Author's note: I'm sorry for keeping you waiting. Real life kept getting into the way of writing fan fiction. However, here is the next chapter. Enjoy!
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58. Shocks and Strawberries
It was early in the morning, and Mrs Bates was bustling about in her usual manner.
Draco put the little stack of banknotes on the sideboard as he always did.
"For July," he said.
Mrs Bates almost dropped the teapot. She gaped at the money and then at him.
"B-but Mr Malfoy," she stammered. "Aren't you going home for the summer?"
"My home is here," he said and added in the privacy of his mind, for the time being.
"But..." she faltered. Her hands shook so badly that she spilled tea onto the tablecloth before she finally managed to put the pot down.
"Is there a problem?" Draco asked, a vague feeling of unease creeping over him.
"Oh, Mr Malfoy, I'm so terribly sorry! Look, I can't afford three empty rooms for more than ten weeks. That's why I always let the rooms to holidaying families during summer. Two have already booked in advance," she spluttered, and it was Draco's turn to be shocked.
"You're kicking me out! Why?" he exclaimed a lot louder than intended. The two sullen businessmen who sat at the nearest table looked up from their kippers and scowled at him, but he didn't care. "I've done nothing wrong! I've always paid the rent on time!"
"But I'm not throwing you out, dear! Of course, you can come back when term starts."
"And where do you suppose I will stay until then?" Draco snapped. "Just for your information – it's against the law to sleep on the beach!"
She looked bewildered.
"But why… Sleeping on the beach? What are you on about? Why aren't you going home?"
The way she stressed the last word gave him a jolt. Home? What home?
His home was here... or he had none at all. The stupid, fat cow – she was destroying his tranquillity, nay, his whole life! How did she dare!
She was prattling on, but Draco didn't listen. He couldn't. Whether it was with fury or with panic, he trembled where he stood. Thoughts surfaced that he hadn't been thinking for a very long time – Tremugenu, Densaugeo, Capillis Privari, Furnunculus, Tarantallegra, Cruditas... He shuddered. There was the prickly feeling again, spreading out from his wand hand and travelling up his arm.
Fighting down the upsurge of raw magic, Draco had a vision of his aunt. Cackling madly, Bellatrix Lestrange cast a Cruciatus Curse at the woman in front of him. Spine-chilling laughter filled the room like something tangible while the apparition whirled round and round and cast Cruciatuses in every direction – at the businessmen, at Mr Wong, at him. For a split second, it felt real – there were the all-consuming pain, the feeling of white-hot knives piercing every inch of skin, the horrible sensation of bones on fire...
You need to really want to cause pain... you need to want to enjoy it.
Bile rose from his stomach. He choked on it, feeling nauseous. Did he want to see Angela Bates writing on the floor in agony? Did he?
He spun on his heels and ran.
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He kept running for hours, panic and guilt battling in his chest for dominance. Panic screamed about just having lost his shelter and guilt cried that there had been a time when he would have laughed – actually laughed! – at Mrs Bates being tortured.
In the end, neither emotion won. He succumbed to exhaustion and queasiness and sank onto a bench in the shade of a huge oak tree.
He tried to think straight, but it was to no avail. His stomach was churning; he hadn't eaten all day. He hadn't even drunk anything, which was probably the reason why he felt dizzy.
He had sat on the bench for about ten minutes when he spotted Mrs Bates walking through the park. She carried a bowl. And she was moving towards him.
He looked down at his knees. He didn't want to see her. She had ruined everything. She had wiped out the spark of hope that he had been kindling. She had destroyed within the blink of an eye what he had been trying so hard to build for the past twelve months – a moderately safe and organised life or, at any rate, a passable imitation thereof.
He heard the soft, crunching noise of shoes on sand as she drew nearer. He told himself to get up and stalk off, but he was afraid he'd faint. He really felt sick.
She sat down next to him without asking his consent; he stared down at his knees, pointedly ignoring her.
Suddenly, the bowl that she had been carrying appeared in his narrowed field of view. It was filled to the rim with fresh strawberries, and she put it gently into his lap.
"There. You haven't eaten all day, Mr Malfoy," she said softly but with a chiding undertone that seemed completely out of place. "And I'm truly sorry."
When he reacted neither to her little speech nor to the offered food, she reached over and removed the thin film of transparent plastic that covered the bowl.
"Come on, don't act like a sulking child. Where are your manners?"
