Chapter 8
On the day after he graduated from Hogwarts, Draco volunteered to join the Auror Corps. Normally, they would not take anyone under the age of eighteen, but those times had not been normal, not by any means. Dumbledore’s recommendations and his own history with the Order of the Phoenix – although there were not many who knew of that – had served to dispel, or at least quash, much of the stigma of his surname and his parentage –
Once upon a time, there had been no stigma attached to the Malfoy name; but that had been a long, long time ago…
And he had been allowed to enter into the Academy and learn what he would need to fight a war that had no definite front line, no easily identified opponents, and no rules or mercy of any kind. And then, a mere six months later, barely eighteen years old, he had been sent out to fight.
Looking back now, he was amazed that he had survived beyond the first week.
*********************************************
“Do you know the worst thing about it?” Ginny asked, slurring her words a little and squinting as she tried to focus. She didn’t wait for her audience’s reply, but went on anyway. “The worst thing,” she said, nodding sagely, “was that he was hated by both sides. The Aurors hated him because Lucius was a Death Eater, and the Death Eaters hated him because Lucius spilled everything he knew before escaping and returning to the fold, and poor Draco was stuck in the middle…”
“Poor Draco?” Tonks squinted at her incredulously. “Ginny, he was an unrepentant, prejudiced git. What the hell did you ever see in him?” She paused, perhaps belatedly remembering her manners. “If you don’t mind my asking, that is…” Unfortunately the wide, drunken grin plastered over her mobile, expressive face belied any attempt at humility.
Honestly, Ginny thought the other woman took far too much delight in abusing her younger cousin. Especially after consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol.
But…
“Well,” she said rather dryly, because although there was truth in Tonks’ words, it was not the whole truth, nor even part of it, “it certainly wasn’t his winning personality and open, inquiring mind...”
*********************************************
(1999)
It was Ginny’s first assignment in the ‘real world’ outside the Academy; she had graduated only a week ago and had been assigned to work under Alastor Moody himself, in an active combat unit that had a reputation for high successes – and high mortality rates. They were all of them ridiculously young – the eldest in the squad was twenty-three, and she herself, at eighteen, had been the youngest. At that time, Malfoy had been with the unit for nine months, and had been wounded three times – the longest anyone had lasted, they said, was two years.
Her father had not been pleased to hear where she had been transferred, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had actually volunteered for this posting. She had wanted to make a difference, and the best place for that – so she had thought, then – had been in one of the six active units that took the brunt of the worst of the action.
Gods, she couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid.
Outgoing, good-natured, and a Weasley, she had had no troubles in fitting in, but had been puzzled by the distance the rest of the team – especially the ‘veterans’ – had kept from each other; not a deliberate unfriendliness, but a slight sense of reserve. It had actually been Malfoy, the most reserved and aloof of the lot, who had enlightened her.
“I’ve been here for nine months, Weasley, and in that time about half of the people I came in with have died, some of them horribly. It doesn’t pay to get too close to people who are just going to die anyway…” And then he had made a disparaging comment on her family, before walking away, leaving her bristling and defensive, trying to think of something she could have said in return.
At first, she hadn’t believed him. She’d made friends among her fellow rookies, some of them quite close friendships, and then – just as Malfoy had predicted – some of them had died, leaving her with a tearing sense of disillusion and grief, and a determination for revenge that had quite killed something inside of her, something she’d never known she’d had until she’d lost it.
And still the war went on, day after day, attack after attack, without any care or regard for her feelings, and Ginny learned the price of survival, of sanity in the madness that had become her life.
“How do you cope with it?” she had asked him once, exhausted and filthy and covered in blood, not caring that this was Draco Malfoy whom her family had always hated, who had always hated her family – all she knew was that he had been through this and survived, and that he could tell her the secret that would make the pain go away, that would numb her to the horrors of her everyday life.
