Continuing from Chapter 7

The Afterlife – Cruise Ship

Draco's tiny cabin

"Draco?" Lucy knocked gently on his cabin door. "Are you decent?"

It took Draco an extraordinary effort to heave himself off his narrow bed, but he made it and slowly plodded the few steps to the door. His lack of speed was mostly due to the speedy case of sunburn he received from his outing in the ocean; the rest was due to what Lucy now realised was depression.

Lucy, on the other hand, looked as fresh and beautiful as a daisy, clad in a white sundress and an enormous straw hat. She winced at the sight of Draco's roasted skin. "You just need to get through today," she said, "and you'll wake up tomorrow as if nothing had happened."

While Draco wouldn't mind being rid of the sunburn, the thought of endlessly waking up, over and over, 'as if nothing had happened,' was almost enough for him to jump into the ocean again and look for the shark.

"Anyway," Lucy carried on, "I spoke to the people and they said they're prepared to help you out with your girlfriend problem."

Draco's cheeks flushed, not that Lucy could tell. "She's not my girlfriend!"

Lucy pursed her lips together. "Well, she's something, at any rate," she replied and grabbed Draco's hand, keen to get him out of his cabin and on to the next stage of his, er, Afterlife.

"Ow!" Draco snatched his hand back. "Mind the sunburn!"

Lucy sighed. "Just follow me."

Ship's Bridge

Draco followed Lucy over a long distance to the front of the ship and climbed up many narrow stairs until she ushered him into a massive room that spanned both sides of the vessel. The sun streamed in from a glass roof but instead of windows that ordinarily would have lined the walls, there were hundreds of little flickering screens. Squinting, Draco could make out moving images of people going about their daily lives. In the centre of the room where the ship's helm would normally be was a large, ornate freestanding Pensieve bowl.

Tottering about the place was a man in a ship's captain's uniform, pressing buttons and twirling knobs and what have you. He turned around the sound of Draco's entry, and Draco almost had a heart attack.

The Captain was Albus Dumbledore.

"Ah! Young Malfoy!" he beamed, striding forward to vigorously shake Draco's hand. "Good to see you. Good to see you."

It was all Draco could do to metaphorically pick up his jaw from the floor and permit his hand to be enthusiastically wrung by the principal of his former school. The esteemed wizard that he was supposed to kill. Except he pussied out of it, leaving his Potions Master to follow through. He cleared his throat and scuffed his foot on the polished floor. "I, um, er, um, that is, I want to say sor" –

"Hmm?" Dumbledore looked at him vaguely, then towards the door. "Ah! Here he is!" Rubbing his hands together, he stepped to one side of the large Pensieve and allowed room for another stately ancient geezer in board shorts, Hawaiian shirt and jandals to amble up. Watching the old man approach, Draco's heart - or whatever organ it was that occupied the centre of his torso - gave another nice, painful squeeze.

"Sal – Sal" – he stuttered. Honestly, his brain and tongue were not doing a good job of talking to each other today.

Dumbledore nodded encouragingly, as if he was watching a little boy laboriously count to five. "Yes, that's right! This here is Salazar Slytherin, in the Afterlife flesh."

Salazar Slytherin did not appear to be particularly fond of his current iteration of flesh, but nodded regally to the boy anyway.

"This is young Master Malfoy," Dumbledore explained. "We were talking about him before."

Slytherin peered suspiciously at Draco's face. "Malfoy?" he barked, but to Dumbledore, not Draco. "You sure? All the Malfoys I'm aware of don't have this particularly lurid colouring."

Dumbledore raised an eyebrow, then joined Slytherin at peering closely at Draco. "Well, I wasn't going to say anything, you know, to be polite," he started, "but since you've mentioned it, young Malfoy's complexion is a wee bit... rosy."

Draco hid an eye-roll. "It's sunburn, sirs."

"Ah!" said Dumbledore, satisfied. Slytherin subjected him to another considered stare, as if he knew damn well that getting sunburned wasn't a thing a Malfoy did.

