92. Lonely Yule
Mrs Smith smiled at him and wished him a "Merry Christmas" when he checked out his reading material for the holidays.
On the whole, arrangements for Yule were similar to those of the previous year. Mrs Bates and her second cousins went to visit relations. Before she left, she presented Draco with a homemade fruitcake and a bowl filled with satsumas and assorted nuts; he gave her a small selection of spiced chocolates in turn. She didn't say much about him staying at her lodging house rather than seeing his parents, but the pity was in her tone of voice and in the expression on her face.
This time her attitude had an impact on him. He had brushed off all nostalgic feelings last year, reminding himself that he had lived through much worse Yule times. But this year, all alone in the eerily quiet lodging house, reminding himself of former Yule days led to actually remembering them.
The Yule break of 1997 he could only describe with the word horrible. He had escaped the Carrows for a while, but only to get Lestrange, Greyback, and the monster in exchange. He had thoroughly failed to make his parents understand his fears and doubts. In the end, he had almost wished he hadn't gone home at all.
He hadn't always spent Yule at home. In his second year, his father had refused to let him come home, advising him to make use of the holidays and study lest he be outdone again by a Mudblood. Two years later, his mother had insisted on him attending the Yule Ball. Another two years later, going home had been completely out of the question. There had been a Vanishing Cabinet to repair, an order to carry out, and a man to kill... He shuddered at the mere thought. Perhaps, at this point of time, he had still believed he would succeed eventually. But then he had run into Snape at Slughorn's party, and their subsequent argument had eroded Draco's already waning confidence even further.
Snape had accused him of speaking like a child.
Perhaps he had spoken like an idiot but certainly not like the child he had once been.
Yule had been so much different when he was a child. He remembered the sea of candles on the big table and the elegant decorations everywhere in the house. His grandfather had put up mistletoe. His mother, all solemn dignity, had read from Nature's Nobility. His father had showed him off to the guests.
Yes, there had been times when his father had been pleased with him.
Failure had never gone down well, but in the early years he had been able to straighten out his mistakes. He had learned to pronounce Abraxas properly or how and when to order the house-elves to punish themselves, and his father had been appeased.
But those times were gone, most definitely gone, and he could never have them back. He was no longer an innocent five-year-old. The manor had been taken away, his mother lived with an insufferable old bat, his father was in prison, and his grandfather was dead.
The Yule season after his grandfather's death had been the first one without mistletoe. Did this change signify something? If yes, what?
He leaned his forehead against the windowpane and scowled at the park shrouded in fog. The weather was dismal. His reading material didn't help to improve his mood, either. His Resident's Library Card limited the range of books he was allowed to check out. He had chosen some of the still unread books left on last year's list – a collection of boring French short stories and a likewise uninteresting treatise about a quadrennial sports competition called The Olympic Games.
He couldn't keep himself from thinking of his mother. How was she? He hadn't heard from her in more than a year.
Should he try to contact her? How? He had no owl, and sending her birthday greetings in an envelope adorned with a stamp showing queen Elizabeth II would be a horrible faux pas. Her reaction to a letter sent Muggle style was beside the point anyway because the post-people wouldn't find Runcorn's cottage. He would find it; he distinctly recalled the sign reading, Beware of Leeches. But if he visited, Runcorn might catch him. He couldn't risk that; he mustn't go near anyone who had a wand and didn't like him.
He was tempted to walk to Trethwyn instead, fog and cold be damned. Perhaps he could see Jory. Then again, feeling depressed hardly counted as an emergency.
...
The days went by at a snail's pace. He was alone with his memories, the ratio of distressing to good ones being ten to one.
He sketched mistletoe and decorated his room with the sketches. He doodled holly and ivy while he tried to piece together the ancient tale about Ivy and her two sons.
