"Nothing endures but change."
--Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC)
-
He remembers every detail of the fifteen minutes that changed his life. Every word, every expression, every request.
Her request.
Send me to them.
Please.
Something in him shifted at that moment. Something mutated.
He spends days searching for the right name for what he felt at the end of those fifteen minutes, when he took her hand.
He took her hand.
She wasn't dirty.
She wasn't foul.
She wasn't worthless.
She wasn't obscene.
Mudblood, he used to call her.
Her skin felt like his. Her body lay like any other body. Somehow he knew her blood would be as red as his.
And he had reduced her to desperation, the freak, she called him, who had killed everyone she had ever loved.
It isn't fair.
This was what he thought when he transfigured her body into a book of advanced charms and left it on the dusty desk so that no one would see what he had done, what she had done.
Nothing is fair now.
She was the smartest witch of her generation, loyal friend to Harry Potter, and the last third of The Golden Trio.
And she was dead. She was dead because she had asked him to kill her.
It's. Not. Fucking. Fair.
Something has to change.
He spends days searching for the right name for what he felt at the end of those fifteen minutes. Finally he decides to call it a transition.
-
Now he looks at the King's slaves and feels something unfamiliar.
He remembers them all, all the annoyingly righteous Gryffindors and the clever Ravenclaws and the realiable, blundering Hufflepuffs. Most of them are gone now, but less and less often he sees someone he recognizes.
Hannah Abbot is the personal servant of his father. He tries not to think of what the title of "personal servant" entails.
Cho Chang is the one who cooks the King's food. He wonders why she doesn't try to poison him.
Dean Thomas waits on Bellatrix Lestrange.
Nymphadora Tonks cleans the floors.
Fred Weasley, the only one of his family left, develops wizarding combat gear.
Hermione Granger served The King and Savior of Wizards. Served. Past tense.
They were titans, heroes, in the days of the war. Now they stare with blank faces and he assumes that they don't recognize him.
They are not allowed to see one another; each of them thinks that they are the only one left.
On the day that Lisa Turpin is beaten and raped during the nightly meeting he decides that he can't take it anymore. Something has to be done, because she changed him. Because he can't stand by and watch anymore. Because it's not fair.
These are people, he wants to scream at the warped face of his master, not animals or the dirt beneath your feet. These are people.
For her, he decides. Because he understands now.
-
Eight days after the fifteen minutes that changed his life he visits his father. Hannah Abbot brings them drinks and she is naked, bruises on her arms and breasts and thighs like purple flowers against her white skin. She looks at the ground and he guesses that she had abandoned shame long before this.
He and his father discuss the mysterious disappearance of Potter's mudblood whore and the King's subsequent murder of two of his other servants.
He was angry, Lucius Malfoy said. He had enjoyed tormenting it.
It.
His vision begins to go white around the edges. He feels nauseous but he knows his father will mistake it for something normal. Sweat pools on his brow. He is physically sick.
She asked him to kill her.
Nothing worth fighting forshould cause someone to feel that lifeis not worth living. Nothing he wants to believe inis worth that.
Then, in the middle of a conversation with his father, a man who could just as easily level him to the floor as praise him as his son, he wonders if any of the other its in this place feel the same way she did. He looks at the woman who was once Hanna Abbot and sees gooseflesh on her bare, discolored skin and doesn't doubt it.
Suddenly his father hisses in a strange pain and he sees the black mark on his arm suddenly go red. Backwards skin necrosis, he thinks.Death.
Still the nausea persists.
My master calls me, says his father, the man who never takes orders from anyone. I trust you can show yourself out, Draco?
He nods and watches the man he once admired with all of his ignorant heart disappear into thin air with a faint noise like a joint popping out of place.
And he sits. Silence and closeness dominate the room and it makes him want to disappear as well, somewhere where he doesn't have to deal with this. He sits until Hannah Abbot asks him if he needs something. She asks Master Malfoy if he needs something.
Don't, he says hoarsely. Don't, Hannah.
He takes of his cloak and hands it to her, his face turned away. She stares blankly and doesn't take it, her lips trembling as she hears her name. Her name, not "traitor" or "scum" or "whore."
I don't understand, her face says.
Don't call me that… I'm not your master, he continues, pain shooting through his chest as he sees her finally sink into herself. A sob escapes dryly from her throat as the realization that humanity hasn't completely disappeared from the world yet. Yet.
Since she doesn't move he stands up, his knees shaking beneath him, and puts the cloak around her nude shoulders. He veils her nakedness and bruised flesh.
He is startled when she leans into his chest, her entire body trembling, her muscles tense beneath his cloak. She cries openly now because his is the first gentle touch she has felt since forever. She buries her face in his neck. She whispers thank you.
Two times, now. Two times someone has thanked him for saving her.
And now he whispers something in return. I'm sorry.
Because he is sorry. Sincerely, for the first time in his short life, he is sorry for everything.
Time makes fools of us all.
He lets her cry, her sobs coming fresher and stronger now that she has heard his apology. Finally he pushes her back by her shoulders and asks her the same question she has been asking people like him for more than a year: How can I help you?
Her eyes go very wide and she stutters a response. B-But…you can't...they w-would find out.
He asks her again. His voice is firm, resolved.
She looks down, turns her face away from him as hope alights in her eyes.
Get me out, she says.
-
He sends her to America. It's not so bad there, he's heard. He gives her all the money in his pocket and enchants his ring with the Malfoy crest on it to portkey her to a city he once saw a picture of on a muggle billboard.
It's all he can do.
There is nothing more. His time is up.
-
Thirty-twohours later Vincent Crabbe comes to his room and tells him that the King would like to see him in his chambers. The boy who had been his companion in school looks like a stranger to him now. He recognizes nothing.
A wry smile contorts his lips, a knowing look. He knew that this was coming.
He says that he will be there immediately.
The King and Savior of Wizards sneers at him as he enters the room. His muffled footsteps echo bleakly off the dungeon walls. They accuse him of everything he has ever done that is what they call "wrong" and he agrees with them. He admits it readily, and condemns them for what they think is law. He tells them what they have caused, that their hate is unjustified.
He tells them about Hermione Granger.
He sees Cho Chang's glowing, once beautiful eyes staring at him from a dark corner, tears falling from her cheeks and onto the cold stone of the floor.
He sees Lisa Turpin cradle her battered head in her hands as his words wash over her.
He sees Fred Weasley's dead eyes looking at him with something like admiration.
They sentence him to the worst, but he doesn't care. He sees some of them looking at him in wonderment, like they finally see the meaning behind his passionately disturbing conviction, and he knows it is worth it. Everything has been worth it.
Something has to change, because it isn't fair.
-
Pain. Curse after curse and pain. His body is broken.
He welcomes death, that distinctive flash of green light. In death he sees his father flinch at the sight of his body but knows that Lucius Malfoy's anger will win out over any other emotion in the end. He sees Hannah Abbot rent an apartment and buy new clothes at a muggle shop, alone in a foreign city but still safe, still whole. She wears his ring on her finger.
He sees the woman who changed his life in fifteen minutes and she calls him her savior. She takes his hand and leads him forward and he sees them all, everyone who was lost.
-
"For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve."
--Bhagavad Gita (250 BC – 250 AD)
-
Author's Note: I decided to continue. Worth it?
I may keep adding to this little fic—I was thinking of jumping from character to character with each chapter (for instance, Hannah Abbot as the POV next chapter, then whoever's life she affects, and so on. It could go on for quite a while.) Did you enjoy this? I don't think it is as good as the first chapter, but what can you do.
Have a lovely weekend!