They were seated on the cold, stone floor of their barracks, their backs against the old brick walls. Malfoy, just as filthy, exhausted and blood-spattered as she, had only laughed – the short, bitter laugh that was no laugh at all. “You block it out, Weasley. All the screams, all the deaths, all the terrible sights and sounds – eventually they all fade into the background, and it all becomes numb.” He turned his head to look at her, his silver eyes dull. “Of course, it’ll all come out in your dreams eventually…”
By then, Malfoy had become one of the veterans of the group: the younger ones – and she was getting jaded, to think of the newer recruits as ‘young’ – looking up at him, telling tales of his exploits, drawing comfort from his still-famed arrogance, his nonchalance and his apparent invulnerability. He was Draco Malfoy. And as long as he had been by their side, with his Slytherin cunning and his knowledge of the Death Eaters, a little bit of his luck rubbed off on them, too.
Unfortunately, as his reputation grew, so too did the hatred of his opponents, who seemed to take it personally that Lucius Malfoy’s renegade son would defy them so successfully. He became a target, began to draw trouble and death like a lodestone – but it had always been his companions, his teammates, who had paid the price – not him, never him…
And his superiors, always watching him closely for any sign of treason and disloyalty, saw the situation and thought it best to take him away from the front line fighting, reasoning – perhaps even logically – that his presence would only bring more and more danger down upon the unit. And besides, they could keep a closer eye on him in London, and maybe even find another use for his wide range of talent and unique perspective in the administration of the war effort, rather than in the field.
The news had not come as a shock to Ginny, whose father kept her regularly updated, and so she had not been surprised to see him heading out of the barracks one morning, with his battered duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his ragged, shoulder length blonde hair caught back by a piece of string. It had surprised her to find she felt a small pang at the thought of no longer hearing his arrogant, supremely confident voice reassuring them all before a mission – usually with a derisory remark – or of talking casually and impersonally to him – as much as he ever talked, which was not much at all – of the nightmares they both vehemently denied, and the numbness that helped them to survive.
“So,” she said, carefully casual, “you’re going to London.”
He dumped the bag on the ground and shrugged, stretching his back – he’d had to dive for cover the night before, and had landed badly. “Yes.”
She made a small, neutral sound in the back of her throat. “Well.” What else could she say? “It won’t be the same without you.”
He smiled, then, a little – a small, wry quirk of the right side of his mouth – and nodded, not offering her any blighting sarcasm. An honour. And then there’d been an impatient call from outside, and he’d picked up the duffel bag, looked back at her one last time – “Stay alive, Weasley” – before walking out the door, and out of her life.
They’d known each other for nearly seven years, and yet it had only been in the last six months that she’d come to know anything about his real self…
She’d wondered, then, if either of them would live to see the other again.
It hadn’t seemed likely.
**********************************************
The reaction to his presence in London had been mixed, to say the least. If Draco had had any doubt before that they didn’t trust him, by the time he’d been left to wait a full twenty minutes in the antechamber to the Minister’s office he’d lost every single one of them. Really, was it his fault that his father had become a Death Eater at the age of seventeen, a full four years before his own birth? Was it his fault that his father had returned to Voldemort once it was clear his resurrection was inevitable and any who didn’t return to the fold would be hunted down and executed? And, finally, was it his fault that his father had fed the Ministry faulty information in order to gain more comfortable environs than Azkaban, from which he’d promptly escaped?
“Ah, Mr. Malfoy,” Fudge had said, seemingly surprised. There’d been no warmth in his voice, not even the pretence of it – only the haughty look down his nose at the man whose ancestry stretched further than this peasant’s could ever dream of. “Officer Shacklebolt told me that you would be arriving soon.”
Draco, in his turn, had said nothing.
“Yes, well,” the Minister cleared his throat, “you are to report to him on the fourth level, as soon as possible. No doubt he will assign you a task suitable to your,” he raised a supercilious brow, “many skills…”
Still, Draco stood impassively and said nothing. But this time, Fudge turned his attention back to his paperwork, waved a languid, dismissive hand, and said, “You may go.”
