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Author's Note:
Content warning on this chapter for descriptions of torture, references to domestic/gender-related violence, recollections of childhood abuse, and references to self-harm/suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised.
Thanks for reading!
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"For those of you who don't know, we are joined tonight by Miss Charity Burbage, who up until recently has taught at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," drawled Voldemort.
The professor's body hung suspended as if a levicorpus spell were focused to dangle her by the small of her back. Her head lolled backwards helplessly, eyes red-rimmed from tearful exhaustion and skin pockmarked from days of abuse.
A fire raged in the hearth of the Manor's dining room, but Malfoy felt no warmth emanating from it. His limbs traitorously threatened to vibrate with his upset, but he sat on his hands to prevent any visible trembling. It was cold, he could argue later. He didn't care what happened to the muggle lover.
"Her speciality was Muggle Studies," Voldemort grinned as he spoke the words, finding the notion incredibly amusing. Professor Burbage's breath gargled in her throat, escaping her chapped lips as the cross between a moan and a gasp.
The Death Eaters lining the table chuckled politely at Voldemort's quip. Malfoy attempted to follow suit, but the noise was strangled in his throat and sounded much more akin to the choking of his professor than to the halfhearted chuckles of his family.
"It is Miss Burbage's belief that Muggles are not so different from us," Voldemort continued, regarding each of his followers with individual eye contact. "She would, given her way, have us mate with them."
Bellatrix made an exaggerated vomiting sound at this idea, leading the group into another fit of giggling that seemed completely juxtaposed to the situation before them.
"To her, the mixture of magical and Muggle blood is not an abomination, but something to be encouraged," Voldemort lectured, rolling his wand between his fingers.
Professor Burbage looked directly at Severus then, mumbling out a final plea for her life. Malfoy felt a bit of bile rise in the back of his throat and almost gave into the impulse to shrink back into his seat lest she turn on him with her cries next. But he knew that would be unacceptable, and instead opted to unfocus his eyes and slowly exhale in an attempt to quell the nausea.
"Avada Kedavra!" came the killing curse, exploding from the tip of Voldemort's wand in an outburst of crackling green light at what seemed to be the same instant that his former professor's lifeless corpse hit the table, rigid and motionless.
Malfoy felt the urge to cry—a feeling that hadn't come to him with such strength in a very long time. He could feel his face tremble slightly and did all he could to scale it back and make it unnoticeable. He fixed his eyes just above the bloody, unblinking eyes of Professor Burbage and imagined himself pushing any of himself down through the floor with a deep inhale.
Eyes up, shove it down, was what he would always say to himself. And he could feel the walls of his own occlumency locking tightly around his emotions.
"Nagini…" Voldemort spoke softly, cradling the snake as if it were a beloved family pet. "Dinner."
Just as the snake unhinged its jaw and lunged towards the professor's body, the scene changed perspectives—not to the perspective of Harry or of Malfoy, but of the serpent itself.
Everything was hazy and unfocused, as if in a dream, but the cool ridges of black tile could be felt clearly gliding along the bottom of Nagini's wriggling form. "Harry," the snake hissed, sounding like a serpentine variation of the voice of Voldemort himself.
Amidst the cloudy orbs lining black industrial shelves that Harry recognized as the Department of Mysteries, Mr. Weasley stood in an aisle with a faint lumos gracing the tip of his wand. Hearing a noise and turning to investigate, his eyes widened in shock and horror.
Nagini, whose perspective Harry was experiencing in first person, lunged at the Weasley father with open jaws and tore an ugly gash into the side of his neck. The man fell onto his back, holding a hand up against the serpent as if to shield his face.
The perspective was broken up slightly, with Harry gasping and panicking and trying to pull back and Nagini continuing the violent onslaught with a meticulous series of gnashes and lunges at the man's chest, drawing more blood.
Mr. Weasley was grunting with each bite, hardly able to keep his shaking hands up by his face as the snake continued to gash open his torso. Harry was similarly thrashing and grunting, feeling as though the veins in his neck may explode with the effort to attempt to stop the snake.
