Archive of Our Own

You’ve won.

You’ve proved that there’s no place for people like me in today’s wizarding world. And there won’t be—not for a long while. We’ll be erased or turned into grotesques, locked away or pushed to the margins of these new times. Perhaps there’ll come a day when the tide turns again—another rise, another fall after the flood—but I doubt I’ll be there to enjoy it.

Your victory wasn’t even aimed at me. I stood aside, watching as the future killed the past, offering it nothing but misunderstanding and a pity laced with contempt. Your words still echo in my mind:

This is your one last chance…
It’s all you’ve got left…
I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise…
Be a man…
Try…
Try for some remorse…

You’re just like Dumbledore—and for anyone who can’t accept your virtues, there’s nothing left but to hate you.

You pass me in the corridor with gracious indifference, a nod in place of the words we used to hurl at each other at every chance, without sense or mercy. A small, polite reminder that I haven’t stopped existing for you. That you remember, and won’t forget. That you’ll drag me before the Wizengamot and see to it that the past is reflected in the future.

One look—that’s all it takes to remind me there’s no escape this time.

It’s like trampling a man crushed beneath his own horse on the battlefield. A puppet show played for someone who is himself a puppet. Run away? Where to? My house stands empty; only the memory of its past occupants lives there—both the unwanted and the loved. One is discomfort; the other, torture.

Run away? How? My son lies in bed, pale as the sheets themselves. He is somewhere far off and doesn’t want to return. All his plans and ambitions lie in ruins, like the castle walls that even now cannot shield him from what’s the real threat. Mine had been rubble for a long time, I’d already mourned them—but his life still held worth. I wanted to protect it.

Now I’ve got nothing left.

I don’t ask myself what I did to deserve this. I know the whole long list of my offences, which could be justified for as long as our cause still existed. Since the fall of the Dark Lord and his vision, we’ve all become criminals, thrown to the mercy or vengeance of the new order. Nothing new in that. Hadn’t I gone through it once before, nearly two decades ago? You were a turning point in my life even then, before you even knew I existed.

Back then, there was no mercy; I was left to my own will to survive. Today I have no will, and I don’t count on mercy, having learnt the lessons of the past. No one will care about my motives. It makes no difference that no greater cause has existed for me in years. After I’d rebuilt my life and my family’s on different foundations, I never managed to believe in it again. This time I wouldn’t even have to lie, but it doesn’t matter. One can only be judged by deeds.

The defeated and the victors do not share the same table.

The table in my house is cold and empty. The brightness of the sun, reflected in the polished surface each morning, is like mockery. The evening glow of candles only brings out the shadows lurking in the corners. At night they creep into my bed, seep into my thoughts, disturb my rest. They refuse to leave.

In my dreams it is late summer. I can tell by the patches of light falling across the walls and furniture in familiar patterns. Draco is a little boy, barely able to walk, and he wanders the empty corridors of Malfoy Manor, searching but unable to find. I hide behind columns, watching from a distance the uncertainty on his face; I move quietly like a ghost wherever he goes, always present, yet unseen.

And then my perspective shifts. Suddenly it is I who am the little boy, barely reaching above the floor. I am both him and myself—two people, two imaginings merged into one in this elaborate nightmare. Everything around me is vast and overwhelming, the familiar corridors become a tangled labyrinth where I cannot find the way, but I go on searching, stumbling and glancing around in growing panic at the endless halls. The pictures on the walls shift, the stone of the floor darkens, day turns to night without my noticing when. I am in Hogwarts, but it too is strange and unknown. I recognise no path, though I should. I feel once more as I did on that first day, abandoned in the huge castle with a new wand, a timetable, and my name, which suddenly began to mean something.

I wake drenched in sweat, unable to catch my breath—and yet by day I return, to find that fair-haired boy in the hospital wing, where I hold his hand in hope that the small contact will show him the way home.

‘Am I interrupting?’

