26. Relapse
On the first day of September, he went to a large holiday resort some twelve or fifteen miles to the west. He found several post offices there as well as branch offices of sundry Muggle bank houses. In just one day, he had more old pound notes exchanged for valid money than in all the weeks before.
He was so gloriously tired by the time he returned to his lodgings, he was sure he would sleep like a baby. However, the moment he opened the window to let some fresh air into his tiny room, Ada whizzed past him. The owl alighted on the headboard and stuck her leg out.
...
The small parcel Ada had brought contained a piece of parchment bearing the Malfoy crest and a short note from his mother informing him of a recent ruling of the Wizengamot: prisoners were henceforth allowed to receive letters from close relatives on a few, select occasions. She mentioned strict regulations, but specified only the one about children being permitted to send birthday greetings to an imprisoned parent.
Draco reached for the empty parchment. He had only hours to compose a letter. His father's birthday was tomorrow.
What should he write?
What could he write? He had no doubt the letter would be read by the guards. So, he had better avoid mentioning his current whereabouts.
Would it be safe to write that he was doing fine – moderately fine at any rate – lest his father worry about him? Or would the snooping clerks perhaps react with, "What, Malfoy is doing fine? That can't be tolerated! Let's make sure that this changes!"
All at once, he was back in the middle of things happening. The feeling of being powerless, of having no control over his life was back, and it was as intense as ever.
He carefully placed the parchment upon his pillow. He got up and, slightly trembling, walked over to the window. The first stars glittered in the sky.
Why was he such a failure?
Why couldn't he cope?
Wasn't he so much better off than his father, who was imprisoned in a horrible place infested with vile, life-sucking creatures?
What did Azkaban do to its victims? The rumours said it damaged both their mental and physical health. Were those just rumours? Or did the foul place indeed shatter the inmates' self-esteem and weaken their will to live? Did it, in the long run, break their minds?
Draco had seen people who had been there for a long time, his uncles for instance, and Aunt Bellatrix. She was undeniably twisted. He couldn't tell, though, whether Azkaban had turned her into a psychopath, or whether she had been that way all along. Perhaps Dementors could not break the mind of people who were already insane. Uncle Rabastan, Uncle Rodolphus, Dolohov, Mr Rookwood – they all had a slight trait of madness about them. It was in their eyes, a strange glint that had made Draco's hair stand on end every time he had witnessed it.
His father hadn't been downright insane when he had returned after a year of imprisonment, yet he had been changed. The differences had been subtle, and Mother had steadfastly maintained that they were only temporary. But there had been no breather for his father, no time to recover.
Life had rapidly gone downhill, and Draco hadn't been able to do anything about it. He had wasted the one chance he had had. Although, in retrospect, he doubted that killing Dumbledore would have done him or his family any good. He had suffered derision and ridicule from his "fellow" Death Eaters for his failing, but success would have earned him their resentment, their envy, and a hatred-fuelled rivalry. Failing had rendered him insignificant. It had made him the target of cruel jokes, but success would have turned him into someone the others had to get rid off in order to ascend in the hierarchy. Some might have been content with inventing slander and cooking up intrigue, but sooner or later, some would have resorted to direct assault. So, in a sense, managing to kill Dumbledore would have elevated him to a position where he was forced to repeat the act of killing, if only to defend his own life. The odds would have been against him all the same because Aunt Bellatrix could never have borne the thought of him outshining her in any respect, and he wouldn't have survived an open confrontation with her, not even if his mother had thrown herself bodily into the fight.
Besides, the other side had won. Murdering their venerated leader would have landed him in Azkaban for the rest of his life.
He had gone free for some reason, but his father...
He had fearfully tiptoed around that thought for the past four months: He was free, but his father was in prison.
He leaned against the window frame and breathed in the scented night air.
Boxwood and thyme grew there amidst the shrubbery. The tangle of plants was, in point of fact, a neglected garden. He had realised that when he had done sketches and, therefore, taken a closer look. There were horseradishes, rose hips, sage...
It took all the willpower he could muster to step away from the window, to turn his back to it, to wrench his thoughts off the comfy topic, and to force them back to the painful one – he had done nothing to save his father from going back to Azkaban.
On the contrary, he had probably betrayed him even further.
It didn't help much to remind himself that the situation his father was in now had nothing to do with what he, Draco, might have told the Aurors after he had downed the Truth Serum. His father was serving a sentence for burgling the Ministry two years ago, and he had to serve it twice as punishment for escaping from prison.
But would helping not have been the duty of a faithful son?
He was sure his father would see things that way. One day, he would have to answer to him for his actions, or rather, for the complete lack of any action whatsoever. Absolutely not knowing what to do had never been an excuse in his father's eyes.
Draco recalled the first time he had severely disappointed his father, or, at any rate, the first instance he was aware of. His shame had been so intense, the event had etched itself into his memory: At a very young age, he hadn't been able to pronounce his grandfather's given name. So, he had once said Abbasass when there had been guests present. The strangers had laughed out loud. As if this had not been mortifying enough, his father had berated him until Draco's mother had intervened. Although his father had fallen quiet, Draco had felt the embarrassment burning in his cheeks. The heat had flared up again as often as he had dared to glance at his father's face that evening.
He had always wanted to do his father proud.
All of a sudden, he felt the urge to kick something; the pent-up frustration needed an outlet. But there was nothing kickable within reach.
He flung the door open and bolted down the ladder-like stairs, stumbling at the end and colliding with somebody in the dimly lit hall.
"Mind to look where you're going?" he yelled out, pushing past. "Stupid Muggle oaf!"
He stormed out of the house with angry shouts following him. The voice sounded like a girl's. He didn't listen.