He felt completely powerless, witnessing himself attack one of the men most close to a father figure that he had ever known as the gargantuan serpent. Arising from sleep, he panted out a few exaggerated breaths, hit simultaneously with the panicked knowledge that this wasn't a simple nightmare and the guilt that it was a part of him that had harmed Mr. Weasley.
Harry could swear he felt agitation from Malfoy's head as a mental whirlwind opened up and sucked him into a new memory. He was in Malfoy's body again, appearing as a teenager with gangly limbs and the beginnings of blonde stubble on his face—possibly fourth year or so.
There was an altercation of some kind behind Malfoy, and he could feel the boy lock his jaw in an attempt to tamp down his rage. Harry couldn't quite tell exactly what was happening, the images swirling before him and the audio muffled as if Malfoy were underwater. One sound broke him out into clarity, the sharp ringing of Mrs. Malfoy quietly crying out in pain.
Without thinking, the young Malfoy whipped around and drew his wand, sending his father flying backwards into a wall. His head hit the cobblestone with a sickening crack and his exanimate form slumped to the floor. He looked as though the air had been sucked from his lungs, barely able to take a ragged breath while keeping his shoulders propped up.
His eyes darted around the room surreptitiously before narrowing on the figure of his son towering above him. It became clear in that moment that the only reason Lucius Malfoy had been thrown from his stance and momentarily paralyzed was that he had been caught off guard. Powerful dark magic seemed to radiate off of him, though he remained unable to move.
Malfoy wished that he were truly as brave as the action he had just performed would indicate. He had a brief vision of himself, towering over the crumpled body of his father, spitting out some grandiose line about never so much as looking at his mother the wrong way ever again.
But Malfoy didn't move to stand before his father. Instead, he trembled and took a shaky breath, helping his mother to her feet while not taking wide eyes off of the paralyzed body.
"Draco…" his mother murmured gently, grabbing him and starting to usher him towards the door. "You should get out of the house."
"I'll be fine," she added, seeing the protest on his face. She patted his arm gently and forced out a tight smile. "Come back tomorrow."
He had only wanted to help—to distract from his mother and to draw the unwanted attention of Lucius' wrath onto himself. As usual, he had instead made things worse for her. And now he was running away from his mess. As soon as he breached the bounds of the manor, he vomited bile into a bush.
With every tug of Malfoy's mind into a new memory from his time as a Death Eater, Harry felt his own mind tugging Malfoy into frame in an equal and opposite measure. He wasn't quite sure if he was doing it on purpose or if there was just a lot of overlapping guilt causing things to flood in from his subconscious. Either way, the tug-and-pull felt completely uncontrollable.
Propelled into another memory, Harry didn't have a moment to catch his breath. He had particularly sausage-like fingers wrapped around his throat, preventing any air from coming through.
It was a familiar scene, his Uncle's rage-red face puffy as he yelled obscenities that caused spit to fly out of the corners of his mouth and into young Harry's face. His small frame flailed about helplessly, instinctively—desperate for air—but to no avail, his uncle had him effectively pinned to the windowsill by his neck.
"Get—off—me!" he gasped out, his head throbbing in agony with each heartbeat. Realizing that he may pass out soon, a wave of panic coursed through him. His uncle released his vice-like grip with a shout of pain and surprise.
Quick to react, Harry scrambled off the ground and fixed his wand directly on his uncle, still coughing and choking on attempted breaths.
Harry could feel the battle for dominance between his mind and Malfoy's, eventually relenting as he was sucked into a maelstrom of Malfoy's recollections presented in rapid succession.
First was hearing the screams of Luna Lovegood. It was in the manor, and it was clear from the memory that she had endured the torture silently for quite some time prior. When a scream finally did break from her lips, it came out as more of a strangled cry. Malfoy felt dizzy, and leaned a hand on the wall outside the room to steady himself.
