Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
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Draco is sitting in Mr. Weasley's deep armchair, a tumbler cradled in his hands and a distant, abstracted, weary smile on his face, as he watches the children tumble together in the corner that Andromeda has partitioned off for their use. For all that he emphatically does not resemble Arthur Weasley otherwise, Hermione thinks, there's something reminiscent of him in that smile.
Ginny has put aside her drink to demonstrate (as far as she could while not airborne) the maneuver she did to avoid crashing into her own Keeper at the last Harpies game. Hermione would take a moment to nod toward Draco, but she doesn't want to interrupt the anecdote.
"Upside down, and backward," she says. "And the crowd went wild, thinking I'd done it on purpose."
Harry laughs. "A shame you didn't have Luna doing the commentary. That would have been funny."
Luna says, "I'm fond of Quidditch, but it's such an odd game." She takes out her wand to draw pictures in the air for the amusement of the children: centaurs and Thestrals, molecular models with vibrating bonds, teacups and saucers (flying saucers, yes, no doubt she means that too), and flying dragons that do the occasional aerial back-flip.
"Yes, that's the very maneuver," Ginny says, gesturing to Luna's flying cartoon dragons.
The children laugh; Teddy grabs for the floating illusions, and the younger two wave their arms and point. Hypatia has figured out how to get up on her knees and lunge, but her fingers fall short of the creatures and she tumbles onto her face.
She looks up, laughs, and has another go at the creatures. Tough little thing, Hermione thinks. Draco has restrained himself, apparently, and not come to pick her up.
Hermione glances toward him just in case. The armchair is empty.
She has been meaning to have a word with Draco, if nothing else to congratulate him on his aplomb during the ceremony… no, his grace, especially that moment of genuflection to receive the ritual tap with the sword.
"Anyone want more to drink?" she asks, by way of alibi for roaming afield.
They shake their heads, and Harry covers his tumbler. "No, I have to study tonight."
She raises an eyebrow.
"They'll be holding the NEWTs again within the year," he says. "Shacklebolt's sending a notice to the Defense Association veterans."
Harry studying without being prompted—well, things have changed, rather. And she herself is juggling three offers, two of them pending the NEWTs, yes, has been keeping them delicately in balance as things are sorting themselves out in the post-war. It will be time to choose, very soon now.
Outside the kitchen windows, the garden shows dark. He's not in the kitchen. She casts Nox to sink the room in darkness; as her eyes adjust to the night, she sees the stars… and on the back steps, a familiar figure hunched in a posture altogether familiar, only this time without his baby sister, who's enjoying the company of her contemporaries in the front room.
She casts a warming charm and opens the door a crack, and hears muffled sobs.
Her first instinct is to close the door and pretend she never saw or heard. It's raw and a bit indecent, intruding on that…
Three years ago, Harry stumbled on a similar scene and got an attempted Crucio for his trouble—well, and Draco came within inches of being sliced to ribbons.
Three years ago. Before the war. It is the post-war. It is the post-war now.
And this is her foster-brother, and things are rather different. If he takes it as interference, she'll step back, but she has duties. That ceremony wasn't mere fancy-dress; the oath of fealty binds her as well, for he's under her family's protection.
Resolutely she opens the door and steps into the December evening. She clears her throat, and lets the door close behind her sufficiently loudly to let him know that someone has joined him.
He looks up briefly, to take another sip from the tumbler in his hand.
"Are you quite all right?" she asks.
"Quite. They're better off without me."
Oh dear. He's reached the maudlin or else the self-reproachful stage of drunkenness. "No use," he says. "None whatsoever. Nobody loves me."
"Your mother does," Hermione says, "and Hypatia, and …" She can't characterize her own feeling toward him as love.
"She doesn't know any better," Draco snaps, swiftly enough on the heels of her declaration to hide her temporizing. "And anyway I didn't mean family." He wipes his nose on his handkerchief, pockets it once more (Pureblood manners apparently being proof against advanced inebriation) and continues, "Those girls look, but they're not interested in me. It's 'oh, what a sweet baby,' and anyway they're Muggles and they don't know any better. And I can't marry a Pureblood, because Mother says it's out of the question now. And none of the Half-bloods will look at me, let alone…" He swallows the next bit, she'd guess, because his drunken brain is dithering over the correct term, and he has decided for the better part of valor.
"You have years ahead of you to find someone."
"But everyone else already has someone. I'll never find anyone. I'll be alone forever." He puts the tumbler down with exaggerated care, folds his arms over his knees, and puts his head down to cry again.
