Chapter 18: Db
The phrase used to be "Happy Holidays"
A time when one could have fun with friends and in general just laze about and not worry about too many things.
Or in his case, when it was usually a time for him to socialize with his peers and ride on broomsticks in the field behind their Manors when his and their fathers were busy discussing the political landscape of the nation.
And which he was sometimes required to sit through.
And which he had hated till date.
But now, he would have gladly have taken endless discussions on politics to what his summer vacation had been.
It had been no vacation.
It had been torture.
The person he was before the break, would now be a complete foreigner to him.
The person he was before the break would have been a child, perhaps not entirely innocent, but a child.
But now, he was well past that.
What he had been subjected to were things that no child would ever have to face, hopefully.
And it had all been over the course of a couple of months.
Draco sighed as he laid his forehead tiredly against the window pane. The glass was pleasantly chilly which helped immensely in cooling his forehead, one that he thought might burst from the sheer pain that he was experiencing.
He had survived another hour of Occlumency and Leglimency training by his aunt (he mentally spat as he said the word) Bellatrix. And what a trainer she was.
He had often wondered if there was something more to her than just the insanity for the Dark Lord's cause that he had heard (and as he shuddered involuntarily, never had experienced) about.
There wasn't.
She had a one-track mind. Actually that could be seen as two-tracks.
Restore the glory of the purebloods by wiping out the filthy mudbloods, half-bloods and other creatures which she considered to be vermin.
And the most important of the two, ensure the success of her favourite and only Lord, the Dark Lord.
Draco shivered again. Bellatrix had failed the Dark Lord at the Department of Mysteries, something that the Dark Lord had pointed out quite clearly to her.
And she had been furious with herself for that failure.
Naturally she had to take her frustration out somewhere.
Draco wanted to vomit once again at what he had seen.
He had been brought up with the idea that purebloods were superior to the others in every way.
And he had never questioned it. And he had been sold on that idea from the start.
That was why he had been particularly vicious to Granger and to Potter. In the case of Potter, it was not just the feeling of superiority, but a hatred that Potter seemed to be able to get whatever he wanted.
He had loathed Weasley because of his wealth. Or lack of it.
He knew he should be feeling far greater anger and hatred towards Potter now that Potter had managed to get his father landed in Azkaban.
And while that anger and rage was there, it was tempered with reason.
Oh no no, the pureblood had not suddenly decided to embrace (literally) those who weren't of the same blood status as him.
Not at all.
It was more to the fact that his father had managed to muck this up when he and eleven others, many if not all of them being Inner Circle members, went up against six school children.
It was a stupendous achievement that the six had remained alive and functioning long enough to have gotten back up.
And on top of that Potter had survived an encounter with the Dark Lord himself and had managed to send his father to prison as well.
Hatred wasn't the right emotion.
Anger and rage were.
Mixed with a liberal dose of respect.
It had led him to question his family's status itself. His father seemed to be just yet another minion of the Dark Lord, just one that he trusted a little more.
But for the most part, the Dark Lord trusted no one.
He used their money, used their manors and houses, and yet not a single pureblood who had supported his cause had come out on top.
To Draco, even at his age, it was very clear which way the battle was likely to go.
And he knew he had picked the wrong side.
A Slytherin would have played the two sides till the very end and would have come out victorious regardless of who had actually won.
He suspected his godfather, his Potions teacher and his Head of House at Hogwarts was one true Slytherin.
His father, not so much.
While he did have a silver tongue and was able to wriggle out of any situation and had managed to escape Azkaban the first time round, he had committed himself too much into the cause.
With distaste Draco realized that his father had shown more Gryffindor and Hufflepuff qualities than that of a Slytherin.
And because of his stupidity and overconfidence, Draco would have to take his father's place.
And it was for that that he was undergoing the torture sessions with Bellatrix.
His stomach churned once more as her recent activities came to mind again. He did not want to remember it, but he had long since realized that when you didn't want your mind to do something, it was precisely the thing that it did.
And as a result of his heavy Occlumency training, he was too weak to put up shields to prevent the thoughts from progressing.
He watched again as his aunt inflicted unspeakable horror after unspeakable horror upon those who had had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Men, women, even children she did not spare.
Again Draco's stomach churned and he felt the bile rise in his throat. Pushing his Occlumency barriers to their maximum and praying that dinner would be called for soon, he pushed the thread of thought away.
He would have really liked to have just eaten the meal in his room right away.
But no, that was no longer allowed.
The moment the Dark Lord had taken control of the Malfoy Manor he had made it compulsory that all meals be taken at specified times and in specific batches.
It wasn't that the Dark Lord was trying to make things more communal. Not at all. That idea was not even remotely close to what he had had in mind.
This way it ensured that the food he received was always sampled first by someone else and could be used to check if there were poisoning attempts that had been made.