Ivy, a gifted witch, had lived approximately three thousand years ago. Her son Oakley had vanished at Halloween – Samhain in the old language – and reappeared at Yule. Holly, his brother, had been strong and had supported their mother during the time of Oakley's absence. But he, in turn, had gone missing between Beltane and Midsummer, and the task of comforting Ivy had fallen on Oakley.
According to Binns, the tradition of using mistletoe, ivy, and holly – plants that were green all year round – as Yule decorations was linked to this tale. Binns had also spoken about the year being divided into a time for growth, healing, and new beginnings and one for rest, reflection, and learning. But as much as Draco tried, he couldn't recapture the details.
He wished he had paid more attention to the ghost's teachings. Instead, he had once more made his parents' opinion his own. To his parents, history started with Salazar Slytherin. Whatever had happened before had never been of much interest to them.
Why?
...
93. The Ultimate Lie
Starting with his parents, Draco charted his family tree. Most of it he knew only as text. It was the first time he attempted to put the entire set of data into the form of a diagram – with surprising results.
There weren't sixty-four people in the generation of the great-grandparents of his great-grandparents, and there were considerably less than one hundred and twenty-eight names in the preceding generation. Part of the shrinkage was due to normal pedigree collapse that occurred whenever people married people they were related to. But the main reason was that the lines ended, and some of them were startlingly short even though he did remember every date and name his mother had made him learn by heart. While learning them, he hadn't minded that all lines eventually broke off because this had saved him from the impossible task of having to memorise an infinite amount of data.
But now he wondered.
His patriline ended nine hundred years ago. Where Guiot, father of Pavo, had come from was unclear. Cepheus the Swarthy, the earliest known ancestor in the Black line, had died in 1156. Only one single line – a small part of the ancestry of Abraxas Malfoy's second mother-in-law and, hence, one of Draco's great-grandmothers – extended actually into the first millennium. However, the further it stretched back in time the less precise became the wording. There were phrases like born ten days after the autumnal equinox without a year given or Morfydd, daughter of the mage Renfrew and the sorceress Gwanwyn, was a contemporary of the four founders.
The founders had lived more than a thousand years ago so maybe information was lost in the mists of time. But why did lines break off somewhere in the nineteenth century?
In many cases, Draco knew only the name of a Black or Malfoy's wife and sometimes not even that. There were statements like Deneb Black married on January the sixth, 1817. His wife descended from a notable East Anglian family. It said nothing more than that there had been a wife, which was somewhat obvious because Procyon Black must have had a mother. Why her family had been noteworthy wasn't explained. No name was given and no remark made about her blood status. The statement was completely pointless. It didn't even say that Deneb's wife had been a witch.
Draco drew a deep breath. Could that be?
Could that possibly be?
He took a closer look. There were two nameless individuals in the suspiciously short bloodline of Druella Black nee Rosier, his mother's mother. No ancestor of Beatrice Knightley, wife of Abraxas Malfoy's grandfather Eugenius, was known. Every line that branched off from either his or his mother's patriline ended with a rather vague description of someone's wife, husband, mother, or father. Was that pure coincidence? How likely was slackness when an issue as important as blood status was concerned?
He snatched up the sheets that lay spread out on the floor, crumpled them into tiny balls, and tossed them into the waste-paper basket. It didn't help. The doubt was there. And he knew, he just knew, if he ever found a piece of evidence, it would not resolve the doubt but prove the lie.
He stood still for a moment, trying to keep the erupting anger in check. It was futile. What bubbled up within him was something akin to the irrational turmoil that Weasley used to evoke in him, something he couldn't handle – fury combined with a feeling of utter powerlessness. It made him want to yell, to lash out, to kick.
He grabbed his parka and raced down the stairs.
...
He ran much faster than usual. He didn't really believe the physical exercise was going to soothe him, but wearing himself out was all he could do to keep himself from smashing Mrs Bates's furniture to bits.
Why did everything turn out a lie?