The voice comes from waking, not from dreams, breaking into my thoughts. There’s hesitation in your movements as you look into the curtained space. Your presence here is so unexpected, so irrational, that I’m at a loss for words. You carry the smell of sun, dust and smoke—all out of place in this clinical setting.

‘It’s nice in here. Outside’s a bloody oven.’

You step to the bed, then to the table. You adjust the bouquet of healing herbs in the vase; their familiar scent spreads in a wave. You top them up with water. You’ve barged in uninvited, the same way you always do, and now you’re at a loss. You shift from side to side, rubbing at your neck, stealing glances at me and at my son. I have no intention of making it easier for you.

‘Madam Pomfrey reckons Draco will wake in a few weeks at most. He’s in a meditative state—it’s a natural defence of wizards who’ve gone through too much too quickly and need to stabilise their magic. She says it’s a sign of healthy reactions. You don’t need to worry.’

I don’t expect a smile; who would, in my position? Yet I receive one, and it’s not a smile of comfort, nor a smile of support. It isn’t meant for me. There is nothing kind in it.

‘She says I should be more worried about myself, really.’

Your amusement is quiet and bitter, but it stirs anger in me all the same, rekindles the dormant hatred. How can you laugh in the face of what’s happened?

You understand nothing. You think you’ve tasted every flavour life has to offer, but you don’t know that in the end they all reduce to the same bitterness you’re now trying to swallow. I cannot wait until you stop smiling. Until you lose, as Voldemort did, as Dumbledore did, as Snape did—as I did.

‘You don’t need to worry.’

Do you know how many smooth lies like that I’ve heard in my life?

‘If you want to join the Quidditch team, just train hard enough.’
‘If you seek independence, become a prefect.’
‘Marry, beget a son, and no one will question your position again.’
‘Take my Mark, and you’ll never need to resort to your heritage.’

And now this:

‘Help rebuild Hogwarts, and time will fly. Before you know it, Draco will be with you again.’

No one here cares whether Draco wakes. Not when so many other, more beloved students and more valued wizards have fallen. Not when, in their naivety, they believe I could have prevented it. I played my role too well all those years, persuading them of my power and influence, for anyone to doubt it now, when they’re all looking for culprits. I pay for it as I pay for every decision I’ve ever made.

You leave too quickly for me to frame any answer strong enough to pierce that armour of denial, bravado and hope you wear with unshaken certainty, no matter how battered it becomes. And I am left alone with all the truths and emotions I had meant to throw at you.

You are one of the cruellest people I’ve ever met, and you don’t even realise it.

Days slip by somewhere between the chaos of hearings and the stillness of the hospital wing. Draco looks the same, calm in his absence. That calm is something new. I envy him for it. And yet I want him to return.

From Pomfrey’s cutting remarks I gather that you drop in here at least every other day, when I’m not around. You avoid me, that much is clear; you come at dawn or late evening, or when the Ministry calls me away for this or that matter.

It comes naturally to assume you do it out of your own discomfort.

The thought that you’re doing this for me appears suddenly the day I see you again.

‘Not hungry? Dinner’s soon.’

You stop on the other side of the bed and look straight at me, openly and with a determination I can’t place. I answer with a stare, not understanding.

‘You could join us in the Great Hall.’

It’s easy to throw out offers when you know they’ll be turned down. That’s the only explanation for your words, though it doesn’t explain why you’d bother with appearances before me at all. You never did before. To join the victors, weary and proud, there beyond the wall? To dine with them, to pretend I belong? An absurd idea. I’m not welcome there, and you know it as well as I do.

‘I’ll sit by the entrance. If you make up your mind, I’ll be easy to find.’

You vanish as quickly as you appeared, but the impression you left lingers longer. The challenge in your gaze wasn’t aimed at me. The war you wage is no longer out there—it’s inside you. I have no intention of joining it. Whatever I do, it’s always someone else who suffers. Usually those I most want to protect.

You don’t appear again with this sort of offer. It was a one-off chance I didn’t take. It doesn’t matter. I’ll end up in Azkaban anyway. No sense in exposing myself to more blows before that happens.

