Author's note
I'm sorry it took me so long to update. I will continue this story but I won't make any promises as to when the next update will be because real life with its various demands might get into the way again.
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23. Crayons
Mr Penwith was positively joyous every time Draco paid the rent for another fortnight. Once, the old man asked Draco to either leave the key with him for the rest of the day or to stay in because the cleaning lady was bound to come.
Draco opted for waiting around. He didn't want anybody to go into his room in his absence. All his money – even if most banknotes were still old ones – was there. The notes were stored in various plastic bags beneath a layer of underwear and shirts at the bottom of the locker. He hoped that this was safer than carrying them around day-in, day-out.
...
The cleaning lady brought a machine with her. It rolled around on three wheels and had a long proboscis with a wide mouth that served to suck the cobwebs off the walls and the dirt off the floor even in the remotest corners. Draco appreciated the objective – the room had undoubtedly gone dirty in the weeks since his arrival – but the noise that the little apparatus emitted was infernal. The cleaning lady seemed to feel the same; she kicked the thing with her foot, and it fell silent with a drawn-out sigh.
However, before Draco, precariously perched on the windowsill, found time to relax, she went about stripping his bed of the linen. His protests fell on deaf ears. She left, the linen carelessly draped over her shoulder and the noise machine in tow. She was back a minute later to thrust wordlessly a stack of fresh linen into Draco's arms.
It took him a while to figure out how to put his bed back into working order, and his indignation about being made to do house-elves' work certainly didn't help.
But eventually, he managed.
...
It was already afternoon when he left the house that day. It was also unusually hot. A long walk did therefore not seem a good idea. He decided to seek out a shadowy place by the cliffs where he could spend the hottest hours and to have a stroll later, when the sun would be less high in the sky.
He had reached the large boulders that littered the beach near the cliffs when the wind blew something white at him. His Seeker's instinct simply taking over, he caught it in midair.
It was a sheet of paper with clumsily sketched boats on it.
Two small children emerged from behind a boulder and asked to have their picture back. Completely transfixed, he stared down at them. Fighting the urge to just prise their little fingers open and take away what they were holding, he stood rooted to the spot until the children's mother appeared. She snatched the paper out of his unresisting hand and, swearing like a riled dragon wrestler, shooed him away.
However, the crude threats she was shouting after him weren't what propelled him forwards. A yearning had overcome him, a crazy yearning that got more intense by the second. Halfway back to Trethwyn, he broke into a run. He left the beach and, heat forgotten, sped down the lane towards the village. He needed to yield to this sudden longing, and he needed to do it soon, or else he would burst.
When he entered the shop, he was drenched in sweat and totally out of breath. But the shop owner was as friendly and helpful as ever. Among all the weird plastic stuff – felt-tip pens, gel writer pens, ballpoint pens Draco read with growing impatience on the boxes – she found a package of genuine, wooden crayons. The paper she selected for him was thick, white and absolutely perfect for sketches.
Without waiting for her to return the change, he rushed outside and sat down on the edge of an oversized flowerpot that happened to stand there. The white paper was screaming at him to be covered in colourful sketches, and he hastened to sketch what he saw – the well in the middle of the village square, the bench next to it, the uneven houses on the opposite side, the green leaves of the young, lone chestnut tree in the dazzling sun, nasturtiums and bougainvillea plants growing out of window boxes, painted shutters, grey slate, chalked walls, hewn flint, shop signs, advertisements, dark ropes that hung between tall posts or between posts and houses, a cream-coloured bowl sitting on a roof... He was amazed how many details had escaped him so far.
And he couldn't stop. He simply couldn't stop sketching.
He didn't stop until he needed a sharpener.
He went back into the shop to buy one. He also bought two more sketchpads. Then he sat down again on the flowerpot and resumed sketching.
The crayons felt good in his hand. He was surprised how well his fingers remembered even though it had been seven years since they had last held a crayon. Crayons had never found a niche in his Hogwarts trunk. His parents had wanted him to apply himself rather than to waste time on idle pursuits.
By and by, he had learned to use his quill for sketching. He had sketched a lot but had burned most of the pictures in the fireplace of the Slytherin common room because he couldn't risk anyone finding them. The few ones that had not ended up in the flames he had hidden in his Herbology folder. Professor Sprout had not expected her students to take notes or to keep folders and, consequently, had never checked. His father had considered Herbology hardly worth mentioning and had not once enquired after it as he had done with other subjects, Potions or Charms for example. Besides, Draco had always got top marks in Herbology. Maybe that had made questions even more unnecessary in his father's opinion.
...
Later, he went down to the beach. There was myriad of hitherto unnoticed details to be seen there as well: seashells and marram, glittering pebbles, beetles and little bits of wood and seaweed that had been washed to the shore.
