Posted: 12/04/15

Beta: the artful scribbler

Unprepared

3rd August, 1998

Draco was high. He was high above the earth, his home, and momentarily his troubles.

His new Firebolt was pretty damn amazing! Slicing through the cool air of elevated altitudes was a rush unlike any other. He'd spent his entire fourth and fifth year of school begging Father for one of these - it had galled him that Potter owned one when he didn't - and Draco knew he'd finally acquired it by guilt. Not that he was necessarily trying to make his parents feel guilty.

Draco was so far off the ground today he wouldn't be surprised to see one of those insane Muggle thingies, the huge ones made of metal, flying past him. When he was younger Draco hadn't been allowed to go much higher than the trees, but since the Dark Lord didn't care about the International Statute of Secrecy, Draco could soar with the eagles with complete impunity.

He liked coming up here and gazing at the horizons. He knew with the Firebolt between his knees it would only take him a few hours to reach them. This was a pointless unrealistic fantasy, but he couldn't seem to stop himself from indulging in it from time to time. Draco just wanted to leave his life behind. He wanted to fly away.

Draco couldn't believe how drastically everything had changed in the past two years. There had been one bad omen, on the evening of his fifteenth birthday. It was right after the Dark Lord had returned to power, and Father's Dark Mark had begun to burn during Draco's birthday supper. They planned to cut the cake soon, but Father told him that his master was calling him and he had to leave.

"Can I come, Dad?" he had eagerly asked. Now Draco cringed when he remembered how naïve he'd been at that point.

Father had fixed him with a look that was partially proud, but there was something else in it too - something he had not been able to recognize at the time. It was sort of like the way Father had looked at Draco when was hospitalized for Dragon Pox at the age of nine. Now Draco understood that wary look for what it was, and it was not at all surprising that he had been unable to discern it when he was newly fifteen. It was fear. And that was not an emotion he was accustomed to seeing in Father's eyes. Not back then anyway.

"It's my birthday! Can't I meet the Dark Lord? It would be a great present!" he had insisted. He usually expected to get his way, because he so often did.

But Father had used a tone, the special one that meant he would brook little argument and Draco shouldn't push his luck.

So Father had left them, and he still had yet to return by eleven. Draco had gone to bed that evening feeling a bit disappointed that Father had to leave on his birthday, but still very proud of him for being a friend of the Dark Lord's.

But Draco had woken up in the middle of the night, something he rarely did. He was not sure what had called him out of his deep easy slumber. Draco got out of bed and went, for some inexplicable reason, to Father and Mother's room. Their bed was empty, but the door to the lavatory was half-open and there was a stretched and beveled patch of candlelight on the floor, lighting his way to the unknown scene inside. He could hear Mother and Father talking; their voices were lowered, so he wasn't sure why he'd awakened or why there was a heavy lump of anxiety in his stomach, as he softly crossed the room on his quiet naked feet.

Making sure he stood outside the pool of light undulating on the floor, he was paralyzed by the grisly scene inside. Blood, Father's blood, was all he could see; the drops and rivulets of the crimson liquid glared vividly against the light grey coloring of the large marble lavatory. Father sat on the broad edge of the bath, bare-chested and battered. Mother stood in front of him wearing a buttery night dress that was floor-length and lacy. Draco saw that she had pinned her thick golden hair in a slapdash bun, and it was one of the few times that he'd seen her looking anything but impeccably coifed. Mother held a large blue phial in one hand, and with the other she gently dabbed at her husband's many cuts and bruises with a bloodied cloth. The pungent smell of the antiseptic potion that filled Draco's nostrils was a familiar one. He watched them, horrified and utterly transfixed.

"I had to tell him, Cissa," Father said. His hands were trembling with the pain and the after effects of the trauma.

"Why didn't you lie to him?" Mother had inquired softly, a touch of disgust in her voice.

