Draco did not eat breakfast nor did he attend lunch. He went down to dinner when he was summoned. He barely spoke. And then he went back upstairs to his room and shut his door.

He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, remembering. Sometimes, in the darkest hours of the night, he cried. He slept twelve hours a day. He dreamed of darkness, of bleakness, of pain, of fear. His father locked in Azkaban, the Dark Lord torturing his mother, his Aunt Bellatrix laughing. He dreamed of Professor Burbage being eaten by a snake, of Crabbe falling into flames, of hallways littered with dead Hogwarts students and teachers. Sometimes he dreamed things that weren't real.

His happiest dreams were of Amaris, and he always awoke with a longing so severe that he ached.

He took long showers. He rarely dressed. He slept. He stared at the ceiling of his room and remembered. His Dark Mark throbbed.

"What's wrong, Draco?" his mother asked.

"Nothing."

He went down to dinner and picked at his food.

He locked himself in his room.

"Are you all right, son?" his father asked.

"I'm fine."

He ate dinner.

He shut the door.

-o-

Theo came every other weekend to rouse him from his mausoleum, a burst of cheerfulness as harsh as midday sunlight to eyes accustomed to the dark. Draco hissed with pain, but did not turn him away.

Theo did not scold him for wearing his pajamas all day. He did not try to force him to eat. He didn't try to get Draco to talk about their school days, about the Dark Lord, or about Amaris. He chatted energetically about his job and the friends he made, about books he read and movies he watched, about places he visited. And then he said, "See you soon, mate," and left.

He came again two weekends later, right on schedule.

-o-

"There's a club," Theo told him, "called Sorcére. A bunch of us displaced Slytherins like to go. You should come."

Draco refused. It took two months before he allowed Theo to drag him out. Draco did not wear a suit. He wore jeans and a simple shirt. He drank until he blacked out, and that oblivion became an addiction.

They went to Sorcére every weekend. They drank and danced with a different witch every night. He never took the girls home, but he found himself in their apartments, their cars, and even in bathroom stalls. He chased the numbness of alcohol, the companionship of a random hookup.

"You should slow down, mate," Theo told him. "I'm worried about you."

But Draco didn't. He couldn't.

-o-

He was in an alleyway with his face buried in some witch's neck and his hands up her skirt when he sighed out, "Amaris."

She slapped him so hard he stumbled across the alley and into the wall.

"You bastard!" she shrieked, and ran away.

Draco slid to the ground and stared at the dark sky and all of the stars, and he cried. His Dark Mark sliced his arm with pain, but it was the stars that hurt him the most. He lay there with the trash and the smell of human waste and rotting food and dead things, and he slept. He dreamed of Amaris and the Dark Lord and dead birds.

When he woke up, he realized that he hadn't wanted to.

-o-

Draco went to see a healer.

For six sessions, he barely spoke. On the seventh, he rolled up his sleeve and showed the man his Dark Mark, and the healer nodded.

"It's just a mark," he said with a shrug, and those four words shattered Draco's soul.

He spilled his guts.

Every week, he went back to the healer and told him a little bit more. He told him the big things, the easy things—the Dark Lord's tyranny over his household, the murders he had witnessed, his fear for his parents, his father's incarceration. Then, he told him the shameful things—what he had done for the Dark Lord, his role in Dumbledore's death. Not the clinical confessions of a courtroom trial, but the raw regret of a boy who had no choice.

The healer told him he had been put in an impossibly difficult situation that even adults would have a hard time navigating, and it was a wonder that Draco had managed to come out of it with so much resilience.

But he hadn't. He was a broken mess. He drank more than he ate. He slept with random witches just to close his eyes and image he was with her. Draco told him as much.

"But you're here," the healer said. "You knew you were in trouble and you came for help."

Draco stopped going to Sorcére. He stopped drinking and having casual sex. He still slept a lot, but he showered every day. He started getting dressed. And he kept his appointments with the healer.

Draco told him the painful things. He talked about Amaris, every excruciating detail—every embarrassing thing he'd said, every jealous thought he'd had, every cruel thing he'd done. He told him how she had rejected him.

"Young love is a storm of intensity and misunderstandings. Her actions tell me that she is both bright and empathic, and that she understood you were in pain, that she forgave you for how you hurt her," the healer surmised. "You wanted her to help you, Draco, but that was an unfair burden to place on her. Because, in the end, we are responsible for helping ourselves."

Finally, Draco told him the little things, the most difficult things… He talked about the Pureblood rhetoric he had grown up believing, that he was better than others. He admitted that he still struggled with that misconception. He confessed that he had offered his hand in friendship to Harry Potter and had been snubbed. He unraveled the seven years of bitterness and jealousy and hatred that was his rivalry with the Chosen One.

