Chapter Text
Got my invitation
To eternal damnation
Get in line, pass the wine, bitch—
We’re going straight to hell!
— Rina Sawayama
~
Draco doesn’t see the end of the war because he’s too busy running.
It all happens in the space of a second: Potter’s supposedly dead body twitches back to life, both sides erupt into a chaos of spells, and beyond it all, his mother turns around and darts straight into the Forbidden Forest.
He takes off after her, feet whirring faster than his mind. He’s sick of fighting, and his body is littered in abrasions from stray curses, and he is terrified that someone is going to stumble across his mother before he does. Narcissa is already wanted by the other side. Now, she has just outed herself to Death Eaters as either an idiot or a liar. Draco has to get to her first.
As he dashes in the opposite direction of the battle, every Death Eater that he passes shoots him a dirty look. Fortunately, all of them are too occupied with defending themselves to follow or assault him. Draco tears his gaze away, tucks his chin to his chest, and uses every last reserve in his body to sprint off into the trees.
The reverberations of spells and screams fade the farther that he travels, and soon he finds himself surrounded by eerie quiet. It only amplifies how dehydrated and dizzy he is. Smoke from the Room of Hidden Things is still lingering in his lungs. When he turns his head from side to side, the trees blur and double. It occurs to him that it would be nice to lay down.
But Draco stumbles on, panting and coughing. With the way his limbs are growing numb and his chest aches with movement, he thinks he does not have much time left. His warped, delirious brain convinces him that if he does not find his mother, she will die because of him.
The minutes stretch, or maybe they collapse. It feels like he’s been running for days, and yet every clearing that he crashes into looks exactly the same. His arms are covered in tiny scratches from blundering through brambles. Sharp twigs have lodged themselves into the soles of his shoes, pricking at his feet. At last, he has to lean a hand against the trunk of a tree and heave deep, struggling breaths.
Draco’s entire body jolts when a spell whizzes past his head and strikes the bark next to his fingers, sizzling into the wood. Whipping around, he spies a dark, masked figure encroaching towards him. Draco blinks hard, and his vision focuses on a familiar bulky build.
The figure lifts his wand, his mask vanishing along with the movement.
“Draco!” Yaxley jeers. He sounds delighted, as if this is a chance meeting of his wildest dreams. The way he says Draco’s name drips with condescension, like he is talking to a child.
“Where are your parents?” Yaxley taunts, with a mock pout. “Looking for them?”
Draco blindly backs up, his movements uncoordinated and jerky, and slams into a neighboring tree. Yaxley laughs.
“Not so brave without mummy or daddy, hmm?” He nonverbally casts a spell that rushes red and fiery at Draco’s face. Of their own accord, Draco’s legs promptly fold, his back sliding roughly against the tree trunk behind him, so that he manages to narrowly avoid it.
“Malfoys, spineless bunch,” Yaxley spits. “They never pick a fucking side. Mummy’s a two-faced bitch, and her precious baby is running away from the fight.”
A glob of saliva lands on Draco’s shoes. “The Dark Lord made you a Death Eater as a joke, you know that? You were never supposed to last this long.”
Yaxley clucks impatiently when Draco does not respond. “Get up,” he snarls. “Duel me so at least you can die with some dignity.”
Draco only stares up with wide, watery eyes. He’s not above begging, but his brain is overheated and his mouth feels loose and disconnected. Distantly, his heart bends in half, mourning how he wasn’t able to locate his mother in time. However, as Draco stares at the tip of Yaxley’s wand, he thinks, faintly, that he might possibly feel a drop of relief mixing into his fear. Soon, he won’t have to try so hard.
“STOP! Hands up!”
They are suddenly surrounded by frantic rustling through the foliage. Seconds later, an entourage of wizards in Auror uniforms burst into the clearing. Yaxley curses and abruptly races away, while a group of Aurors break off to chase him further into the forest.
Draco releases a shuddering sigh, relieved by the rescue, before the remaining Aurors spin to point six wands in his face.
“I said, hands up,” one of them commands roughly. He is older than the rest of the Aurors, with weariness around his eyes and a greying mustache on his upper lip. “Voldemort is dead, and you are now under arrest for crimes against wizarding kind.”
