Disclaimer: If I owned it, there wouldn't *be* any movies.
A/N: Okay, so, I'm entirely unsatisfied with this chapter, that's why I didn't have it up yesterday. It took me this long to struggle through it. I would have just skipped ahead, but the info in it is just too important to leave out. I apologize for all blatantly obvious angst and over-dramatization in here, okay? Ugh. Just hit me and get it over with...
*********
Late summer, seventh year
*********
Draco Malfoy was folding his clothes into his trunk. There weren't that many that still fit him, however. He reminded himself that he had to get down to Diagon Alley soon, to buy robes that fit.
In went his spellbooks. Since sixth year had been cut off prematurely, he assumed he would need all his old ones as well.
Glancing at his Hogwarts letter, he thought that, yes, his Diagon Alley trip would have to be today. He'd leave a message for his mother with one of the house-elves, she'd gone off to visit his father. His father...
Memories came pouring into Draco's head.
When Lucius Malfoy first came to him to ask him to be a spy at Hogwarts, Draco was already so wrapped up in self-loathing that he would take any scrap of a compliment and prize it like the greatest treasure ever created. And at the time, his father was buttering him up; so, naturally he accepted. _Bimonthly reports,_ said his father, instantly cold once Draco said yes, _sent to me. I'll expect updates on the activities of your headmaster, your potions teacher, and anything else you deem significant, especially anything about that no-good Mudblood Harry Potter._
Draco hadn't needed to ask what the information in the reports would be used for.
While he was gathering information, he made certain to act as usual: cruelly. People often asked behind his back what his problem was, and had he ever picked up a book on psychology, he would have found a page for his problem, realized exactly what it was, and still have been able to do nothing about it. If one is putting others down to bring oneself up, it's a personal problem that can only be solved by feeling better about oneself. That certainly didn't appear to be happening anytime soon.
People thought he hated them, and he let them think that. But the truth was, he didn't hate anybody, really, except himself.
So twice a month reports were owled out of Hogwarts about the goings-on there, and Draco felt worse and worse. He didn't have any real friends, he didn't have his own viewpoint on anything. He was merely an extension of his family; a tool. What was worse, for the longest time he didn't *want* his own viewpoint on anything: he just acted the way he was expected to act and thought the way he was expected to think.
All that changed right after Christmas, fifth year. Well, maybe not the acting part--he still acted exactly as he was expected to, exactly as he had been--but the thinking part, certainly. Ten former-and-still-likely Death Eaters escaped from prison, and the thought had come tumbling down over him like a wave:
_This is serious._
A war was brewing, he knew then, and people were going to be killed. Good people. People, he realized, that some tiny part of his subconscious had been admiring for all of his life. Children brought up in bad homes, it is said, when exposed nearly year-round to bad values, are still able to find at least one shred of goodness in something--that's how they realized they're being brought up badly. Draco had found his hope, and now it was in sincere danger of being extinguished.
Nothing was suspected from his father's end: the reports still came like clockwork, only now they were missing any information that could be deemed valuable. However, it wasn't until that summer that Albus Dumbledore began receiving the anonymous notes detailing plans and meetings of the Death Eaters. Every one came with a different owl, but they were all in the same spiky handwriting, and each was signed 'a friend.'
At first Draco just listened to his father's words as he came back from the meetings, but he soon realized that not enough was being said--his father was too dedicated to the cause to mention anything significant. So he moved onto riffling through Lucius's desk, looking for important documents pertaining to the building tension between light and dark forces. He'd often spend late night trying to break the code-spells on these, then he'd frantically copy everything down and send it out.
Later in the summer he grew bolder in the search for information. Not knowing where the meeting was to be held, Draco followed his father to a meeting in a very secure room. The only way that he found himself able to listen in was through luck, when he'd discovered a crawlspace beneath the floor, and had performed a listening spell to the boards beneath the Death Eaters' very feet. His reward had been great that time, and his letter was filled with three times as many valuable facts as it had been previously.
Emboldened by his success, he followed his father to as many meetings as he could that summer, before he finally had to go back to school. The last meeting he'd snuck into had been the most frightening, and he'd selected the fastest owl at the post office to deliver this letter: a raid on Hogwarts was being planned.
During the first month he felt entirely useless. There was next to no useful information he could glean from his classmates, so all he could do was sit around waiting for the attack to come. Which it did. In a horrendous manner.
Draco was send back to his family's home, and for a few tense months he was surrounded by all the news he could have handled, all of it horrible. It was the night he found out the most noteworthy bit of intelligence that he was finally caught.
