Chapter Text
Shimmering afternoon light, mottled against starburst strands of hair. A star perched on a tree. A sprig of a boy, twiggy legs dangling on either side of the branch where he sat. Head bowed. Low, so very low. As if the weight of it might finally win.
A whimper, a roil. It moved through his shoulders like a creature trying to break free.
He was bending toward the light. Or away from everything else. Scarce was the mercy that existed under the oak's full bower.
Draco gasps, consciousness landing like a blow. A heavy weight is on top of him. His body lies on hard ground in an open field. A torrent of rain thrashes against him, stinging his cheeks, overwhelming his sight.
Draco called from below.
Come down, he said.
You’ll fall to your death, he said.
The boy wouldn’t budge. Draco reached for the bark, hauling himself up. It prickled his palms, scratched them ruddy as a sunset afterglow.
Hand over hand, splinters needling under his nails, he climbed. Papery layers crumbling where his feet sought purchase.
Come down, he said.
You’ll fall to your death, he said.
Still nothing. The boy held something small in his hands. When Draco tried to crane his neck to see, the boy only curled further around it, a shell drawing closed.
Come down, he said. Again and again it was said. Long past the point where the words held any meaning at all, until finally, he reached the branch that held the boy. Pressing his chest against the trunk and holding on tight, he stretched his other hand out.
I’m here, he said.
Draco squeezes his eyes shut, begging his mind to be still. The weight crushing him is a person. His palms flatten against the man's shoulders and he shoves, ribs flaring hot and sharp. Groaning, he gives up, his hand falling away from the man to press against his side. His robes are torn there, a laceration as wide as his palm.
“Go away,” the words wobbled wet and small out of the boy’s throat.
Draco wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard the earth splitting at the sound. The branches wailed in a way the boy refused. Shaking and moaning, underwood protesting, viridescent leaves scattering.
We’ll fall, he said.
To our deaths, he said.
And then he could see it. Laid open across the boy’s lap: pages the color of old cream, cover a worn down scarlet. On the right in plain faded print, a title: The Velveteen Rabbit. Underneath, an illustration of a stitched and tawny toy rabbit. On the left, the boy's finger traced a name, it appeared to be written by someone trying very hard to correct their tottering hand.
His eyelids flutter, his fingers moving without him, like the boy in his head, following the jagged curves of his own marred skin. Assessing the wound. When he’s done he brings his hand back to the man above him, heaving through the pain, muscles locking against it, until he finally rolls the body over and off him.
He looks down at the man’s rain soaked face, and his breath stutters at the sight.
His index finger was no bigger than Draco’s pinky, delicately it followed the lines, overlarge and imposing as they were:
He knows it’s a name, written by a child. But the lines aren’t decipherable, warbling and reshaping.
Underneath, another inscription:
For you, my darling Scorpius. For when the world asks you to prove you’re real. You are. You always have been, always will be.
Swiftly, the boy’s head turned his way.
Draco nearly fell over.
Earth splitting.
The face of a Malfoy. It was his father. A cutting curse. Crimson rivers over sallow flesh.
And what had father said—
You must kill her… Draco, it’s a mercy…
Your mother won’t survive their prison or… or life on the run…
Kill her…
And it will give you—
And then father was dead.
Eyes the color of a grey washed sky.
A nose that sloped to a pointed tip.
Rubicund cheeks set against lily-white flesh and a forehead covered in pale falling locks.
“Mummy taught me how to climb.” The boy’s lips twisted, teeth pinching them in here and there. His eyes were wide and unblinking, dripping moons. “Mummy lied. She’s gone. Mummy’s gone and nothing is real.” A sob wrenched free, unstoppable, the thrashing creature now loose.
The skies bellowed. A droplet on Draco’s cheek, another on his hand, another on his nose.
Rain pelted through the boughs.
No, no, no. Father is gone. It’s father who is gone.
The heel of his palm drives into his temple, a shooting pain so intense he’s sure his skull is splitting apart. He forces himself up, snatching his wand from the ground.
Bodies lay everywhere. Some motionless, others barely so, limbs twisted, robes singed to ruin.
The throbbing behind his eyes only tightens. The feel of the cold rain beating his head offers some scrap of relief. He grits his teeth, squinting against it and moving—clutching his wound and limping, directionless.
His vision blurs. Sweat breaks through the cold, mingling with the raindrops on his forehead. His stomach churns violently, and he bends over.