Next was the wave of shame that hit him as he recalled feeling some sense of relief that Bellatrix had all but claimed Granger in the manor. As inventive as the sadistic witch was, at least the conversation would be, in the words of Bellatrix, girl-to-girl.
He had seen the look in those snatchers' eyes when they had caught the Golden Trio—the ones that lingered on Granger's pale flesh. He had heard the things they said about the castle, and he selfishly wasn't confident that he could stomach something like that.
He recalled Granger's body splayed out on his parlor floor, eyes red-rimmed and voice hoarse from sobbing, the word mudblood carved viciously into her forearm. It was almost as if he were shoving the image into Harry's mind, challenging him to dismiss Malfoy's culpability in what had permanently maimed his dearest friend.
More guilt flooded him, more shame—and then his own use of the cruciatus curse.
Voldemort stood just feet from Malfoy's shoulder as they looked down on the two men bound before them. "Do it," Voldemort commanded, his tone icy. And Malfoy realized that he couldn't simply fix his eyes up and shove himself down for this one.
Instead, he let the guilt and the shame and the self-loathing flood him until it bubbled up as rage. He thought about how badly he wanted—no, needed—to hurt for the things he had done.
These men, Dolohov and Rowle, were basically him. They had sat through everything he had sat through, egging it on enthusiastically even where Malfoy had barely choked the words out.
"Crucio." The word was off his lips and sending his magic to envelop the men in front of him. It had worked this time, starting them both writhing around as they attempted to stifle their agonied cries. "Crucio," he repeated, the unbridled rage of self-condemnation nearly ripping his chest open.
"Well done, Draco," Voldemort murmured beside him, sounding almost impressed. Something surged in Malfoy then, something that could be construed as pride but that he knew to be self-hatred, and the concentration of his magic darkened as the mens' screams pitched even higher.
For a moment, it was as if Harry's mind knew that Malfoy's attempted cruciatus curse on him would come next. And it wasn't sure if either of them could handle the scene that had followed that event.
Instead, Harry was catapulted into his own memory of a successful torture curse. Amycus Carrow had advanced on Professor McGonagall, who had refused to shy away in some of the most righteous Gryffindor courage that had ever been displayed.
When Carrow leaned over and spat in the older witch's face, Harry leapt out and cast Crucio. Carrow's body seemed to levitate and jostle about violently in the air before shattering into a nearby bookshelf, immediately crashing to the ground in a heap of bloodied flesh, splintered wood, and broken glass.
"I see what Bellatrix meant," Harry mused. "You need to really mean it."
With that, the two came spiraling back into the present day of the Room of Requirement. For a moment, all that could be heard between them was the rhythmic pattern of their labored breathing. Even the instrumental music and crackling of the fire that seemed omnipresent in the room appeared to have silenced.
"I need a moment," Malfoy said finally, quickly stacking their notes and sliding them into his bag before turning on his heels and heading towards the door.
"Wait," Harry pleaded, reaching out to grab Malfoy's arm. Malfoy flinched away, taking another step backwards towards the door.
"What?" he nearly snarled, ripping his left arm out of Harry's grasp and cradling it into his torso like a wounded animal.
"Are you gonna be okay?" was all that Harry managed to ask. "That was a lot."
Malfoy snorted in derision, adjusting the bag on his shoulder. "I think I'll live."
"Malfoy…" Harry trailed off, fingers reaching out to rest on that shoulder before he could convince himself to do otherwise.
This time, Malfoy not only flinched, but skirted away as if he were a wild pygmy puff cornered against the outreaching flames of a fiendfyre. His eyes were crazed and distant, similar to the look behind them when he and Harry had actually been surrounded by fiendfyre in this very room.
"Let it rest, Potter," was all he said, robes a flurry as he bolted out of the room.
Well, letting things rest had never been a particular strong suit of Harry's, particularly when it came to the whereabouts and actions of Draco Malfoy. But he'd be proud to report that he had held off for a FULL forty five minutes after returning to the dormitories before checking Malfoy's location on the Marauder's Map.