He followed his father into the woods, after tailing the car for miles by moonlight on his broomstick. Even though he'd always been a bit creeped out by the forest, he knew he had to find out the instant the tide turned the right way in the war. It was pure dumb luck, he thought now, that some stupid forest creature had chosen to rustle the bush just behind him *just* at the moment when there had been a tense pause in the Death Eaters' conversation. Dragged out in front of his father and the rest of the men in black cloaks, after being treated to a sample of the Cruciatus Curse, he remembered himself saying, looking glumly at the ground, 'I just wanted to be included, father.'
After a dire warning, he'd been released. Since he'd found his own way here, they concluded, he could find his own way home, which he did, at top speed. Once there, he jotted the shortest note he'd ever penned to be sent to Dumbledore, dropped it at the post office to be sent in the morning, and hailed the Knight Bus to take him to the Leaky Cauldron. It had been the next day when he'd awoken to Dumbledore telling him he'd known all along. A few weeks later, the war ended, the remaining Death Eaters captured, and the Dark Lord fallen.
Standing witness at his father's trial had not been easy, Draco recalled, to say the least. Those cold eyes, less than a few feet away, as he spoke the words which would send his own parent to jail for life...Draco had been empty and shaking as they led his father away after the trial. Dumbledore had seemed to understand, and hadn't pressured him to go home, letting him stay at the Leaky Cauldron. Draco spent much of his days locked up inside of his room there at first, with the lights turned off, until finally his mirror had cajoled him into going outside. He'd gone to Gringotts, and that's when he'd found out his small personal account had been frozen.
One month late, he went back to his parents' house to find an irate Narcissa Malfoy. At first the anger had been held tightly inside her as she welcomed him back, but then it burst out full force the next day, when he'd received his letter from Hogwarts, informing him that he was Head Boy. However, it was in a different form than he'd expected: she asked him to resume his spying at his school, to bring any Dark forces still remaining into power. She seemed unaware that the war was over.
'You'll be in the perfect position,' his mother said to him over gradually chilling scrambled eggs. 'It's the least you could do for your father.'
Draco's emotions had raged within him, and there'd been a huge row after that, ending in his outright refusal of anything more to do with any wars. He hadn't spoken to his mother since.
Now he paced across his room, grabbed his Hogwarts list, stroked the feathers of his eagle owl's back one last time, and left for Diagon Alley.
*********
No one was speaking to him, and Draco couldn't say that he blamed them. The general consensus on the part of the wizarding public was that he was, and would always remain, a prejudiced, snotty jerk, loyal to Dark magic. So, despite the fact that numerous people he'd been familiar with were doing last-minute school shopping at Diagon Alley, he remained silent and stoic, except when speaking to clerks at the various stores he went into.
Among the stores visited were the usual bookstore, an apothecary, and a robes store. At these he got the books on his list, refills for his potion ingredients (as well as some more rare ingredients that only seventh years were allowed to handle), and some robes that actually fit him. Before he'd received his letter this year, Draco had assumed he wouldn't be needing his dress robes anymore, but no, there they were on the required items list, so he let the friendly fitting-witch bustle around searching for the perfect color. Among the stores he *didn't* visit were the Quidditch store, a store devoted entirely to hair-care products (because he'd given up on being concerned over his appearance long ago), and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes (because no matter how interested he was in the merchandise, he knew he'd never be welcome there).
Before he left for home, Draco stopped at the Leaky Cauldron for a drink. Sitting down at the bar, he greeted the bartender and asked for a glass of water. Anything to delay his return home for awhile.
As the bartender served him, he asked, "Why so glum, chum? Been a bit of time since you've been in here. As I recall, you weren't too happy then, neither."
Considering the man, Draco decided that he wouldn't understand, and took a sip of his water. "Nothing that's going to get better anytime soon."
"How do you know that, mate? Why, I'll bet there's a twist of fate just around the corner--things'll turn around when you least expect 'em to."
"Yeah. Right." Malfoy decided he was better off at home with his depression than here with an optimistic bartender. Downing his water, he said, "Thanks. 'Bye," and made his exit.
*********
With nothing more than a chilly glance from his mother as a farewell, Draco found himself on the train to Hogwarts. Usually he'd have to sit in the Prefects car, but he soon found that, as his home life had been changing, so had his school life--there wasn't a Prefects car anymore. Sitting in a car full of excited first years had been a mistake, he was thinking now, because once they got over their original trepidation of a gloomy seventh year, they resumed bouncing around the car wildly. Draco found himself slipping into his thoughts once again...