~
After Draco is able to rest— taken to a temporary Ministry cell and given some food, water, and even a thin cot— he finally finds the words to beg. He argues his case with the guard on the other side of the bars and pleads for her to at least tell him the state of his parents. After days of wheedling, he only gets a single gruff confirmation that they’re alive.
He spends weeks inside his little cell, which he suspects used to be an office before it was converted to hold him as he awaits his trial. He supposes that there are likely dozens to hundreds of Death Eaters held in other spaces throughout the now reclaimed Ministry of Magic, and likely the highest offending criminals are going to trial first.
Draco finds solace in that. He marks each passing day by scratching his nail against the wall, and he uses the time to prepare his own defense. He thinks it’s solid enough: he was a child, he was coerced and threatened, he was never truly on their side anyway. Take your pick. There’s probably not enough space in Azkaban to even waste on a non-starter like him.
When the day of his trial finally arrives, Draco walks into the courtroom with his head held high. He’s grown a bit of a beard and certainly looks disheveled, but that plays beautifully into his argument. Malfoys don’t belong in prison. The mere idea is ludicrous. Draco feels that over the course of the last several years, he’s hesitated and delayed and avoided enough to prove that he is not truly bad.
The prosecuting argument is endless. He’s forced to listen to graphic descriptions of all the crimes by his own hands, and then the crimes perpetuated by others in which he did not intervene. For a moment, his hope is buoyed when Potter steps up to testify about his refusal to identify the trio at the Manor, but the hope is extinguished when someone else brings up his attempt to capture Potter in the Room of Requirement. Every good thing he’s done is canceled out by three horrible ones.
The trial takes several days and it rips apart Draco cell by cell. After he is escorted back to his cell at night, he lays motionless on the cot, refusing to cry as his whole body quivers. At first he tries to bury the memories, but there are too many and they overflow the compartments of his mind to drown him in images of blood and panic. As the trial reaches its conclusion, Draco has accepted that he is guilty. He just wants it to end.
He still hopes, perhaps foolishly, that they will be lenient with the sentencing. That there is a difference between him and all the other Death Eaters, because at least he didn’t really mean it. His Crucios were always a bit weak, and his Avadas were only utilized during battle, when he could aim to miss. But the judge looks Draco in the eye as they deliver the life sentence, and Draco wonders why he is even surprised. Casting even a single Unforgivable famously buys one a lifetime in Azkaban, and all the hesitations and qualms in the world cannot erase the fact that Draco has casted all three, repeatedly.
Draco is too exhausted to resist the Aurors dragging him away. He’s silent as they shackle him, transform his clothes into a humiliating stripe pattern, and hustle him off to be imprisoned. His body bounces between the different guards escorting him, limp and directionless. Once at Azkaban, they burn something onto the back of his neck, telling him that it’s his prisoner identification number. As if he’s not instantly recognizable just by the color of his hair.
Draco catches a glimpse as they usher him past a glass window. The tattoo is black and huge, marring his fair skin. It takes up the entire posterior of his neck and even wraps around a little to the sides. Draco hates it.
He says nothing throughout it all. The urge to protest only rises in him one more time, as the Auror leading him down the halls of Azkaban halts outside an empty cell. The Auror undoes Draco’s shackles, and in the one second that Draco is free, he has half a mind to beg for mercy. To apologize and placate and even humiliate himself, because he knows that once he passes through those bars, he will never be the same. However, the opportunity slips by too quickly, and before his thoughts can assemble themselves into words inside his dry mouth, Draco is shoved into his prison cell.
And all desire to beg permanently leaves Draco’s body.
~
The first two years of Azkaban are unspeakable. Dementors hover outside his bars and lower the temperature to just a degree above freezing. Draco supposes that he must have a cell mate— Azkaban is too small of a prison not to have any— but he barely notices because he spends nearly all his time curled on his cot, teeth clenched against the chill. The only cognizant thought that plays in Draco’s head, over and over, is I’m never leaving here.
At some point, the Dementors are cleared and replaced by Auror guards. Prison reforms, Draco is told. Took years to pass through the Ministry.
