April 2006
Azkaban. Blaise wished he wished he would have never had to set foot there. He wanted to forget the two previous times. The memories were traumatic.
The visitors' entrance hadn't changed in a year; the walls were as black as ever, the atmosphere as heavy as he remembered, and the silence as disturbed as always by the prisoners' screams. He sometimes heard them at night, during bouts of insomnia that seemed more interminable than ever. As prepared as he was, Blaise couldn't help but clench his fists in his coat pockets, one of his hands wrapped around his wand.
He was following a warden he had never seen before. That was the only thing that had changed here. The man had barely looked at him, called his name in the arrival hall which was full of visitors, checked his wand, then asked him to follow. The prison seemed to have filled up considerably since his last visit. The increase of prison sentences was not just a rumour. Used to defending those who wanted to get out, he had come to no longer know what was happening on this side of the law.
Although Blaise had been involved in setting up the new law allowing visits, he had no idea how things actually worked. Prisoners with the lowest sentences went to a sort of visiting room, but for the Death Eaters... Blaise was certain that things would be different. It always had been, more or less. Everything had been done without regulation as soon as the war had ended, purely for efficiency purpose. These trivial practices had not disappeared.
And indeed, he was led into an empty white room. It looked like some kind of bathroom, with nothing but a shower and stools. It was spooky, almost eerie. Did they have so few resources that they had to organise visits in bloody shower rooms? It didn't make any sense.
"Sit there," the warden muttered, pointing to one of the two stools in the centre of the room.
Blaise tried very hard not to say anything back to this idiot who thought Blaise was one of his prisoners. He had never put up with them. He sometimes wondered how these wizards had auror training. He contented himself with doing as he was told and placed his small briefcase on the floor.
Then he waited. The guard had walked out, probably to find Gregory.
But Blaise hated waiting. He wasn't patient, and certainly not in a place as gloomy as this. He ran a hand over his face. His leg was twitching on its own, the heels of his shoes were clicking on the shoddy white tiles and he glanced at the door at regular intervals.
The room had no smell, he quickly noticed. It was quite surprising for such a clean shower room. Sometimes there was that nasty old smell of magic that clung to the tiles after a quick wand clean. There was no smell of soap, dirt or mould. It was just empty. Too empty. Perhaps that was the worst of it.
He didn't know how much time had passed when, at last, Gregory walked through the door, manacled and with his head down. A guard pushed him towards the stool and made him sit down. It was a different person to the one who had accompanied Blaise here.
"You've got twenty minutes," the man said before leaving. "I'll be behind the door, if there's any trouble... just shout."
Blaise didn't answer. The door slammed shut. They were alone.
Yet silence reigned. Blaise couldn't believe that Gregory was facing him, or at least that the ghost of the man he had once been was sitting opposite him. It wasn't him, it wasn't his friend. This... man was nothing like the boy he'd known. Nothing at all.
He swallowed. All blood had left his face. His leg was no longer trembling. He seemed petrified.
Goyle had long hair, so long that it reached below his shoulders. But that wasn't the most shocking thing, the one that made the most difference. He was thin, terribly thin, even thinner than Draco and Theo when they came out. He looked as if he hadn't been fed for months, for years. His prison garb fell off his right shoulder, and you could have put three or four of his arms in each sleeve. It was aberrant.
His eyes were empty, staring at the ground as if he had nothing else to do. He looked like a madman. Maybe he was.
"Greg?"
No answer. The silence was heavy. Blaise felt cramped in this bloody bathroom.
"Greg, it's me, mate. It's Blaise."
Gregory fluttered his eyelids at regular intervals. Blaise breathed slowly, struggling, as tears welled up in his eyes. What had happened here? What had been done to his friend? He could hardly believe what he was discovering. He didn't dare touch him for fear of hurting him. Although his body wasn't as bruised and battered as Draco's had been, he didn't seem to be in the best shape. Far from it. He was absent, empty.
The trauma came from somewhere else. He wasn't even sure he'd get any response from touching him, from shaking him. He was a shadow of his former self. Blaise's heart was pounding in his chest. He was hot, or cold, he wasn't really sure.
What had been done to his friend?
"I don't know if you can really hear me, but... things will get better, mate."
Maybe talking to him normally would help him realise who he was. Maybe he was no longer used to being treated like a full human being, a wizard with rights and a need for decency. Blaise's anger mingled with his pity for Greg. His body was disturbed, shocked by this dismal scene. His brain was looking for excuses, solutions, justifications. Maybe he could do something, anything. Suddenly he felt desperate. He was powerless.
It was like one of those horror films that Pansy used to watch. Ever since she had bought a Muggle television for their house, just to explore something other than Mary Poppins, she had been forcing him to watch all sorts of strange things. She said she loved these stories full of madness and tortured characters. Blaise felt like he was facing one of them.
"Theo and Draco are working on it," he said, scratching the back of his head. "They're going to write a book, or whatever. Theo thinks it'll open everyone's eyes, that they'll come to understand what you've been through."