She sits down next to him, and awkwardly pats his shoulder, left-handed. Her right hand has gone to her wand-grip, just in case. No, Crucio doesn't appear to be in the offing, and a good thing too, but she is taking no chances.
"I'm nobody," he says. "I used to be somebody. My father, y'know." He takes a long shuddering gasp for breath. "And now I'm nobody, because my father was… was … "
For a moment, she thinks he's going to be sick, but he merely shudders and hugs himself. He's shivering from the cold. She casts a warming charm on him—he's far gone indeed, if he hadn't thought to do that, and with the alcohol in his system, he's far more likely to fall victim to hypothermia.
"You are not your father."
"No," he says, rocking back and forth, as if trying to soothe something into sleep. Arms empty, that usually hold…
… a baby. What she'd never have guessed of him when he was at school. No, she never would have guessed that horrid little boy for an affectionate father in the making.
"You know, they don't let me see him. Mother goes to visiting hours alone." He stares off into the distance, eyes blank and unseeing, then unbidden yanks his left sleeve up.
She hears the cloth tear.
"That's never going to fade. They'll find it on my bones when I'm dead." He says, "I was so proud of it, you know, when I got it." He picks up the tumbler and knocks back the contents before she can stop him, never mind he's quite drunk enough. "Bellatrix fucking Lestrange."
She drags him to his feet. "No more."
He grabs the tumbler, empty as it is, and follows her, unresisting.
Four steps into the garden, he stumbles and sprawls face-down in the snow (the glass still clutched in his left hand). This time she doesn't bother with main force; she flicks her wand to lift him carefully, straightening him like a crumpled puppet.
After setting him on his feet, she warms and dries him, with a touch of Scourgify for good measure.
"Azkaban does fucking weird things to your sex drive," he says. "She wasn't sleeping with him any more, if she ever did."
The conversation is rapidly traveling into the territory of things she never wanted to know, but at the same time, it doesn't seem advisable (or even possible) to interrupt him. At some point she is going to have to take that tumbler, and make sure that nobody lets him drink any more.
He leans on her arm, and his fingers close on her forearm. No, nowhere near as heavy as she would have guessed, except when he stumbles and flops like dead weight.
"She was in love with that dead thing. He was dead, you know, just hadn't realized it. Bloody necromancy." A hiccup, or maybe it was a cough. "Of course it isn't permitted. Universally banned. Krum told me they only taught the theory at Durmstrang." A loose unhumorous laugh. "After he told me he'd de-ball me if I ever said anything about Grindelwald again." He clarifies, "Pushed me up against a wall and told me there were much, much worse things than dying, and if I had even a tenth the sense he expected from a Malfoy, I'd know what sort of thing my father was serving. And that was before the Dark Lord returned." He stops, hands on knees, doubled over as if he is going to be sick; Hermione readies herself to Vanish the mess.
He retches experimentally, then straightens up again. Hermione lets him find his balance again, and offers her arm. They continue their weird meandering promenade. Overhead, the snow-clouds have cleared, and the sharp winter constellations show, Orion with his hunting dog. Connect-the-dots, a human mnemonic; she knows that overhead reaches a shallow ocean of atmosphere (whose convection makes the starlight twinkle and waver) and above that, the hardest of hard vacuum.
"A dead thing," he mumbles. "Fucking walking around and raving and killing things. Right in the bloody fucking drawing room. I can't stand that bloody room." He stops, and leans on her. The tendons of his hand stand out stark in the dim light with the tension of his grip, his arm linked through hers in a parody of chivalry…
… only she knows who is the knight.
"Except he's dead. He's dead now, thank god, thank gods, thank fucking Merlin and Harry sodding Potter." Draco's language has gone straight to the gutter after his (how many?) tumblers of firewhiskey. "I watched them shovel him into the pit, thank god, so I know he's dead and he's not coming back. Fucking necromancy. My father showed me the rite, you know. His father wouldn't let him read those books until he was twenty-seven. It's in our library, of course. Finest collection of grimoires outside of Hogwarts and the Department of Mysteries.
"Secrets of the Darkest Art. You've read that one." A horrid loose-lipped laugh, high-pitched and braying. "If you knew about Horcruxes, which plainly you did." That barking laugh again (maybe barking in earnest, she thought), and then, "And the Codex Maleficarum. Read the whole fucking Restricted Section, didn't you, Granger? And then Dumbledore turned the whole lot over to you."