A tremor climbed from below. When it reached them, the boy’s branch gave a great crack and lurched downward. Gravity claimed the old book, its pages splaying open like wings until it struck the earth with a flat, dead sound.
The boy yelped, scrabbling toward him. Still against the trunk, Draco lunged to grab his shirt, meaning to haul him across. But then the fabric tore loose from his fingers as the branch broke, the limb half-attached. The boy threw his arms around it on instinct, cheek pressed tight against bark as the branch swung wide. His legs had nowhere to go, sliding down until they dangled.
No! Draco shouted, clambering down the tree to reach the boy again—but beneath him the oak shuddered, a deep groan rising through the trunk itself, through his palms, through his muscle, through his bones.
And Draco knew:
The root would not hold.
Draco pulls in shallow breaths, the back of his hand wiping vomit from his mouth, his other braced on his knee. He straightens, his head falling back, the weight too much. Rain bites at his exposed throat and face.
If only mother could see him now. With this thing licking at the inside of his skull. Scraping at the soft matter of him. How she always swore that nothing about him had come from her, not his blood, not his mind, not his goodness or his badness.
See, mother? Mad like you. Flesh of your flesh, realized at last.
He’d always known it would come for him too. And still, he can’t help but answer its call.
Go west.
You are falling.
Fall westward.
Draco flees to a thicket of trees. Once they’re done licking their wounds, he expects The Resistance will return to that field, now spoilt with the dead and injured. To catalogue bodies, pilfer wands, finish what they started.
Once he feels he’s made it far enough he leans against the bark of a tree. He wipes at the sweat pouring from his temple and it only feels wetter. His hand lowers. It’s stained in blood diluted with rain. It’s then that he registers the tang on his tongue.
The pounding in his head dims to a dull ache and he sighs in supplication to whatever grants him the mercy. Carefully, he removes his sodden robes. His shirt comes next, wincing, he pries it off from where it clings to the stickiness of his wound. He grabs a leaf, transfigures it into a large cloth and reaches for his boot. Within it is a tin of dittany salve he never fails to carry.
His fingers shake over the torn flesh there, he can’t quite remember how it happened, but he suspects blowback from the cutting curse that hit his father. He performs the most basic of healing spells, never having learned anything beyond that—having been holed in the manor for so long.
He redresses slowly and conjures water, swilling it down in gasping gulps.
He wouldn’t attempt an apparition in this condition even if he could. But he knows that he can’t. It was the reason he chose this peninsula. He also knows that the only thing west is water, water, and more water.
He’s rested long enough.
His uniform is restitched where it tore, and he readies to move.
A fallen branch becomes a walking stick.
Light dapples through the forest canopy, the sun sitting low through the breaks in the leaves.
Golden.
He follows.
The forest is quiet, save for his labored breathing, his footfall on damp ground. Somewhere above, the birds start fussing, resettling after the violence of the night before.
The trees thin until all at once they give way, yawning into an outstretched coastline. Open sky and below that sky is dark jagged rock shelving down into lapping grey water.
He makes his way down, the first step pulling on his wound in a way that makes him shudder.
When he makes it to the seaweed-filled waterline, he lowers, gritting his teeth, careful not to hurt himself further. He pools water into both hands, it hits his face with a shock of cold—dirt and grime and blood washing away with it.
He spots a boat, a small thing with weathered apples painted in gold. It bobs there innocently. Draco watches the apples catch the sun. His head feels like static. He’s not sure if it's the blood loss or something else, the way the water moves, the way the gold fruit shimmers, but he feels like the boat is beckoning him.
Clumsily, he walks toward it. Clumsily, he pulls himself on. Clumsily, his hands cast off the mooring, pushing the vessel away from the shore and toward the sun.
The sail takes him an embarrassingly long time to work out, his wand work insufficient. He has to resort to using his hands, sharp shocks against his ribs with every adjustment—a bright pain that keeps him present when his consciousness threatens drifting.
The crossing is cold. It vibrates through his bones until he’s numb to it all together. It’s not gentle either, the swell rolling up, lifting the vessel and dropping it back down in a slow, relentless rhythm. Water licks against the boat's edge, dropping inside the hull and back out again.
His mind wanders. Thoughts and images arriving uninvited.
Blood spilled on the Moorlands.
Flashing spell light.