When he did, concern immediately etched itself into his features. He tried to shake it off, to remind himself that Malfoy didn't have the power to have nefarious plans of any kind anymore. But part of him knew that wasn't the real cause for concern.
Harry tried to remember that Malfoy had rejected his attempts at communication in every way, that the man likely did genuinely want to be left alone. But each time he tried to put his wand away and tuck himself in for sleep, images of mussed up blonde hair and silver eyes wide with alarm wormed their way into his head.
Heaving a disgruntled sigh, Harry draped the invisibility cloak over himself, put on shoes, and began to make his way through the castle.
When he opened the heavy door to the Astronomy Tower's North lookout, Malfoy nearly jumped out of his skin in alarm. He was positioned sitting upright on the ledge, head now on a swivel and wand raised towards the door with a shaking hand.
"Who's there?" Malfoy asked to the air, eyes frantically darting around the area surrounding the door.
It wasn't until this moment when Harry remembered that he was indeed still invisible. Removing the cloak, he held his wand up in open palms and said, "Relax, it's me."
Malfoy's face went through a journey of expressions, from instant relief to utter confusion to disbelieving irritation. He lowered his wand, the momentary terror on his face replaced with a scowl. "What are you doing up here, Potter?"
"Well, I saw you up here and I just wanted to make sure that you—that you didn't do anything stupid..." Harry trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. If he was trying to mask the concern on his face, he could feel that he wasn't doing a very good job of it.
Malfoy snorted softly, eyes fixed on the reflection of the moon across the lake. "I'm not the stupid one here, Potter," he spat out, but his words didn't have any of their usual bite.
When Malfoy looked back at him, Harry had expected to see the usual snarl still plastered across his face, but instead he just looked tired—exhausted, really. He looked as exhausted as Harry felt, with his cheeks sunken in and heavy bags under his eyes.
"Will you just leave me alone?" he snapped, swinging his legs back over the side of the ledge to fully face Harry. Harry hesitated for a moment, some part of him wanting to stay and offer Malfoy some semblance of comfort. But Harry had seldom been provided such comfort in his own times of enfeeblement, and didn't have the creativity to draw words from an empty pool.
"I promise not to pitch myself off the Astronomy Tower," Malfoy rolled his eyes as if to emphasize how ridiculous the notion was, "if you just go back to your little friends and forget that you saw me here. I'll see you in Potions tomorrow."
"Er, right then," said Harry, cheeks blushing pink with embarrassment that he had even come all the way up here.
When Malfoy finally heard the door swing shut behind Harry, he let go of a little tension in his shoulders that he didn't even know was there. He turned back around to swing his legs off the edge of the tower and leaned right to rest his head against the cool stone, trying not to envision the Headmaster he had been charged to kill plummeting towards the ground.
…
Harry fiddled with the vials that lined the shelves above their pensieve, waiting with bated breath for Malfoy to re-emerge and say something. They had agreed to this: that they would dig into memories with strong likelihood of interference during occlumency training, that they'd do it in the pensieve to avoid any further severe legilimency mishaps, and that they wouldn't speak of it outside of this room.
He had started off with a series of childhood memories that were really rather tame, in Harry's opinion. But it was still quite vulnerable, and that was scarier than any curse.
It was one thing to hear about the incidents of Number 4 Privet Drive—to have the saga told as a heroic epoch that distanced itself from the reality of being a neglected orphan who was routinely punished for daring to exist.
It was another thing entirely to see them happening in real time—to see his small frame only growing smaller as he nibbled on scraps of his brother's dinner, to see his Uncle Vernon unceremoniously grab a fistful of his ragged hair and send him spiraling onto the floor, to see him nurse bruised ribs from his brother's friends as he lay on a paper-thin mat in the dusty cupboard underneath the stairs.
Harry was starting to understand why Malfoy had insisted they see his shameful memories together through legilimency—the waiting was torturous. After what felt like hours but couldn't have been longer than a couple of minutes, Malfoy resurfaced and took a gasp of air as he would when breaching the surface of the lake.