She stares up at the stars that don't care, that will still be there when she and Harry and Ron are long-dead absences and the war too far in the past even to be a memory. "He was out of the picture, and I made use of the window of opportunity."
"Albus fucking Dumbledore. Not such a mad old bat as they said. 'You're not a killer, Draco.' Much good it did me. Bellatrix never let me forget it. Every day, 'You're not a killer, Draco, you're a shame on the House of Black.'" The impression of Bellatrix is exact enough to raise the hairs on the back of her neck. Their voices are in much the same vocal range, and Draco's impression resurrects that horrifying seductive whisper …
He is taking long steps now, having remembered his legs. He'd make a fairish long-distance walker, with that long loping stride, even if it's beneath his dignity as a Pureblood wizard.
"She was like a fucking Dementor herself. Never wore the mask after Azkaban. Her face was the calling card." He whispers, "When she kissed me I thought, oh gods, this is what it's like to be Kissed. She laughed, and told me I was a dead failure at Occlumency, and she'd have another go at me to see if I could get it."
They've reached the edge of the property now, where the hedgerow separates the garden from the road to Ottery St. Catchpole. It towers above them, its burden of snow glowing in the starlight.
"Funny, it was only that Muggle doctor who helped, at all. Slagged down to bedrock, I was. She never laid a hand on me other than that, but she was in my head every moment. When I least expected…"
That pale set face stares at something invisible and horrifying, that floats before him and hides the hedgerow and then the vegetable patch.
Then in a calm, reasonable voice, "Dr. Burgess said, 'There is a core. We will build up from there. You have survived, and that's the prerequisite. Tearing down is easy. Building up is hard.'"
Then his voice breaks, and the tears run down his face.
She stops, turns him by the shoulders, casts another warming charm and dries his tears.
"I don't ever want Hypatia to live through that."
It isn't so cold that their footsteps crunch or squeak on the snow. She hears his breathing, short and harsh. "I bet you don't know who I hate the most in all this."
She wouldn't presume to guess.
"It isn't you."
"I didn't imagine it was," she says. "We scarcely know each other, even now."
He narrows his eyes. "Severus Snape. He sold me out." He shook himself. "Bloody hero, but he couldn't be arsed to tell me what the fuck was going on. Had at me like bloody Bellatrix, and I fought him off. I'd learned that much." That defiant chin-tilt didn't belong to present-tense Draco, but the boy of sixteen. "Double dealing son-of-a-Muggle, halfblood fucking bastard."
Draco drunk could give Ron a run for his money. Only a vampire could be fonder of sanguinary epithets.
"What would you have done if he'd told you the truth?"
"He wouldn't have told me. I was nobody, everybody's little pawn. I am not a fucking moron, Granger. There was the Dark Lord and all that. I wasn't sleeping at the bloody trial." He said, "It's obvious. Burgess had to point it out too: I'm angriest at the one who tried to protect me. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't dig him up and fucking Reducto his half-Muggle arse."
He stares straight ahead, and lurches forward as if taking on the next leg of a death-march. "Black marble tomb and all. You bloody Gryffs hated him when he was alive, and now he's everybody's favorite dark hero. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Or Potions Master. Or the Dark Lord's favorite man on the inside, which he was. And wasn't."
Snape's mortal remains reside now under an unmarked black marble slab at Hogwarts, the gleaming shadow of Dumbledore's white tomb.
"And they all go on about how he protected me. Except he didn't. Bellatrix … and the Dark Lord … both of them …"
No need to specify the verb. After the trials, the whole world knows it.
"And I'm nobody. My father's double, but he's in Azkaban. Very much more convenient to snub me, because I'm Lucius Malfoy to the life, and not in a position to Crucio them for their impertinence.
"My father made this mess for us." The grimace shows teeth, sharp and white in the snowlight. "Pureblood this and Pureblood that, and his fucking Lord is a fucking Half-blood, and he didn't even have the wit to know the difference."
"You aren't your father."
"Fucking obviously not, Granger."
She disengages her arm and steps back, wand in hand. "And I am not your punching bag, Draco-with-too-many-middle-names Malfoy. So let's get the language back in line, or not talk at all." She adds, "Unless you call it talk, when you're giving me a raw feed from your subconscious."
He recoils as if she'd hit him.
She says, "You wouldn't talk to Hypatia like that."
"She's a baby. I don't want her to know anything about this."
"She's your sister."
