The next Lord Malfoy was crying, openly in front of his enemy, decorum and composure abandoned, because he didn’t have anyone left for whose sake he could keep it.
A lie. A lie.
Everything had been a lie, it was all lies piled on top of lies, lies lies lies—
“You should die,” Draco forced out. “You should die for having killed Father.” The words only filled him with more emptiness, but they had to be said.
Harry Potter just shook his head. “And if that’s not an option?”
“You should hurt.”
Harry only shook his head again.
The Boy-Who-Lived pressed the Lord Malfoy for his decision.
The Lord Malfoy refused to give it. He couldn’t say it, couldn’t bring himself to say it, either way. He didn’t want the war’s victor and their mutual friends to abandon him, and he wasn’t going to give Harry the absolution he wanted, either.
So Draco Malfoy refused to answer, and then the time of that self’s memory ended.
The boy sat in an office near to where the once-Deputy Headmistress had held court. His tears had run dry hours ago. Now there was only the waiting to see what would become of him, the orphan ward of Hogwarts, whose life and happiness lay in the hands of his family’s enemies. The boy had been called to this room, and he had come, because there was nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go. Vincent and Gregory had left his side, called back by their mothers for their fathers’ hurried funerals. Perhaps the boy should have gone with them, but he could not bring himself to do so. He would not have been able to act the part of a Malfoy. The feeling of emptiness that filled him up was so profound that it left no room even for lies.
Everyone was dead.
Everyone was dead, and it had all been futile from the beginning.
There was a knock upon the office door, and then, after a polite pause, it opened to reveal Headmistress McGonagall, dressed much as she had dressed when she was a Professor. “Mr. Malfoy?” his family’s victorious enemy said. “Please come with me.”
Listlessly, Draco rose up, and followed her out of the office. Seeing Harry Potter waiting beside her gave him some pause, but then his mind simply shut it out.
“Here’s the last thing,” Harry Potter said. “I found it in a folded parchment whose outside said that it was the last weapon to be used against House Malfoy, telling me not to read any further until the whole war hung in the balance. I didn’t want to tell it to you before because I thought it might prejudice your decision unfairly. If you were a good person who never killed or lied, but you had to do one or the other, which would be worse?”
Draco ignored him and continued in Headmistress McGonagall’s company, leaving Harry behind looking sadly after.
They came to the Headmistress’s old office, where she lit her Floo-fire with a wave of her wand, said to the green flame “Gringotts travel office” and stepped through after a firm glance in his direction.
For lack of any other option, Draco Malfoy followed.
She lay in bed, feeling more listless than usual that morning, awoken too early with the Sun just beginning to rise—though the direct sunlight was blocked by the skyscrapers that shadowed her house. A faint tinge of hangover gnawed at her temples, dried her mouth; she tried to be sparing with the drink (though she didn’t know why she bothered) but yesterday she’d felt… even more depressed than usual, like she’d lost something, somehow. Not for the first time, not for the hundredth time, she thought about moving—to Adelaide, to Perth, maybe to Perth Amboy if that was what it took. She always had the sense there was somewhere else she ought to be; but while she could live a comfortable life on the payments the insurance company made to her, she couldn’t afford luxuries. She couldn’t pay to go gallivanting around the world looking for someplace that fit her unsatisfied sense of belonging. She’d watched the TV for long enough, she’d rented enough travelogues, to know that nowhere the VCR showed her gave her any more sense of rightness than Sydney.
She’d felt frozen, stopped in time, ever since the traffic accident that had stolen her memories—not just of a dead family that meant nothing to her now, but memories like how a stove worked. She suspected, no, she knew, that whatever her heart was waiting for, whatever key needed to turn inside her to make her life begin moving again, it was one more thing she’d lost to that runaway minivan. She thought about that almost every morning, trying to guess what she was missing, missing, missing from her life and mind.
Somebody rang her doorbell.
She groaned, turning her head far enough to look at the LED alarm clock at the side of her bed. 6:31, it said, with the AM dot lit. Seriously? Well, that idiot could wait while she staggered out of bed at her own pace, then.
Stagger out of bed she did, ignoring the doorbell as it rang again, as she ducked into the bathroom and dressed herself.
She clambered down the stairs, ignoring the ever-nagging sense that someone else ought to be answering her door for her. “Who’s there?” she called to the closed door; the door had a peephole, but it was fogged over.
“Are you Nancy Manson?” came a woman’s voice, speaking in a precise Scottish accent.
“Yes,” she said cautiously.
“Eunoe,” spoke the Scottish voice, and Nancy leapt back in shock as a flash of light came from the door and hit her and…
Nancy swayed, putting a hand to her forehead. Flashes of light just going through doors and hitting people, that was… that was… that wasn’t particularly surprising…
“Would you please open the door?” said the Scottish woman’s voice. “The war is over and your memories should be returning shortly. There’s someone here who ought to see you.”
My memories—
Nancy’s head was already feeling clogged, like she was about to start hacking something out of her brain, but she managed to reach out and yank the door open.
There in front of her was a woman dressed as a (perfectly normal) witch, from black robes to tall pointed hat... — and standing beside her a boy, with short white-blonde hair and wearing (perfectly normal) dark robes trimmed in green, staring at her with his jaw dropped and eyes wide and beginning to fill with tears.