Book Three: Astoria Greengrass and the Legilimens of Hogwarts

Full summary:

"You're not secretly a Legilimens, are you?" Astoria asked.
"What if I was?" Draco asked quietly in turn. "You'd be more careful, wouldn't you?"
"I'd have to be."

Astoria Greengrass starts to untangle her feelings for Draco Malfoy, but his feelings for her aren't so clear. As far as their budding relationship goes, it isn't ideal that Astoria sees more of Pansy's rage than Draco's affection on any given day.

Astoria tries to put her energy elsewhere — writing music and studying the furtive art of Legilimency (which she isn't sure is totally legal). But no amount of Legilimency could have warned her to the secrets Draco was keeping just out of reach.

Info & Book Three content warnings:

The Legilimens of Hogwarts takes place during The Half-Blood Prince.

-Child abuse (referenced), sensuality, violence, bigotry & prejudice, death, strong language

-Book Three is rated M for the above content warnings and thematic matter.

Song rec: "Bookworm" by Margot and the Nuclear So & So's

The Ministry of Magic had raided the manor. Every talisman was confiscated, every suspicious object was taken for testing, and if Draco Malfoy was not mistaken, a kleptomaniac was part of the investigation squad and had grabbed more than enough innocuous peacock-feather quills. A thorough job, however, was not necessarily a perfect one, and whilst Draco, his mother, and his friend Theodore Nott were trying to unwind in the drawing room, he could hear what the Ministry most wanted walking round the floor above.

"Where's my room?" demanded Theodore, eager to lock himself up before he could be greeted by the other tenants.

It wasn't a question Draco could answer, but his mother was not going to say a word to someone who spoke to her so sharply. The resulting silence made the shuffling noises above much clearer. Draco stood, and, to draw the answer out of her, said, "Mother, I'll show him to his room."

"Room fifteen in the east wing should be befitting," she said into her teacup.

It was a miracle that the young men did not encounter the strangers on their way upstairs, since Theodore could not keep his voice low as he criticised the method of the rooms' numbering and started describing his proposal of a new, "correct" one.

"I suggest you stay in here until I come and get you," Draco said whilst Theodore was scanning his room.

"Put in a good word for me, Draco," he said quietly, "if they require one."

Theodore locked the door.

Draco once more sat across from his mother in the drawing room. He waited for her to speak first. Her voice would have filled the room under normal circumstances. She was the type of mother who had to know everything — how school had been, when his reports would arrive, how much he had eaten on the train home, if he was tired.

Nothing.

The emptiness of the room only reminded Draco of how full the house should not have been.

"She's excited to see you," Draco's mother whispered.

The words were right, but the tone was wrong. He was being warned about meeting his own aunt in the minutes to come. When the clock struck, the tenants came downstairs.

Bellatrix Lestrange was an uncomfortable image to behold. Her hair was coiled and spread above and across her like a mangled wedding veil. Her eyes were wide open, soaking in the image of her nephew. The eyelids, which initially drooped, were forced upward into layers. She was wearing clothing that was twenty years too young for her; she had aged into her mid-forties in prison. She seemed uncertain of her faculties and teetered like a toddler. She clenched and unclenched her fists as if gripping hands that were not there.

"You were right, Cissy. He looks exactly like his father."

Nobody over the age of thirty ever said anything else upon first meeting Draco. Bellatrix embraced him, filling his nose and mouth with the stench of her lemon balm perfume. She wasted no time in bringing up a dispute that Draco's mother had never brought him to see "Auntie Bella." It amazed Draco that Bellatrix seemed not to know why she had been so neglected in prison. The embrace she provided was as cold and gristly as her leather vest. When she touched Draco's hair, he constricted. She seemed hardened to the motion, and Draco did not want to know why.

The only hints that the ring on her left hand meant anything soon walked in to meet Draco. Bellatrix's hairy husband, Rodolphus, was still a mammoth creature despite his time in Azkaban. In this, he differed greatly from his wife and brother: drained, wriggling beings who craved the prey they needed to make up for the lost weight. Rodolphus looked Draco up and down and forcibly patted him on the back to see if his knees would buckle. They did. The brother, Rabastan, made no extra contact but instead placed his hands behind his back and looked to the ceiling, bored. He seemed to enjoy flaunting the scars and the hole on the left side of his head; he owned both of his ears only a few months ago.

"Nott's son here?" Rabastan asked.

"He is," Draco responded.

"Hiding?"

Rabastan grinned with sharp, crooked teeth, but Draco felt repulsed by much more than the man's smile.

"No," Draco said with more force than he should have. "He's unpacking."

Draco found himself retrieving Theodore sooner than either young man expected. The unwelcome trio's inspection of Theodore was quicker than Draco's, but the results were less satisfactory. If Draco was not mistaken, his aunt and her cohorts intended to bring the flimsy Nott to tears.

"Sad news about your mummy, Teddy," Bellatrix clucked. "She was so young, wasn't she? Much younger than your father. What got her in the end again, Teddy? Not her hæmophilia, was it? Or her asthma?"

Theodore could have passed for a wax figure.

"Oh, poor boy, he doesn't remember," said Bellatrix, grabbing Theodore's arm in no comforting fashion.

"He remembers," grunted Rabastan. "Don't you, Nott? It was a nasty—"

"Motorcar," Theodore rasped.