But it’s almost worse now, because without the Dementors to steal his every thought, Draco has far too many of them. His entire spectrum of emotion is restored, and it is all unbearable. Instead of spending all day shivering on his cot, he paces his cell and slams his palms against the walls. He snaps at the Auror guards and sometimes skips meals out of sheer anger. At night, when he and his neighboring cell mates can pretend that they are all sleeping, he stares up at the dim stone ceiling and sobs as quietly as he can.
His mother comes to visit, once, as soon as she is able to. It’s another new privilege granted to him by prison reforms. When Narcissa arrives, Draco is ushered into a separate room specifically for this purpose, and an Auror stands watch over the entire encounter.
His mother bursts into tears as soon as she lays eyes on him. Draco looks down, trying to see what she sees, and observes long, gaunt limbs peeking out from a loose, ill-fitting uniform. He smiles awkwardly and attempts to reassure her, patting her hand.
He would never, ever admit it, but deep down he feels a twinge of resentment— that he has to comfort his own mother when she’s the one who got the better deal. His mother had been sentenced only to house arrest for a few years, because she never formally joined the Death Eaters and didn’t cast any Dark Magic on her own. But that feels like such a technicality. It was down to sheer luck that Voldemort had never asked these demands of Narcissa, because Draco knows that if the Dark Lord had, his mother would have done it all in a heartbeat. For the same reasons that Draco did.
As much as he tries to hide it, Draco’s resentment makes him feel monstrous, so he tells his mother that she doesn’t have to visit him. That clearly it is hard for her, and she should just write him instead. She squeezes his hand near to bursting, weeping loudly, and Draco thinks that she’s going to refuse— going to insist upon seeing her only son. But she only nods once, with sad resolve. Before long, she takes one last look at Draco and hurries off, sniffling into her handkerchief.
Within the hour Draco is back in his cell. He is empty and alone, and he wishes he had said anything else.
One day, his cell mate is swapped for someone new. The people surrounding him are always rotating— an endless carousel of grey, dead stares— but Draco notices this time because this new person is young, with eyes that still light.
He looks vaguely familiar, and Draco wonders if they went to school together. He has messy, dark hair and would look identical to Potter except there are no glasses to obscure his clear, blue eyes.
Draco can’t stop staring, because it’s been a long time since he’s seen color and even longer still since he’s cared about being polite. He feels like a caged animal inspecting a new mate thrown into his enclosure. When the prison bars snap back into place, the man turns around and catches him.
“Oh! You’re Draco, right?”
Something long buried begins to stir in his chest. He doesn’t remember the last time someone has said his name.
Draco can’t help himself from sneaking peeks— while they’re eating their meals of tasteless porridge, while they’re being ushered to the showers, while they’re granted a rare afternoon outside underneath the bleak, sunless sky. He feels a strange sense of camaraderie, sharing space with this man whose youth is also being stolen from him.
Often, he finds the man peering back. One time, he even smiles at Draco. Draco tries to stretch his mouth into a similar shape, but it must look garish due to how disused those muscles are. The man simply laughs, all the sparse light in the room catching in his eyes.
The man’s name is Theo, which Draco learns because he leans over and whispers it to Draco one night, when the Auror guards have vacated the corridor outside their cell. Draco learns that Theo has been sentenced for several years due to possession of illegal Dark Artifacts which had belonged to his late father. Theo had held onto them too long to turn in honestly, and was caught trying to trade them in Knockturn Alley.
He also learns that Theo had been a Slytherin in his year as well, which is ironic because sometimes Draco wonders if his life would have been different if he had kept different company in school. But it must not matter. Even if he had been friends with this clear-eyed boy who smiles warmly even in the darkest of rooms, eventually Draco probably would have been caught helping him with his Dark Artifacts, and then they both would have been bound for Azkaban. Inevitably marked for it the second they were sorted into Slytherin, really.
Over time, their smiles turn into hand brushes, and that becomes leaning into each other as they sit against their cell wall. They don’t speak much, because there is nothing to really speak of in their dull, blank purgatory, but it is enough. Draco is comforted knowing that he isn’t the only 22 year old fuck up in wizarding Britain.