It’s enough that Pomfrey always wears an expression as though my very existence offends her. Perhaps she’s offended that McGonagall consents to my presence here. I don’t know what I did to deserve it either.

Only two weeks later do I learn you’re behind it too—unmoved by the opinions of anyone who isn’t you. You’ve become an oracle. One may disagree with you only in whispers; aloud, everyone repeats your words. I wonder how long you’ll waste breath on me. I suspect you’re simply granting the last unspoken wish of a condemned man—the hero through and through. I cling to that belief until the afternoon, late and scorched with sun, when you come to me again.

Your face is grimy with dust and a single blue petal clings to your hair.

Like a tear hung out for all the suffering to see.

‘How are you holding up?’

How am I holding up?

I don’t need to speak; you clearly read the answer in my silence and in my expression, because you hasten to continue.

‘Looks like the Wizengamot’s ready to consider my proposal to replace your Azkaban sentence with a restriction of liberty.’

I can’t make sense of your words.

Why would you make any proposal at all to alter my fate? Why should you care? Why do you appear here like some angel bringing glad tidings, when there are so many places where people crave your presence, so many matters demanding your attention?

You are a mockery. Refined and sharp as a blade. Your very existence is a jest at the expense of men like me, and of those who want to believe they’re anything like you.

You stand leaning against the bedside table, arms crossed, listening to whatever I have to say with the same calm composure. The content doesn’t matter. I need to speak, though you drown me out with your very presence. It’s a shield—primitive, yet effective.

You may claim the attention of our entire world—but not mine.
You may win hearts, gather followers—but I’ll remain on my side, even if I’m the only one left.

I don’t know what in my words finally unsettles your composure. Was it the mention of Dumbledore’s name, or Shacklebolt’s? Was it the challenge to your reason, or to your motives? Or perhaps simply the reminder that I’ll never sing tearful hymns in your praise, nor lay down my life in your hands with a bow.

Your anger tastes different now than back then. There’s less of wounded pride in it, less contempt, and no real urge to hurt, even though these days you certainly hold the sharper weapons.

‘For Merlin’s sake, Malfoy! Has it ever crossed your mind—even once—that you might be wrong?’

Something in your eyes, or perhaps your mouth, makes me feel guilty. That only feeds my anger.

But you slip away again, before I have the chance to unleash it. When I’m left alone with my son, who is unable to say anything, all my emotions twist into something alien and threatening, something I cannot sit with in this cramped space. I leave the hospital wing, the castle, as far and as quickly as I can, before I realise I haven’t whispered to Draco a barely audible ‘Goodbye.’ That’s the first time.

I want to turn back at the gate, to climb the damned hill again just to utter that small spell. I’m afraid that if I don’t, something terrible will happen. It’s absurd—as absurd as the reason I don’t turn back: the thought of meeting you again, while the memory of our clash is still fresh, the emotions too sharp, and the taste of my words still clear.

I Apparate home. The dinner is too salty. Perhaps it’s the tears I keep swallowing, which I try to wash away with tart wine—or maybe my house-elves have come to despise me as much as everyone else does.

I don’t dare believe your assurances until I hear the sentence read out to me and see it in writing, with the proper signatures and seal. I won’t go to Azkaban. I won’t go, because you don’t want me there. Perhaps you prefer to watch me at my son’s bedside, his life turned to such a hell by my hand that he chose to live in dreams rather than in the waking world. Perhaps that is the more fitting punishment.

I wait for the summons to begin my ‘rehabilitative community service for the wizarding world’, but it never comes. Only you do. You don’t say a word. Your silence is like a complaint, a sentence, and an insult all in one. I force myself not to look at you, yet still I feel the weight of your judgement.

And then I lift my eyes—and in yours there is only sorrow.

So it’s my own voice whispering all those things?

It’s absurd how easily I mistake them.

You stay for only a moment, standing at the foot of the bed, and then you leave as quietly as you came. I don’t know what demons put that look on your face or drove you here of all places, but for the first time I can’t bring myself to be angry with you. Perhaps because, for the first time, you don’t look like a victor.