He hadn't originally wanted to go to Hogwarts. Durmstrang, a school focused primarily on the Dark Arts, had been his first choice, mainly because of the fact that it was hundreds of miles away from his father. But that hadn't worked out, so he'd wound up at Hogwarts, a Slytherin because of his mindset the first year, and surrounded by hundreds of children who were closer to enemies than friends.
Pondering life this year was certainly a daunting task. Half of the people in Slytherin, he figured, would be gone for some reason or other stemming from the war, which only made sense, since they'd been planning to be. So he'd be stuck in the same old cold dungeon dormitory, but it would seem even more empty than before. And his friends--well, he couldn't really call them friends anymore, could he?--would probably have heard of his traitorous ways, if no one else had, and would shun him. Not that he wanted to speak to them ever again anyway. Draco knew a bad person when he met them, he just hadn't had the intelligence to stay away from them before.
He wondered what his duties as Head Boy would be. Could he have to--
"Hey...uh...mister?" An insistent tugging of his sleeve drew his attention to the source: a frightened-looking first year. Had he ever been that small? Draco wondered.
"Yes?"
"Um...we're here. At Hogwarts?" The kid looked excited. "You know? Um, you wouldn't know where we're supposed to go, would you?"
Draco couldn't help but smile. He'd been that eager to attend, once. "There's a man out there," he chucked a thumb toward the window, "who'll be over the heads of everyone on the platform. Just follow him to the boats. Leave your trunks here," he said as he stood up to go. "Good luck at the sorting," he called as he exited the car, and then wondered why he'd said that.
"What 'sorting'?" he heard behind him.
Oh, if that kid only knew...
*********
A/N: Congratulations! You made it through! Could the foreshadowing and obvious angst get *any* *thicker*? Honestly, I'm disgusted with myself. Don't worry, people, I'm almost certain the next chapter will be an improvement. And, although I make no promises, as usual, I hope to have it to you by tomorrow night. :D
Special questions:
1) What's the name of Malfoy's eagle owl? Does anyone know?
2) When do Hogwarts students learn to apparate?
3) N.E.W.T.s are seventh year, right?
Just want to check this stuff before I put it in the story. I'll love you if you help me out. Thanks!
A/N: Okay, so, I'm entirely unsatisfied with this chapter, that's why I didn't have it up yesterday. It took me this long to struggle through it. I would have just skipped ahead, but the info in it is just too important to leave out. I apologize for all blatantly obvious angst and over-dramatization in here, okay? Ugh. Just hit me and get it over with...
*********
Late summer, seventh year
*********
Draco Malfoy was folding his clothes into his trunk. There weren't that many that still fit him, however. He reminded himself that he had to get down to Diagon Alley soon, to buy robes that fit.
In went his spellbooks. Since sixth year had been cut off prematurely, he assumed he would need all his old ones as well.
Glancing at his Hogwarts letter, he thought that, yes, his Diagon Alley trip would have to be today. He'd leave a message for his mother with one of the house-elves, she'd gone off to visit his father. His father...
Memories came pouring into Draco's head.
When Lucius Malfoy first came to him to ask him to be a spy at Hogwarts, Draco was already so wrapped up in self-loathing that he would take any scrap of a compliment and prize it like the greatest treasure ever created. And at the time, his father was buttering him up; so, naturally he accepted. _Bimonthly reports,_ said his father, instantly cold once Draco said yes, _sent to me. I'll expect updates on the activities of your headmaster, your potions teacher, and anything else you deem significant, especially anything about that no-good Mudblood Harry Potter._
Draco hadn't needed to ask what the information in the reports would be used for.
While he was gathering information, he made certain to act as usual: cruelly. People often asked behind his back what his problem was, and had he ever picked up a book on psychology, he would have found a page for his problem, realized exactly what it was, and still have been able to do nothing about it. If one is putting others down to bring oneself up, it's a personal problem that can only be solved by feeling better about oneself. That certainly didn't appear to be happening anytime soon.
People thought he hated them, and he let them think that. But the truth was, he didn't hate anybody, really, except himself.
So twice a month reports were owled out of Hogwarts about the goings-on there, and Draco felt worse and worse. He didn't have any real friends, he didn't have his own viewpoint on anything. He was merely an extension of his family; a tool. What was worse, for the longest time he didn't *want* his own viewpoint on anything: he just acted the way he was expected to act and thought the way he was expected to think.