And then, one night, as their guard retreats from the corridor and shuts off the light, Theo turns his head and kisses Draco on the cheek. It ignites everything. Draco is lit alive from his head to the soles of his feet. Insistently, desperately, they push their mouths together as if they can inhale more life from each other.
Draco’s knees sting as they slam against the stone floor, but he doesn’t care. He props himself on his hands and trembles with anticipation as he hears the rustling of pants being pulled down behind him. His own are unceremoniously lowered past his hips by a set of shaky hands. Before anything else happens, they pause and stroke gently up his spine.
Draco looks over his shoulder to find Theo fondly smiling down at him.
“Who would have known the sole Malfoy heir is gay?” he whispers, hands sliding up Draco’s back.
“Um,” Draco responds. His tongue is numb and his brain is stupid with desire. “Kind of?”
Theo’s brows furrow. “Kind of?” he repeats.
“I, uh. I like witches…too.”
Theo stares back, the lust in his eyes replaced by dawning confusion. Then, he suddenly barks a laugh. “Oh! It’s the 21st century, Draco. It’s okay to be gay, you know.”
“But I’m not.” Draco doesn’t know why he’s still speaking. Some misguided intention to tell the truth, he supposes. The words fall gracelessly out of his mouth. “I like…both.”
“Both?”
Theo gawks at him, eyes darting between Draco’s as if hoping to find a lie. The conversation is utterly derailed, and Draco doesn’t know what just happened. He feels horribly vulnerable, arse out and shivering.
“Yeah?” Draco whispers hesitantly.
“Oh.” Hurt flashes across Theo’s face. They stare at each other, and Draco watches the beautiful blue of Theo’s eyes progressively dim until for once, they look utterly cold.
“You greedy bastard,” Theo says at last. His tone is not malicious, but the disappointment that colors his words seeps deep into Draco’s bones. Theo’s eyes dip to the floor as he starts to pull up his own pants. “Never content with what you already have, are you?”
The words, and the way Theo is already starting to edge away from him, impale Draco through the heart. He rushes to clarify. “That’s not what I—”
“Forget it,” Theo cuts in, firm and final. “I’m not interested in being your little prison tryst while you figure out who you are.”
Draco’s mind and body are frozen, shocked with disbelief over how quickly everything is falling apart. Without waiting for a response, Theo clears his throat and shuffles away to the other side of the cell, turning so that all Draco can see of him is his back. The effect is that of a candle being blown out, abandoning Draco in the darkness.
After a moment, Theo adds, “I should have known that a Malfoy could never pick a fucking side.”
Still stuck to the floor, Draco shudders out a breath as if he’s been punched in the gut.
After that, they don’t so much as glance at each other again. They remain on opposite ends of their cell, and when the guard returns in the morning, Theo requests to be moved to a different one.
Draco lays on his cot, numb through it all. He wonders, for the first time in his life, if there is something uniquely, irreversibly, fundamentally wrong with himself.
Years seep out of Draco like lost blood. Time keeps passing and each dull day sands away at Draco so that there is less and less of himself left. Eventually, Draco feels more animal than human— an untamed, thoughtless body that eats and shits and hisses and doesn’t at all know what to do with itself. Every morning, Draco wakes up and is disappointed that he does.
So when the Aurors come to pull him from his cell one day, he doesn’t quite understand. He stumbles after them numbly and can barely focus enough to process their words.
“Looks like daddy bought you a ticket out,” one of them grumbles. Draco is taken to a room and read a whole lot of rules, and the whole time his head is buzzing because he doesn’t understand. Where is he going? What else is left for him?
The Aurors hand him some plain clothes in a bag and ask him to remove his Azkaban uniform. In another life, Draco would request privacy to change, but in this one he just strips down in front of everyone because he’s exhausted and it’s easier and he doesn’t really have any dignity to protect anymore. When he’s done, one of the Aurors tugs sharply on his arm and the dark room around them begins to spin and bend.
Apparition lands them on a bed of weedy, tall grass. Draco glances up to a familiar silhouette casting a shadow over the fenced, now ill-maintained lawn. Malfoy Manor.
A nauseating combination of nostalgia and fear pierce through him. It’s the place where he first felt magic running through his bones and learned to fly a broom, and it’s also the place that made him a front row witness to death and torture. It’s too much to remember all at once, after years of blank slate walls and wordless waiting.