The suspicion crept over him that he had not wanted to see. He had ignored the sea birds and the white crests on the waves to the same extent as he had ignored the Muggles milling around. He wasn't too sure why. Here he went again – he had just happened on another question starting with why.
He knew why he ignored Muggles – he didn't wish to interact with them more than absolutely necessary. But why hadn't he seen the thicket of common sea-buckthorn? Well, he supposed that he had seen it, but he hadn't consciously perceived it.
It was very odd.
There was nothing to be said against sea-buckthorn. It grew in poor soil or in places where it was exposed to the elements – full sun, salty air, strong winds – like here. It was a useful, resilient plant that didn't need any tending. Various parts of seabuckthorn went into nearly twenty different potions.
Maybe the reason why lay here – thinking about potions led inevitably to thinking about Snape or Slughorn.
Slughorn was a self-righteous, fat, old shirker who had treated him as if he were an irrelevant speck of dirt. Draco had soon realised that Slughorn wasn't the type of man he could rely on if push came to shove. Slughorn was probably the type of man nobody could rely on except Slughorn himself. However, Horace Slughorn had been a mere nuisance to him; he hadn't been dangerous.
Snape was an entirely different matter. Draco had never been able to figure Snape out. While other people hid behind facades, Snape was walled in by facade upon facade.
He wondered what had become of his former house teacher.
Had the Aurors questioned him about Snape?
What did he know about Severus Snape apart from the fact that he mustn't be trusted? Even Dumbledore had fallen for the two-faced mole. Draco couldn't believe till today what he had seen with his very eyes – how could anyone commit murder in such cold blood?
Ever since that night, Snape had pretended Draco didn't exist. He had never again talked to him in private, not once, not for a single sentence. Draco supposed that this had been his former teacher's way to make him feel his worthlessness.
When Snape had made Blaise Zabini Head Boy, Draco hadn't been surprised in the least.
...
24. A Potion Gone Wrong
He spent much of his time doing sketches – he sketched the hills, the hedges, the little copses, the promontory to the west, the beach and the sea dotted with small Muggle boats.
Boats were perhaps an exaggeration – they had sails, yes, but they were designed for only one person, and that person had to stand on rather than to sit in the boat. The Muggles seemed to consider riding these would-be boats nevertheless a worthwhile occupation and engaged in it a lot. Bad weather didn't bother them even though they lost balance more often than not and plunged into the water. Actually, they looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Draco reluctantly conceded that riding such boats might be something very similar to riding a broomstick just for fun.
He also noticed that Muggles could swim. Already their children possessed that skill.
Was he less talented than the average Muggle brat? He shouldn't think so.
He watched people swimming. They used a variety of styles. They preferred certain areas of water to others, and, apparently, swimmers had also to mind the tides.
Then, one night when the crescent moon was bright, the water calm and the air balmy despite the late hour, he ventured into the sea and imitated the arm and leg movements he had seen. Although he swam slowly and unsteadily at first, he soon got the hang of it.
The idea of learning to swim had never occurred to him throughout his childhood. The deep pond at the Goyles' estate was as Grindylow-infested as the Hogwarts Lake. Why would anyone go in there, and for fun no less?
When he had seen the champions swim, he had thought they – along with the hostages – had received special training. The younger of the French girls had quite obviously been rubbish at swimming, and Potter and the Weasley prat had dragged her to the shore.
Draco didn't know whether anyone else could swim. Such a topic had never come up in the Slytherin common room. Why bother if you could float above the water or walk on it with the help of simple spells, if you could Apparate to the other bank of a river or cross a lake on broomstick?
If you could.
He was pretty sure he hadn't yet comprehended his punishment in its entirety. He discovered new facets every time he came across another problem he had to solve without magic. But doing it, managing something without magic – like laundering his shirts or teaching himself how to swim – gave him the feeling of cheating those who had thought up such punishment for him a tiny little bit out of their triumph.
Besides, swimming skills came in handy. Spending his time crayoning required foregoing the long, time-consuming walks. But he needed a certain amount of exercise because physical exhaustion was still the best substitute for a Sleeping Draught.
...
The weather held; cold or stormy days were few and far between. There was always a blustery wind, but he secured the sheets of paper with stones and clothes pegs against flying off. He had his favourite places where he sat and did his sketches – places where he had a fine view of the beach, the village or the hills.
Most of his pictures showed nothing but landscape, sun-lit, wind-blown and wide. Some things, sunsets for instance, were harder to sketch than others because instead of the ninety-six crayons he had once owned he had only twenty-four to create all the different hues.