"I can't lie to him. No one can. He kept asking and asking, and I tried to evade him," Father confessed, bringing up his trembling hands to rub over his eyes. "But there was nothing I could do," he told her. "I didn't think he'd be that upset about an old book. I mean, it was obviously an object with immense power, but… I don't know, Cissa." Father's voice was shaking badly at that point. "He was angrier than I have ever seen him. I thought my life was over. I thought I would never see you and the boy again."

Father, rather roughly it seemed to Draco, pushed Mother's graceful blood-splattered hands away from his body and reached out with his long white arms to hook her haphazardly around her slim waist. He watched Father pull Mother down to his lap, bury his head in the corner of her neck, and then his shoulders began to heave. Draco heard an odd noise reverberating out from the lavatory.

The entire world seemed to be falling away from beneath Draco as he realized that Father, his fearless, powerful father, was actually crying. As quietly as he could, Draco slipped back to his bedroom, because the only thing worse than knowing Father could cry, would be for Father to know that Draco knew hecouldcry.

After that day, Draco stopped thinking of the Dark Lord as Father's friend, and he began to understand why he was always referred to as Master. Little did he then suspect that a mere one year later the Dark Lord would become his own Master too.

Draco took a nose dive at a dizzying spin, slicing through the air like Sectumsempra through satin, and pulled up just before he reached the ground. Once he was back on earth, back home and with his problems all before him, he headed up a shaded path that led to the garden. He was parched, and knew Mother would have some refreshments waiting at the Nook.

"'Elp!"

Draco hesitated for a moment, and then stepped off the path and made his way through the spiny undergrowth, to the coniferous tree in which he knew he'd find her sitting. She was spectacularly stupid, this little freak.

"'Elp!" she called again right before he came into sight.

She saw him then and directed her cries for assistance at him. "Would you's 'elp me down?"

She wasn't even that far off the ground, her head was just a bit higher than Draco's own, but obviously being a cripple made it impossible for her to jump down safely. For the life of him, Draco couldn't figure how any person as brain-dead as Jane could have survived for even five years, let alone twelve. Jane climbed up this tree about every other day and couldn't get manage to get down. He thought, by now, she would have either worked out which branches to use as a ladder, to lower herself safely back to the ground, or she would have realized that she should quit going up the tree in the first place.

"You're a complete moron. You know that don't you?" he asked her.

"Please 'elp me."

"Why do think mudbloods are so stupid? Got any half-brewed theories sloshing around that empty head of yours?"

"Please 'elp me's down," she repeated.

"I'll help you down…if you say, 'I'm a stupid mudblood.'"

"Please," she said softly in her husky voice. Draco didn't think her deep voice matched her size. It wasn't masculine really, it just didn't seem right that someone so immature should have such a grown-up sounding voice.

"Poisson, why do you always climb this tree when you know you can't get down?"

She didn't say anything but her lower lip started to quiver. It seemed like she couldn't get through one day without crying at least five times. And sure enough, as Draco stood there watching, a small tear started sliding down her mucky face.

Merlin's beard she was so filthy! Draco looked her over and saw she had already ruined the brand new gown his parents had purchased for her in Diagon Alley. The hem was ripped and caked with dirt, and crusted remnants of her breakfast and lunch spattered the bodice. All this combined with her dusky skin and he thought she really put the 'mud' in mudblood. He hated getting her out of this tree, having to touch her, but knew he was duty-bound to do it, so she wouldn't wind up breaking her revoltingly precious neck.

"Please?" she asked again with a trembling voice.

"I told you. Say, 'I'm a stupid mudblood', and I'll get you down," he told her, vicious and inclement, his pale eyelids lowering to malicious slits.

She put her forehead against the trunk she was clinging to and started crying harder. "Please get me's down."

"Say it first, and then I'll get you down."

She just kept crying. She was a stubborn little thing.