Blaise laughed ironically. He found all this hard to believe; he was more perplexed than anything else. From his point of view, there was no such thing that could be compared to his work as a lawyer for a better world. He was almost angry that they wanted to manage without him, when he had already been fighting for years.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. All the hope he'd had since his arrival had evaporated the second Greg walked in. Greg. What was left of him.
"I'm waiting to see how things will change even if Justice makes no progress. If you ask me, they're going to get into even more trouble, but Pans' wants to give them a chance, so I'm keeping my mouth shut. I feel like I've been shutting up all the time lately. With the Minister and their foolish ideas, I'm forced to sit on my hands. If it were up to me, I'd take the names of all those blooming guards and bring them before the Wizengamot, along with a generous dose of Veritaserum. Believe me, things would change if they admitted everything they'd done. But it's against the law and everyone wants me to wait before I leak their names to the press. The Minister says it could ruin his reputation, the others think we should wait for Draco's testimony."
He fell silent. He spoke in a vacuum. He was just saying out loud what he'd been thinking for weeks. When his wife had repeated Theo's words to him about his plan, he had learnt a little more about the behaviour of the wardens. That's how the idea of bringing them to justice came into his head.
He was already aware that the men hired there were just incompetent aurors sent as far away as possible from missions that really mattered, but he had never realised that they were one of the main sources of the problem. A problem that had mutated his best friends. It still seemed so implausible.
Blaise stood up, inhaling sharply; he was angry, incensed. Greg was still not moving. He was staring at the ground as if his future had been drawn there.
"What are they doing in this bloody prison, then? Tell me, Greg!"
He was losing patience. Seeing him like this drove him crazy. He remembered how he'd reacted after Draco's release. He had been beside himself for days, and Pansy had to persuade him to stay calm, not to make a scandal at the Wizengamot. He thanked her every day. Who knew where he would be now?
"Maybe this bloody testimony will help us understand. Nobody seems to be able to explain it, look at you, you're not even moving! I should have done something a long time ago! I shouldn't have listened to Pans', I should have made a scene as soon as Draco was released! They're destroying you! They're driving you completely mad."
Goyle didn't react. Blaise ran a hand over his face. He was soaking wet. His body was giving out on him. He couldn't stand it. He'd tried to bury in the back of his mind the fact that his friends had come out of prison in such a pitiful state, but reality was staring him in the face.
"I'll get you out, I swear," he breathed as he picked up his briefcase.
On the spur of the moment, he grabbed Gregory's chin and raised it towards him. His friend's gaze was as blank as ever, except that his pupils had dilated at the sudden movement.
"You're not alone, mate, do you understand? You're not on your own. We're here, and we'll get you out."
He let go of him and walked briskly towards the door of the room. It looked like a cell, as it turned out.
"Open up!" he shouted, banging on the door.
When a guard opened the door, Blaise gave him a murderous stare. He promised himself he'd have him locked up, he'd remember all their faces.
oOo
"June 1995,
I'd say that's when it all started for me, or at least when I first became a puppet for my father and Voldemort. Before that, I had no role in my father's fraudulent dealings. I knew something was up, I wasn't naive or stupid. I'd seen his arm before; he constantly told me that the Dark Lord would return, and I'd been raised my whole life to follow in Lucius Malfoy's footsteps.
However, by the end of my fourth year, I had done nothing for my father's 'noble' cause. It wasn't until later that I realised that I had started to participate at that point. At first, I just thought he was interested in my day-to-day life at Hogwarts, that he was being a dad for the first time, whatever the reason for this sudden change. I was blinded by my need for recognition. I was naive enough to believe that, despite years of never hearing from me, he was finally interested in what I was going through.
From the end of May 1995, he started sending me several letters a week asking me lots of questions about Harry Potter. Of course, he hid them in the middle of questions about my day, which I promptly answered every day.
My father and I have never been close. I grew up constantly wanting to please him, to make him happy, to make him proud. Seeing him take such an interest in me was something I never wanted to even hope for. So I answered every one of his questions. Did Potter seem stressed about the Third Task? Was he missing classes? Were his little friends, Granger and Weasley, still all over him?
I answered everything, carefully. Did it really help anything? I don't know, but I do know now that these questions weren't insignificant. He wanted to know more, he wanted to know every detail of Potter's life to form their little Death Eater plan.
Weeks later, when Potter appeared in the middle of the Quidditch pitch with Diggory's lifeless body, I…"
"Draco!"
Draco looked up from the notebook he had been writing in for half an hour and saw Hermione coming out of the house. He was sitting outside, at the edge of a large white plastic table that she had suggested him to use. He had hesitated for a long time before agreeing, unsure of his ability to stay outside for so long, but she had finally convinced him to do so. He had no regrets. The fresh April air did him a world of good and writing such dark things required him to be comfortable.
Hermione carried the two daily's baskets of washing with difficulty, one under each arm, and walked towards him with a big smile on her face. Like every Sunday, she spent the day at the house and, with the return of the sun, hung out the washing at the end of the morning.
"Will you help me?" she asked as she dropped the two baskets on the table.