"We don't get to choose the things our parents teach us, but we do get to choose what we believe. You're angry because you are struggling to change in a handful of months the beliefs that you were taught your entire life to believe. Give yourself some credit, Draco. Nothing happens overnight. Time is the most powerful magic of our world."

Draco started eating better and sleeping normal hours. He met with his friends when they dropped by and he kept those appointments with the healer until, somehow, a year had gone by.

His mother asked him, "How are you?"

"I'm fine," Draco replied, and he was surprised to realize that it wasn't a lie. He smiled at her and he hugged her, and he didn't feel so heavy, his Dark Mark didn't hurt so badly.

-o-

Draco and his father had their first real conversation in a decade. They walked through his mother's gardens and discussed the war and the Dark Lord and their parts in it. Wizard to wizard, father to son, they picked their way through their fears and prejudices and pain, revealing slivers at a time. It wasn't easy, but they muddled their way through.

It ended in an embrace.

"I love you, son," his father said, and it was the first time that Draco recognized those words as unconditional.

-o-

"The best way to claw the Malfoy family back into society's good graces," Theo said to him one afternoon when they were having a beer at a local pub, "is to buy your way back. Throw enough money into the right causes and even those self-righteous arseholes will have to acknowledge you."

Draco had begun the very next day. It had required a sacrifice of pride on everyone's part, theirs and his. Neither side wanted to shake the other's hand, but they each had something the other needed—Draco needed to restore his family's name and they needed financial support. So, he forced himself to smile and shake their hands.

You catch more flies with honey. Kindness is a choice.

Thus began Draco's career as a philanthropist, and it was only through utilizing Seles Grey's mantras that he had managed to stifle his bitterness long enough for it to begin to dissipate. Kindness was a choice, he realized. He may not have always felt it, but even when he faked it, the results were astounding.

Almost like magic.

-o-

More than a year before the law was even put into the books for consideration, Draco freed Tippy. Not as part of his healing process and not out of the goodness of his heart, but because one day he looked at her and remembered her leaning over Amaris's bloody feet, trying to help her, and the words just burst out of him. He passed her a scarf and told her to go. She was so shocked, she stood there gaping at it for a whole minute before she apparated away.

Two very domestically difficult days later, Draco awoke to Tippy bringing him breakfast.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Tippy doesn't know where else to go."

"You're not my servant anymore."

"Tippy doesn't know what else to do."

Annoyed, Draco blurted, "Anything!" And he chased her out.

For three days, he did not see Tippy, but he felt her presence in his home. Hot meals randomly appeared, messes were quickly cleaned, laundry was done before he ever figured out how to do it himself.

"Tippy," he called, appeared instantly.

"Yes, Master," she said.

"Stop calling me that."

"Yes, Master."

Draco sighed. Then he did the only thing he could do—he offered her a job. Her duties would remain the same as before, but she would be paid with a comfortable room, a full wardrobe, and a generous stipend.

But it turned out the only thing Tippy wanted was a safe place to store her collection of glass miniature figurines. Draco wasn't sure where she had gotten them or how she had hidden them all these years, but he gave her a beautiful, handcrafted display case with plenty of shelves to expand her collection.

And everything he had promised.

-o-

Draco met Astoria at a charity event. She was so bright and kind, his attraction to her was instant. They started dating shortly after, having found unlikely allies in one another, two souls trapped between two societies, belonging to neither—the Purebloods that still clung to their backwards thinking about Muggle-borns and magical society, and the rest of the wizarding world who hated Pureblood bigotry and still blamed them for all the pain and death. They had grown close quickly, but the love between them had been the familiar, platonic feeling one had for a good friend, not the passion and intensity of lovers.

Draco realized too late that he had been drawn to Astoria because her kindness and warmth had reminded him of Amaris.

"You're with me," Astoria had said after five months, "but I feel like you're dating someone else."

"What are you talking about?" Draco had asked.

"You're dating the idea of me," she explained, "and that's all right. I think I was dating the idea of you, too—the hope that everyone can change."

Their break-up was mutual and they parted as friends.

-o-

Draco knew there were still whispers behind his back, but the more he ignored them, the easier it became. It was a point of pride—to not let them know their preconceptions affected him. If he could smile at their disdain, if he could laugh at their hate—and if he could do it all without retaliation—then he sent the undisputable message that they were beneath him. And, even though he had truly discarded many of his old prejudices, Draco could never quite cure himself of the pleasure he felt being in such a position.

In the end, he still liked feeling superior, after all.


Author's Note: I almost didn't write this chapter, planning to insert summaries of pieces of it into later chapters, but, in the end, it felt too important to leave out.