's army was making use of throughout Wizarding England, but at Malfoy Manor they were disgusting. The upside was that nobody went down to rape the prisoners anymore. Perhaps there had been complaints. Rape was one of the incentives for the Snatchers, informants and some of the others in the lower ranks of the Dark Lord's army.

The Dark Lord swiveled around to face his aunt with a sinister grin. "And Bella, what problem have you noticed?"

Her red lips spread in a slow smile. "Some of our newer members haven't yet bloodied their hands. They're too soft." Her eyes travelled over Vince and Greg and they visibly stiffened under her scrutiny. "And need to be broken in." Her gaze landed on him, and she winked.

Draco's bowels went cold. He knew what was coming. He knew what would happen if he couldn't do it. All their parents were there to watch and provide… incentive. He still remembered his mother's and father's screams when the Dark Lord was told he couldn't kill Dumbledore. The only reason they were still alive was because he had successfully brought the Death Eaters into the castle.

What was Aunt Bella thinking? Why would she instigate this situation? Did she want her sister to be tortured? Maybe killed? He shifted his gaze to his parents. His father was frozen, and his mother was trembling, unable to hide her fear anymore.

"So you see," The Dark Lord's eyes flicked to his, Vince's and then Greg's. "Two birds," he held out one pale scaly hand to his side, "one stone." He held out the other hand, and then clasped them together.

"Corban, if you please."

The tense, terrifying atmosphere of the ballroom quickly transformed into panicked desperation. Yaxley Disapparated and reappeared a few times with several of the Muggle-born prisoners and their families that were captured in the raids during the prior summer and sitting in the Malfoy dungeons. The ones the Order hadn't managed to hide in time. They were frightened and sobbing, their chains clinking on the floor. Family members were clinging to each other, parents hushing their children. He eyed with growing horror the two children he had made laugh earlier when he Imperiused another prisoner to do somersaults.

Draco wanted to vomit.

Alecto sauntered over to him, unfazed by the impending carnage and purred into his ear. "If you had been at Hogwarts this year, I would have taught you properly." Her finger trailed up his arm. "Without pressure to… perform."

"Vincent," the Dark Lord called him. "Execute this filth."

Immediately the children began to scream, and his aunt silenced them with sneer and a flamboyant swish of her wand.

Vince raised his wand to one of the men kneeling on the floor, arm trembling. "Avada Kedavra!"

A green light shot out of his wand and the man pitched over, but he didn't die and his body convulsed. Vince gaped at the man, horrified that he had failed. Alecto walked over to him with a smile. "First time?" Vince nodded numbly. She took hold of his wrist and made a curving motion. "Like this on 'dav.' KeDAVra. Try again."

She sauntered back to Draco, her hand travelled down his arm and she circled behind him. Her hand pressed against his lower back and slid over his arse. "I know you'll do better than that," she whispered in his ear.

The convulsing man spat foam and blood out of his mouth as Vince raised his wand again. He shouted the incantation, green light thudded into the prisoner's chest and finally he lay still. Alecto's fingers dug into his rear and her breasts rose and fell as her excitement grew.

Draco couldn't move, he tried and probably failed to keep his face impassive while his mind raced through his options.

None of them were good. They all ended in death.

Trapped.

"Two more, I think?" His aunt looked back at the Dark Lord and he nodded once in approval.

Vince raised his arm and with more confidence, killed another man and woman. His parents sighed in relief.

"Practice makes perfect." Alecto's hot breath fanned against his neck, and then she licked his ear lobe. Draco swallowed the bile rising in his throat without vomiting. He couldn't manage much more than that.

The Dark Lord turned to Greg with a thin-lipped smile. "Gregory." He motioned to two adults clutching their crying boys.

Greg was visibly terrified. Like Vince, he started with the man. The spell failed, and the man fell over, clutching his chest and screaming. His wife bent over his body and stroked his face, sobbing his name. Beads of sweat formed on Draco's forehead. He couldn't help it. He couldn't Occlude. He no idea what to do. He was going to die.

Alecto strolled over and grabbed Greg's wrist. "With a swipe at the end. Like this."

Greg tried again and the man fell silent. Alecto nodded in approval and sidled up next to Draco again. Greg turned to the woman, took a deep breath and killed her as well. Alecto pressed her chest against the back of his arm and reached around to his front, placing her hand on his thigh. He was going to retch if this lasted much longer. To keep the nausea at bay he inhaled sharply through his nose. Alecto misinterpreted his reaction and inched her hand up, towards his crotch.

The children screamed soundlessly, clutching the bodies of their parents. Greg tried and failed. The spell did nothing at all, the green light thudding without effect into the boy's small chest.

Voldemort spoke softly to him. "They are filth, Gregory. They poison our society, our way of life. Age does not matter. They will grow up and steal what is rightfully yours. They'll ruin your family. The children are no different from their parents."

