title: if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)
chapter title: no idea where my heart could have been
summary: no one walks out of a war with clean hands. hermione, draco and the 8th year fic literally no one asked for.
dedication: moirail, because no one else screams about HP with me the way you do. and also because no one else could ever have made me see anything to admire in pansy parkinson
if you're still breathing (you're the lucky ones)
Truth be told, Draco is not sure what to do with his barely-awarded freedom.
When the Dark Lord crashed into the floor of the Great Hall and then later, when the Aurors came bursting through the wards at Malfoy Manor, he fully expected to be incarcerated with the rest of the Death Eaters they've managed to take alive. His mother is serving time, after all – and she was never even a real Death Eater, just the wife of one.
"It's alright," she'd said, touching his face so gently before she stepped forward to face the judgement of the Wizengamot. "They cannot punish Lucius, so one of us will have to do. I'm the adult. I made my choices, my son."
"I made them too," he'd argued. "Mother –"
"You were a child," Narcissa said. "You are still just a child and had you been only my son, you would never have been touched by this war. I want you to have a future, Draco."
He spends his summer haunting Malfoy Manor, drifting between the empty rooms and trying to remember how it felt before the Dark Lord set up residence. He cannot enter the drawing room, cannot sleep at night without remembering how this paradise of his childhood was polluted with fear.
It still is.
He scours every room, the walls and the floor with a cleaning charm he finds in one of the books in the library. The room and the air is full of soap suds, but it's not enough. He can still hear Charity Burbage screaming, hear the crash of her body onto the dining room table, the soft sibilant slither of Nagini snaking over its surface towards her.
He can still see Luna Lovegood in the dark basement, trying to keep Ollivander cheerful. In all the times he'd daydreamed about – about beating Potter finally it had never looked like that, Bellatrix cackling with ecstasy and Granger screaming and screaming and screaming –
Draco cannot sleep.
"When are you coming back?"
It's Harry who has phoned her, static tripping down the line between time zones and oceans. They're not sure floopowder would work across such a long distance and it gets tiring to wait for owls. His voice steadies her, steadies something that knocked loose the moment she lifted her parents memory charm.
Hermione tucks the phone between her shoulder and chin, looking out the window of the spare bedroom towards the beach. "Soon, I think. My parents plan on staying for a while longer, but I think I've almost had my fill of Australia. The heat is – well. You can imagine what it's done to my hair."
Harry laughs, but not meanly. It must be very late or very early in England, she's lost track of the time difference honestly, but she yearns to be there as much as she yearns to stay away forever. She wants to be everywhere and nowhere, wants to crawl out of her own skin most days. But she could never leave Harry.
"London is grey and rainy," he offers and she can hear the slightest of smiles in his voice.
"A classic British summer then," she replies, twirling the phone cord around her finger. "I suppose I've missed Wimbledon."
"Next month, I think. I never did get tennis. But we – we could go, if you're back by then. Pretend to be muggles for the day, just you and me."
She bites her lip, wanting and not wanting to know. "And…And Ron and Ginny?"
Harry is quiet for a long time. "I don't think they'd be interested in it right now," he says. "Things are – well, you know how it was before you left. It's not got better really. Mrs Weasley is trying, but Ron is just – he's so angry. Ginny is too, but she'll talk to me about it. Or she'll take her feelings out on the orchard on the days she doesn't want to talk."
Ron has always worn his anger close to the surface, Hermione thinks later, when they've said their goodbyes. Most of the Weasley's have. Most of the time she's risen to meet it, but she cannot rise to meet this. Grief is different; Hermione cannot out-shout him, cannot needle at Ron until they blow up, sulk and apologise to each other the way they always did in school.
She misses him, his physical presence and the boy he was before the war. The two weeks before she came out to Australia were painful, full of slammed doors and awkward silences between all three of them – there are splinters between them and Ron now.
It might be nice, Hermione thinks, to slip away from it all for a day with her best friend. No war, no loss, no death – just the people they are in the long summers away from Hogwarts, a boy and a girl who have never felt the touch of magic. They have grown up, the two of them, with a foot in each world and if she wanted to, Hermione knows she could disappear into her old life, the girl she might have been, who gets her A-Levels and goes to Oxford.
It makes for a pretty daydream, on the nights when she wakes with flashes of green light behind her eyelids and Harry's motionless body hanging in Hagrid's arms still featuring in her dreams.