The rage on Potter’s face when he caught sight of Draco.
Father rushing in front of him.
The way father fell.
Blood spilled.
And he takes a moment to sit with it. It’s done, at last. His doing, afterall. He didn’t expect much past the battle. Didn’t expect to see the sunrise after it.
But here he is, gaze fixed toward the sun.
He could think about where he might land. Where he might go after. What after looks like.
But thinking means acknowledging there’s a destination at all.
So he keeps moving, the bow pointed toward the light.
The wind picks up mid crossing, the boat moving faster, spray hitting his face, salt on his tongue.
The hull reeks of fish and wet wood. Yet it does nothing to quell the hunger that crawls through his stomach, making him regret his last meal of whiskey and air.
Hours pass, he thinks. He wonders how far the news has spread.
Victory made decisive. Not unheard of, in the abstract. But even after standing on that field and watching it happen, even after waking up to its aftermath, he still could not make it feel true.
Who could have known? Believed?
The part of him that waded through the shallows of futility all these years never quite did.
And still, he toiled, year after year. He never could suss out his reasons. He told himself it was rage that had nowhere else to go. Boredom that gnawed him to bone.
The ghoul of Malfoy Manor earning back his body, layer by layer. Blood and vein, organ and muscle, bone and flesh. Until at last he was made manifest again.
And now that he is: who will he be?
He thinks he ought to hold onto the thought, turn it over like one might turn over a peculiar stone. But thoughts lead to more thoughts, and thoughts lead to stops.
He must keep moving.
His mind hasn’t cracked since that moment after waking—yolk of fragmented visuals spilling out.
It's the same solid mist as always.
Dull and grey.
There’s a dark line on the horizon that must be Ireland. Black cliffs rising from the water. The ocean hitting them in booming crashes.
Poorly, he brings the boat along a strip of shore where the cliffs relent, the hull scraping against rocks. He smells the tangy atlantic air, brine and peat from somewhere inland. He fumbles into shallow freezing water that hits below his knees and braces on them, catching his breath. The seashore’s noise is everywhere, muscling its way into his chest as much as his ears.
Then he sees it. Something dark and small on a lone stone atop a cliff. He blinks a few times, unsure if he’s seeing correctly.
“Stymphalian,” he whispers, not surprised at the rasp in his voice—so heavily unused.
He stands there, water lapping at his legs, looking up at his bird. The familiar father gifted him at sixteen. The raven who’s been lost to him for years now. Who should not be here on a cliff in Ireland.
The raven tilts his head. The same way Draco remembers he used to, an assessment that always made Draco scared of being found wanting.
Water sloshes as he drags himself onto the stones. The rocks are wet, his hands are numb and the incline is steep but he manages, even as his wound angers with each upward reach. From stone to stone to greenery at last.
When he makes it to the top of the cliff the wind is coming off the ocean in full gusts, hitting him in the face and chest.
Stymph rises, soaring in circles above his head. It makes him want to shout: You are not a vulture and I am not dead.
The raven's body pivots his way, wings flapping against the heavy wind until he lands on his shoulder. He pecks at Draco’s dampened strands of hair before launching himself off again—flying and hovering.
Draco walks his way and Stymphalian continues on.
Toward west. Sunbound. And Draco follows.
At one point he dries his boots. His wound is a dull presence. Stymph continues moving ahead of him, his glide unhurried.
They walk with the Atlantic at their side, vast and dark at its edges until it melts away with the cliffs. They pass through brown and purple heather, soft black earth and pools of water catching late afternoon light. They pass cottages few and far between, fields and land that rises and falls in gently sloping hills.
Occasionally Stymphalian glides low before settling somewhere to wait, then rises again, a steady presence under the travelling sky, clouds and gold light chasing each other across it.
Scattered hawthorn trees appear, some twisted and leaning sideways, he gets close enough to touch the bark of one and the raven joins him. Draco gazes upward, the gold is muting. Soon enough amber will bleed into dusk and Draco thinks he ought to reach his destination before that happens.
They continue on, the sun burning bright, one last reach before the horizon takes it. It falls on everything at once, catching Stymph’s feathers and turning them iridescent, violet shifting around their edges, bronze and green like oil on water where the light hits brightest.
The raven stops at a stone wall. And he looks at his bird for a moment in this golden hour, something catching in his chest. It’s a blip of a feeling, a flicker before it’s gone entirely, like it was never there at all.