Draco whirls around, but the Auror that had deposited him here has already left. Swallowing hard, Draco attempts a faltering step towards the Manor.
It’s a dark, overcast day, and the Manor is menacing in its sharp angles and pointy towers. Draco only manages a few more steps before he turns on his heel and starts running in the opposite direction, toward the front gate.
He can’t be here right now. He just needs a second to breathe, somewhere neutral that doesn’t stoke an increasing sense of panic in him. However, the minute he throws open the creaking iron gate and steps a foot outside, the sky cracks with displeasure and his body is thrown backward onto the property hard enough that his spine connects with the ground.
Stunned, Draco blinks upward to find a familiar Auror with a mustache pointing a wand toward him.
“You have to stay on house arrest first, remember?” the Auror sighs. “Don’t make us take it all back on your first day out.”
Draco stares at the weary creases on the man’s face, before his eyes drift to a metal badge pinned to the man’s robes. Engraved upon it is GAWAIN ROBARDS.
“I’m the assigned officer to your case,” Robards clarifies shortly, catching the direction of Draco’s gaze. He shrugs, then shoves his wand back through the holster crossing his chest. “It’s not personal, Malfoy. It’s just the law.”
The terse Auror doesn’t say anything else, crossing his arms and staring back at Draco expectantly. With each passing second, Draco’s eyes glaze over and he feels his face slowly slacken into blankness.
As the older man watches, Draco pulls himself together enough to rise back to his feet. He averts his eyes to the ground, and with heavy, leaden limbs, he trudges back towards a house that happily eats him alive.
~
Draco’s mother is, of course, ecstatic over his return. She fusses over how little he eats at meals and seems delighted to admonish him over mundane things such as combing his hair more neatly. More often than not, she wears a set of thin, silk robes that are splendid in luxury but much too flimsy for outside wear. Draco suspects that even though she is technically the most free Malfoy, his mother has not stepped a foot outside the Manor for a very long time.
After several more months, his father returns home, too. Lucius had been able to secure Draco’s conditional release by offering a donation to the right Ministry official, but even more effort and time had been needed in order to secure his own freedom. Ironically, in the end, it had been a massive grant to the maintenance and expansion of Azkaban itself that finally allowed for Lucius to rejoin his broken family.
On the day of his father’s return, Draco stands at the other end of the entrance hall, hands clasped behind his rigid back, stoically watching as the door creaks open. When Lucius slips in, gaunt and light as a shadow, their eyes connect immediately.
At first, rage crests within Draco. It had been his father who had predicted the outcomes of the world incorrectly; his father who had foolishly led the family into ruin. Without Lucius, Draco might have never seen the inside of Azkaban at all.
But it was also Lucius who had saved him from an eternity of rotting within it. Draco’s eyes run over his father, noting the sharp jut of his cheeks, the hollowness in his gaze, and the resigned lean of his body. His father looks pressed out, enfeebled. So frail there is barely any of himself left for Draco to be angry with. Even though it’s been months since Draco was imprisoned, Draco still gets the sensation that he is gazing into a mirror, because his father looks exactly as Draco feels.
As Draco stares back at his father, the thought strikes like bitterness sweeping over his tongue: his father knows. Knows rusty barred doors and tasteless mushy meals, buried emotion and cold waiting, just as intimately as Draco does. For years, they were both staring at the same grey stone walls. Despite the grudges that run deep between them, Lucius might be the only person in the world who could possibly understand what the last few years of Draco’s life were like.
Draco swallows hard, crosses the hall in several long strides, and wraps his father in a tight embrace.
The Malfoys clink around the Manor like three discordant music notes. Narcissa reads the Daily Prophet with trembling hands, Lucius disappears for days at a time into his study, and Draco spends most of his time mouldering in his bed. Sometimes, he turns his head and screams into the pillow— not even out of any strong emotion in particular, but because he needs to prove to himself that he is still alive. That he still has some modicum of free will, even if it is useless and has no impact on the world at all. The screams putter out before they even travel into the hallway, the Manor so large that no one ever hears him.