He turned to look at Harry with an odd expression on his face, one torn between empathy and guilt. "I'm surprised that I never picked up on that."
"Do you…" Harry nearly choked the words out. "Have any experience with that?"
"Well, I've only read The Grimoire of Eternal Recall and parts of Fragments of the Mind's Veil, so I wouldn't say that I'm an expert or anything—"
Harry grimaced, lips pressing into a tight line.
"Oh," Malfoy paused. "You meant do I have any experience with that."
The boys stared at each other in silence for a moment.
"Yes," Malfoy admitted rather sheepishly, "I do. I figured you would have gathered as much from what you saw in the library."
Harry recoiled as if he'd been slapped. "I—no, I didn't…"
He spoke softly now, voice barely creeping above a whisper. He tried to keep the concern out of his tone and facial expression, but he could tell that it still showed as clear as day. "Your father did that?"
Malfoy chuckled darkly, features snapping back into their usual solemn apathy. "It was for good reason, Potter. You met me as a kid—I was quite the little shit. I'm just glad my father knocked it out of me before the Dark Lord came into the picture." Malfoy shivered, eyes glazing over at the thought.
Harry's brow furrowed and he leaned in, trying to search Malfoy's face for any cracks in the mask that he was clearly putting on. Finding nothing, he leaned back against the wall and shook his head, sighing.
"How long did that go on for?" Harry asked after a pause.
Malfoy's face flushed and he brought a hand awkwardly up to the back of his neck. It was one of the only times in which Harry could recall Malfoy looking genuinely awkward. "I don't suppose it ever really stopped."
Harry's face must have blanched something awful, because Malfoy went into full defensive protest mode. "What I mean is that it was manageable. Here, I'll show you," he said, filling the pensieve with one of his own swirling silvery thoughts.
Harry held his breath instinctively and dunked his face into the glimmering liquid, immediately feeling the scene setting into place around him. A young Draco Malfoy, probably only a couple years younger than they were today, stood at the corner of the Malfoy Manor dining room as Lucius pored over documents on the other side of the dining table.
Malfoy didn't cower before his father like he had when he was a kid. It was clear from his demeanor and expression that there were many places he'd prefer to be than in this room with the present company, but the experience of interacting with Lucius was mostly just an irritating thing to have to deal with day-in and day-out.
"Draco." He could practically hear the condescension dripping from the older Malfoy's voice. "It's getting to be a bit much with the bruises."
Malfoy looked down, and Harry followed his gaze to the bruises in various stages of healing that decorated his arms. Purple marks in the shape of fingerprints circled around his wrists and a large brown blotch was forming on the outside of his right forearm.
"Sorry," Malfoy mumbled while he turned to exit the room. As expected, he had committed some perceived infraction before he'd been able to leave, and Harry saw a stinging hex hit his back with such force that it nearly knocked the wind out of him.
"And don't mumble," his father grit out. "You know I hate that."
Malfoy took a breath to steady himself before opening his mouth and speaking a bit more clearly, "I'm sorry, sir."
His father gave a curt nod and returned to the documents on the table, giving Malfoy just enough time to slip out of the room.
Harry stood from the pensieve, reflexively shaking any excess liquid from his hair. "So that shite's complicated, huh?" He had asked the question in a gentle and understanding tone, but he cringed at how ridiculous the words sounded.
There was a moment of silence, and then Malfoy started chuckling. He wasn't exactly sure what about—just the incredulousness of the situation, possibly. How was anybody meant to respond to that, anyways? It was as normal of a response as could be expected.
Before he knew it, Malfoy was folded over, clutching his stomach and gasping for air because of how hard he was laughing. This eventually turned into heaving and before long, he had started to cry. Horrible, painful sobs wracked out of his body—and he was somehow still laughing.
He looked up at Harry, who was eyeing him cautiously as if he'd gone completely mental, and this just made him laugh and cry even harder.
