"Sorted Too Young"
Dumbledore tells Snape, "Sometimes, Snape, I think we sort them too young."
CHAPTER 7 – FINDING A PLACE
Draco had lost the entirety of spring due to the war and then due to healing. A glance out the bedroom window showed evidence of the April rains having given way to May flowers. This house was not the usual Burrow home. That had been burned to the ground along with much of the vegetable gardens and grain fields. This rebuilt structure on the same grounds stabbed guilt into Draco. He pressed his hand to the glass then his forehead as he sat in the sill. The grounds were left to do as they pleased. In their random way, out of the charred and blackened damage, beauty rose in hues of white, green, gold and dotted with pink and blue and purple. Thus grew the fields by the end of May. Draco wondered if anything good could come of his own charred and blackened body and soul.
The casts had been removed and many of the bandages, now. He still needed to bandage his right knee for support. He could not stand without that nor without leaning on walls and such. He was a walking cripple. The state disgusted him with himself. How was he to be any kind of change like this? Unable to even cross the room without risk of falling over. The hand on the glass fisted. That same arm remained bandaged as well and had resisted the flesh healing charms and potions. There was a plan to sneak him into a muggle hospital where a contact of theirs was a doctor who might be able to help. Draco wondered if there would be any light at all that could come out of him, anything good at all with so much dark magic rooted within him. He worried silently that maybe one day he would just snap, go mad with the darkness and kill everyone. He shuddered.
Footsteps sounded behind him and a gentle mothering hand rubbed through his hair as Molly often did with her own sons. Draco no longer flinched to it. He was moody, but needed the comfort too badly to throw this off. "You should come down for dinner, Draco. Eat with the family."
He only shook his head. Harry was away at Grimauld Place and Hermione was not at the Burrow either. She must have gone home to her own loving family. Draco's stomach clenched at the loss of his own. No, he could not sit there amongst all these Weasleys without the buffer of Harry and Hermione. He hated that disappointed sigh Molly gave. It was almost as manipulative as his own best conniving words. He muttered a shy and shameful confession, "It hurts to take the stairs down."
He had spoken so little since that last shock. She seemed to understand and promised to bring dinner up for him.
His birthday was in but a couple weeks and that weighed greatly on him. There would be nothing from his father or his mother. Since his father had spent time in Azkaban, Draco had been held to blame and Lucius stopped any show of kindness to him. But Draco missed his mother so badly it hurt in his chest as much as the worst of his tortured wounds. He didn't even get to be present at her burial. He had no idea where she was buried, even.
The days trickled by in moody awkwardness as he tried to cope with his emotions and senses of loss. The charmed wall calendar flipped to the next month, to June. On the 5th day there was a symbol. He hobbled over to inspect it. Squinting in confusion, he tapped it with a finger. The symbol transformed for a moment to say, "Draco's B-day" and back to the symbol. He didn't know how he felt about that. His 18th birthday was mark on some other family's calendar. He turned away determined to ignore it. Dressed for the day, though late as he had slept through breakfast, he figured he would try to seek out lunch. He was certain he had heard Hermione's voice. A buffer was in the house and he felt that maybe, just maybe he could venture down into the rest of the house.
He gritted his teeth and limped down the stairs. The family of red-heads greeted the arrival of their father, Arthur. Hermione had only apparated in maybe an hour ago. She took something from Arthur cheerily. And then approached Draco as she saw him at the bottom of the stairs. Ginny thundered down the stairs behind him. He tensed up expecting an impact or to be knocked over in her enthusiasm to greet her father. She skidded suddenly behind him, gave him a swift hug then darted around him to hug her father. Hermione smirked (and covered her mouth to hide it) at the bizarre and totally caught off guard expression that flashed over Draco's reddening face.
She placed a cane in Draco's free left hand. His face instantly fell into something unreadable, blank and stoic. Then he frowned deeply, jaw working as he reigned in the storm that rushed to the surface full of panic and hate. "I don't want this!" He threw it to the ground and limps back up the stairs as fast as he could. He could not hold it, hold a cane as his father had. He could not bear the reminding. He felt so offended and furious and scared all at the same time. It was hard to contain.
Hermione picked up the cane that Arthur had bought and charmed to automatically adjust to the needed height of the holder. "Draco? Draco!" she followed him up the stairs. He entered his room and slammed the door in her face. "You bloody God damned GIT!" she yelled through the door. She opened the door and invaded his borrowed bedroom, slamming the door behind her. "How dare you!" She stomped forward.
He could not outrun her or throw her out. He had no wand and no physical stability. He chose to shut her out in the only way he could. He turned his back on her and faced the window, his right hand leaning on the side of the window frame for balance. His left hand fisted against Hermione's self-righteousness.
"How dare you! They have done so much for you! We have done everything we could to save you! They gave you a roof! Protection! Healing! Care! And this is how you repay it!" Every word she said was true and it twisted inside him.