Things were fine as long as he stuck to landscape and, perhaps, birds and sheep. As soon as he attempted to draw people, he somehow lost control over the crayon in his hand. As if of its own accord, it generated big, burly men, and their faces became invariably that of Vincent Crabbe. The crests on the waves turned yellow and then orange. They rose higher and higher until they sprouted ugly heads. He never stopped, though, when he realised he was sketching things that weren't there. Those flames had been real one horrible night not so long ago. The images were amassed in his head, and they were fighting to get out. So, he let them.
He always felt a bit drained afterwards but also strangely sober. For a little while, shame gave way to a blurry sadness. The effect was similar to that of crying.
Crying dulled pain, or fear, or humiliation, if only for a fleeting moment. He wished he could cry again, but for some reason, he had lost the ability. No tears would come no matter how lost or wretched he felt. All the more welcome was the transient change brought about by sketching Crabbe.
Crabbe...
Vincent Crabbe was no more.
Dying had always been a looming prospect in the course of the past two years, but that night in the Room of Requirement, death had been only seconds away. And Crabbe had never made it out of the roaring inferno.
Once upon a time, they had been close. Sort of, at least.
Before his life had changed beyond recognition, Draco had steered Crabbe through term after term. Learning had been tough work for Crabbe. There had hardly been a topic that had not been slightly beyond his grasp. Draco had usually done his homework twice – he had written a comprehensive version that he would hand in himself and then a shorter, simplified one for Crabbe to copy down. He had dedicated countless hours to rehearsing the most basic facts of their major subjects with Crabbe in order to make sure the numskull passed his O.W.L.s, if only just so.
Shortly before O.W.L.s, Snape had provided an opportunity for Slytherin students to get some last minute training in potion making. Everybody had been to work on his or her own as it would be during the exam. Draco, however, had monitored Crabbe's work closely. He had given him hints by nodding or shaking his head since verbal conversation hadn't been allowed. Everything had gone just fine until Crabbe had added the last ingredient. Suddenly, the potion had started fizzing. All Draco had been able to do was shouting at Crabbe to dive for cover. Crabbe had been too slow, though, in both the literary and the figurative sense. The hot liquid had erupted from the cauldron and drenched him from tip to toe.
The overall damage hadn't been too serious – the potion itself had been a truly harmless one, and Madam Pomfrey had healed the petty burns in no time at all. Yet, something in the story irked Draco. So close to the exams, Crabbe could have done with a little encouragement, and a flawlessly done potion would have boosted his confidence. Instead, he had suffered injury and, needless to say, ridicule.
Reminding himself of his vow to adhere to the truth, Draco had to admit that he had not thought this way two years ago. He had joined the laughter without thinking twice. He hadn't felt bad for Crabbe. Quite the opposite had been true. Laughing at Crabbe had somewhat relieved the anger caused by a remark Snape had made. The teacher had blamed Draco for the mishap. Of course, he hadn't done so openly. While everybody's eyes had been on Crabbe, Goyle and Nott leaving for the hospital wing, he had bent down a little and whispered into Draco's ear, "That was your fault, actually."
The incident should have been a warning Draco realised now, but he had been blind.
He had not wondered how it was that Snape knew Draco had overlooked a slip-up in Crabbe's work. He had not concluded that Snape, obviously knowing about the impending debacle, could have interfered before it was too late. Instead, he had been solely focussed on figuring out what had gone wrong with the potion. It had taken him all afternoon, a great deal of the night and the better part of the next day before he had spotted the mistake: Crabbe had made it when he had put in the dried beetroot extract – the first ingredient to go into the cauldron after the water. Instead of clockwise, he had stirred three times anticlockwise, and Draco, standing opposite from him, had failed to notice that error. So, essentially, Crabbe's potion had been ruined right from the start despite it showing all the correct colours and consistencies afterwards. The disaster in the end was the result of a minor mistake made at the beginning.
The story could well serve as a metaphor Draco thought. He hadn't made a botch of a potion; he had made a botch of his life. Was there a point back in time when he had stirred anticlockwise?
...
25. Sons to the Power of Seven
August came and went.
There was little change. The cleaning lady made another appearance and so did Ada, his mother's old tawny owl.
In essence, his mother's letter told him that the Bulstrodes were currently not interested in associating themselves in any possible way with the name of Malfoy, and if Araminta was the reason for his prolonged absence, he should return home immediately.
His reply was as short as the previous one and consisted mainly of the plea to be given some more time to recover.
In his heart of hearts, he knew that he wasn't any nearer to recovery than he had been two months ago. He was perhaps a bit better physically. The swimming did him well. It seemed to tone up his muscles more than Quidditch practise ever had. Mentally, however, he hadn't made much progress. The acute panic had subsided, but he was still kind of paralysed by the sheer enormity of what had happened.
He hadn't come any further than pondering a few sub-problems because he couldn't bring himself to even glance at the big picture. It was too scary. Too many pieces had slid out of place. The fundamental values he had been taught threatened to give way under the onslaught of adverse facts, and defending them appeared to be every bit as hopeless as abandoning them seemed wrong.