"I'll give you one more chance, Poisson. Say 'I'm a stupid mudblood', or you're going to find out whether these woods really are infested with werewolves at the full moon," he said. It was a lie, of course. No Malfoy would ever tolerate a werewolf in their woods, and he honestly wasn't sure whether the moon was full this night or not. But she didn't know that, and he was pleased to see her eyes widening in fear and panic. With the instincts of a born predator, remembering what Scabior had told the Dark Lord the day she was delivered, he added, "Sometimes Greyback runs around back here, too."

"Please!" she wailed. "Please get me's down!"

"Fine, I'm going back to the house now," Draco replied nonchalantly, and started to walk away.

"Wait!" she sobbed urgently. "Please don't be leaving me's 'ere! Please, come back!"

He walked a few more paces and then stopped and turned around.

"Come on, Poisson," he said softly. "Just admit that you're a stupid mudblood. We all know it, including you."

"Okay, I's say it! I's a stupid mudblood! Now please be 'elpin' me's down now!" she cried.

Having extracted his cruel-but-necessary toll - and not feeling as satisfied by it as he hoped he would - Draco crossed the small clearing to the tree. He stepped onto the lowest branch, getting himself level with her, and wrapped his arm around her. She smelled awful, sort of sweaty and sour. Sometimes these unpleasant scents mingled with other mysterious musky odors that Draco refused to try and identify.

Jane clung to him with all her might, one tiny arm around his neck, the other clutching tightly around his middle; until he had carefully lowered himself, and then her, to the ground. Luckily she was very light. Draco doubted she even came to seven stone. Once she could feel that her foot and her prosthesis were both planted firmly on the moist earth she swiftly released him, and with a mumbled, rather doleful, 'fanks', headed toward the garden, swiping her foul, sap-sticky hands over her dirt-colored cheeks.

He strode a little ways behind her and watched her walking. He despised her limp as much as everything else about her. The idea of her deformity sickened him. He didn't understand how anything as pathetic as her would want to exist. Why didn't she just off herself and put him and his parents out of their misery?

When he was a little boy, Draco had often had a certain idea. He'd mulled it over many times, despite knowing that it would never happen. When he was young he had thought that if for whatever reason (a reason he could never come up with), some ordinary Muggle were to come into his home, look around at their beautiful manor, see his parents using magic, come face-to-face with the glorious portraits of their numerous ancestors, get a glimpse of the wall-to-wall tapestries that depicted their vast family-tree and lineage, and just really understand what he and his family were - the height of purity and power – then that Muggle would then go back to whatever dingy shack it came from and look around it and, once it was forced to recognize how dismal its own pointless, dreary, magic-less existence truly was, it would inevitably decide to end its own life. He had been persuaded of the truth of this idea with a passionate conviction that is common in children and rare in adults. Draco hadn't really remembered that idea in years. But now that Jane was living with them it had come back to him.

He and Jane rounded the last garden path and headed into the courtyard toward the Nook where his parents were sitting. When they saw them approaching Mother poured them each a glass of lemonade.

"You sit there," Draco told her, pointing to the chair positioned closer to the fountain.

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm not sitting downwind of you," he said simply.

Father glanced up from the book he was reading, saw that Jane was now positioned downwind of him, and uttered a dour 'thanks' toward Draco.

"Poisson, what have you done to your new dress?" Mother asked.

Jane plopped herself gracelessly into her appointed seat and just shrugged, as though she didn't know or care what had happened to it.

"The Dark Lord is coming to see you in a little while, Poisson," Father told her.

She didn't say or do anything to indicate that she heard him. She just sipped her lemonade and helped herself to one of the pears from a bowl in the middle of the table.

"Did you slip away yesterday evening?" Mother asked her.

Father and Draco both looked at Jane to see if she would answer the question. She didn't have to tell them anything, not really. The Malfoys were simply her caregivers, not her masters, and her duties to the Dark Lord were really between her and him. However, since she was in their care they all knew that, in a lateral way, they were responsible for her ability to slip away.

Jane nodded, and they all experienced a release of tension in their shoulders, chests, and bellies.

It seemed cruel to the Malfoys that they might be held accountable for anything as arbitrary as Jane's "power" appeared to be. But there it was.