"You could stay here with us. Hermione. You don't have to leave."
She smiles at her father over the cereal – cornflakes with warm milk. There were never sugary cereals in her house growing up, no Coco Pops or Frosted Shreddies, just toast and marmalade and low-fat yogurt. It's a familiar scene at the breakfast table, but it does not feel like home anymore.
"Yes, I do." Her mother cannot bear to look at her. Neither of them will acknowledge it, but it's been three weeks and she is only hurting them by staying. "It's time to go home."
"Is home not where we are?"
Hermione bites her lip, twists her hands into anxious knots beneath the table. Outside the only sound is the ocean and seagulls and her mother chatting with the neighbour in low murmurs. They could be happy here, she thinks, in this land of sunshine and warm ocean.
"The home of my childhood," she says, "always. But I've not been a child for a long time, Dad. I just – hid that from you, I suppose."
"You hid too much from us."
"I compartmentalised," Hermione decides, because that's as much as she can give him.
And when did that start? When Voldemort came back? When the Death Eaters went on a rampage at the Quidditch World Cup and Malfoy sneered at them all to keep her out of sight, because didn't they know she was no different in their eyes than the poor muggles floating over the camp site?
Or was it earlier than that? Dementors lose at the edges of the grounds, mysterious attacks that left students petrified, Voldemort making a play for the Philosopher's stone? Was it when the troll came into the girls bathroom and she realised this brand new world was dangerous?
Or was it when she was so homesick and lonely in that first term of her first year that she thought she would die and wanted to spare them her suffering? Was that when she neatly cleaved her own life in two?
Harry does it too, she knows – swings between being the Boy Who Lived and the boy in the cupboard every year, except they are the same person when it counts. Hermione Granger, muggle and Hermione Granger, witch, are two quite different people. The latter has done things the former could never have imagined doing; found a spine of steel and a ruthless streak a mile wide where the people she loves are concerned. And maybe that streak was always there, under the surface – maybe she'd have channelled it into one cause or another, but –
The bird-boned inquisitive child she was in her father's eyes is gone and there is no more pretending otherwise.
I left them behind, Hermione thinks with a sinking heart. I ran away into another world and didn't let them see it or me. I hid behind myself to keep them safe and now the act is over they don't know who I am.
Hermione finishes her cornflakes in silence. Later, when she books her flight out of there and back to cloudy English skies, neither of her parents try and make her stay.
All his friends have gone, except for Pansy. She's annoying and stubborn and has a vicious streak a mile wide if you get on the wrong side of her, but her best quality is that she's loyal to the bone. Blaise can fuck off to the other side of the world without a backwards glance and Theo can bury himself in the sand without a care for anyone else, but Pansy –
Draco and Pansy grew up together, squabbling at the same tea-parties and Christmas balls, the same weddings and funerals. He's known her name for almost as long as he's known his own and that matters.
She's cut her hair short, a severe bob that falls to her jaw and dark eyes narrow at him across the room. He likes that look when it's trained at some other poor sod.
"Don't be pathetic," Pansy snaps, kicking off her heels and throwing herself elegantly into the nearest chair, pale legs dangling over the arms. "You're a Malfoy, you don't mope."
Draco is lying on the library floor, books and a tumbler of firewhisky empty beside him. Day drinking is probably not an admirable quality, but after weeks and weeks of silence and awful memories chasing themselves across his eyelids, Draco doesn't care too much. What, exactly, has he done in his whole life so far that is admirable?
"Why are you in such a cheery mood."
"I'm not," she sneers. "Our whole world has gone to rubble and you're just lying here like a useless sack of potatoes. Narcissa would be so disappointed in you if she knew you were showing as much spine as a snail."
"And I suppose you're doing better."
"I'm not wallowing," Pansy points out, leaning over the snag the remaining firewhisky out of his reach. "Look, we lost Draco. We were going to lose even if the Dark Lord won, he'd never have been satisfied just with killing all the muggleborns. Nothing was ever going to be enough. It's better this way."
He's not arguing. He just doesn't know what to do next, has never been good at picking himself up and starting over, doesn't know if he even can or should after what he's done. Maybe he is just a kid, maybe he didn't choose to get in as far as he did, but he still chose to parrot his father year after year after year.
He is – he is complicit.