He rushed into the night, only realising where he was heading when he had already reached the beach.
He threw his clothes down and dived into the sea.
...
27. Cruel Irony
He didn't want to.
He didn't want to think about all these things.
He didn't want to remember.
He didn't want to remember the dinner party when he had said Abbasass. He didn't want to remember the afternoon at the Ministry when he had said Merlin knew what.
He kicked the water with all his might.
But no matter how hard he kicked and pushed, the water would still engulf him like, figuratively, his memories engulfed him regardless of his efforts to push them away.
There was no avoiding it. All these memories of failure and fiasco, of errors and fear, of betrayal and shattered hopes were part of him.
But he wished they weren't.
All this incompetence, all this weakness and inadequacy was, essentially, him.
But he wished it wasn't.
He switched to the swimming mode he knew to be the most exhaustive one. You had to move your legs like a fishtail and to raise both arms out of the water simultaneously, pulling the whole upper part of your body along. He couldn't keep this up for longer than a minute before his strength failed him. He rested for long enough to catch his breath, and then he started again. After that, he did a third round. And then, a fourth one.
By the time he trudged back to dry land, he was shaking with cold and fatigue. He could only just keep his teeth from chattering, but the haunting memories were blissfully dulled.
There were people on the beach. In the darkness, he first thought they were a trysting couple. When he came nearer, though, he saw that they both were men in their thirties.
He had no choice but to walk up to them because they lurked exactly where he had dropped his clothes.
They gave him outrageously curious stares. Such behaviour seemed highly inappropriate even for Muggles. Pretending not to notice the sodding gits, Draco struggled to pull his trousers up his wet legs. Of course, he had no towel to dry himself with since he wasn't on a carefully planned outing, but had got here in a frenzied dash.
"You had better go to the Naturists' Club for that," one of the strangers suddenly said.
"And you had better mind your own business," Draco rejoined.
He flung his vest and shirt over his shoulder, grabbed his other stuff, and walked away from the giggling idiots. They actually giggled! Then again, Muggles did behave in crazy ways every so often. He therefore told himself that he shouldn't worry too much about the encounter.
On the contrary, he felt strangely sober. He dressed himself properly when he was halfway between the two Muggle idiots and the village. Since he was still very cold, he ran all the way back to his lodgings.
...
The door to his room stood wide open. He had left it that way he realised with a jolt. He hastened to check on the money. It was where it belonged – either in the plastic bags beneath the clothes or still in the rucksack.
Nothing in the room seemed touched. The sole exception was the parchment. It lay no longer on the pillow, but in the middle of the bed. Ada sat next to it, giving him reproachful looks.
"Yes, I know," he sighed.
He didn't want to.
He didn't want to write this letter. There was nothing he had to say. All he had were an endless catalogue of questions, doubts, and a heavily distorted picture that showed his life as a succession of misfortunes and debacles. No more than the hundredth part of all this would fit on a single sheet of parchment. Above all, any such listing would only delight the nosy guards. His father would drop it in disgust.
He selected a dark green crayon and, pressing the parchment against the locker, wrote,
"Father,
I apologise for being such a disappointment to you.
Draco"
He rolled the parchment up without giving his writing another glance. There was something amiss here, most definitely. He couldn't wrap the problem up in words, though, and that made him even more uneasy. For a few seconds, he toyed with the idea of not sending the letter at all but a Fiendfyre sketch in its stead and felt promptly shocked at how such a thought could ever occur to him.
He fastened the parchment to the owl's leg, fumbling with haste. He had to get rid of this letter; he had to get over with this upsetting task.
Ada flew off into the starry sky, but his gloomy mood remained.
He wouldn't see his father for a very long time...
He stood by the window, breathing in the cool night air and the scents from the forgotten garden below.
Had he ever had the means to help his father to go free? He could have told the Aurors of his own free will what he most likely had told them anyway under the influence of Veritaserum: how Lucius Malfoy had been humiliated by the monster, how he had been forced to surrender his wand, and how he had almost been killed by his sister-in-law. But all these things had happened afterwards, after the attempted theft and the breakout. Later mishaps could not serve to rectify former deeds.
Besides, the only effect of such details being known would be – or, in all probability, was going to be – a lesser chance for his father and the family in general to regain any sort of reputation. Hoping for a revision of an already pronounced verdict was futile. The Wizengamot would never consider taking a sentence back. They wouldn't do so even if there was overwhelming new evidence to prove a man's innocence. The name of Sirius Black had not been cleared even though the truth about Wormtail had been revealed.
Twelve years in Azkaban, served for nothing...
His father had still to serve more than six, almost seven years. Maybe Azkaban couldn't break people who were strong, people like Sirius Black, like the Lestrange brothers, like Mr Rookwood or Antonin Dolohov.
But his father wasn't strong. It had been a shock to realise that. However, it had been one shock among many. It didn't stick out very prominently.
He had always wanted to be like his father. This had been both his topmost goal and his deepest desire. He had done everything for it. He had diligently pretended whenever he couldn't achieve the real thing. Or so he had thought. In truth, the act of pretending had been a more accurate imitation of his father than he had realised at the time. Like his father, he had hidden his shortcomings behind a meticulously maintained facade. And like with his father, there wasn't much left once that facade had tumbled down.
Was there a reason why his abilities were hardly above average or why he lacked the brilliance and courage others possessed in abundance?
He was descended from two of the finest bloodlines; the Blacks were practically royalty. He had been taught from the earliest age that he was to consider himself superior not only to Muggles but also to the majority of wizarding folk, pure-bloods included.
By now, this sounded like a particularly bad joke.
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Author's note:
Many thanks go to Nooka and Athaeth for beta reading.