All that changed right after Christmas, fifth year. Well, maybe not the acting part--he still acted exactly as he was expected to, exactly as he had been--but the thinking part, certainly. Ten former-and-still-likely Death Eaters escaped from prison, and the thought had come tumbling down over him like a wave:
_This is serious._
A war was brewing, he knew then, and people were going to be killed. Good people. People, he realized, that some tiny part of his subconscious had been admiring for all of his life. Children brought up in bad homes, it is said, when exposed nearly year-round to bad values, are still able to find at least one shred of goodness in something--that's how they realized they're being brought up badly. Draco had found his hope, and now it was in sincere danger of being extinguished.
Nothing was suspected from his father's end: the reports still came like clockwork, only now they were missing any information that could be deemed valuable. However, it wasn't until that summer that Albus Dumbledore began receiving the anonymous notes detailing plans and meetings of the Death Eaters. Every one came with a different owl, but they were all in the same spiky handwriting, and each was signed 'a friend.'
At first Draco just listened to his father's words as he came back from the meetings, but he soon realized that not enough was being said--his father was too dedicated to the cause to mention anything significant. So he moved onto riffling through Lucius's desk, looking for important documents pertaining to the building tension between light and dark forces. He'd often spend late night trying to break the code-spells on these, then he'd frantically copy everything down and send it out.
Later in the summer he grew bolder in the search for information. Not knowing where the meeting was to be held, Draco followed his father to a meeting in a very secure room. The only way that he found himself able to listen in was through luck, when he'd discovered a crawlspace beneath the floor, and had performed a listening spell to the boards beneath the Death Eaters' very feet. His reward had been great that time, and his letter was filled with three times as many valuable facts as it had been previously.
Emboldened by his success, he followed his father to as many meetings as he could that summer, before he finally had to go back to school. The last meeting he'd snuck into had been the most frightening, and he'd selected the fastest owl at the post office to deliver this letter: a raid on Hogwarts was being planned.
During the first month he felt entirely useless. There was next to no useful information he could glean from his classmates, so all he could do was sit around waiting for the attack to come. Which it did. In a horrendous manner.
Draco was send back to his family's home, and for a few tense months he was surrounded by all the news he could have handled, all of it horrible. It was the night he found out the most noteworthy bit of intelligence that he was finally caught.
He followed his father into the woods, after tailing the car for miles by moonlight on his broomstick. Even though he'd always been a bit creeped out by the forest, he knew he had to find out the instant the tide turned the right way in the war. It was pure dumb luck, he thought now, that some stupid forest creature had chosen to rustle the bush just behind him *just* at the moment when there had been a tense pause in the Death Eaters' conversation. Dragged out in front of his father and the rest of the men in black cloaks, after being treated to a sample of the Cruciatus Curse, he remembered himself saying, looking glumly at the ground, 'I just wanted to be included, father.'
After a dire warning, he'd been released. Since he'd found his own way here, they concluded, he could find his own way home, which he did, at top speed. Once there, he jotted the shortest note he'd ever penned to be sent to Dumbledore, dropped it at the post office to be sent in the morning, and hailed the Knight Bus to take him to the Leaky Cauldron. It had been the next day when he'd awoken to Dumbledore telling him he'd known all along. A few weeks later, the war ended, the remaining Death Eaters captured, and the Dark Lord fallen.
Standing witness at his father's trial had not been easy, Draco recalled, to say the least. Those cold eyes, less than a few feet away, as he spoke the words which would send his own parent to jail for life...Draco had been empty and shaking as they led his father away after the trial. Dumbledore had seemed to understand, and hadn't pressured him to go home, letting him stay at the Leaky Cauldron. Draco spent much of his days locked up inside of his room there at first, with the lights turned off, until finally his mirror had cajoled him into going outside. He'd gone to Gringotts, and that's when he'd found out his small personal account had been frozen.
One month late, he went back to his parents' house to find an irate Narcissa Malfoy. At first the anger had been held tightly inside her as she welcomed him back, but then it burst out full force the next day, when he'd received his letter from Hogwarts, informing him that he was Head Boy. However, it was in a different form than he'd expected: she asked him to resume his spying at his school, to bring any Dark forces still remaining into power. She seemed unaware that the war was over.
'You'll be in the perfect position,' his mother said to him over gradually chilling scrambled eggs. 'It's the least you could do for your father.'
Draco's emotions had raged within him, and there'd been a huge row after that, ending in his outright refusal of anything more to do with any wars. He hadn't spoken to his mother since.