"Bella," Draco's mother interjected. She was ignored.

"Surely she wasn't driving it?" chuckled Rodolphus.

"Hit her, didn't it? Countryside road. You were all on holiday. I heard she lost a leg straight away," Rabastan said.

"No, it was definitely an arm, Rabastan," Bellatrix upheld.

"Bella."

"We've always tended to use your mum as an example, Ted," Rodolphus yawned, "when we've run into Muggle-lovers."

"Filth!" screeched Bellatrix. "Traitors!"

The colour had been sluiced from Theodore's skin.

'Get him away from these people,' Draco's mother said with only a look in her eyes.

Theodore was quickly relocated to the room next to Draco's.

At the first weekend of summer, Draco and Theodore spent their time trying to compose letters to their fathers, who were being temporarily detained at the Ministry. Draco's mother, who was supposed to be helping him think of things to say to his father, was much too affected to put anything into words. In an attempt to protect her son from the stress of the hopeless trial, she forbade him from attending and instead insisted that he stay at home and look after his ailing grandfather. Draco certainly fought her about it, but he soon realised that he neither wanted to witness his father receive a life sentence nor leave his grandfather alone with the Lestranges. On the morning of the first of July, Draco's mother and Theodore set off to see the splitting of several families whilst Draco mixed up potions for his grandfather, who was honestly beyond help. He had not responded to treatment for his dragon pox at the hospital and was left to spend his remaining days without the company of his only child. Draco's mother believed that the old man was too sick to realise what was going in the house, but the first thing he said to Draco when he entered the sickroom was, "Lucius meets the Wizengamot today, does he?"

"…Yes," Draco had to admit to his occasionally lucid grandfather.

The old man sat up, bringing the green shade of his skin into the light of the lamp.

"Never was careful, that Lucius. Never was. I was always careful."

Typically, Draco would have started a row with someone who insulted his father, but if anyone had room to talk about Lucius Malfoy, it was the man who raised him. Draco carefully handed his grandfather the medicinal potion he had slaved over only to have the old man refuse it.

"Now might be a time for me to say something pitiful such as 'You are watching over me now, though I once watched over you,'" the old man said as he shook away the goblet. "But I didn't watch you, did I? Here or there, perhaps. Yet it always seemed to me that Lucius and your mother hogged you."

For a moment, Draco tried to think of a response, but he guessed it was better to simply let the dying man talk.

"That's the way I kept Lucius away from my father, see," he coughed. "My father was always doing the thinking for me, making the decisions for me. But I didn't want him putting any ideas into Lucius's head about living a quiet life. I said, 'Lucius, if you want to get into politics, go right ahead.' Lucius was a fine boy; he could do whatever he wanted. So that's what he did. He got involved in politics, but not before he got involved with those Riddle bastards. And so, I thought yesterday, maybe if I had let my father step in with advice once in a while, your father wouldn't be going to Azkaban."

"He'll get out," Draco said instinctively, but the cyclic thought presented itself as irrational in speech. Draco's grandfather looked at him the way someone might look at a child who thinks that thunder is the sound of angels bowling.

"Draco, listen to me," said the old man quietly, and Draco understood that he needed to come in closer. Only since his grandfather had passed the contagious phase of dragon pox was he comfortable being near him.

"These people in the manor are not to have their hackles raised. They're not — you know," Draco's grandfather said, pointing a shaky finger to the side of his head.

"I'm keeping as far as I can, Grandfather; believe me," Draco whispered.

The dying man grunted and said as firmly as his ailment allowed, "In the wall, behind that portrait of your grandmother Nora, there's a box. The password is 'Phasianadæ,' but it's Nora who might give you a hitch or two. Now, in the box is the key to my personal vault in Gringotts. Take whatever you need to leave the manor when it becomes necessary. Those Riddle bastards already got my son, and I can't have them getting my grandson, too."

Draco threw his grandfather's words to the back of his mind. That evening, when his mother and Theodore came home, Draco did not need to ask them how the first day of the trial had gone. He spent the following morning helplessly watching his grandfather deteriorate. When his mother and friend came home that second day, they brought news of the verdicts with them. Draco's father had been given a life sentence, and though Theodore's father had been given a sentence of twenty-five years, all knew that it would fill the rest of the older man's life.

Theodore spent most of the afternoon at Draco's side because he was afraid to be alone in the Malfoy Manor. Draco could not blame him, but it was not easy to have the fidgety companion nearby when Draco and his mother were on a death-watch. Draco's grandfather made things worse by refusing to speak to his own daughter-in-law; he apparently blamed her for having the Lestranges in the house. Draco, and even Theodore, understood that she had no other choice, but nobody was going to argue with a dying man. Each time he fell asleep, everyone felt it could be the last time, but he continued to wake. Cruel impatience stirred within Draco. He tried to remind himself that this was much harsher on his grandfather than it was on him.

It was past midnight when Draco's grandfather told him in a daze, "I'm dying, Lucius."

Draco didn't feel so impatient anymore and wondered why he had had such a feeling in the first place. Everything in his life was going wrong already, and now his only grandparent left was breathing his last. Draco's eyes burnt, and, to comfort his suffering grandfather, he forsook his own goodbye and said, "I'm here, Father. I'm here."

The funeral was scheduled to take place on the upcoming Friday.