From his earliest childhood on, his parents had encouraged him to think of others as being inferior. They had told him over and over and over again about his flawless bloodline and how he was therefore destined for pre-eminence. They had made it seem a fundamental principle of life.
Could he have doubted them?
Children depended on their parents. The younger they were, the more they were at the mercy of their mothers and fathers. The parents defined the world, its outline and boundaries, its contents, its meaning and purpose. Children had no means of escape; they didn't even know that a thing called "escape" existed. If there was an "outside", it was probably hostile and dangerous and to be avoided. They had no other protection than their parents.
Why should he have doubted his parents?
Having more and better toys than everybody else, being better clad than everybody else, living in a bigger manor than everybody else, plus boasting a lineage longer and more immaculate than everybody else's had seemed proof enough.
Boasting was a fitting word indeed. He had enjoyed showing off – his flying prowess, for instance, not realising that it wasn't such a big feat to outperform Crabbe or Goyle on a broom. With arrant pride he had repeated his father's words – words like It will be a crime if my son isn't picked to play for Slytherin house.
Drenched in such beliefs, he had gone to Hogwarts where he was confronted with the infuriating fact that other people got picked to play for their house during the very first flying lesson of their life. He hadn't considered the possibility that said people might be more talented than he was. Instead, he had been fuming. He had vented his frustration by blaming McGonagall and Dumbledore and the rest of their bunch for their foolishness and bias and favouritism.
The rage had turned into downright hatred when his father no longer had words of praise for him. I would have thought you'd be right ashamed that a girl of no wizard family beat you in every exam. Had he been ashamed? Probably yes, but fury had usually trounced all other feelings, especially when he was humiliated in public. I hope my son will amount to more than a thief – said by the man who served a sentence for burglary – though if his school marks don't pick up that may indeed be all he is fit for.
But his father's rapidly changing attitude towards him hadn't stopped him from parroting the man at every possible opportunity.
When should he have started to doubt his parents?
It had taken him forever to spot the catch in You are supposed to outshine the rest of the world. It was the word supposed. The realisation had made him panic. Merlin knew he had tried to live up to the doctrine. But at the utmost, he had come second best. Most times he had not even managed that. Failing and failing again had made him all the angrier. He had directed his boiling anger towards those he had considered responsible for his misery – the disgusting riff-raff that didn't belong in the wizarding world and the stupid do-gooders and blood-traitors who advocated the presence of Mudbloods and other misfits. Both his parents had encouraged this way of thinking.
Even after he had realised – much too late – the flaws in his father's concepts he had still believed his mother's teachings to be reliable.
And now he had uprooted the ugly truth. She had merely been subtler in deluding him. Obscuring undesirable facts with ambiguous phrasing was exactly the thing his mother would do.
He felt betrayed. He had been fed lies and half-truths throughout his childhood. He had never had all the facts. He didn't have all the facts now, either, but now he knew at least that he didn't have them.
It took a hundred laps until he had exhausted himself to a point where he no longer felt the urge to wreck something large and solid. He slowed to a walking pace as tears mingled on his face with the fine spray of falling fog. It was well after nightfall. He was alone in the park. He could sob as loud as he pleased.
...
He was cold and wet when he eventually walked back home. His vest and shirt were drenched in sweat, and the drizzle had soaked through the rest of his clothes.
He ran himself a bath, adding a generous shot of citrus-scented bath soap. He lounged in the warm water and enjoyed a little interlude of simulated intercourse. Then he lounged a bit more until the water started to cool off.
As he watched the water flow down the drain he wished it would take with it not only a few squirts of sperm but also the myriad of untruths.
...
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to be continued
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Author's notes:
(1) Many thanks for beta reading and advice go to TheMightyKoosh and Nooka.
(2) The story of Ivy and her two sons is loosely based on the tale of the Oak King and the Holly King.
There is no actual evidence in the books that Professor Binns ever talked about the topic. However, they are told from Harry's point of view, and there is always a good chance that he simply didn't pay attention...