Luckily, he had forgotten all about Draco and was absorbed in the paperwork – had he looked up at that moment, and seen the look in Draco’s eyes…
But the hot, feral temper was firmly brought under control, and he quickly turned on his heel and exited the office, anything he might have said or done swallowed by his self-control and common sense.
The Headquarters of the Auror Corps dominated the entire fourth floor of the Ministry Building. Draco had only been here once or twice before, so he wasn’t too familiar with the layout, but he had developed a certain detached indifference since he had first seen death – in combat, that is – and there was very little that could faze him now. Not even the crowds of serious, bustling dark-robed Aurors and clerks filling most of the rooms with their noise, their purposefulness.
There were so many of them! And they were so…unwary. They let others approach them from behind, without flinching, they let strangers touch them without reacting, and they walked in front of open windows and through potential ambush zones without a qualm…
He balked, stopping in the doorway, spooked; the strangeness of it all hitting him at once. He had been living at such a high state of awareness for so long…
“Hey, you!” A hand came down on his shoulder, and he flinched instinctively, reaching for his wand, spinning, dropping to the ground, all his killing reflexes coming to the fore –
And only just stopped himself from killing a young, freckled, red haired man with wide, suspicious blue eyes. His wand pressed firmly against Ron Weasley’s throat, he smiled grimly. “Your timing is impeccable as always, Weasley. Now piss off.” A little reluctantly he replaced the wand in the little sheath strapped to his left forearm and turned his back to enter the now quiet, staring room.
Behind him he heard sputtering, indignant curses. “Don’t walk away from me, Malfoy, dammit… What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were out with the ASUs.” There was an unspoken question, a demand, in his voice; he couldn’t hide it.
Draco sighed, turned back – he had had enough experience of Ron Weasley to know when to give in. “I was recalled yesterday. The last I heard, your sister was alive. And as for safe and well…” he raised a brow, shrugged. But then, uncharacteristically, he went on and said something quite odd. “You should not have let her join the ASUs, Weasley.”
For once, they were in perfect agreement, however much it killed Ron Weasley to admit it. “I know that,” he muttered sourly, “but do you think she’d listen?” And then, rather awkwardly, he seemed to realize the situation and pull himself up, muttering some insults under his breath, pushing past Draco to stride into the – once more bustling and mobile – crowd and disappear. Draco was left to make his own way across the room, sliding through the crowd, most of who seemed to melt out of his way – none of them daring to catch his eye – and searching for Kingsley Shacklebolt, who would tell him why he had been so summarily pulled away from his station and what he was to do now.
He could not see himself, or the picture he presented. His long dark blue robes were ragged and tattered at the edges, his hair uncut, pulled back for convenience, he was pale – from staying out on patrol all night and sleeping all day – and his eyes were terrifying; lightless, seemingly colourless now, and always moving, always searching, always calculating. He himself seemed to radiate a dangerous, feral sense of awareness, of constant wariness that was quite disconcerting to those who had never seen real action – and even to some of those who had.
He could not see himself, but he could see their expressions, hear their whispers as he went past.
…My God, who the hell is that? Are you sure he’s safe?
…Just came from an active service unit… They say he’s been there for more than a year…
…ASUs? They’re all killers, every single one of them…
…Malfoy… …You know, old Lucius’ son…
…You’re not serious? He can’t be that old, then?
…Not even twenty. Look at him…
…His eyes…he's feral. And they say they're all like that...
***************************************************
Yes indeed, he’d been feral. And they’d been afraid of him, all those administrative aides and clerks, afraid of the raw, unshielded killing potential he had – the evidence that he had crossed over that divide that kept humans from killing each other indiscriminately, and done it quite deliberately, and could quite easily do it again.
Well, he had been very young. Since then, he’d learned to disguise that emptiness, the terrible knowledge that came with coldly, deliberately killing another human being, but he’d never quite managed to banish it. All he’d done was learn to fill it with something else – sex, drugs, drink – and to get on with his life, blocking it out, reducing it to background noise…
And to take Dreamless Sleep every night, to ensure that the nightmares could never find him.
