Ron nodded. "Fred and George found you and brought you here."
"And then the Healers gave me a blood-replentishing potion, I presume?"
"Er," Ron said. "Not exactly." Oh, this arrogant pureblood wasn't going to like the next part at all.
Malfoy turned and looked at him. "What do you mean?" he asked.
"Well, blood-replentishing potions work well on people who are short on blood, but not in too much danger, and you'd lost so much-well, they decided the best way was to, er, replace the blood you lost."
"Replace it?" Malfoy demanded. "With what? Did they squeeze it all out of my robes or something?"
"No, no-not your blood. Another person's blood. They took a little bit of blood from four or five other people and put it all in you."
"Oh." Malfoy leaned back. "So I've got someone else's blood in me? Whose? Yours?"
"They got it from a blood bank. It's a thing Muggles run. See, you don't actually need magic to move blood from one person to another, and, well, if you don't have magical healing at your disposal, then you run into a lot more situations where you want to replace a hurt person's blood with another person's blood, and so the Muggles are very, er, good at this sort of thing..." Ron's voice trailed off.
"Muggles," Malfoy said. "Do you mean to stand there and tell me that I have a load of muggle blood inside me?"
"Yes," Ron admitted.
Malfoy looked at the ceiling. Ron wondered what he wasn't saying, in front of Muggle-lover Arthur Weasley's son. He was probably upset. Honestly, Ron admitted to himself, it would upset him to have Muggle blood in his veins, even if the Healers assured him that it wouldn't deplete his magical ability...
"What was that spell you cast on Bellatrix?" he asked.
"Spell...oh. Multithanatos. It's not a spell. I was activating a very old spell. Basically, it meant that if I died on the Manor in the next hour or so, I would...explode. Taking Bellatrix with me. It's one of those powerful spells you have to set up in advance."
"And...why was she there?"
Malfoy was silent for a moment. "I don't actually know. But I can guess." He paused. "Chess or checkers, Weasley."
Ron blinked. "Um...I'm not sure you can sit up."
"No, no. It's just something my father said. You see, in chess, if your opponent takes your king, the game is over, but in checkers, they have to capture all of your pieces to defeat you. My father remembered what happened last time, Weasley. He remembered how narrowly he escaped-" Malfoy swallowed hard. "-escaped Azkaban. And he thought he probably wouldn't, a second time, if the Dark Lord fell again. So if anything happened to him..."
There was a pause, as Malfoy struggled to collect his thoughts.
"My father made plans, I think, so that if anything happened to the Dark Lord, then his followers wouldn't fall apart and betray each other again. He had to do this in secret, of course-he would not tolerate any resources wasted on contingency plans; he couldn't get any benefit from them. So Father probably set things up so that if anything happened to the Dark Lord, then he would end up on top of the Death Eaters.
"And if he heard the faintest rumor that someone was setting something like that up, there would be no way he'd believe that Father wasn't planning to assassinate him."
There was a pause.
"He may even have been right," Malfoy said, very, very quietly. Ron looked at him.
Malfoy turned his face to the wall and, to all appearances, fell asleep.
FIN
Author's Notes: After reading enough stories based on the premise that Draco would leave the Death Eaters during the war, I started thinking about possible ways this could happen. Frankly, I don't see Rowling's Draco deciding to change sides because he thinks the Death Eaters are wrong. In the first place, I don't think he thinks they're wrong. In the second place, I doubt he cares. He tells Harry that he has picked "the losing side", not "the wrong side". Draco wants what is best for him, and him alone, and not the rest of the Wizarding world.
So what might get Draco away from the Death Eaters? Well, either he would have to think that they were going to lose, or he would have to be in immediate personal danger from the Death Eaters. This story, obviously, is based on that second premise.
