Something More - Chapter Three: Backtrack
Well, once we weren’t seen together again for awhile the fuss died down. People tend to get over the initial fluster over gossip quickly; though it’s rarely truly forgotten and does, therefore, have a general tendency to resurface at bad times. This hadn’t been the first time that Skeeter had decided to pair Draco and me up in the headlines to create a stir and up her ratings, though it was far worse this time. But that’s not the point now.
I suppose I should explain how Draco and I moved from our enmity at Hogwarts to the not-just-acquaintances-but-not-quite-friends state we had attained before we met up at St. Mungo’s. The long and short of it was that there was a string of favours that never quite seemed to balance out.
The first of this string was during the War. Draco was in a very unenviable position after he failed to kill Dumbledore. He went with Snape back to the Death Eaters and was punished in ways I don’t want to think about and he still doesn’t want to talk about. They killed his mother in front of him before he managed to get out of there. It’s no wonder he spent years basically fucking up after that, acting out, being self-destructive.
But that isn’t really the point, either. Well, not quite. It turned out that Voldemort had decided to entrust some of his more faithful servants with some of his Horcruxes.
One went to Lucius Malfoy, of course, the diary, and Bellatrix Lestrange got another. And that’s how this whole Draco thing really started. You seen, when the Lestranges went after the Longbottoms Bellatrix decided to entrust her sister, Narcissa, with the Horcrux. She knew there was a definite possibility of their getting caught, apparently, and didn’t want such a precious thing to be found when the Aurors later seized their house.
So Narcissa Malfoy had one of the Horcruxes hidden away in Malfoy Manor. Before she died she told Draco about it, though she apparently didn’t know what it was she had, exactly. Draco figured it out. Well, rather he told Snape about it and they figured out what it was. And then one day Harry, Hermione, and I received an owl from him with the information.
It was an amazing help, really, and is actually what started off this whole chain of events.
*****
So, what do you do once the man, if he could even have been called that, who had tormented the wizarding world for decades was dead? Well, I'm sure plenty of people cried about it, danced in the streets, had wild parties and celebrated. It took me a while to figure it out. One day Severus up and left and I didn't see or hear from him for almost a week and I think that, on top of everything, nearly broke me completely. I wanted to panic. Maybe I did, I don't remember. By that time everything just sort of happened in an abstract way, conversations, dreams, even the letter I wrote to the Golden Gryffindor Trio, all of it happened to me. I still don't honestly remember any of the doing. Severus was missing and I thought he was dead and I was fucking terrified so... so I left Spinner's End.
I left and somewhere between Severus' front door and my bedroom at Malfoy Manor I found out that the war had ended. I didn't feel much about it. Maybe a little tired and a lot lost. The Manor was empty and cold and it was odd to walk the halls and know that Potter and his do-gooders had been in my home, or at least they probably had since they'd won the war. The Aurors found me in one of the sitting rooms, staring at a fire, probably looking more than a bit dazed and confused. They were loud and brash, glared at me, asked me what I was doing there and where I had been. One of them grabbed my left arm roughly and faltered a bit at the sight of unblemished skin. Pip, the house elf in charge of things around the Manor, came bustling up to my defense but there wasn't much either of us could do.
I ended up in Azkaban and when they told me I could contact any who might act as witnesses on my behalf, I penned a letter to the only people I could think of. Weasley, Ron, was the one who came. I don't think he was all that happy about it, but he helped me. A favour for a favour, I guess. For a few days the Aurors stalled, wanting to pin something, anything, on me. Eventually, though, they accepted the fact that I had been never been Marked and that I had even helped win the war. I wanted to thank Ron, but I didn't really. I remembered it, of course, but neither of us spoke after that. I should have left it at that, but I felt obligated to do Ron another favour years down the line. Or maybe I was being proud. I don't know. I just know that I didn't stop the strange cycle that we developed. I kept it going.
*****
It would have been a statistical impossibility for all of the Weasleys to survive the War. And we didn’t all survive. We lost Percy early on, Fred near the end, and Dad in one of the final battles. I’d like to say that Percy saw the light and came back and we all accepted him with open arms, but that wasn’t what happened. Christmas my sixth year had pretty much resigned all of us, except our eternally optimistic mother, to the fact that Percy was gone for good. And he was. No one ever saw him at the Burrow again. Not alive, anyway. It tore Mum apart, Percy’s death, but all of us were affected. He was the first and we’d none of us been on good terms with him. It’s difficult not knowing if he hated us. If he realized we didn’t hate him. And then Fred; poor George still seems lost sometimes. But Dad was the worst. Mum didn’t know what to do. They’d been together since Hogwarts. And then, one day, the meager Weasley family savings were used up. Mum, being Mum, made them last far longer than they had any right to, and we all helped her out in whatever way she’d let us, but it was inevitable.