On the day after he graduated from Hogwarts, Draco volunteered to join the Auror Corps. Normally, they would not take anyone under the age of eighteen, but those times had not been normal, not by any means. Dumbledore’s recommendations and his own history with the Order of the Phoenix – although there were not many who knew of that – had served to dispel, or at least quash, much of the stigma of his surname and his parentage –
Once upon a time, there had been no stigma attached to the Malfoy name; but that had been a long, long time ago…
And he had been allowed to enter into the Academy and learn what he would need to fight a war that had no definite front line, no easily identified opponents, and no rules or mercy of any kind. And then, a mere six months later, barely eighteen years old, he had been sent out to fight.
Looking back now, he was amazed that he had survived beyond the first week.
*********************************************
“Do you know the worst thing about it?” Ginny asked, slurring her words a little and squinting as she tried to focus. She didn’t wait for her audience’s reply, but went on anyway. “The worst thing,” she said, nodding sagely, “was that he was hated by both sides. The Aurors hated him because Lucius was a Death Eater, and the Death Eaters hated him because Lucius spilled everything he knew before escaping and returning to the fold, and poor Draco was stuck in the middle…”
“Poor Draco?” Tonks squinted at her incredulously. “Ginny, he was an unrepentant, prejudiced git. What the hell did you ever see in him?” She paused, perhaps belatedly remembering her manners. “If you don’t mind my asking, that is…” Unfortunately the wide, drunken grin plastered over her mobile, expressive face belied any attempt at humility.
Honestly, Ginny thought the other woman took far too much delight in abusing her younger cousin. Especially after consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol.
But…
“Well,” she said rather dryly, because although there was truth in Tonks’ words, it was not the whole truth, nor even part of it, “it certainly wasn’t his winning personality and open, inquiring mind...”
*********************************************
(1999)
It was Ginny’s first assignment in the ‘real world’ outside the Academy; she had graduated only a week ago and had been assigned to work under Alastor Moody himself, in an active combat unit that had a reputation for high successes – and high mortality rates. They were all of them ridiculously young – the eldest in the squad was twenty-three, and she herself, at eighteen, had been the youngest. At that time, Malfoy had been with the unit for nine months, and had been wounded three times – the longest anyone had lasted, they said, was two years.
Her father had not been pleased to hear where she had been transferred, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had actually volunteered for this posting. She had wanted to make a difference, and the best place for that – so she had thought, then – had been in one of the six active units that took the brunt of the worst of the action.
Gods, she couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid.
Outgoing, good-natured, and a Weasley, she had had no troubles in fitting in, but had been puzzled by the distance the rest of the team – especially the ‘veterans’ – had kept from each other; not a deliberate unfriendliness, but a slight sense of reserve. It had actually been Malfoy, the most reserved and aloof of the lot, who had enlightened her.
“I’ve been here for nine months, Weasley, and in that time about half of the people I came in with have died, some of them horribly. It doesn’t pay to get too close to people who are just going to die anyway…” And then he had made a disparaging comment on her family, before walking away, leaving her bristling and defensive, trying to think of something she could have said in return.
At first, she hadn’t believed him. She’d made friends among her fellow rookies, some of them quite close friendships, and then – just as Malfoy had predicted – some of them had died, leaving her with a tearing sense of disillusion and grief, and a determination for revenge that had quite killed something inside of her, something she’d never known she’d had until she’d lost it.
And still the war went on, day after day, attack after attack, without any care or regard for her feelings, and Ginny learned the price of survival, of sanity in the madness that had become her life.
“How do you cope with it?” she had asked him once, exhausted and filthy and covered in blood, not caring that this was Draco Malfoy whom her family had always hated, who had always hated her family – all she knew was that he had been through this and survived, and that he could tell her the secret that would make the pain go away, that would numb her to the horrors of her everyday life.
