4th March 1999
After nine hard months in Azkaban, following 3 years of sharing a breakfast table with the self proclaimed 'Lord' Voldemort, and a lifetime of his father's fanaticism the concept of 'freedom' had become quite novel to Draco Malfoy.
"Have I ever been free?" He wondered, as he sat (without any other option available to him) strapped in a hard chair, his arms and legs restrained by chains, the dark mark glaring up between the links of metal. He sat before the watching Wizengamot who were deliberating before they announced a verdict that would determine his entire future.
He didn't expect to survive this and so, when the Chief Warlock stood to address the court room, it wasn't hope that bubbled in his stomach but dread. "There has been much deliberation with my peers over the evidence and fate of the accused stood before us today.
Draco Malfoy has caused great suffering, but he has also suffered greatly and, despite his actions, we the Wizengamot of Great Britain believe his hand to have been forced. We shall then declare to you, the people of Wizarding Great Britain, our verdict: Draco Malfoy is not guilty".
It felt like the young Malfoy had been struck in the chest as he gasped at the verdict. His gasp, so loud over the hushed whispers, seemed to suck every atom of air from the room leaving his lungs wanting as he struggled to juggle the verdict and base functions. The chains that held him tight were the only thing to stop him from falling out of his chair when black spots danced before his eyes and he fainted.
The trial had been bad. Perhaps even comparable to a creative torture; one that had been devised to make him relive and experience each and every horrific act he'd been complicit in throughout his past. Not content to just explore his role alongside Voldemort they studied his childhood: the conditioning, the pureblood mania, his father.
For the first time in his life he'd shown humility and willingly. He had dropped his walls, not that he could have resisted their prying, and invited them through his mind where it was sacked and trampled as they explored every sordid detail. He co-operated fully and to the best of his ability, hiding nothing, not his teenage lusting over Granger at the Yule Ball or his tears to Myrtle.
Yes, the trial had been bad, but it didn't compare to time spent in the crumbling hellmouth of Azkaban. His nine months, though they felt more like years, in Azkaban had been a relentless and constant test of his resolve and sanity - something he'd been hardly holding on to before imprisonment. With no dementors remaining to guard the prison, subduing and sapping each and every last happy thought and emotion from them, the rapid road to insanity amongst the prisoners had become a loud and constant thing.
The screaming, he'd decided after a mere week within the walls, was the least excruiciating part of the decent. Everyone screamed, it was part and parcel of their lot, an accepted inevitability of their stay but one could only scream so much before one's voice went hoarse with the effort and the scream settled as a dry rasp hardly heard over the crashing of the North Sea.
The facilities, as he fondly called the two buckets in the corner of the room, were simple and would not break him. There were expectations of him, as a Malfoy, to sneer and snap, crumble and complain when life's luxuries were taken from him like a petulant child punished. This may, he'd concede, have been true of him once in his early years at Hogwarts but now, after sharing his home with Death Eaters, Draco Lucius Malfoy gave no fucker the satisfaction of seeing him squirm because he hadn't had a bath.
There were those, trapped in their granite cages, that the dirt fascinated and so their bucket of 'clean' water would go untouched. When the only changing thing in a cell is the layers of dirt you amass and all their minute and subtle changes then the dirt becomes a source of entertainment. Though maybe entertainment was too strong a word, confined to their cells with no socialisation the dirt becomes a companion: a new friend with a different story every day.
Some spoke to it, nurturing and cultivating the smallest patch; some teased and fought with the one thing they could control in their deadened existence. Draco had heard, just two holes away, the day-long arguments of one man and the speckle of grime on the side of his knee until one day he rushed a guard and was silenced for good.
The dirt broke many, but not Draco. He washed meticulously with the clean water, keeping as clean as he could and the dirt at bay. It wasn't just for fear of insanity either, a slow and calculated wash could kill the hours as well as the germs floating through the prison.
The food was straight up awful and calling it 'food' was surely an insult to someone. The daily deliveries of just enough nutrition to ensure they didn't die too quickly was insignificant. They were served the same, day in day out, and it was meaningless; just another form of sensory deprivation designed to make the hell worse. Another luxury he wasn't afforded, he would yawn at the predictability of it all if it occurred to him.
No, it wasn't the screaming, the facilities, the food or the dirt that pushed you over the edge in Azkaban. It was the rumours and whispers that killed you. Rumours spread through the corridors of Azkaban like wildfire and every day a new rumour threatened to raze their minds. Each became a susurrus of torment that whistled on the breeze through the open and exposed windows, charmed to keep them just warm enough to prevent pneumonia.
It wasn't always big things that travelled on the wind either, not that they needed to be, and the tiny rumours would take a hold of the minds of the prisoners so easily. Sometimes just a hint of weather was enough to cause a spiral of torment within the Azkaban prisoners. "They say there's going to be snow," would bounce from cell to cell like a pinball hitting every bell and bumper in its case, accumulating a frenzy as the stakes and score got higher until "The ministry's brewed up a snowstorm to come and wipe out the prison, the guards have gone. We'll die here".
Everything spiralled, everything escalated and, with so little in the cells to engage with, everything… became everything to them.
His mother had been tried first, back in June, the first to sit in the chains that flexed so tightly. Narcissa, like her son, welcomed them to her mind and the shit show that was her adult life lay before them. Freedom was granted to her, following her co-operation and a shiny testimony from Harry Potter, something she accepted (like everything) with the grace and poise she was known for.
He didn't, from his cell, begrudge her her freedom. All he had ever wanted was his mother free and clear from the dark and twisted residents of Malfoy Manor, his father included. She had freedom, she had opportunity for the first time in her life and she could go whether she pleased.