The threat to Greg's mother and father was clear.

Greg squeezed his eyes shut and steeled himself. Sweat dripped down his temple. The green light flashed out of his wand and the boy fell over, lifeless. His parents sighed, and his shoulders relaxed.

Draco's mind wandered back to when they were children. Probably the same age as the boy Greg just killed. They enjoyed playacting in the warm summer weather. He, Vince and Greg would chase each other around the extensive grounds of the Goyle estate, pretending to hunt down and kill Muggles. Sometimes, if Madam Goyle could spare the help, they could even make a House Elf join in their games and play the part of the Muggle. Once Vince had kicked it so hard that he had stained his new dragon hide boots with its blood. His father reprimanded him for taking such poor care of his boots.

Alecto's hand inched higher. Draco felt himself getting hard and nearly convulsed in revulsion. He wanted to die.

"Vincent," the Dark Lord called. "You may do the other one."

Vince killed the other boy without problem.

"Your turn," Alecto's voice teased. She removed her hand, and backed away, grazing his member.

He swallowed the acid taste in his mouth and tried not to grimace.

There was one family left including a boy and a girl. The two kids he'd made laugh in the dungeons. Blond hair and blue eyed, similar to the girl Granger had Polyjuiced into the day they met in Fortescue's, and a grandmother. Draco's heart thudded in his chest and the world seemed to go silent around him. He gazed into the grandmother's eyes, everything around him was a blur.

He was terrified. He had already failed to kill once. If he failed again, would his mother and father die? Or just be tortured? Aunt Bella wouldn't instigate a situation that resulted in her sister's death. Would she? It didn't matter though. He knew he would fail.

He couldn't kill them. He couldn't do it. He would die. And his mother might die too because of him.

Draco swallowed his bile again and looked over into his mother's clear blue eyes. He was scared out of his wits, but she wasn't. Instead of fear, he was shocked to see that she was only profoundly sad and… accepting.

His mouth went dry. His mother was giving him permission to fail. She knew he couldn't do it, and she had accepted her torture and death as inevitable.

Everyone was watching him as the seconds dragged on, silent.

The only people that he hated in this room, he wasn't allowed to kill. He peered into the eyes of the grandmother. Tears trickled down her wrinkled face while she squeezed the hand of the little girl. He couldn't do it. He couldn't do it. He would die. His mother would die. His father would die. And none of it would matter because the Mudblood family would all die anyway, regardless of Draco's actions. They were all dead anyway. It didn't matter what he did.

Unless… maybe he could save his parents.

Draco made a decision and raised his wand with a sharp inhale, index finger in place. He looked coldly down at the grandmother.

"Diffindo!"

His slicing hex cut straight through her spinal column, esophagus and airway. Before her body even had time to slump to the floor, he did the same to the children. By the time the grandmother's body collapsed to the tiled ballroom floor, the mother and father were already dead on their knees.

Speed and precision. Jugson would be proud.

The children fell face forward to the ground, and the parents slumped over half a second after. Five individual pools of blood slowly spread on the floor and joined together. The dark red contrasted with the shiny white polished stone tiles. Maybe it would stain.

The room was stunned to silence.

Draco exhaled slowly and turned to look at the Dark Lord. There was a faint glimmer of surprise on his snake-like features.

His voice was curious. "You did not use the Killing Curse?"

Draco stared back into the red probing eyes dispassionately. "They are vermin through no fault of their own. I don't hate them for being unable to go against their nature." He brushed some imaginary lint off his sleeve. A signature Severus move. "All the same, they should be exterminated."

Voldemort studied him for a few moments and rolled his wand between his fingers. Everyone was quiet, waiting for the Dark Lord to pronounce his verdict. Draco felt like a cord was being pulled taught inside of him. Tighter and tighter, until it would snap.

"Their dirty blood is making a mess of your floor. Clean it up, Draco. No magic."

He felt the cord release and exhaled in relief.

Draco couldn't look at his mother, afraid of what he would see in her eyes.

oooooooooooooooooooo

After Vince, Greg and himself had cleared out the dungeons dispersed throughout Britain that the Dark Lord was making use of, Draco came back to the Manor to dispose of the family as the Dark Lord had commanded. His father advised him to burn the bodies and be done with it, but Draco wanted to bury them. They were a family. They lived together, they were imprisoned together, they were murdered together, and he wanted to bury them together.

On this, his father sensed Draco wouldn't give in, and retreated to his study, perhaps unwilling to argue after having barely survived yet another threat to their lives. No cutting remarks, no sarcasm. No talk about responsibilities in the Dark Lord's army and needless sentimentality.

His mother understood his need for closure and showed him a quiet corner on their estate under a tree which was blossoming in the spring.

Draco dug five graves.

No magic.