And then eating in batches ensured that there was always a guard at the important places. Always an eye to ensure that no one sneaked up on the Dark Lord.
Finally there was the fact that he deliberately paired people who disliked each other to eat at the same time.
Not because he wanted better camadarie between them, no. But because the grouping would always be fresh in their minds and they would want to earn the Dark Lord's favor so that they could be promoted to the next circle.
It had led to most of them being particularly vicious.
And then there were the object lessons that the Dark Lord gave. Where the objects, who were really people, were tortured for the slightest infarctions or for having been born wrong.
Every night without fail the Dark Lord would have one such lesson.
Every night Draco would return to his room and then throw up his dinner.
That was the one saving grace for Draco. He was given his own room and that hadn't been taken away from him. Oh, the Dark Lord had tried, he wanted young Draco to be as indoctrinated as possible.
But thankfully the magic of the Manor would not allow it. And since it was ancient familial magic, the Dark Lord had had no say in the matter.
The object lesson that evening was something that Draco would never forget.
And he was sure a variant of it would haunt him in his nightmares and the dementor induced visions.
It was getting tired, this needing to pull up his Occlumency shields every so often, mainly because of what he had been subjected to.
In his opinion, they were horrors.
But to the Dark Lord and his dear Aunt Bellatrix, they were important lessons.
Draco hated every moment of his vacation. He was literally counting down to when he would be able to get on to the Hogwarts Express, hopefully before the Dark Lord assigned him any task.
But he knew that was just wishful thinking.
His mother had made it clear to him, well as clear as she possibly could given that they were hardly ever given time for private conversations, that the Dark Lord was going to be assigning a task to Draco.
He had heard nothing from his Aunt on the matter, which let him puzzled. Usually an assignment by the Dark Lord to a particular person was a sign that the Dark Lord had enormous belief in the person's abilities and was a sign of honour.
But his Aunt had said nothing.
Which meant there were only two possible reasons - one she did not know or two she had been told not to tell him or celebrate it.
He hated to think which was worse.
But his mother had dropped him enough hints (that woman was literally using every trick in the book to spend as much time talking to her son) that it would be a big task and that he would be expected to fail.
That was another evening he wanted to forget.
He wanted to run and hide and just wish everything away. But he knew that would never happen.
And then, his mother had had a brilliant idea.
Not with the task itself. But to help keep him alive.
She herself was unable to help with the task. She wasn't sure if she was even supposed to know of it and so she couldn't exactly plead her case to the Dark Lord (not that it would the slightest difference).
But every evening, once dinner was done and once dinner was returned back to the earth by Draco, a book would be waiting on his bed.
It was never the same book in the inside even though it would seem to be the same book on the outside.
And his mother had once again showed her sheer genius in it - the outer cover resembled the Malfoy Family Grimoire, which basically meant that anyone not a Malfoy (by birth or through marriage) would be at a risk of at worst, killing themselves, and at best would gibberish inside.
His mum had also enabled it such that the cover on the outside switched with one of his text books. After all, reading the family Grimoire for long periods of time was likely to lead to questions that neither mother nor son wanted to answer.
And when the book was one from his coursework, the inner content reflected the same as well.
But the topics were anything but his coursework.
His mum had been thorough. The first time alone, she had dropped by his room to let him know of the arrangements for the books lest he be scared. While he was not a voracious reader like Granger, he did read and he did read his school work while at home as well.
Hence the warning to Draco by his mum to keep up the normal facade, even though the content was way beyond NEWT levels.
And Draco had fallen upon it with a hunger that he had not known had existed within him for information and knowledge.
Defence Against The Dark Arts.
Advanced Potion Making.
Advanced Occlumency.
Advanced Leglimency.
Wandless Magic.
Non-verbal Magic.
And finally, the cream of the crop according to him, The Complete Animagus Transformation Guide.
He was going to make sure that he read through every single word in every single line in every single book till he understood its contents so well that he could recite it and perform the spells even if he were woken from slumber.
Two things had helped - one the fact that the books were all interesting and presented the subject matter in a manner that made it engaging for the reader, and second his mum's plan to only spring this on him once he had mastered the basics of Occlumency.
As a result, hopefully his Aunt and the Dark Lord remained unaware of his instruction.
At the moment, this was Draco's only way to survive.
And he would do whatever it took to survive in this war.
Briefly he contemplated if he should play the other side as well.
He was sure that he could convince that muggle-loving fool, Dumbledore, that he was truly repentant about his past actions and that he was willing to turn to the light now.
It wasn't going to be a very difficult role to play. He had become highly disillusioned with the whole Dark Lord saga.
And if he didn't feel repentence yet, then he would make sure that he damn well felt it at the time he met Dumbledore.
He really wanted to stay alive.
And it was time to prove that he was a Slytherin, like the hat had sorted him.