They were seated on the cold, stone floor of their barracks, their backs against the old brick walls. Malfoy, just as filthy, exhausted and blood-spattered as she, had only laughed – the short, bitter laugh that was no laugh at all. “You block it out, Weasley. All the screams, all the deaths, all the terrible sights and sounds – eventually they all fade into the background, and it all becomes numb.” He turned his head to look at her, his silver eyes dull. “Of course, it’ll all come out in your dreams eventually…”
By then, Malfoy had become one of the veterans of the group: the younger ones – and she was getting jaded, to think of the newer recruits as ‘young’ – looking up at him, telling tales of his exploits, drawing comfort from his still-famed arrogance, his nonchalance and his apparent invulnerability. He was Draco Malfoy. And as long as he had been by their side, with his Slytherin cunning and his knowledge of the Death Eaters, a little bit of his luck rubbed off on them, too.
Unfortunately, as his reputation grew, so too did the hatred of his opponents, who seemed to take it personally that Lucius Malfoy’s renegade son would defy them so successfully. He became a target, began to draw trouble and death like a lodestone – but it had always been his companions, his teammates, who had paid the price – not him, never him…
And his superiors, always watching him closely for any sign of treason and disloyalty, saw the situation and thought it best to take him away from the front line fighting, reasoning – perhaps even logically – that his presence would only bring more and more danger down upon the unit. And besides, they could keep a closer eye on him in London, and maybe even find another use for his wide range of talent and unique perspective in the administration of the war effort, rather than in the field.
The news had not come as a shock to Ginny, whose father kept her regularly updated, and so she had not been surprised to see him heading out of the barracks one morning, with his battered duffel bag slung over his shoulder, his ragged, shoulder length blonde hair caught back by a piece of string. It had surprised her to find she felt a small pang at the thought of no longer hearing his arrogant, supremely confident voice reassuring them all before a mission – usually with a derisory remark – or of talking casually and impersonally to him – as much as he ever talked, which was not much at all – of the nightmares they both vehemently denied, and the numbness that helped them to survive.
“So,” she said, carefully casual, “you’re going to London.”
He dumped the bag on the ground and shrugged, stretching his back – he’d had to dive for cover the night before, and had landed badly. “Yes.”
She made a small, neutral sound in the back of her throat. “Well.” What else could she say? “It won’t be the same without you.”
He smiled, then, a little – a small, wry quirk of the right side of his mouth – and nodded, not offering her any blighting sarcasm. An honour. And then there’d been an impatient call from outside, and he’d picked up the duffel bag, looked back at her one last time – “Stay alive, Weasley” – before walking out the door, and out of her life.
They’d known each other for nearly seven years, and yet it had only been in the last six months that she’d come to know anything about his real self…
She’d wondered, then, if either of them would live to see the other again.
It hadn’t seemed likely.
**********************************************
The reaction to his presence in London had been mixed, to say the least. If Draco had had any doubt before that they didn’t trust him, by the time he’d been left to wait a full twenty minutes in the antechamber to the Minister’s office he’d lost every single one of them. Really, was it his fault that his father had become a Death Eater at the age of seventeen, a full four years before his own birth? Was it his fault that his father had returned to Voldemort once it was clear his resurrection was inevitable and any who didn’t return to the fold would be hunted down and executed? And, finally, was it his fault that his father had fed the Ministry faulty information in order to gain more comfortable environs than Azkaban, from which he’d promptly escaped?
“Ah, Mr. Malfoy,” Fudge had said, seemingly surprised. There’d been no warmth in his voice, not even the pretence of it – only the haughty look down his nose at the man whose ancestry stretched further than this peasant’s could ever dream of. “Officer Shacklebolt told me that you would be arriving soon.”
Draco, in his turn, had said nothing.
“Yes, well,” the Minister cleared his throat, “you are to report to him on the fourth level, as soon as possible. No doubt he will assign you a task suitable to your,” he raised a supercilious brow, “many skills…”
Still, Draco stood impassively and said nothing. But this time, Fudge turned his attention back to his paperwork, waved a languid, dismissive hand, and said, “You may go.”
