"My place in society." He rolled the words around his mouth, then rubbed his hands over his face and chuckled. "I'll give it to you, when you call in a favor, you certainly call it in. Hermoine," his use of her given name, as well as the gentle tone, startled her. "I'm just as much a pariah as any other Death Eater. Yes, I have money, a lot of money, and a lot of connections still exist from my fathers days, but to bring down the Ministry of Magic? I don't see it being possible. There is no place in society for me anymore."
"Trust me, you'll be accepted," she said darkly. "You have the money, the power, an old old name, and I'm betting your father trained you from the moment you could talk to be the consummate politician. You'll have charmed your way back into everyone's good graces in a year."
"I never said I was going back." She gaped.
"What? You can't be serious! Slytherin Prince Draco Malfoy not return to the wizarding world once his sentence was up? Impossible." He slammed his hand down on the table.
"Gods, this is ridiculous! I hated that damned title from the moment that bitch reporter thought it up. Prince my arse, there is not one person, not one, who ever considered me that except my damned father and mother."
"So you're willing to just let them win? Let them ruin everything?"
"And isn't that exactly what you're doing?" he demanded. She flinched.
"I don't have a choice, now do I? I don't have the power and the influence you do. I can't even get a bloody job washing dishes there. Trust me, if I could I'd Avada the whole bloody lot of them and let the whole mess straighten itself out."
"Let it go, Granger. You never liked the killing in the first place, don't try to make me think you'd go through with that plan. I might, but not you."
"All these years and you still think you have the monopoly on evil. I find it ironic in the extreme that with that attitude you consider me the naïve one of us. Besides, I can't give up the magic, Draco. I tried. I got a real job, I lived as a muggle again, but I couldn't keep it up. I couldn't stop using spells, brewing potions. It hurt. I don't know how you survived." He placed a bill on the table and pulled her up, leading her out of the pub, and up a set of stairs at the side of the building. At first Hermoine didn't realize where they were going until he unlocked a door at the top of the stairs and led her into a flat that covered the entire floor of the building.
It was tastefully decorated in modern, but luxurious furnishings with exquisite artwork scattered about, highlighted by spotlights coming from the fifteen foot ceilings. It was a loft style, the suggestion of rooms showed by the placement of furniture, even though there were no real walls. But the centerpiece of the space had to be the huge grand piano in it's own corner of the space, its ebony wood gleaming with care in the soft light.
"I didn't want to continue this conversation where anyone who cared to could overhear," he said simply, walking to the kitchen and setting the kettle going. "Look on the table, tell me what you see." Curious, she walked over. There was nothing on the table except a small bowl with several brightly colored plastic chips in it. She ran her fingers through them, seeing each had a number on it.
"Do you know what those are?" he asked, finally bringing a cup of tea over to her, dropping a bare spoonful of honey in and stirring it around before handing it to her. She took a sip, then raised her eyes to his.
"You remember how I take my tea?" He shrugged.
"It's a habit. These are Addicts Anonymous chips. Each one is for a milestone moment of sobriety, or in my case, of not using magic." She looked over the chips with more than a little surprise.
"Tell me, please. I," she shook her head ruefully. "You, out of all of us, seem to have been the one who has found his peace, at least a little. I have to admit I find it more than a little ironic. You were the one who would never accept help, or friendship, companionship, even though we were in the inner circle together you seemed apart, intentionally, from the rest of us. How, Draco, how did you, of all people, learn to live again?" He smiled, and picked up a chip with a 1 on it.