First, she returned to Azkaban as a visitor to her son. The guards treated her as little more than a prisoner but this was to be expected. There'd been no difference when she first visited Lucius during his first stint on the island, it was the way of the place. The simple idea that if you were to be rude enough to the visitors that they wouldn't want to come back neglecting the prisoner's further was hardly a secret.
She sat at the table with her hands before her, they weren't to touch - no physical contact between inmate and their 'guests' - but she desperately wanted to hold the face of her son between her hands and will his torment away.
"Mother," he said in greeting once the guard had retreated to the wall to glare throughout their brief alloted time.
"My son, you look well," she replied, her eyes dancing with humour he'd rarely seen in the past ten years. His mother had always been a different women without his father around.
A choke of laughter escaped him before he could restrain it, "thank you, I'm sure it's the sea air, so good for your health I've heard".
Her eyes softened as she watched him make light of it, try to protect her as if she'd not spent her own time there in confinement. "It won't be long, Draco. I'm told it won't be a year. They're getting the trials done as quickly as possible, even if they choose to make you stew and wait for your time, you just need to hold it together a little longer".
"I'm doing fine, Mum," he assured her and they both knew he was lying. "Compared to the Manor over the past 3 years I may as well be sat in the Leaky with a butterbeer". This she knew had a layer of truth to it. Malfoy Manor had been hard, on both of them, from the constant dark magic and energies to the sheer volume of cruel people revelling in wickedness at all hours. It had been a torment to exist there alongside it all.
'Not long' it turned out, was 8 and a half months later. With little warning and no time to prepare he was collected one morning before the slop and his daily buckets were delivered. His pride burned with shame as he was presented to the Wizengamot in such an uncouth state.
His cheeks burnt as the shackles on the chair weaved up his limbs, cold like Nagini and twice as strong. As he was presented before the wizarding world he struggled to fearlessly raise his head and meet the eyes of the court, as he'd been taught by his father. How could he when he was so terrified and had gone so long without social interaction?
They read his charges and he fought to keep the tremors at bay, it wasn't that he wasn't aware of the reality facing him, but when hearing them one after another he could see no end to the living hell he was subject to.
In the moments of rest, when he wasn't being hounded for answer upon answer, he obsessed on one word in particular that his ministry assigned defence repeated over and over, a word echoed by Hermione Granger herself, "Draco Malfoy is an innocent".
Innocence. It wasn't for him to define (thank Merlin), the Wizengamot were more than happy to do that, but surely innocence was beyond him. He was culpable, surely. A victim of the xenophobia of his father, cursed by hundreds of years of toujours pur, but still undeniably complicit in his crimes with the Death Eaters.
Draco wants to be innocent, if that counts for anything, a realisation that shakes him the first time he stumbles on it. He wants to be innocent not to be free of Azkaban, though the perks are undeniable, but to be able to move on. To take the weight of the burdens off his shoulders and become a new man with a second chance. He'd dearly love a second change.
He doesn't believe he can have innocence though, and night after night he turns the word over in his mind trying to find a place for himself in its pure and clean definitions. He can strive to be innocent, he decides, but even if the Wizengamot absolve him he'll always see himself and fine what lies before him wanting. He can be declared an innocent but what he wants, the best he can hope for, is redemption and the chance to redefine himself as the man he wishes he had the strength to become.
"We shall then declare to you, the people of Wizarding Great Britain, our verdict: Draco Malfoy is not guilty," he hears and he faints.
When he's roused, by a sympathetic wizard in the plum robes of the court, he measures the verdict in his mind and finds he prefers it. "Not guilty," he finds less pressure in the words. Unlike Granger's "innocent" this is something he can aspire to, something he believes he can manage.
And so he finds himself a free man. No longer detained at the ministry's pleasure he returns to the Manor, for lack of an alternative. His mother, he knows, is in France; she avoided the trial to spare him the comparisons of their trials in the papers and courts.
"No need, Draco, to remind them of the number of Death Eaters in the family, willing or not," she'd told him on one of her short visits.
He stays at the Manor mere hours but long enough to shower and shave before he stuffs a fistful of galleons in the pockets of his muggle clothes. He'd bought the nondescript 't-shirt' and (rather tight if you asked him) jeans in the summer after his fifth year at Hogwarts and hidden them immediately beneath his bed, glamoured to hide their true nature, but ready in case he and his mother needed to run.
He apparates, back to the ministry just 3 hours after leaving, and makes his way to the Department of International Transportation without sparing a glance to the peering eyes in the atrium.
The room is busy and he joins a long queue, glad that the Easter holidays hadn't yet arrived at Hogwarts. He finally takes his place before the witch at the desk and prepares for his first interaction free of incarceration trying to keep the giddy feeling of freedom out of his expression: nobody needs to seem too happy at the ministry, it would be suspicious and just delay things.
"Where to?" Asks the witch, not bothering to look up and engage with him as, he's surprised to find, he so desperately wants. Merlin, he thinks, I must be starved of conversation.
"The furthest place as soon as possible, please".
She huffs a sigh, "Australia. Twenty minutes. 14.03 departure time, 30 galleons, sign here then take a seat".
"Thank you," he tells her as he stacks the galleons on the desk and signs the parchment in front of him, eager to be as far away as 'Australia' as soon as possible.
He doesn't know where, exactly, Australia is. Geography, outside of learning where the most Death Eater sympathetic countries were, wasn't exactly a Malfoy educational staple. In fact, he was rather ignorant of the wider world outside of Britain and the Black estate in France.
He doesn't know where he's going, he doesn't know what it'll be like when he gets there but he does know it's far and it's not here and that is more than enough to satisfy the simple needs of Draco Malfoy.
Notes:
Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed, favourited etc!