Dream: Draco

“Get up. Now walk down stairs and form a line.”

Draco had thought the worst part of his life had been during the war, when the Dark Lord had forced him to do things he couldn’t even bare to think about, when he had seen all his friends, everyone he had known die or go to Azkaban. Later he would learn he had been wrong so very, very wrong, the worst had yet to come.


Draco never knew how she got into the Manor. He never really even knew who she was. He only knew on that night he didn’t even have time to make a sound before the spell sealed his lips and jerked him out of bed.
He tried to scream, tried to fight it, flail about, but he couldn’t all he could do was march towards the door of his own bedroom, then out into the hall, were his parents were standing, equally mute, equally helpless. She marched them all down the stares into the great hall of Malfoy Manor. A woman he had never seen before, in a simple black robe. He didn’t understand, the war was over, the ministry had pardoned them, and this wasn’t supposed to be happening.
She lined them up in the great hall, then walked in front of him. She took his chin in her hands and forcing his face up to meet her eyes. Her touch was not ungentle and neither was her voice when she spoke.
“It is not a good thing for wizards to betray their blood,”
she told him almost kindly.
“To betray their Lord and bring their world to ruin. Your father has been a bad example for you Draco. He has taught you poorly of the ways of the world”
She stroked his cheek gently
“I will re-educate you. Watch”
It was an order and under her spell he couldn’t refuse. She lifted her wand and pointed it at Lucius standing to Draco’s left. Because of her spell he couldn’t move when Lucius head literally exploded, he couldn’t even scream.
In the deafening stillness that fallowed she smiled very slightly and pointed her want at Narssicia.
Then she burned the house down.


He walked away from it, the blazing ruin that was his home, out on to the lawn of the Manor where her power finally left him.
He couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t stop screaming. They took him to St. Mungo’s. There they tried to wash the blood and dirt off him, tried to cut the blood and brain tissue out his hair finally just end up buzzing it all off. They mended the burns all over his body, but it was hours before he stopped shaking, days before he’d take his hands way from his face, weeks before he’d speak to anyone. Auroras’ came and went, questioned him, or tried to. The Healers tried to do the best they could for him. Everyone was terribly nice but no one came to visit more then they had to. After a month he was allowed to leave.
They had taken his families money after the war, and now he had no house and no parents. He scraped together what little money the ministry would give him and left.
He went to Japan. There no one had heard of the war. No one knew the names Voldemort or Harry Potter. Most importantly no one knew the name Draco Malfoy. He used the money he had and enrolled at a wizarding business school. Several months into his first year there the head of the school called him into her office. She was a small woman; with her hair pulled back from her face so tightly it made his scalp ache in sympathy. She looked like the oriental version of McGonagall and like she might have been able to kill him using only her little finger.
“Darco Malfoy” she’d said in her heavily accented English when he entered and bowed. He tried hard not to flinch.
“You are a very gifted young man. You are brilliant with numbers”
He had bowed again, and murmured something appropriate and polite. All the way back to his rooms he had felt strange and light headed. No one had ever told him he was brilliant at anything before.
The year he graduated, he stopped buzzing his hair and started growing it out again. He started working in the wizarding stock market, something very few wizards back in England even knew existed but something vastly important and flourishing in the rest of the world especial America and Japan. When he turned twenty-three he moved back to England and bought a small flat. He had started dressing mostly in a highbred of muggle suits and wizarding styles, like his life, which had become a mixture of the muggle and the wizarding worlds. He lived and kept mostly to muggle London avoiding most wizards when he could. Once he had hated muggles and distained from having anything to do with them. Over the years though he had learned that they did have a purpose, even worth, he’d learned humility and he’d learned to survive.
Once his life had been terribly simple. He was a Malfoy, that was all that mattered. It came with great privilege of course but also great responsibility. All his life he was told that if he did as his father told him and lived up to his family’s expectations he’d have everything he ever wanted and then more. His line, his name, his blood was all that mattered, as long as he proved worthy of it.
Now he knows he’s father lied. The first thing he had done once he had left Mungo’s was to swear he would never have children. The second thing was to swear that if he did, or if he ever came into any sort of contact with any one else’s children, he would teach them that it was all a lie. There names meant nothing, their lines, there blood nothing. The only thing they had, the only things that were important were what they make themselves.
Now his name is a curse, reviled around the wizarding world. The story of his line told to small children to teach them what happens to wizards when they go bad.
Draco sits in the office of his latest client. One elegantly tailored leg crossed over the other.
“Draco Malfoy” his client reads, he frowns, his forehead creasing.
“Malfoy. Didn’t your family fight on the wrong side in the war?”
Draco clenches his teeth but still manages to smile at his client
“The war was a long time ago, times have changed and I was only a child then”
Not the whole truth, but enough. He sees the worry lift from his client’s face and smoothly continues on with the business at hand.
His life is almost good. He makes enough to live comfortably. Everything he has he’s made himself. Slowly the world is starting to forget Draco Malfoy son of a Death Eater and only see Draco Malfoy young businessman. He has no reason to want anything more. There are only some nights, more often then he’d like to admit.

“Get up. Now walk down stairs and form a line.”

And he’ll wake, sweating, shaking, wondering if the war will ever really end.