Her words, despite the mention of manners, might have failed to get through to him, but the smell that wafted up from the strawberries defeated him within an instant. He ate with far less reverence than the delicious fruit deserved.
Squashing the last one with his tongue, he shot Mrs Bates a sidelong glance.
She looked tense.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "If you'd asked in advance, it would have been easier to organise something for you."
The necessity of talking to her about his affairs had never occurred to him. It was always the same – he didn't see things coming until they hit him fair and square in the face. All Hogwarts students went home for the summer – why should Muggle schools have different regulations?
"Thanks for the strawberries," he said after a long minute of awkward silence.
"That's all right. You skipped breakfast, and it's already time for lunch now," Mrs Bates replied. "Now then, I could have asked you about your plans as well. It simply never crossed my mind. Mr Wong will move out this weekend. He is leaving for good because he's going to work for a consulting enterprise on the continent and, honestly, no student has ever wanted to stay for the summer months. But there's always a first, isn't it?"
She paused, waiting for him to say something.
"I was planning on staying here for the next four years," he stated.
"The next four years! So you're already planning on doing a Master's degree, do y- ... wait, what about the holidays? Are you saying you mean to stay for those times, too?
"I do. Or did, to be precise."
"You're still at odds with your parents, right?" she asked. "Is that why you don't want to go home?"
He took a deep breath. Then he said as calmly as possible, "Do yourself a favour, Mrs Bates, and refrain from mentioning my parents."
"Sorry," Mrs Bates said quickly. "I didn't know it was that bad."
He shook his head. He needed to keep the two worlds apart. He had troubles here, and he had troubles there, and each set of troubles was enough on its own.
"All right, it's none of my business to snoop into your family affairs," Mrs Bates went on. "Let's sort out the problem at hand. I checked the reservations for the next months. I can give you one of the first-floor rooms for the first days of July and later again after July 26. The weeks in between will be a bit tricky. I phoned a number of acquaintances who let rooms, too, and I found somebody with a vacancy for that time. You'll have to move back and forth between houses, but it's not very far – Old Mansion Lane, just on the other side of the ferry."
"On the other side of the ferry!" Draco exclaimed, sitting up straight. Maybe there was a solution after all!
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59. Reprise
Walking the distance from Trethwyn to the university and back again in one day would be a challenge. Perhaps he could pull that off every other day with a day of rest in between. He needed to know the exact schedule of the ferry, he had to figure out where to eat breakfast without having to go in the opposite direction first, and he had to notify Mrs Highbury of his altered working hours. Here, his thoughts stopped short.
In all likelihood, the head librarian was taking it for granted the same way as Mrs Bates did that students left for the summer. Anything else would give rise to questions.
He let out a sigh. He was going to miss the work.
"It's really not very far," Mrs Bates said pleadingly. "Given the number of jogging rounds you do every day, you should be well able to walk there. And I can organise a car for the luggage."
"Thanks. But I think I'll stay at Mr Penwith's lodging house in Trethwyn. I'll try, anyway. If that doesn't work out, I shall come back and take you up on your offer."
"Trethwyn!" She smiled for the first time that day. "Now, that's a lovely idea! Trethwyn is such a nice seaside place."
"It is," he agreed.
"So, this is settled?" she asked.
He hoped it was. He hoped they could get back on good terms with each other. He had to make himself accept that his landlady had meant no harm. She had simply acted on what her experience had taught her to do.
Quite another problem was how he had comported himself. What was the phrase she had used – sulking child? Well, maybe here was another hitherto diligently ignored truth. Even Zabini had called him a spoilt brat at times.
"I apologise," he said with an effort. A formal apology shouldn't be that hard to utter but, for reasons he didn't want to examine too closely, the shame was genuine. "I apologise for behaving like I did this morning."
"It's all right, Mr Malfoy. You were upset and raised your voice a bit. So what? You mustn't be too strict with yourself. We all have our weaknesses," she answered, much to his surprise. "You know, I was completely baffled at first. But then I realised that to you the matter must feel like I was really throwing you out without warning. Not knowing where to sleep the next day must be frightening."
He nodded mutely. She seemed content with her own explanation so he oughtn't say anything that made her think twice.
"When may I come back?" he asked after a moment.
"Well, dear, be back before courses will start by mid-September," Mrs Bates said eagerly. "And as for your belongings, the stuff you don't want to take with you – winter clothing and textbooks and all the other bits and pieces you don't need during the holidays – well, I have lockers in the basement. You can have one of them until you're back."
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He left for Trethwyn two days later.