It doesn’t bring me the satisfaction I’d expected.

When heroes fall, there’s no hope left for ordinary men.

That evening I linger, held by the irrational sense that I’m waiting for something. But the sun sets, dusk seeps into the castle, and nothing changes. My son’s breathing is as soft as ever, his face just as calm, the hand I hold still lifeless.

When the chamber glows with torchlight, I whisper ‘Goodbye’ and leave with a sense of disappointment I cannot explain.

Outside, a warm wind blows. The colours of dusk spill across the sky like a ransacked collection of potions—dark and saturated, soaking slowly in indigo. A pale shape stands out against the lake; only when I come closer do I see the familiar figure broken by some strange distortion.

It’s you again.

You sit on the white tomb, dressed like a Muggle, one shoe propped on the marble, the other dangling in the tall grass. It’s surreal: seeing you here at this hour, when all those working on the rebuilding have long gone home, and the day’s chorus in the Forbidden Forest has given way to the symphony of night. Until now you’d managed to avoid me so well. If I didn’t know your silhouette so clearly, I might have thought you were some water spirit risen from the depths to listen to the frogs’ evening performance.

There’s a stone in your hand. I wait for you to throw it, to break the still surface of the lake.

But no. You only test its weight, casually tossing and catching it over and over again. Judging its potential without using it. I want to walk up and push you into the lake together with that stone.

At the very moment I think of it, you spring up, strip off your shirt in one fluid motion, and break into a run to plunge into the still waters.

I stand rooted, watching the ripples spread from the spot where you vanished beneath the surface. Five seconds, ten, fifteen. After twenty, you break through again, several fathoms away. You shake yourself like a drenched Crup; droplets glimmer, falling about you like stardust.

Your laughter carries across the water and reaches me like a voice from another world.

The defeated don’t laugh like that. Madmen, perhaps.

I didn’t even notice when I strayed from the direct path to the gate. I adjust my course and hurry away from that cursed place—away from your laughter, your bare back, the stardust and the madness.

For the first time I understand why the Dark Lord was so afraid of you.

You are the unforeseen. You are what slips through the laws of probability. You are different. Every forecast I ever made of your fate turned out wrong.

Better to stay away from you.

If only that were mine to decide. Avoiding you is like trying to flee from a storm; one may as well stand still and pray it passes by. But who would heed my prayers?

You come, deceptively calm, with a shadow of tan on your bare arms and strands of hair sticking untidily to your forehead.

‘Mind if I?’

A question that serves no purpose. You reach for the jug of water without waiting for my consent. Some you pour into the vase of herbs, while a few gulps go to the obscene moistening of dry lips. Now I know why you come here. I’m your one-man audience, in front of whom you can stage all your plays and perform your tricks without the slightest regard for decorum. My opinion means nothing to you, so you can take any sort of liberties.

No doubt I should feel honoured to have been invited to the Potter’s Little Theatre.

You look at me as though you can hear every word I don’t say aloud. And still I speak, for I want to know when someone will drag me from my son’s side and chain me to a mine—or wherever it is these days that one serves a community sentence.

‘No one’s going to drag you out of here, Malfoy.’

I can’t tell whether the ominous note is truly there, or whether it’s only I who hear it.

It’s true. No one will drag me from here. No one ever could.

And again: you fix me with that gaze, as though you can hear the murmur of my thoughts. You pierce me with a possessiveness so brutal it feels like you own me—as if you had any right. You try to strip away every layer I’ve bound around myself in over forty years of life. You’re shameless. When you look at me like that, I feel naked.

A shiver runs through me.

Your eyes mock the followers of Slytherin’s ideology, just as your Expelliarmus mocked everyone who ever strove for power. You should have blue eyes, naive as an infant’s, or brown, sweet as honey, warm as fur by the hearth.

Those cold green eyes don’t suit you at all.

I ask for reasons. The question is a semblance of control. But when you answer, I don’t feel like I have power here at all.