"How are you enjoying your Firebolt?" Father asked Draco.

Draco lifted his long arms over his head and stretched. Then he casually crossed them behind his head. "It corners on a sickle," he answered.

"Good," Father said.

Draco watched Father gently twirling the dark contents of his wine glass in between sips.

Bellatrix appeared in the doorway leading to the conservatory. She didn't come out completely, just hovered there noncommittally and called out, "When did you say He's coming Cissy?"

Mother, her back to Bella, rolled her eyes a bit and answered, "In about an hour, Bella." She didn't raise her voice the way her sister did. That was such a common way to behave, and when they were growing up, Bella had known this too.

Bellatrix must have heard Mother anyway, because Draco could see her mouth spread in an indecently-pleased, gap-toothed smile, and she turned back into the conservatory. Through the glass walls Draco watched his aunt heading into the house. She was practically skipping, he noted in mild disgust.

Draco felt Mother should have been more honest when she spoke of her sister, languishing in wizard's prisons. When he had come home for his summer holiday, right after he had learned of Father's capture in the Ministry, he knew he would finally meet this infamous aunt of his. His first thought on seeing her was that she wasn't pretty any more. In fact with her hollowed eyes, slovenly hair, and careless attire, his first impression of her was that she seemed a bit less the progeny of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black than he had been led to believe, and a good deal more feral. Sometimes first impressions are spot on. He had learned over the years why she'd received a life sentence in Azkaban. But torturing a couple of people into insanity, all in the name of restoring the magnificent Dark Lord, had seemed so noble and a bit glamorous to him then, when it was all just words.

The reality of the Cruciatus Curse was an entirely different thing in all its panoramic sick-making sounds and scents. He hadn't known that after thirty minutes of muscle-clenching agony blood vessels begin to rupture, nasal cavities start to leak mucus and blood, bladders release their contents, and eventually so will bowels. Draco hadn't known that after listening to screams of anguish for so long, they would embed themselves in his skull, so that hours later, no matter how exhausted he might be, the strangled, ear-splitting echoes would still be clashing and colliding inside his aching mind.

"So Poisson," Father interrupted these dire thoughts, "do you think you managed to gather some useful information for our master?"

She shrugged again.

Over the past couple of months of caring for Jane, the Malfoys had noticed that one of her few good qualities was her silence. She almost never spoke unless she absolutely had no other choice. She hummed incessantly and was outrageously uncouth, but other than that she didn't intentionally draw attention to herself. Well, that is, if you didn't count her stench. She always bobbed her head up and down, or shook it back and forth, to answer yes and no questions. She also had this irritating way of shrugging, even if they were asking her a question that other people might use as an invitation to give their opinion. Jane would just vaguely lift her shoulders. They could only assume that her extreme ignorance of the English language prevented her from understanding the words they used that contained more than two syllables. When they discussed this among themselves Father always said, "Well, I have to say I prefer a laconic mudblood to a garrulous one." And Mother and Draco instantly voiced their agreement. It was better all around that she spoke too little than too much.

"Did you have a good time playing in the woods, Poisson?" Mother asked her.

"She got stuck up that tree again," Draco imparted rancorously, glaring curses at her.

"It's not safe for you to climb trees, Poisson," Narcissa said calmly, in a pretense of concern.

"You're going to fall and get hurt," Lucius chimed in, sounding equally mock-mindful.

They were all looking at her to see how she would respond.

Jane just pulled her good leg - the left one - onto her chair, pulled her dress up and started picking at a scab on her knee, meanwhile giving everybody at the table an unobstructed view of her new white knickers. Draco and Father - who had been exposed to these types of unseemly displays before - scowled at each other, sharing a complicit revulsion of her immodesty and a tinge of shame on her behalf - since she apparently had none.

"Poisson!" Mother exclaimed, actually raising her voice. Draco knew she was angry at herself for being incensed to such unrefined measures, but mostly angry with Jane for making her behave in this brash way. "Put your dress down! How many times do I have to tell you that it's indecorous to expose your legs above your knees?"