The little village hadn't changed much. The lone chestnut tree was a bit bigger, the tourist office had a new roof, and one of the bakery girls was heavily pregnant. The well in the small square was as dry as it had been, the cars crawled tentatively along the cobbled streets, and the landscape was as wide and windswept as Draco remembered it.
Mr Penwith was feeding his chickens when Draco arrived.
The old man was obviously happy to see him. When he heard about staying until September 12, his happiness increased even further. He shuffled off and returned with the keys, a clothesline, and a stack of bedlinen. He handed these things over to Draco and told him to make himself comfortable.
Everything was as it had been – Draco occupied room number two, and smells of boxwood and thyme drifted in through the open window. He stood there for almost half an hour, gazing down at the neglected garden below and breathing in the fresh, salty air. He was looking forward to sketching coastal landscape instead of city vistas and also to swimming. Swimming was what he had missed most. But the shock of having to leave Hind Green Close all of a sudden hadn't completely faded yet. Mrs Bates had punctured his little bubble – the most recent one of his bubbles. It had proved exactly as fragile as all its predecessors. He longed for something solid, something that would last.
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Being back in Trethwyn turned out a mixed blessing.
Sketching was fine, and the swimming did him well, but roaming the hills brought back the very thoughts he had been thinking a year ago while walking the same paths. Every now and then, the same internal terror flared up as well. On such days, he wondered whether it had been a downright stupid idea to come here again. Most times, however, he could muster the strength to re-assess the old problems and unsolved mysteries. He marvelled at his grandfather's amazing foresight and mused about his father's flawed views of the world. He thought about how Pansy and Zabini had turned their backs on him and how Slughorn or McGoggleall or the Carrows had despised him – for different reasons maybe but with the same ardour. He thought again about Crabbe's ruined potion. He thought again about how he had failed to see the warning signs. By and large, he came to the same conclusion as before: He had been blind and gullible and above all, self-deceptive.
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Excluding his internal struggles, the days passed without major incident. They started with eating breakfast at the baker's – the shop assistant had her baby in early August – and ended, unless the sea was too rough, with a nice, tiring swim after sundown.
He did a lot of sketching. He still produced pictures of mortal fear and Chimera-headed flames but aside from them, he soon had also a sizable collection of pictures showing scenic views of the coast from Maiden's Cliff in the east to the promontory west of Trethwyn, the village itself, or plants that grew alongside the Coast Path.
Once a week, he undertook long walks in search of post offices or branch offices of bank houses to which he hadn't been before. Over time, he managed to change the better part of those outdated banknotes that he hadn't left in the locker at Hind Green Close.
Even though it would seem at a cursory look that nothing had changed in comparison to his first stay in Trethwyn, something was significantly different. Draco was pretty sure the women had worn the same kind of beach outfit the previous year, but back then, it hadn't affected him in the least. Now it did. His body's reaction to the display of female attributes was prompt and intense.
That was why he kept away from the more peopled parts of the beach and sought out stretches where he was more or less alone. However, no matter how carefully he avoided the immediate sight of sparsely clad women, their images would appear in his dreams, and the dreams would result in stained sheets.
Long hours of physical exercise – helpful as they were in fending off nightmares – seemed to have no effect on this kind of dream. Besides, his resolve to fight them wavered right from the start. If all the girls and gorgeous young women featuring in his dreams were Muggles without exception, so what? Whatever happened in his dreams happened there and only there. Dreams were as private as anything could get, especially such ones. No real-life action was going to ensue and no-one would ever know. His mother was not nearly as good as Legilimency as he had become at Occlumency.
As time went by, he also stopped feeling embarrassed about having to put freshly laundered pyjama trousers on the clothesline in the morning. Mr Penwith never even looked.
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60. Bloodied Talons
It was the last Sunday of August. The weather was nice – warm and dry with a pleasant, steady breeze blowing from the southwest – and the beach was packed with people.
Draco sat on a grassy patch above the cliffs and sketched a group of grown men fooling around with their little would-be boats. He had picked up the term surfboards somewhere.
This was one of the little pieces of information that he had gathered during the last few months. Another snippet of knowledge concerned the overhead ropes that led from one tall wooden pole to the next, marring the beauty of the landscape thereby. They weren't ropes put up for birds to sit on; they were wires. They carried electricity.