"No." He said, "She's my daughter. And she doesn't need to know what he was. He was just as careless, fathering her. He didn't think, any more than I did. I can't make it up to Pansy … but Hypatia is alive, and she's going to live to a hundred and fifty, if I have anything to say about it." Against the snow-lit garden, his profile shows sharp-cut as the prow of a dragon-ship, never so much like his father as when disowning him. "He'd have killed her for being a Squib."
"You're probably not ready to hear this…"
He nods, but pauses as if to say, yes, but tell me anyway.
"You're under no obligation to your father. Even if I believed the feudal nonsense your lot go in for, I'd think the debt discharged by what he put you through. You can go your own way. You can marry whomever you like." He shakes his head, as if harried by flies. "All right, if freedom gives you agoraphobia, then think this: you're under the protection of the House of Granger. We are a Muggle-born dynasty—" she tries not to burst into laughter at the notion of her sensible middle-class parents as dynasts—"and you can marry a Muggle, if that's who catches your fancy. You can change your name, dye your hair green, emigrate to America, take up sky-diving, go on the stage like Zabini…"
"Zabini's a prat."
"Be that as it may, he's a decent actor."
"How would you know?"
"I heard him rehearsing bits from Shakespeare. He wants to play Hamlet."
"He'd have his choice of skulls to soliloquize over," Draco says. The smirk twists into a sour expression, as if he's trying to spit out something bitter. "For that matter, so would I."
"Do you want to go inside?"
He nods. By now, they've made a complete circuit of the rather extensive back garden of the Burrow.
"So is this how it is with brothers and sisters?"
"I think you'd best ask someone else. I can't say I have experience." The door to the kitchen opens, and Ginny peers out.
"So that's where you've gotten to."
"Oh no, Hypatia!" Draco says.
"She's quite all right. Andromeda fixed her up a cot, and she's sleeping." She turns to Hermione. "Is he still dead drunk?"
"In vino veritas," Hermione said, "and in Firewhiskey…"
"I know where mum keeps the Sobriety Potion."
Draco shakes his head violently, then sways a bit as if he's made himself dizzy.
He trips twice coming up the back steps. Ginny and Hermione maneuver him into the kitchen, and thence to the front room, full circle to Mr. Weasley's deep armchair.
Ron takes the tumbler out of Draco's hand. "Looks like enough for this one."
"So, Weasley, does your sister talk sense to you?" Draco asks, peering at Ron in a way that would be comical if it were anyone else.
"All the time," Ginny says. "He wasn't going to let me date Harry, or anybody else for that matter, and I told him he had little experience and less sense, given…" she bites off her own words as she briefly makes eye contact with Lavender, and looks away again, "so he could sod off with his protective-elder-brother pose…"
Ron says, "And I'm the one told her to try out for the Harpies and let the NEWTs go hang. So give me credit…"
"For not being a complete git."
"I don't have a sister," Neville says, "but Ginny told me that I wasn't 'nobody in particular.'"
"And hexed the snot out of anybody who'd say otherwise," Ginny says, with a predatory smirk, and a significant look at Draco, who puts both hands protectively over his nose. "Bygones being bygones, Malfoy, as long as you behave yourself, you'll have my sisterly wisdom too."
His face shows chalk-white under the mellow lamplight. "In spite of my father."
"Your father can sod off. And I'd think Azkaban far enough."
"I'm sorry. What happened to you…" Ginny's face closes and hardens, which plays up the resemblance between her and Draco. Hermione wonders how many ancestors they share, for that kinship to show at the bone.
"It happened to me," he says. "But I wasn't eleven at the time. Not that it should happen … to anybody. At any age."
He doubles over, and sobs inconsolably.
Ginny and Ron stare at each other, then at Draco. Neville pats Draco on the back, somewhat awkwardly, and the other two follow suit.
"It's not his fault his father's a nasty piece of work," Ginny says.
Ron says, "Noblesse oblige." Unspoken, because it would have been provocation, not everybody's lucky enough to be born a Weasley.
Harry, sitting at the edge of things and looking distinctly uncomfortable, nods.
Luna drifts in from the kitchen, taps Draco on the shoulder, and says, "Tea?"
He looks up, wipes his eyes, and takes the proffered cup and saucer. Hermione is fairly certain that Luna has dosed it with a dollop of Sobriety Potion, because his eyes seem a bit more in focus, and his movements more coordinated, after downing it.
"For the record," he says in a cold level voice, "my father is dead to me."