There in front of the stone wall is a dip of land and then he sees it. Surrounded by scattered oaks, is a cottage. Two stories of weathered limestone, ivy climbing from the windows on one side all the way to the door frame. Two chimneys, grey smoke rising. A low garden wall at the eastern edge, enveloped in moss. Herbs and late winter plants spilling beyond its borders.
In the lower window, a single candle burning.
Standing at the field's edge, he can’t bring himself to step forward. Stymph lands on his shoulder and it’s like being broken from a trance. His jaw tightens, brows pulling together. He casts a silencing charm on his feet and forward he walks, steps tentative.
There’s a large tree on the front left side of the home. Draco pauses when he sees it—thinks of the tree that plagued his mind that morning. It’s sizable, its trunk wide enough for a large man to disappear behind. Its canopy is dense, would do well for cover, and he tells himself this is the reason why he should move toward it.
The pre-evening light is still lofty, but underneath, the branches swallow most of it. As he steps under, stipples of sun catch his boots, the dark of his uniform, the slow sway of branches around him.
He can’t see Stymph, didn’t even notice that he flew off, and he remembers—remembers how he used to whistle for him. It came naturally, something he started doing only the first week of having him. A fledgling of a boy and his fledgling of a bird. Back then Stymph seemed distinctly vulnerable, his eyes nearly matching the grey of Draco’s, before the years had turned them coal black. His plumage was dull and soft, his body small, his feet overlarge. Awkward and curious and already so unnervingly watchful that it made Draco anxious whenever he lost sight of him.
He licks his lips, and for the first time in—Draco doesn’t know how long—he calls for his familiar.
The whistle starts low and breathy then climbs into one clean, high pitched arc.
His raven does not answer. Instead, sharp and abrupt, something strikes the crown of his head. And a book goes flapping to the ground like a wounded thing, landing on its back.
Scarlet cover. Letters embossed in gold.
The Velveteen Rabbit.
He looks up.
Nestled in the thick fork of a branch, haloed in broken sunlight, is a woman. Prismatic rays catch on her dress—dusty blue, impossibly soft looking, hanging off her body like falling waters. The light threads amber through the wild crown of her hair. Golden hues reflect off her face as the branches shift around them.
He blinks, squints, focuses.
He knows that face. His hand absentmindedly lowers from where it cradles the soreness on his scalp.
His mouth parts, for a long moment he simply looks at her, his mind trying and failing to organize any semblance of sense.
Hermione Granger sitting in a tree.
Her breaths are coming in staccato pulls. Her brows drawing together in what he can only guess is concern. Though what she has to be concerned about, sitting serene in a tree, he cannot even begin to parse.
Her eyes are glossy, swelling at the edges with some emotion he can’t begin to place.
He tilts his head.
Turns her over in his mind like a peculiar stone. Chalcedony split down the middle—light diffused in shallow waters.
And then she moves.
It happens fast, her body shifting, unsteady and then she’s falling. Straight down, straight toward him. Instinct takes over. One arm finding the plane of her back, fingers curling in there. The other catching underneath her thighs, gripping tight. Her hand closes around the front of his uniform, a fistful of fabric, knuckles pale.
Her breath comes in short, warm bursts against his neck, making him acutely aware of just how cold he is, and probably has been for—
Woodsmoke. Wet Earth. Burnt copper.
A body. An inferno. Riotous curls, flames singeing them away in a serpentine crawl. A window with a candle whittled to a stub, glass broken, fire crawling its frame.
His eyes squeeze shut. He’s swaying, thinks the weight in his arms might drop. Then he remembers it's her, and he wonders why she’s not pulled away, why she’s so still. Looking at his face as if studying it. As if she has minutes to sketch it and someone’s life depends on the likeness.
Something shatters. It comes from the direction of the house. His head snaps that way, eyes taking inventory. The door, every window, every stone. Before he can finish there’s a flurry of hands pushing and fabric tangling—she’s finally lowered herself from his grasp, backing away and yanking something from the ground.
Her wand.
It’s leveled at him.
He raises his.
She holds a mild dueling position, one he thinks he should find insulting. But coming from Hermione Granger it jams his brain.
His temple pulses.
Woodsmoke.
Flames eating at honey-freckled skin, gorging on screams that come from within. Dancing along ivy-clad limestone. Bellying from windows, spreading toward an oak large enough to disappear a man.