He nearly choked on the tears and the laughter, just sitting there cackling like a maniac for what felt like minutes—struggling to even find pauses where he could gasp for air.
Eventually, he was able to compose himself enough to talk.
"Sorry," he apologized, taking a deep breath and wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his cloak. "That just got me for some reason."
"Er—it's okay," Harry said, still eyeing him as if he might fully break down at any moment. "That's probably enough of the pensieve for today. Why don't we move back to the couch?"
Malfoy just nodded, his breathing pattern once again gaining some consistency.
"Have you visited him?" asked Harry nonchalantly once they had made their way back over to the couch and sat down in the warmth of the fire.
"No, I can't yet," Malfoy said, curling a leg into himself and seeming to shrink deeper into the fabric of the cushions. "He's in the high-security wing, with the dementors. He won't be moved for another three years."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry," said Harry, his face serious as he leaned in a bit closer to Malfoy. And he realized that it was authentic—he knew that it was Lucius' own beliefs and decisions that had landed him in Azkaban, but he also knew that his imprisonment had essentially caused Malfoy to lose a family member. And if there was one thing that Harry had experienced a completely painstaking number of times, it was losing a loved one.
Malfoy shrugged absentmindedly. "It's fine."
"Do you think you will visit him?" Harry asked, genuinely curious.
Malfoy sighed, sounding tired. "I dunno, Potter. Maybe. A lot can change in three years. I don't know where I'll be with everything."
Harry reflected on who in his life he'd willingly go through a pack of dementors for, and realized that the list was quite limited. Yet here was Malfoy, looking like he would seriously consider going through all of that for a man who seemed to have hexed him with a concerning amount of regularity.
"That's awfully brave of you," Harry admitted quietly. "I can't name many people I'd go through a pack of dementors for."
Malfoy barked out a laugh, nearly snorting. "Oh, please. You say that, but it's not true. You're Harry bloody Potter. I've seen you staring down the barrel of the cruciatus curse and still only focused on saving the people around you. Honestly, who wouldn't you go through a pack of dementors for?"
Harry was quiet for a moment, considering, and then noticed Malfoy's face fall—a subtle, almost imperceptible change, but he picked up on it nonetheless. "Well, except for me," Malfoy added softly.
"I would face dementors for you," Harry countered, almost instinctively, then broke into a quietly triumphant smile. "Actually, I already did."
"What?" Malfoy asked, looking puzzled at the assertion. "When?"
"At the Wizengamot," Harry said easily. "I gave memories to testify for you and your mother. It was before they had the dementors removed, so I still had to deal with them hovering around whenever we were in a legal space."
Malfoy's jaw had dropped open at the admission, but Harry just shuddered at the memory of the purveyors of freezing dread that had loomed over the courtrooms. "Honestly, I had assumed you already knew that, what with you being nicer to me than usual this year and your mother sending me treats by owl every five minutes."
"My mum's been sending you treats, has she?" Malfoy chuckled fondly, the sound much lighter than his usual derisive snorting. "I wouldn't be surprised if she had that information and didn't share it with me—probably didn't want to upset me by bringing the trials back up."
"Actually, I wasn't aware it was your mother until a little while ago," Harry recalled. "I kept getting anonymous care packages. And then you offered me chocolate in the library—I had never seen that brand anywhere before, other than in the care packages. I figured it must've been pretty rare. And then you said that your mum sent them to you."
A small smile flitted across Malfoy's lips. "That sounds like her. She can be very doting."
"Don't tell her I know," Harry protested suddenly. "I don't think she wants me to know it's her."
"No, I'm sure she doesn't," Malfoy agreed, still smiling and shaking his head.
"Also," Harry argued, raising his index finger as if to make an astute observation. "I'm a little scared that she'll stop sending them if she figures out that I know it's her. And I really don't want her to stop sending that chocolate."
Malfoy laughed at that, a bright and tinkling sound that seemed to send a beam of light through whatever dark had been clouding around him these past few years. Harry vowed then and there to say more things that would cause Draco Malfoy to make that sound.