It had been over two years since Dad’s death when it finally happened. Mum was trying to steel herself for finding a job, for supporting herself, for not being able to just be a good mother and grandmother and have that be enough. And then it happened. I think the really strange thing is that we didn’t really question it at the time. Probably for the best, that. I was livid enough when I found out. No one else knows. Still.
We got word, around this time, that a friend had entered Mum in some contest or other. Basically a lottery-type thing. And she had won. It was enough to last her for the rest of her life and then some. Hell, it was enough to last a normal person for a lifetime: my great-grandchildren will probably inherit some of this money. So Mum was set. She didn’t have to find a job, she could just baby-sit the grandkids and cook huge meals on Sundays and garden and pad around the Burrow, which she refused to make any improvements on.
I don’t remember exactly how I found out what had really happened. I remember I was sifting through some old papers, helping out a bit with Spring Cleaning (Mum wouldn’t touch the papers, she put new ones where the old ones had been but she wouldn’t go through the old ones. Apparently she’d tried once and it’d been too much for her.), and I found some documentation about that lottery. Something in the name of the sponsor struck me as oddly familiar and I realized that no one had ever heard of that contest again and it all clicked.
Draco Malfoy.
The rich can never understand the pride of the poor that inspires hatred of charity. Draco certainly didn’t understand mine. But there was nothing I could do, ultimately. I was hardly going to tell anyone else in my family, let alone anyone outside it, and even if I’d wanted to the money was Mum’s. If she found out Merlin knew what she might do. No, it was better to leave her pride and her content, if somewhat lonely, life just as they were.
But I had to return the favour somehow.
*****
The thing about the many months and then years after the end of the war was that no matter how much time passed, I still meant nothing. My name meant nothing and that was a hard adjustment to make. Being out in the world alone when I had expected my parents to be there with me, and Severus and any number of my old friends and peers, was bad enough. Without power behind the Malfoy name, it was miserable. The only things that anyone knew for certain were that Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy were both dead, most definitely at Voldemort's hands, that I had been responsible for the infiltration of Hogwarts near the beginning of the war, that I'd nearly killed Albus Dumbledore before Severus Snape had done it for me, and that I'd only managed to get out of Azkaban by some fluke of the system. I had the Malfoy money and the Malfoy property, but none of the respect that my parents had commanded, and there was no way to get it. I tried giving money to charities, but that was generally anonymous or the coverage in the papers was negative enough to keep anyone from thinking I meant anything good by it.
I'd nearly forgotten my little extension of goodwill toward the Weasleys (their tale of woe had been in the paper a few times, the rest I garnered by word of mouth and I'd found a way to pay Ron back for his help in getting me out of Azkaban) when I got the invitation by owl. It was a pretty thing, familiar because I could still remember my Mum and Dad opening the same things every week or so. Words were scrawled across the parchment in blue ink inviting me, Draco Malfoy, to some Ministry sponsored charity ball for the good of war orphans or something. I thought it was suspicious. No one wanted to invite me to anything. I knew it.
At the same time, this was invitation only and no one could assume that I was sneaking in. They would all think that I was supposed to be there and that would give the Malfoy name a bit of credibility and of course I was going to go. Anything to get some of my pride back. I didn't expect to hear from Ron or to see him. But he sent me a note one day that said simply that he knew what I'd done for his family and that we were even. I don't remember whose idea it was to go together. I might have suggested it jokingly but it doesn't matter now. What matters is that we showed up to the ball together and it certainly made me look good, for all that there was a sizable uproar over the whole thing. I guess that after that we both assumed we'd live completely separate lives. We were even, or so Ron had said. Looking back now, I don't think either of us believed it.
*****
I think I’ve chosen to blame it all on that charity function, now. We actually had a decent time. Mostly because there are few things better than having someone really, really snarky with you at one of those things. Draco knew more things about some of the people there than they probably did. Oh, we weren’t anything approaching friends after it, don’t get me wrong. But we’d made the strange discovery that we could be around each other and not be completely miserable. Besides, we’d had so many of these favours that I think there was some sort of unspoken truce. We only saw each other to say hello after that until the Black Magick thing, but apparently all of that was enough to somehow turn into what it did.