Jane put her leg down.

Very slowly, as though he was addressing a person of substandard intelligence, and well, he was really, Draco fastened his gray eyes on her and said, "Indecorous… means… not… good."

His parents started to snicker but their amusement swiftly transformed to disgust when they saw Jane stick her finger in her nose. All three of them groaned, and simultaneously cried, "Stop that!"

Jane got up and wandered toward the fountain. She seemed to love the bright blue and green fish living in its murky depths. It made sense that she had a preference for the slippery creatures, as she probably acknowledged them as kin.

"It's so degrading to have that thing here," Father said, quite monotonously Draco thought.

Lately Draco had begun to realize that he was angry with his father and mother. It wasn't an incendiary sort of anger that inflamed his mind and inspired rebellion, but merely a disapproving type of cool discontent that lapped icily at his insides. His entire life, Father and Mother had reared him in a thoughtless bubble of innocence and indulgence. He had been petted and pampered, puffed-up with praises of his positive perfections. He was wholly unprepared for the world of the Dark Lord and his aggressive followers. He now knew that his parents had been downright remiss in educating him. They should have exposed him to the…less appetizing aspects of torture and violence from an earlier age.

In their defense, Draco knew that neither of them had once entertained a hope that the Dark Lord would really rise again. He couldn't count the number of times he'd heard Father lamenting the loss of his master: the one wizard with enough power to restore the Pure-bloods to their proper status. But Draco had believed that reinstating their status would be limited to more bureaucratic practices, like not allowing mudbloods to attend Hogwarts, and making sure only the ethnically pure attained the highest positions in government and in the work force. Over the past year, since that night on the astronomy tower, the Dark Lord had done these things. Albeit in the messiest manner possible.

"What is that, the third dress It's ruined this week?" Father asked.

He didn't really care about the dress. Martha, it transpired, had mastered quite a bit of magic that pertained to the mending and stain removal of garments. The Malfoys rarely had need for such things themselves, as they took meticulous care of all their possessions. They also replaced their wardrobes every few months, but Martha couldn't afford to do this. They weren't sure exactly how many children she had - it might have been anywhere from six to a round dozen as far as they were concerned, which wasn't at all. But even if Martha couldn't repair Jane's tattered dresses, the Malfoys would have just ordered some new ones from Twilfitt and Tatting's.

Draco was so sick of the mudblood. He knew he and his parents had little else to say to one another. Discussing their own lives, for which more than a few comparisons to the damaged condition of Jane's dresses could be fairly made, wasn't really an option for the Malfoys. So they simply discussed her, criticized her, admonished her, used her to make them feel better about themselves. They were also beginning to realize that Jane could potentially be on the brink of having a higher status with the Dark Lord than they did, or even would for a long time yet.

It wasn't as though Draco had thought the Dark Lord was going to be some fluffy, chummy man who would pinch his cheeks or keep sweets in his pocket to pass out to those who made clever jokes or pleased him. He'd just thought…a Death Eater meeting would be more like a formal dinner party, with plenty of polite conversation between sophisticated, well-dressed pure-bloods. He imagined everyone in attendance would all have the same cultured accents as him and his parents. Perhaps there might be an occasional bawdy joke spoken in French to excuse its lewd nature. They would discuss things in a civilized manner, make toasts with good liqueur, and there would be… a level of equality. And he never thought they would be forced to host these gory meetings against their will.

But however disappointed Draco might feel about Father and Mother glossing over the nastier aspects of the Death Eater life, he also was unspeakably grateful to them. Thank Merlin they'd had the sense to marry one another, and they'd given him an unblemished bloodline. By now he knew that, no matter what lowly position they might retain in their master's ranks, their spotless heredity lent them an iron-clad lifeline. That is, as long as they all kept their heads down and gave the right answers, which, given that they were all Slytherins, the ability to do these things was pretty much inherent.