It is after one such primal scream that Draco bursts out of his bedroom, thirsty and crazed, feeling like he can’t stand to be anywhere if he has to remain in his own skin. He stumbles to a stop when he notices a slight young woman standing startled in the hallway, hand to her mouth as she peers back at him with fright.
She’s blonde and small, her hair wrapped into a tight chignon at the base of her neck. Her features are as delicate as porcelain and a sumptuous, elegant purple robe drapes over her shoulders and falls to the floor. Tension lines her body, as if she is still deciding whether to stay or run from him.
Draco swipes a hand over his eyes, blinking hard, wondering if his mind is so warped that he’s started hallucinating as well. The movement seems to release the young woman from her state of frozen shock, and she quickly pops herself into a tidy curtsy.
“Please pardon me. I’m trying to locate the sitting room. My mother and I were just having tea with Lady Malfoy. I slipped away to find a washroom although I seem to have…gotten lost on the way back.”
Her nervous patter draws to a pause. “You…you must be her son, right? Dr–Draco, isn’t it?” Draco feels the burn of her gaze lingering on the edge of the tattoo wrapping around his neck, before her eyes dart back to the ground.
“Yes.” Draco clears his throat. “And you are…?”
She blushes, the color faint and pretty on her cheeks like lacquer. “Oh, I’m being horribly rude! Please forgive me. I’m Astoria Greengrass. I suppose we haven’t met.”
But I’ve heard all about you, her tone implies as her voice trails off. Her wide eyes flit to his neck one more time before she curtsies again and begins inching away.
“Anyway, let me stop inconveniencing you. I’m sure I can find my way back to the sitting room, thank you for your time—”
“I can escort you,” Draco interrupts. Immediately, automatically, his long buried pureblood conditioning resurfacing as he recognizes all the little ways this woman has been taught to dither about the point and couch everything in elegant, obfuscating language. She’s clearly intimidated, and yet she likely thinks it too improper to ask a stranger for help. It’s relieving, how effortless it is to know what to say next. Like following a script that’s already been engraved into him.
“Let me show you to the sitting room,” Draco insists, with all the gallantry of someone who once spent an entire childhood learning customs and courtesies.
Relief sweeps through Astoria’s round, youthful face. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I’m forever in your debt.”
He leads her down long, stretching hallways lined with tall windows that showcase the now barren grounds of the Manor. His mother has let the landscaping fall by the wayside, but Astoria is still fascinated, gawking at the garden’s bare bones.
“That used to be a hedge maze,” Draco explains, nodding towards a skeletal mess of shrubbery. “I would get lost in it for hours as a child.”
At Astoria’s curious silence, he adds, “Not on purpose, of course. Usually I was chasing some ball or snitch into it and found myself completely swallowed up. Had to wait hours for my house elf to rescue me.”
It’s not that funny, but Astoria giggles breathlessly, peeking at him out of the corner of her eye.
Touring her around the Manor is a welcome distraction. He points out hidden rooms and historical paintings, and Astoria keeps gasping and nodding as if it is all of extreme interest to her. For once, Draco feels like he lives in a house someone might want to visit, instead of a haunted trap. Briefly, Draco pretends to himself that he has visitors all the time, that the past five years never happened and he is nothing more than a pureblood prince entertaining one of his peers.
When he returns Astoria to the sitting room, she spins to give him one last, grateful smile. It’s reserved and shy, but Draco smiles back politely. He feels closer to normal than he has in years.
Later, long after the visitors have left, his mother approaches him with a rare gleam in her eye.
“What did you think of Miss Greengrass?”
“Nice,” Draco responds noncommittally. He thinks of how demurely she acted, tiptoeing around him with the stumbling innocence of a newborn fawn, even though she couldn’t be more than a couple years younger than him. “Cute.”
“She was very impressed by you,” his mother says faux-casually. “How well you treated her. I think she would be interested in meeting with you again.”
The underlying hope in her tone is obvious, but Draco doesn’t see a point in denying his mother. There is nothing in particular to dislike about Astoria, and Narcissa is lit by an eagerness Draco has not seen in her for ages.
His mother glows brighter when Draco says yes.