There were only questions and no answer anywhere in sight. But while he found no answers, he did find an activity that took his mind off the nagging questions and thus, gave it time to relax. Once discovered, he made excessive use of it. Sitting on some rickety bench along the Coast Path or on a flat boulder on the beach and sketching pastoral landscapes, he slipped into daydreams and fantasised about days in a faraway future or in different worlds where he was a man of distinction and repute, worlds and times where people would greet him in the streets as, by the way, some of the native Muggles did by now. Once he had heard somebody in the pub refer to him as the young artist; he couldn't help wondering what the Muggles saw in him.
The dreams weren't coherent stories. He simply replayed short, unconnected and, for the most part, downright soppy episodes in his mind. His favourite scene was a Great-Hall-at-Hogwarts setting where neatly dressed, white-blonde students outnumbered the blasted redheads ten to one.
Why couldn't he have six siblings, who would each have seven children in turn? Two such generations and there would be strength in numbers, if not anywhere else. Of course, the Malfoy clan was still rich in his dream scenarios – they could provide when the Slytherin quarters grew too small to accommodate all their offspring. He imagined McGonagall's sour face when she was forced to accept his money in order to keep her school running. He imagined her face – and that of any other teacher who had never liked him – when they were met with a white-blonde child in every class they taught.
He imagined himself standing on platform nine and three quarters, seeing his older children off while he was surrounded by toddlers and held his youngest daughter – a baby of two or three months – in his arms. And he pictured McGonagall offering him grudgingly her congratulations and asking him in a voice full of despair, I believe she is number twenty-two, Mr Malfoy? And he would relish his answer, My sincere apologies for correcting you, professor: Gemma is our twenty-fourth child. And under his breath, he would add, And there will be a Malfoy in every year for the rest of your miserable reign at Hogwarts...
He did know the dreams were ridiculous. But he dwelled on them nevertheless. They allowed him to believe that one day in a hazy, distant future, things would be fine, that he would live again. He didn't think he lived right now. He merely existed, waiting for his bewildered mind to catch up with reality.
He was whole-heartedly grateful for the respite that his grandfather's money bought him. For once, he didn't feel the pressure of upholding time-honoured standards, of preserving a reputation, of bringing honour to a name – in short, of living up to all sorts of expectations. He didn't have to live up to anything, really. No-one reminded him to school his face into an expression of indifference at all times, no-one told him off when he was in his shirtsleeves for dinner. The Muggles seemed perfectly fine with him lazing around in their village. They acted as if he actually belonged here. That was odd, but it was also soothing in a way.
His grandfather's forethought combined with the Muggles' unwitting acquiescence granted him the luxury of sitting quietly by himself – on the beach, or a random bench, or the terrace of the Muggle pub – and indulging in blissful fantasies.
His dreamt-up worlds held neither Aurors nor Death Eaters. No past existed there, and neither did guilt. Those worlds floated on sunbeams like on unblemished magic. Gentle summer rains caressed his dreamlands and the happy children that lived therein.
One day he would have children, many children.
He wasn't sure whether the scores of children all around, despite them being Muggles, triggered the dreams. The real-life shouting and laughing on the beach echoed through his fantasies. He imagined himself watching his own children playing in the sand or paddling in the sea and shrieking when the spray of a larger wave hit them. He imagined them rushing towards him and throwing themselves into his arms. He imagined teaching his children how to swim. Musingly, he made a promise to his unborn children that he would not become impatient if they didn't perform flawlessly at the very first go.
His mind slipped into the dreams like his body slipped into the water after sundown. He fantasised about walking into the sea now and coming back to the shore twenty-five years later. He fantasised about a frail, withered witch called Minna McGoggleall gawking scandalised at him and his appearance. He, giving in to the fact that his underpants would slip down anyway as soon as they became wet, emulated the small number of holidaying Muggles who preferred a special stretch of white sand that was separated from the main beach by fallen rock on one side, and obstructed by several groynes on the other. Muggles were strange folk by definition, and their bathing habits were just another proof thereof – when they went for a swim at that little, secluded place, they did so in puris naturalibus. It seemed indeed to be an officially approved custom because the policemen patrolling the beach regularly chased off delinquents who set up tents there or who lit illegal campfires, but they never bothered the nude swimmers.
Draco nonetheless waited until late in the evening before he climbed down the narrow, meandering trail that branched off the Coast Path just beyond the promontory. Usually, most Muggles had left by that time, and he was careful to keep a safe distance to the few remaining ones. They, in turn, ignored him almost completely.
He was glad nobody interfered with his late swimming because he really liked the sensation of cool water washing over his bare skin.
...
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