He nodded with an amused chuckle as he noticed her flushed face and over wild hair from struggling with the baskets. He picked up his pink one and together they headed for the washing line.
"You've started," she observed as she laid out a pair of dungarees.
"Yes, I... I've stopped putting it off. I was just getting stuck at the beginning, I think, but once I got going, it went pretty easily," he admitted with an embarrassed grin.
She smiled at him, gently, proudly. He felt his heart beating a little harder in his chest and looked away.
"Do you still want to write in chronological order? You know, I maintain that if you do things out of order, it might allow you to move on when some parts are too hard..."
"I know. But I'm afraid I'll forget things and anyways... For now I'm getting on fine like this."
"Maybe you should make a list of everything you want to tell?" she suggested, grabbing one of her white sheets from the basket.
The smell of laundry floated between them. Draco loved it. The fresh breeze shook their clothes just enough and the sun shone around them. It was pleasant, it relaxed him. He felt free.
The breeze brought a floral scent from the surrounding countryside. It blended so well with the scent of the washing that Draco closed his eyes for a few moments. Just to enjoy it.
He was startled when he felt Hermione's hand on his back. She was walking behind him to continue hanging out the clothes. He opened his eyes again immediately but tried not to move. The last thing he wanted was for her to notice that this gesture had troubled him so much.
He could still sense her fingers on the material, so close to his skin.
She did not respond and merely suspended the other end of her sheet on the line. Draco cleared his throat and went back into action.
"Yes, that's the plan," he half-stammered.
She stepped under the wire and faced him. She was smiling. He smiled back. It was so simple.
"Will you read over what I wrote?" he asked.
He was asking the question for the third or fourth time, but he needed to be sure. He had the impression that his text couldn't be right if Hermione didn't approve of it. Not that he thought she was better than him or an expert in the field, let's just say that he needed to know what she thought. Her opinion mattered to him.
She only smiled wider, a smile so big it showed her teeth. She was nearly laughing.
"Yes, Draco, I promised you," she replied with a certain tenderness in her eyes.
He nodded several times, letting her know he had understood. He would not ask again. She promised, she wouldn't withdraw. He bent down to his laundry basket to resume.
"I planned to feed Hera and Ares after hanging out the washing, do you want to join me?"
Draco looked up at her and scanned her face for a few seconds. He'd ended up telling her about his little mishap in the stables. He hadn't gone into detail, but his obvious embarrassment had seemed to be enough for Hermione to understand.
This time, his gaze was confident, calm. Reassuring. With a single glance, she was telling him that everything was fine. And he trusted her.
He nodded and she smiled. She never stopped smiling. It was even rare that she didn't when they were together. Draco had been surprised to discover this at first, it had seemed strange to him. But then he realised that she was simply happy to be with him, relaxed, almost happy.
But there was still a glint of sadness in her eyes. In the evenings, she seemed more tired, less cheerful, as if her anxieties had suddenly returned. He knew this all too well.
Especially since he had stopped drinking dreamless sleep potions. That was his new goal these days. Every night, Draco went to bed with the burning desire to run to the bathroom and empty the vials of potions there. He would relive his nightmares and anxieties for hours, until sleep eventually overtook him.
Day after day, he fought against his memories, pursuing his path towards renewal. That was his only concern. He slept badly, he relieved horrors, but he could see things changing. The more the days passed, the less he thought about the simplest, most radical solutions.
He sometimes wondered if Hermione heard him screaming, crying, when night fell. She never mentioned it.
He noticed that she had gone back inside the house to put the baskets away only when she came back towards him. He was startled out of his thoughts when she put a hand on his arm. She noticed it this time.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. Shall we go?"
He nodded. He felt as if that was all he was doing, nodding silently. But it felt right. He was by her side, and it felt right. Sometimes she turned towards him, as if to check that he was still following her. He would smile at her; it felt right.
She opened the stable door, and he followed her inside. He stopped in the doorway, and she did the same, noticing it. She looked up at him. Their shoulders were almost touching. Draco stared at the horses that had just poked their heads over the fences.
He could feel her gaze on him but he couldn't take his eyes off the horses. That was as far as he'd got last time. He had gone back to his room, overcome by his own thoughts.
Hermione slipped her hand into his and he looked down at once. Her smile was soft and reassuring. He felt the beginnings of his anxiety subside. He breathed out the air he had unconsciously been holding in his lungs.
After a few seconds, Hermione pulled him by the hand. He followed her without a word until they reached the front of the stalls. Ares had finally moved away from the barrier, but Hera was still there and they were able to approach her.
"Hera is the calmest, but the proudest," she taught him, raising her free hand to stroke its head. "She reminds me a little of you."
Draco turned towards her with surprised eyes, but Hermione wasn't looking at him. She was staring at her mare, her cheeks flushed.
"And Ares?" he asked as he too dared to raise a hand to stroke Hera.
"He's more... lively. Let's just say he doesn't take it lying down. He gets frustrated quickly and he's a lot more emotional."
"A bit like you," Draco joked.
Their two laughs echoed through the stable walls, as butterflies flew into the pit of Draco's stomach. It felt so right.