He blinks. Sweat trickles down his scalp.
Granger watches him as if assessing, and she says, “Lower your wand.”
Draco did not till the earth, did not scatter seeds, did not come all this way to lower his wand and be taken.
To be confined.
Again.
He can’t and he won’t.
“Let me help you. You look hurt,” she says.
A laugh rasps out, scraping against the flesh of his throat.
He accepted an old man’s offer of help once. On that rotten tower. And look what it got them both.
The old man died anyway. Then Draco died anyway.
Another noise from inside, a clatter. Then spell light. A flick of his wrist and the stupefy she just sent his way glances off.
She backs herself behind the tree. Draco doesn’t have the patience for it.
He circles around the trunk, a stinging jinx catches his torso, incensing the soreness he’s been carrying around all day. She moves right before he can grab her, running from the tree.
He aims for the ground at her feet. Roots spring up, coiling around her ankles, climbing to her calves.
He sees her mouth moving and he’s not sure if he heard right but he thinks she’s whispering an apology to the tree before she brings a hefty branch down toward him. He splits it in pieces mid-fall, stalking her way.
Her eyes don’t leave him but he can tell she’s distracted. And Draco knows he needs to take care of her before whoever is on the other side of those walls comes out.
He blocks the slicing charms she aims at the roots around her legs.
Her gaze falls to his body. A whisper.
And the wound he’d hoped was on its way to healing rouses to life.
Skin stinging as if ripping. He clamps his teeth shut, staunches a groan that begins in his throat, grips his side — staggers — and keeps moving. The hand at his ribs wettens—
Wet earth.
Earsplitting thunder. Air thick with moisture. Water in violent motion. Sheets of rain, greeting a house in flames—halfway to ash—spirited against the fiery consumption of an oak.
Draco gasps. Chokes on dry air. Halted mid-step.
She’s managed to free herself from the earth that had her.
Draco was never one for trapping, but many a rabbit he caught at father’s behest.
He ignores the hurt, the weakening, the pounding at the base of his skull.
And gives chase.
She’s halfway to the house when he reaches her. Hand outstretched, he takes hold of the hair at her nape and wrenches her back until she’s flush against his chest. His other hand finds her wand, tosses it. Then his own wand jabs into the soft curve of flesh under her chin.
“Who’s inside?” he whispers, she trembles at the sound of him. He’s mildly aware just how serrated his voicebox sounds.
“He’s mine,” she chokes out. Raggedly, “I’m all he has. Please.”
She claws at him, thrashes against his body like small prey, despairing and frightened. He always let them go, though, didn’t he.
Except the ones he gave to Stymph.
He thinks he might have to take her apart the same way Stymph would. Beak finding the soft exposed places, working backward from the wound.
“Surely, if you’re all he has, he can do better. We’ll be doing him a favor, yes?”
A raven croaks, like a warning, like the air before lightning strikes—
Burnt copper.
Charged particles. The wind carries it. Flame and smoke. The water breaks it. His hands made it. Marrow-deep current, bent and released. Magic of his flesh.
Hermione Granger on fire.
Consumed.
His doing.
A raven croaks.
It pierces his skull.
His eyes are closed.
“The man,” says a boy.
Draco parts his lids.
Eyes the color of a grey washed sky.
A nose that slopes to a pointed tip.
Rubicund cheeks set against lily-white flesh and a forehead covered in pale falling locks.
His hold loosens. Wand hand dropping—wrist sliding against Granger’s chest, against her torso, against her hips.
He swallows down a wash of saliva as wooziness takes hold.
She stumbles free, running to the boy, he can’t be more than some years old.
He only has her, she said.
But the boy has Draco’s raven—perched on his shoulder.
Draco’s breath comes in flickers.
Granger’s hands find his face, thumbs moving across small cheekbones in a gesture Draco isn’t so familiar with. He knows mother must have once but… it’s remembered like a half-dream.
He’s made of half-dreams and little else. His chest does that winking thing, like wandwork trying to find its spark.
Stymph stays with the boy, he looks massive against his little body, a protector, like he’s his.
A raven’s black eyes find Draco’s and don’t let go.
Granger tells the boy, “close your eyes.”
Draco’s wand arm twitches.
The boy looks up.
Grey melting into grey.
Eyelids shutting.
Granger moves in his periphery, a whisper—
And Draco falls.