Draco and Astoria start courting, which mostly involves having a lot of tea at the Manor while feeling watched by his mother in the distance. Even his father seems invested, from the way his posture perks whenever Draco informs him that Astoria is expected to visit that day. It is clear that Draco’s life is the only interesting thing in an otherwise stagnant Manor.
If Astoria is disappointed that Draco cannot offer her more than sitting room teas and walks in an underkept garden, she does not show it. With the elder Malfoys, she smiles dutifully and curtsies deeply. With Draco, she shares curated facts about herself and asks the right questions— what Draco is looking for in a partner, what kind of family he would like to have, what he would like to do in the future. Luckily, he is able to pontificate so beautifully and verbosely that he ends up saying nothing at all. When Draco offers his arm to her as they stroll down the lawn, Astoria slips her hand through it and secretly beams to herself.
Draco is reassured to learn that she went to Beauxbatons because it means she has no idea at all what he was like as a child. To her, Draco is a blank slate that she can project her wishes onto, and Draco lets her. He supposes that if anyone knew what he was really like— all the monstrous things he’s done and said and thought— he would never be able to find acceptance, much less love.
They are good at pretending everything is normal and almost forget that it is not— except once, Draco makes the mistake of mentioning that he has to meet with Robards later that day, as he always does once a week. At the mention of the word “parole,” Astoria’s face immediately shutters closed.
“How much longer is that going to last?” she asks quietly.
“I don’t know,” he sighs. “A few more years, at least. Maybe shorter, if they decide I’ve been good.”
“Okay.” Astoria inhales a delicate, deep breath then nods gamely to herself.
“Is…that alright?”
“It’s fine.” Astoria rests her hands on his chest and looks up with a placid smile. Absentmindedly, one hand reaches for the collar of his shirt and adjusts it so that his neck tattoo is covered.
“It’s temporary,” she reassures him. “One day it will be over. And we will never have to talk about it again.”
When his mother hands him a velvet box containing a Black heirloom ring, Draco understands what is expected of him. He doesn’t protest because he doesn’t have any alternative ideas for the rest of his broken, hollow life. If he is to remain so empty, he may as well allow others to fill him with their own hopes and desires. Later that very day, Draco proposes in the garden underneath a sunset of cool blues and oranges, and he knows that both his parents are watching from the windows.
Astoria is ecstatic, swinging her arms around his neck, and Draco tries to draw from her excitement. He knows, now, that there is definitely something wrong with him, because even as he smiles back up at her, nothing stirs inside his cavernous chest. He feels thousands of miles removed from the scene, as if he is looking back at himself through a distorting lens. As if part of himself is still imprisoned and caged away.
Draco rigidly stands and Astoria’s arms twine tighter around him. She presses herself to his body, radiating joy that Draco desperately wants to feel too, and when his arms reciprocate around her lower back, she pushes up onto the balls of her feet to whisper in his ear.
“Will you allow me to stay over tonight?”
In an uncharacteristically bold move, Astoria’s fingers slide to cradle the back of his head. It feels simultaneously so intimate and so foreign that Draco’s heart aches.
Stunned, he nods, mostly because it has been so long since someone has touched him like that.
As soon as the door to his bedroom swings shut, their lips land on each other with an urgency that finally sparks something inside Draco’s chest. He grunts, surprised, and grabs at Astoria’s hips, kissing her hard enough to nearly bite her. His pants tighten and he is so, so relieved that there is still desire in him left to be felt. He thinks, maybe marriage to Astoria will not be bad. Maybe, if he is too corrupt and ruined to feel love, he can at least feel pleasure, and he can convince himself to be satisfied with that.
Lust floods his body as Draco grinds against Astoria and walks her backward to his bed. Someone finally wants him, so he wants her back. He collapses on top of her, nearly growling as he attacks her neck, and Astoria’s hands fall on his belt. It is only when he feels them shaking against his abdomen, too tremulous to effectively pull the leather out from the buckle, that he pulls back to look at her.
The wild haze dissipates from Draco’s vision when he sees that Astoria’s eyes are wide with apprehension. They’re twitching back and forth between his, and although her lips are pressed tightly together, the slightest quiver runs through them. Her hair is straying, most of it pulled from her sensible chignon. A fresh bruise is blooming on the side of her neck.