"So, to business," Dumbledore began. "We understand you're having a bit of a hard time adjusting to the Afterlife? Not to worry. Happens to us all, you know."

"Speak for yourself," Slytherin added scornfully. "I've been here so damn long I can barely remember what it was like when I was alive."

Draco turned pale under his sunburn. What Slytherin just said almost made him break out in hives. Which was the last thing he needed, considering the sunburn.

"Well, sirs, it's just that I died trying to help Granger get back to her ramshackle lot of resistance members so she could help them defeat Voldemort and win this ridiculous war, but she's forgotten all about her life! She seems quite happy settling into a Muggle existence, and – well, it's not right, sirs! Watching her turn further and further away from the wizarding world is damn stressful."

"Granger... damn Muggleborn," Slytherin muttered, holding up his hands in innocence when both Dumbledore and Draco glared at him. "What? At least I said Muggleborn!"

Dumbledore turned back to Draco. "Why don't you think it's right? Young Miss Granger is just as entitled to free will as the next person is."

"But she's critical to the success of the war!" Draco replied with passion. "Potter and Weasley can't be trusted to fight themselves out of a wet paper bag, let alone take on Voldemort! She's essential to their success! Surely, sir, you wouldn't want a wizarding world that's fallen under the yoke that of that green-skinned cretin?"

Dumbledore shrugged. "Free will," he repeated.

This time, Draco lost his temper. "Screw free will!" he shouted angrily to the surprised veterans, before tacking on "sirs," at the end. "Just one person is responsible for helping Potter save witch- and wizardkind as we know it, and I believe anyone with a vested interest in saving all those people, our way of life, to ensure light magic triumphs over dark has a duty to help her! Just one person! And that's Hermione Granger."

Slytherin eyeballed him while sipping a pina colada that appeared out of nowhere. "Weren't you on Voldemort's side?" he asked, not unreasonably.

"Forcibly, yes," Draco gritted.

"You must have done some reprehensible things."

Draco's eyes darkened. "I have," he replied stonily. "I shouldn't be here at all."

"But you are here because you sacrificed yourself to save Miss Granger," Dumbledore added. "To lay down one's life for the sake of another is worthy of redemption."

"Well, it feels like I've wasted my life, because it's all gone wrong."

Dumbledore pushed his specs further up his nose. "Doesn't Miss Granger deserve happiness, young Malfoy?"

"Yes, of course, but" –

"How do know she won't be happy living her Muggle life and forgetting all about the magical world?"

Draco put his hands on his hips. "Do you honestly believe Granger would be happy knowing she left those two gits for dead? That her parents were put at risk for nothing?"

"How would she know?"

"I'll let her know," Draco replied angrily, resting his arms on the edge of the Pensieve. "Somehow."

Dumbledore crossed his arms and contemplated his navel before turning to Slytherin. "Miss Granger is an astonishingly talented witch, Sal."

"Yes, yes, don't rub it in," Slytherin replied testily.

"Young Malfoy is correct in that her involvement in the war would most likely result in defeat for Voldemort and the salvation of the magical world. And if we follow through Malfoy's selfless action to its preferred conclusion, Miss Granger could possibly have retained her memories and made her way back to the Order of the Phoenix."

"It would be churlish to deny that Master Riddle really has taken Slytherin aims and ideals to ridiculous levels," Slytherin muttered. "Pity. He was so promising, once. And that relationship he has with that snake is positively obscene. And I really like snakes."

Dumbledore smiled. "Which is one reason why you're in the Afterlife, sipping pina coladas, and not Down Below, with nothing to drink but rancid pumpkin juice."

"Blech. I hate pumpkin juice! Rancid or otherwise."

The two old gentlemen met each other's eyes, and nodded. Then Dumbledore turned to Draco.

"We have a proposal," he said.

"How did it go?" Lucy asked, falling in alongside Draco as he made his way to his cabin.

He looked at her with dancing eyes. His face was transformed, allbeit tomato-red. "I'm going back," he said.

"Back?" she repeated, shocked.

"To the Muggle world. I'm going to help Granger recover her memories."