All day he worked, shoving the spade into the ground with a crunch, pressing down with his boot, wrenching up grass and dirt and throwing it to the side. He made no sound, not even a grunt as the sweat dripped into his eyes and down his body. Despite the cool spring weather, he became unbearably hot from the exertion and removed his shirt, wiping his chest, face and hair with the dirty fabric before tossing it to the side.

He didn't drink. He didn't eat. He worked without pause, without break.

His back hurt, his arms ached, his legs were killing him, and his shoulder muscles screamed in pain by the time he was finished. But Draco didn't care. It should hurt. He wanted it to hurt. He wanted to be punished. He hadn't gotten Crucio'd but wished he had been. He wanted to die. He didn't deserve to live.

Above everything else, he just wanted this misery to end.

After finishing the graves, he walked back to the Manor and stared down at the five bodies, slumped over in their own blood.

Five people. A family.

Draco wiped down each one of them with rags and towels, cleaning off as much of the blood as he could, from their faces, from their limbs, trying to preserve some sense of their dignity in death. When he finished, he wrapped each of them in a white sheet, and carried them individually out to the gravesite at the edge of the estate.

His mother watched him work all day and accompanied him in silence. The grandmother was light, but the children didn't weigh much of anything at all. Tiny, fragile little bodies. Their last moments spent in abject terror, screaming and clinging to their parents. Small children turning to adults for a protection that couldn't be given.

Draco was careful, climbing down into the grave and laying each one of them down inside the dirt as delicately as he could. As if they could break. As if he hadn't broken them already. After each person was resting, he stood above them all and gazed down. Five people wrapped in white sheets in five shallow graves.

He wiped the sweat from his face, inhaled sharply, and grabbed the shovel to cover them up. The sun started to set, and his mother's skin changed from her regular pale coloring to yellowish, warm orange and then darker pink in the dimming light. Filling the graves was much easier than digging them. The earth was loose, not packed, and the pile of dirt to the side gradually got smaller as he filled the holes one by one.

Draco finished burying them and patted the dirt with his shovel, forming five ovular mounds.

He thought back to Dumbledore on the Astronomy tower, telling his sixteen-year-old self that he wasn't a killer. In a few months he'd be eighteen. Today, he crossed a line and couldn't come back.

Draco sighed and shoved the spade into the ground. He rested his elbow on the handle and leaned on it, surveying his work. His work. He had done this. Sweat dripped from his head and he ran a hand through his wet dirty hair.

They needed a gravestone.

"I don't know their names." His voice was raspy from not talking during so many hours of hard labor.

His mother glanced up him and blinked, a few tears left her eyes and she wiped them away. "We have records. I'll find out."

Draco didn't know what to say. It was a funeral without words. He didn't know who they were, only that they were Mudbloods and that was a death sentence. He knew that they loved each other and that they didn't deserve to die. Leaving the spade in the ground, he picked up his dirty, sweaty shirt and turned around to walk back to the Manor. His mother followed him in silence back up the path. They entered the ballroom and he stared down at the pool of blood on the floor, waiting to be sopped up.

He squeezed his eyes shut, unable to remove the image of his Diffindo hex cutting through their throats.

"You don't have to stay here, Mother. You didn't do this."

"I did," she said, placing her hand gently on the skin of his back. "And I'll stay."

ooooooooooo

Draco stood in the shower, sobbing, gritting his teeth and scrubbing his skin raw. There had been so much blood and dirt, he could still see it in his cuticles and embedded in his nails. His hands were stinging, blistered from shoveling all day. He didn't bother healing himself. He wanted to feel the pain.

After he couldn't see any remaining blood or dirt, Draco leaned forward and placed his palms on the tile wall of the shower. The hot water beat down on his back and he gasped another sob. He hung his head down and watched the water swirl around the drain between his feet. It took the blood, sweat and dirt that had been encrusted on his body.

Draco still didn't feel clean.

He tilted his head back. The hot water hit his face and he opened his eyes into the stream so they would burn. He wanted to burn. He wanted everything to burn.

He shut off the shower and stared at his feet again, listening to the water drip down onto the tiles and the residual puddle gurgle down the drainpipe. He was empty, carved out and hollow. And slightly dizzy. He hadn't had anything to eat or drink since the murders.

Draco opened the shower door and grabbed a towel. He stared into the mirror as he dried himself. His eyes had dark bags underneath, giving him a haunted appearance. He couldn't stop seeing the children as they silently screamed for their parents. Couldn't stop feeling their tiny bodies as he cradled them in his arms, taking them out to their graves.

He didn't want to stay in this house any longer.

Nagini was here. The Dark Lord was here. Charity Burbage was eaten here. His parents were tortured here. Prisoners were tortured, raped and killed here.

He eyed his communication Galleon on the bathroom sink.

Draco couldn't stay here tonight. He had to go where he felt safe.

Chapter end notes:

Trigger warning – children get murdered, it's explicitly described