Draco fully sits up, suddenly nauseous as he assesses his handiwork. He’s disgusted with himself. He’s lost control. He’s been far too rough with her.
“Sorry,” he chokes. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” Astoria is quick to reassure. “I’m ready, it’s okay.” Her hands are still on his belt, and she attempts again to undo it, but trembles so hard that Draco peels her off of him.
“We shouldn’t,” he states hoarsely, and the more that he stares back at her fragile, nervous form, the more resolute he becomes. Surely, she must still be a virgin. Unlike him, she didn’t have to lose it while panicked and young, terrified that looming war and imminent death would arrive too soon to have any other chance. Astoria grew up untouched by conflict, an entire country away. She probably waited patiently her entire life, hoping to lose her virginity on a soft and sweet wedding night. Draco is ruining it for her.
“No,” Astoria protests. “No, I want to give you what pleases you.”
That makes Draco feel worse.
“No, you shouldn’t— No,” he commands. His tone is so harsh that Astoria flinches, and Draco wants to scream. He’s horrible. He can’t do anything right. He’s left Azkaban a raw, savage mess, and he barely knows how to act human.
He forces his voice to soften. “No, I think— I think we should wait for marriage first. Please.”
Astoria blinks skeptically at him, but Draco is already rolling over to the other side of the bed, back facing her. Exhaustion fills every crevice in his body, and he suddenly craves the blankness of sleep.
“You can stay here still,” he mumbles. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”
Astoria stutters soft reassurances, but they wash over Draco’s ears, unheard. He squeezes his eyes shut, and a defeated part of him almost misses the empty grey of his old cell. At least there, no one expected anything of him and he could be nothing.
At least there, he didn’t hurt anyone. Most of the time.
Both of them pretend that night didn’t happen. Astoria and their two mothers begin wedding planning, and Draco nods along to their ideas, grateful that the rigid gender roles of pureblood culture do not necessitate that he really have much of an opinion on these kinds of things.
They pick a date that initially seems far off in the future, but advances upon them with dreadful speed. In the last month before their union, Astoria stays late nights at the Manor, happily plotting out the future with his family. Often, out of an obvious longing for companionship, she ends up sleeping over in Draco’s bedroom. She doesn’t dare try touching him again, and they always stay a chaste two feet apart, but she drifts off to sleep with her face turned towards him, smiling into her pillow. Draco thinks that if he’s so fucked up that he doesn’t know how to be happy, maybe it’s enough that everyone else around him is.
Draco feels locked into a life that belongs to someone else. He starts avoiding his father, who has taken to asking Draco repetitive questions on what he plans to do after his parole ends, now that he will have a wife. His mother brings up grandchildren and Draco nearly vomits. Even though they’re only engaged, the family tree tapestry in their sitting room has already started embroidering the first few letters of Astoria’s name next to Draco’s. Someone is discussing the wedding somewhere in the Manor at any given time, and his hours of alone time are suddenly replaced with hours of keeping Astoria company.
Draco lies awake at night while his fiancée sleeps beside him, and he feels like he can hardly breathe. Like everything is balancing in a precarious stack, and the moment he takes the wrong step, the walls of the Manor will topple onto him.
Two weeks before the wedding, a stately Ministry owl delivers Draco an unexpected proposition from his parole officer. He reads the letter multiple times in a row before stashing it in the bottom drawer of his desk, heart beating wildly.
He continues to think about it over the course of several days. While eating dinner, while walking with Astoria, while watching house elves begin to set up space for a ceremony in the garden— Draco imagines freedom. He imagines unbound wrists and open plains; endless sky and a place where no one else knows his name. His pulse thrums at the chance to stop the inevitable train of his life and start over from the beginning.
One week before the wedding, he sits down at his desk and pens a letter to his mother, his father, and to Astoria. His hand shakes so much that the parchment is spotted with blots of dark ink. He’s anxiously shivering so hard that he wonders if he is even making the right decision after all.
Still, Draco opens the bottom drawer of his desk and removes the Ministry letter from it. He reads it one more time, trying to fight off the chill sweeping over his bones by thinking of the warmth he will feel once he is able to be anywhere other than here.
Then, Draco grits his chattering teeth and writes his response to Robards’ offer.