Electricity was apparently kept in very small houses that had no windows. Half of them didn't even have a door. Up until a short time ago, he had simply avoided them cautioned by the black and yellow signs saying things like Keep out! and Danger! High voltage. Often the signs showed also a triangle that framed a man struck down by lightning, and Draco had recently found out why: According to one of the French letters, electricity consisted of tamed lightning. It was used for illumination purposes and for making machines work.
But the writer of the letter had also maintained that electricity was only innocuous as long as it was properly caged because it would always try to break free and become wild and dangerous again. Safety depended on sufficient and durable insulation.
His knowledge still being superficial, Draco didn't know what sufficient and durable insulation was or how it could be achieved. Had the art been mastered since the letter had been written in 1892? Judging from the number of overhead wires, electricity seemed to be in wide use at the present time.
Nevertheless, a tamed dragon was still a dragon, and the many stern warnings were surely there for a reason. Once, he had witnessed a mother yelling at her two toddlers who had been chalking on one of the small electricity houses: Come here this instant! There is electric current in there! Do you want it to come out? The children had looked thoroughly horrified.
Draco could see the woman's point: teasing something – animate or inanimate – that was trapped was never a wise thing to do.
He paused. His hand, holding a burgundy-red crayon, hovered an inch above the paper. With consternation, he stared at the blood-dripping talons he had sketched instead of surfboards.
The memory welled up as red and hot as blood from torn flesh. Mocking a captured animal – wasn't that exactly what he had done?
He had wanted to impress. Overconfident and full of juvenile ignorance, he hadn't reckoned with the beast attacking him like a fury out of hell.
The blood had gushed from the deep slash so fast and in such great quantity he had feared he would bleed to death. His arm had gone limp; he hadn't been able to move it anymore. And nobody had even looked! Everybody had been gawking at the stupid oaf of a gamekeeper and his blasted bird.
The blood-loss hadn't been the main problem, though. Two standard doses of Blood-Replenishing Potion had made up for it. But Hippogriff talons had magical properties and that was why the injury hadn't just been a simple gash. Unknown magic had been at work in the wound. Snape had eventually provided a special brew that had stopped it. Unfortunately, the potion had suppressed all kinds of magic, which had made it impossible for Pomfrey to speed up the healing process with spells.
He had regained the full use of his wand-hand, but it had been a close call. He had listened in to what the nurse had told his parents, and her words had scared him a great deal.
The day after, he had put up a show of bravery and anger. Well, the anger had been genuine. Apart from that, his behaviour had been an act – Malfoys did not show weakness; Malfoys did not cry. Aged thirteen, he had believed this to be one of the most fundamental principles he had to live up to.
The thought that the accident might have been, at least partially, his own fault hadn't crossed his mind. On the contrary, his father raving about how that insufferable excuse for a teacher deliberately endangered the life and health of students had strengthened his conviction that whatever a Malfoy did was well done. If things didn't work out as planned, somebody had hampered the effort by wilful naughtiness or grievous incompetence.
Eagerly, he had awaited his father's success in having Hagrid removed from Hogwarts.
Maybe he should have looked a bit harder. Back then, he had seen the ensuing activities as an indication of how precious he was to his father. He had felt treasured and important. Unlike the year before when his father had paved the way into the Quidditch team for him with a liberal sum of Galleons, Draco had ignored the fact that he and his well-being weren't his father's only considerations. His father had aimed for a higher goal than getting rid of Hagrid. His father's ambition had been to bring down Dumbledore as well, and he hadn't made a secret of it. Quite the reverse had been true – he had explained to Draco how Hagrid's failure should be held against Dumbledore because the old fool had given a teaching position to a person who didn't even have N.E.W.T.s.
But Draco hadn't allowed the not-so-flattering details to penetrate his thick skull. Like his adored father, he had preferred to disregard what he didn't want to see.
He sighed and put the crayon back into the box. Then he shredded the picture that showed the pair of bloodstained talons methodically to bits no bigger than a fingernail.
He had been such an idiot. He had been so ill-informed and ill-advised, so blind, so naive... Maybe he would feel less bad now if he had tried at least once in a while to check some of the ready-made notions and concepts with which he had grown up for their soundness. Regrettably, his brain had been too soaked with vainglorious ideas to work effectively.
Then again, how much astuteness was to be expected of a thirteen-year-old, give or take three months?
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More notes:
(1) Many thanks to my beta readers Kevyn and TheMightyKoosh. :)
(2) Capillis Privari is the Latin term for hair loss. Tremugenu is an attempt to translate Jellylegs into something that sounds like an actual jinx.