"I'm glad the Dark Lord is dead," he says. Every day since Voldemort's return has been a nightmare, even if he didn't see it at first. "He was a rot and I helped spread it through the world, Pansy. We all did."
She sighs, tilts her head back at the ceiling so he can see the long line of her pale throat. "Things are going to change. They are changing. If the Ministry has its way, all the old families will be pushed out and punished for this, forever. We can't let them shut us out, Draco."
"Why? It's not as if we've done any good."
"We've done plenty of good," Pansy snaps, outraged. "Think how much money your family has given to St Mungo's over the years, they don't heal only purebloods there. We've supported local businesses instead of just relying of Diagon Alley, brokered peace with the other wizarding nations, preserved dragon species that were threatened with extinction! We are not just this war."
For the first time in their shared lives, he cannot find the words to explain himself. Yes, their small corner of the magical world has done its fair share to strengthen and support innovation, but it's also their small corner of it that is solely responsible for tearing it apart. They got it wrong, somewhere.
"None of that matters anymore," he murmurs, unfocused eyes on the ceiling. "This is our legacy, Pansy. This is how they are going to remember us."
"It will be if you don't buck up and do something."
He rolls over, shoves his sleeve up and exposes the black lines of the Dark Mark etched into his skin. It's an ugly thing, really. When he was a child it had looked like a badge of honour on Lucius's arm, but on his own it just feels like a branding.
"What exactly do you think I can do?" Draco demands of her. "Look at it. Look at me. You think anyone out there is going to listen to me when I've got this carved into me? It will never come off!"
I am marked forever.
Pansy scowls, eyebrows pinching together and it's hideous that even with her face scrunched up like that she still manages to be pretty. It's one of the things her mother cultivated in her so carefully – how to use her beauty and how to dig her heels in to get what she wants. She's a survivor, first and foremost, has always managed to tread water instead of drowning.
"Leave me alone, Pansy."
"Fine!" The way her nose tilts up into the air is intimately familiar. "Fine. I can't talk to you when you're like this, but we're not done Draco. When I come back, I expect you to be done with this disgusting display of day-drinking and feeling sorry for yourself."
The sound of her heels tap-tapping across the polished wooden floorboards until she apparates with a sharp crack! echoes and echoes and echoes when she's gone.
It's not that he wanted company. But the manor suddenly feels very empty without Pansy in it. Draco tips his head back and reaches for the decanter of firewhisky.
The last of the rubble has been cleared away. Behind her, the castle is whole again – the windows are repaired, the marble staircase looks as if it was never broken – but there are things even magic cannot conceal. There are deep hollows in the ground, places where the giants tore up the earth with their carelessness and blackened stone where flames licked up the side of the castle.
There are graves – endless graves of white stone at the far edge of the lake. Not all of their dead are buried here, but there are still too many to count.
This was a school, Minerva thinks, with a little despair. This was a school and it was supposed to be safe.
There are some in the Ministry who didn't want to see Hogwarts repaired.
"Let it stand as a reminder," she remembers someone saying, "of pureblood violence and how it will tear this world apart!"
They want to make this place – her school, Albus's legacy – a memorial. They want scars on display, every new generation cowed by evil and what it had cost to defeat it. Minerva has put her foot down.
"Hogwarts is a school," she'd said, repressed fury in her voice that she knew every member of the new Wizengamot had heard. "First and foremost. It was before the war and it will be afterwards."
She'd meant it – let them build their own memorials and preach about bloodshed – but here, in these halls, the truest victory Minerva can think of is to rebuild. There is too much anger in the magical community. She will not deny it's a powerful tool in the right hands at the right time, but she has only ever seen it used for destruction.
Useful for burning down a brutal regime, she thinks, but not for peace.
Maybe that's the problem – those grieving, wounded souls don't want peace, but punishment instead. She thinks of Albus in his study, half-moon spectacles perched precariously on his crooked nose. He would not let children be raised in a world of ashes.
Neither will she.
tbc
notes: i am so glad i'm writing this now and not ten years ago
notes2: i've never written McGonagall in my life and i loved it? where did her voice come from?
notes3: you guys seriously don't understand how much i have missed potter. won't reveal my old penname because good lord i wrote some awful tripe in my early teens but it's really a relief to have their voices back in my head. i hope they stay for a good long while. i have some plans for this.