Now he paced across his room, grabbed his Hogwarts list, stroked the feathers of his eagle owl's back one last time, and left for Diagon Alley.
*********
No one was speaking to him, and Draco couldn't say that he blamed them. The general consensus on the part of the wizarding public was that he was, and would always remain, a prejudiced, snotty jerk, loyal to Dark magic. So, despite the fact that numerous people he'd been familiar with were doing last-minute school shopping at Diagon Alley, he remained silent and stoic, except when speaking to clerks at the various stores he went into.
Among the stores visited were the usual bookstore, an apothecary, and a robes store. At these he got the books on his list, refills for his potion ingredients (as well as some more rare ingredients that only seventh years were allowed to handle), and some robes that actually fit him. Before he'd received his letter this year, Draco had assumed he wouldn't be needing his dress robes anymore, but no, there they were on the required items list, so he let the friendly fitting-witch bustle around searching for the perfect color. Among the stores he *didn't* visit were the Quidditch store, a store devoted entirely to hair-care products (because he'd given up on being concerned over his appearance long ago), and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes (because no matter how interested he was in the merchandise, he knew he'd never be welcome there).
Before he left for home, Draco stopped at the Leaky Cauldron for a drink. Sitting down at the bar, he greeted the bartender and asked for a glass of water. Anything to delay his return home for awhile.
As the bartender served him, he asked, "Why so glum, chum? Been a bit of time since you've been in here. As I recall, you weren't too happy then, neither."
Considering the man, Draco decided that he wouldn't understand, and took a sip of his water. "Nothing that's going to get better anytime soon."
"How do you know that, mate? Why, I'll bet there's a twist of fate just around the corner--things'll turn around when you least expect 'em to."
"Yeah. Right." Malfoy decided he was better off at home with his depression than here with an optimistic bartender. Downing his water, he said, "Thanks. 'Bye," and made his exit.
*********
With nothing more than a chilly glance from his mother as a farewell, Draco found himself on the train to Hogwarts. Usually he'd have to sit in the Prefects car, but he soon found that, as his home life had been changing, so had his school life--there wasn't a Prefects car anymore. Sitting in a car full of excited first years had been a mistake, he was thinking now, because once they got over their original trepidation of a gloomy seventh year, they resumed bouncing around the car wildly. Draco found himself slipping into his thoughts once again...
He hadn't originally wanted to go to Hogwarts. Durmstrang, a school focused primarily on the Dark Arts, had been his first choice, mainly because of the fact that it was hundreds of miles away from his father. But that hadn't worked out, so he'd wound up at Hogwarts, a Slytherin because of his mindset the first year, and surrounded by hundreds of children who were closer to enemies than friends.
Pondering life this year was certainly a daunting task. Half of the people in Slytherin, he figured, would be gone for some reason or other stemming from the war, which only made sense, since they'd been planning to be. So he'd be stuck in the same old cold dungeon dormitory, but it would seem even more empty than before. And his friends--well, he couldn't really call them friends anymore, could he?--would probably have heard of his traitorous ways, if no one else had, and would shun him. Not that he wanted to speak to them ever again anyway. Draco knew a bad person when he met them, he just hadn't had the intelligence to stay away from them before.
He wondered what his duties as Head Boy would be. Could he have to--
"Hey...uh...mister?" An insistent tugging of his sleeve drew his attention to the source: a frightened-looking first year. Had he ever been that small? Draco wondered.
"Yes?"
"Um...we're here. At Hogwarts?" The kid looked excited. "You know? Um, you wouldn't know where we're supposed to go, would you?"
Draco couldn't help but smile. He'd been that eager to attend, once. "There's a man out there," he chucked a thumb toward the window, "who'll be over the heads of everyone on the platform. Just follow him to the boats. Leave your trunks here," he said as he stood up to go. "Good luck at the sorting," he called as he exited the car, and then wondered why he'd said that.
"What 'sorting'?" he heard behind him.
Oh, if that kid only knew...
*********
A/N: Congratulations! You made it through! Could the foreshadowing and obvious angst get *any* *thicker*? Honestly, I'm disgusted with myself. Don't worry, people, I'm almost certain the next chapter will be an improvement. And, although I make no promises, as usual, I hope to have it to you by tomorrow night. :D
Special questions:
1) What's the name of Malfoy's eagle owl? Does anyone know?
2) When do Hogwarts students learn to apparate?
3) N.E.W.T.s are seventh year, right?
Just want to check this stuff before I put it in the story. I'll love you if you help me out. Thanks!