Luckily, he had forgotten all about Draco and was absorbed in the paperwork – had he looked up at that moment, and seen the look in Draco’s eyes…
But the hot, feral temper was firmly brought under control, and he quickly turned on his heel and exited the office, anything he might have said or done swallowed by his self-control and common sense.
The Headquarters of the Auror Corps dominated the entire fourth floor of the Ministry Building. Draco had only been here once or twice before, so he wasn’t too familiar with the layout, but he had developed a certain detached indifference since he had first seen death – in combat, that is – and there was very little that could faze him now. Not even the crowds of serious, bustling dark-robed Aurors and clerks filling most of the rooms with their noise, their purposefulness.
There were so many of them! And they were so…unwary. They let others approach them from behind, without flinching, they let strangers touch them without reacting, and they walked in front of open windows and through potential ambush zones without a qualm…
He balked, stopping in the doorway, spooked; the strangeness of it all hitting him at once. He had been living at such a high state of awareness for so long…
“Hey, you!” A hand came down on his shoulder, and he flinched instinctively, reaching for his wand, spinning, dropping to the ground, all his killing reflexes coming to the fore –
And only just stopped himself from killing a young, freckled, red haired man with wide, suspicious blue eyes. His wand pressed firmly against Ron Weasley’s throat, he smiled grimly. “Your timing is impeccable as always, Weasley. Now piss off.” A little reluctantly he replaced the wand in the little sheath strapped to his left forearm and turned his back to enter the now quiet, staring room.
Behind him he heard sputtering, indignant curses. “Don’t walk away from me, Malfoy, dammit… What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were out with the ASUs.” There was an unspoken question, a demand, in his voice; he couldn’t hide it.
Draco sighed, turned back – he had had enough experience of Ron Weasley to know when to give in. “I was recalled yesterday. The last I heard, your sister was alive. And as for safe and well…” he raised a brow, shrugged. But then, uncharacteristically, he went on and said something quite odd. “You should not have let her join the ASUs, Weasley.”
For once, they were in perfect agreement, however much it killed Ron Weasley to admit it. “I know that,” he muttered sourly, “but do you think she’d listen?” And then, rather awkwardly, he seemed to realize the situation and pull himself up, muttering some insults under his breath, pushing past Draco to stride into the – once more bustling and mobile – crowd and disappear. Draco was left to make his own way across the room, sliding through the crowd, most of who seemed to melt out of his way – none of them daring to catch his eye – and searching for Kingsley Shacklebolt, who would tell him why he had been so summarily pulled away from his station and what he was to do now.
He could not see himself, or the picture he presented. His long dark blue robes were ragged and tattered at the edges, his hair uncut, pulled back for convenience, he was pale – from staying out on patrol all night and sleeping all day – and his eyes were terrifying; lightless, seemingly colourless now, and always moving, always searching, always calculating. He himself seemed to radiate a dangerous, feral sense of awareness, of constant wariness that was quite disconcerting to those who had never seen real action – and even to some of those who had.
He could not see himself, but he could see their expressions, hear their whispers as he went past.
…My God, who the hell is that? Are you sure he’s safe?
…Just came from an active service unit… They say he’s been there for more than a year…
…ASUs? They’re all killers, every single one of them…
…Malfoy… …You know, old Lucius’ son…
…You’re not serious? He can’t be that old, then?
…Not even twenty. Look at him…
…His eyes…he's feral. And they say they're all like that...
***************************************************
Yes indeed, he’d been feral. And they’d been afraid of him, all those administrative aides and clerks, afraid of the raw, unshielded killing potential he had – the evidence that he had crossed over that divide that kept humans from killing each other indiscriminately, and done it quite deliberately, and could quite easily do it again.
Well, he had been very young. Since then, he’d learned to disguise that emptiness, the terrible knowledge that came with coldly, deliberately killing another human being, but he’d never quite managed to banish it. All he’d done was learn to fill it with something else – sex, drugs, drink – and to get on with his life, blocking it out, reducing it to background noise…
And to take Dreamless Sleep every night, to ensure that the nightmares could never find him.
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