"One day at a time. Just like it says on the posters. "We admit we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable." He dropped the chip and picked up another that had a 30 on it. "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." He dropped 30 and picked up one that said '6 months'. "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Gods as we
understood them." Hermoine felt her eyesmoisten as he recited the words that were so obviously a carefully memorized litany. The he reached into a drawer and tossed a device onto the table. Even from across the tabletop she could feel the malevolence in it, and shied away from touching the thing. He laughed. "And the funny thing is, justice was what truly made me a master of Dark objects. The therapy helped, but there is nothing that can remove the burn of the magic, except by removing the magic itself before it starts to escape in your sleep. But that, it rips the magic from your blood, stores it in phials. It makes the burn tolerable again. It saved my life even though it tries to take it every time." He reached over and pressed two fingers to her head, and whispered "legilimens". And she gasped.
The taste of whiskey and cigarettes was stale in my mouth and I couldn't remember the last time I had seen the out of doors. I hadn't the energy to move or bathe and I couldn't even use a simple scourgify to rid myself of my own stink. I was wallowing, in hate, in bitterness, and most of all in self pity. I had become the one thing I had always sworn I wouldn't be. I was weak, and I had no idea how to stop it.
….
The television was on. It was the one Muggle contraption I had learned to use and enjoy in this hell of a world I was stuck in. It was instructive, I could behave like the pictures in the box and I could manage. I could pretend I knew the rules of this place. Who was I kidding? I was as lost as it was possible to be. And it was a commercial that saved me. An advertisement for a program about a character who couldn't live without alcohol. I looked at the bottle beside me and laughed. I could live without the whiskey, without the cigarettes, they were just what replaced everything else I lost. It was the magic that was killing me, the feel of it in my blood every day, seeking a way out, screaming for me to cast any kind of spell, even a damned Patronus, just to relieve the pressure. I knew what addiction was all right, and I knew it would never get better. But I damn sure didn't want to become a slave to it either. I had survived my childhood with a father who thought an unforgiveable curse was a normal type of discipline. I survived Voldemort, I survived watching most of the people I thought I should care about die, and now I was going to lose my life and even my soul to something that didn't even think. No. I pulled myself out of the chair and into the shower. The address was in the directory, and I knew how to use a cab. I was drunk, was I ever not drunk in those days, but I managed to get into a seat, and when it started I stood up and I said the hardest words I've said in my life. 'My name is Draco Malfoy, and I'm an addict'. For only the second time in my life, I confessed something important. And no one laughed.
My sponsor didn't know what to make of withdrawl symptoms like mine, they never got better, only worse. No one knew how to deal with a pureblood wizard who physically needs to perform magic to dissipate its concentration in the blood. But the squib who ran the bike shop knew, and he went to Knockturn Alley.
The howling, stabbing, sucking agony of the device became like a catharsis, I almost looked forward to the simple agony; it was so much easier than the constant shuddering need to perform magic that I welcomed it every month like a lover. And yet I kept going to the meetings, the litany helped make sense of the senseless, and better, reminded me that, for once, I was not alone.
Hermoine returned to her own mind in the chair with her face wet with tears. Draco sat across from her, his face calm.
"I learned there that muggles were simply people, the having or not having of magic was simply an accident of birth. I learned that kindness and acceptance was something much more common in the world than I had ever thought. I learned that what had gone wrong in my life was due in great part to the fact that I had only sent evil out. How could I then expect good to come back? There are ten chips here, one for each year that I served my sentence. And I served it by my honor, not by having my power stripped from me. I think that's why they left it to me, in the hopes that I'd fail and they would have the excuse to perform the Kiss on me too, rid the world of troublesome Malfoys permanently. At first I did it with the simple intention of surviving to see every one of them who did that to me burn. I wanted to come back and wreak havoc on them, watch them die one by one. But hate could only take me so far. I had to let it go before it weakened me to the point that I failed. I never fail, Granger. So, thank you for bringing my wand back to me, but don't ask me to join this crusade. I'm tired, and I'm not doing it all again."
"I understand," she said quietly, standing. "I'll leave you to your life then, and I really do hope it brings you contentment." There was a crack and she apparated out of his flat. The first thing Draco did when she left was to put up security wards. If she could get out, others could get in, and he knew somehow that it was unlikely that now she had been there that this would be the end of it.