"You have no idea!" Draco spat back. I don't want that! I can't have it, can't… you don't understand!"
The Weasleys wondered if they would hear the fight take on the pops and bangs of thrown spells or thrown objects.
Half way across the room she tapped the cane on the floor to get his attention. He flinched reflexively, ready to block a blow. She frowned. Looking down at the cane and back at him, her bright mind swiftly adding up the pieces. "I think I do," she said more gently. "Did he hit you with it?" He turned back to the window ashamed of his cowardice. "He did. I know he did. He hit you. He took you to that dungeon we were in and experimented on you. He… raped you. I remember you accusing him in the school stairway."
He inhaled shakily and covered his eyes with the hand with the one not leaning on the window frame. It seemed like the room lost all its air. It was hard to breathe. Tension rolled through him as he fought for control. It didn't help that she had come so close he could feel her bosom press a little against his back shamelessly. She whispered some foreign ancient words in his ear. Then spoke, "Breathe Draco. Just breathe." He felt himself take in a deeper breath at her command, breathing almost in time with her. He hand between his shoulder blades like an anchoring life line. He surrendered to her steadiness, slowly relaxing with each breath. The connection gently broke when she stopped touching him. He turned to finally face her.
He wondered where she had learned that trick, that bit of ancient wandless magic. Only old wizarding families knew it and used in in part of very intimate magic. Hermione truly was too smart for her own good. She forced the cane firmly but gently into his left hand again and adjusted it till he held it properly and found himself leaning on it.
Her hand caressed his over the cane's handle as she spoke, "It does not make you like him. You are not like him and never will be, Draco." He dropped his eyes at her words and stared at the cane he now leaned on. She raised her other hand and softly held his cheek. "Your mother's ghost asked me to tell you something.
His eyes suddenly snapped to hers. His mother ghost had spoken to her. He wanted to use occlumency to see the memory for himself. If he had a want, he might have used that dark magic on her regardless.
"She told me to tell you she loved you, more than life itself." He swallowed hard, knowing that Hermione spoke the truth, he could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes. "She said she was very proud of the man you are becoming." She brushed a tear he had not realized meandered down his cheek.
Over the next hour, it seemed very quiet in his bedroom. The Weasleys hoped they were both alive.
Hermione helped teach him how to walk properly with the cane. They came down together as lunch was being served on the table. He was shaky on the cane, uncertain, but he had to admit it helped a great deal. He still didn't feel like this was his place in the world or even in this house, though. Sitting at this table for a meal for the first time in weeks. Surrounded by Weasleys and Hermione. He felt out of place, but stayed and ate in silence. Harry apparated to the front door to join them just in time.
After lunch, Harry intercepted and guided him out to sit on the front porch. "I know how it must feel sitting there at the table. You feel like a welcomed guest, a loved family member that had been lost for so long, and yet at the same time you feel like it is all wrong. The food is wrong the way it is served to you, the place setting. You feel like you just don't belong. You want to belong so badly it hurts and you want to run and hide from this forbidden place they have found for you simultaneously."
Draco looked at Harry incredulously. "How… how do you know?"
"It's how I felt the first hundred times I sat at that table with them." Harry leaned back on his hands and swung his feet back and forth over the side of the balcony floor's edge. "We just come at it from opposite side and yet similar experiences. For you, it is not the rich table setting and fancy foods. It is not the restrained propriety of manners and likely silent eating while house elves almost invisibly served you. For me it was an overpowering invasion of welcome. I was used to being the servant and eating the scraps shoved to be in the cupboard under the stairs where they locked me up for the first eleven years of my life."
Draco could hardly believe anyone would do that to a child, even a muggle. But then, considering the other things his father had done to him, anything was possible.
Harry went on, "We've both been beaten bad by family who should be caring for us and loving us. We've both been raped by family who should never have ever touched us like that." At Draco's gasp, Harry looked over. "Hermione knows. She's held me through lots of nightmares of my cousin attacking me. She's a really good friend and strong when I cannot be. She'll be strong for you too. But try to remember, she's lost her family too and also no longer has a place to go."
"But I thought…"
"You thought her sweet muggle family would welcome her home with open arms?" asked Harry. Draco nodded. "Maybe they would, maybe one day in the future they will, but not till someone can find a cure or counter spell for the obliviate charm."
"Who obliviated them?" Draco asked a bit stunned.
"She did," Harry stated flatly. Draco's jaw dropped. "She had to. Death Eaters were seeking out the muggle families of muggle-borns and killing them. So she obliviated all memory of her from her parents. She is very strong Draco, but try to remember she sacrificed a lot too. And that she too hurts and is scared and lonely."
"Will we ever find our places in this world?" Draco asked more to himself than to Harry.
Harry sighed. "I think we will have to make our places in this world ourselves, not find them. The world is a total mess."
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