‘Given your current state, I doubt community service would do any good—for you or anyone else.’

Of course. You think so, therefore no one will dare to say otherwise. The hidden meaning hits me faster; the one on the surface emerges slowly as I notice the worried crease of your mouth and brow.

My current state? What a wretched figure I must cut, for you to look at me like that.

Suddenly I feel not only naked but filthy. I hate you for making me feel this way—almost as much as I hate myself in this moment.

‘The sentence will be postponed until Draco wakes,’ you add, shifting your gaze to my son, who, even if in some way aware of what’s happening around him, remains utterly indifferent to it.

And what if he doesn’t wake? I ask the question, though the answer has no meaning. If he doesn’t, they may as well kill me or throw me into Azkaban.

‘He will. And you’ll serve your sentence, Malfoy. I’ll see to it.’

I want to believe you. I begin to believe you, against my own experience, against the voices in my head and the torment of my soul. I begin to understand why so many people followed you, even though you had no idea where you were leading them. It terrifies me.

The next morning the vase holds fresh herbs, and I know it was you who replaced them, not Pomfrey, for she would never think to pick buttercups. Against the finer flowers they look like suns in a sky of galaxies and distant stars.

It’s absurd, cramming so many suns into one little vase.

Even more absurd is looking at them every morning and marvelling that they’re still there. They don’t wither, don’t dry out, don’t drop their petals. They dazzle my eyes and disturb my sense of aesthetics. At one point I wonder why I haven’t got rid of them already. I do nothing with the thought.

I have become passive.

Passivity helps me understand how meaningless and tasteless my life has become. The understanding deepens the passivity. The circle closes.

I wait.

The bouquet looks just the same on the day something shifts in the air. I turn, sensing I’m not alone. It’s been long since you last slipped in while I was here; I’ve gathered so many words I could say when you appear.

But it isn’t you. There’s no one behind me; the ward is empty. Pomfrey is most likely off helping with the rebuilding again. It’s her second favourite pastime these days, right after reminding me that were it not for her professional oath, she’d gladly send me straight to hell.

No, no one is here. I turn back to the bed. I am alone.

Alone with my fear.
Alone with my grief.
Alone with my…

Son.

Draco.

He’s looking at me, squinting one eye in the bright light falling across half his face. His mouth twists in a grimace. He shifts and turns with a faint groan, fleeing the sun. Only when his whole face lies in shadow does he open both eyes, gazing at me directly and plainly from beneath slightly furrowed brows.

‘Father?’

I have missed his voice so much.

I don’t know whether I speak or act first—whether I reach for his face with a trembling hand, or whisper his name with a breaking voice. I never raised him with tender words or gentle touch. I never raised him with love. If I am to atone for something, it should be this above all else.

Words weave with gestures. Lies become truth. The hated voice within me insists this is impossible—that I’m dreaming or hallucinating. Meanwhile Draco repeats that it’s all right now, that he is here. It is I who should be saying this, but I cannot. I was unprepared for the flood of such devastating relief and such piercing joy. It swept me away, consumed and stunned me.

Pomfrey appears within ten minutes, summoned perhaps by a sixth sense or by some clever spell. She drives me out to run a series of tests.

I stand in the corridor, staring through the window at a world drowned in sunlight.

It is so beautiful.

Perhaps I wait there for five minutes. Perhaps for half an hour, perhaps for a whole. Time behaves strangely when one is happy, and in this unreal moment that’s what I am—happy, grateful and intoxicated by life that suddenly has taste again. It is not sweetness. It is an entire bouquet, where the bitterness and the salt of tears matter as much as all the rest.

If only one could live an entire life in the state of such revelation.

When I return inside, Draco is half-sitting propped on two pillows. His face looks healthy, his cheeks wear a trace of colour, and on his lips lingers the shadow of an embarrassed smile. I can’t remember the last time I looked into his eyes without seeing fear; for two years it never left them. Now there is calm, and it has not dispersed with his return to waking.

I thank the world for this act of mercy as I never have before.

Everything is as it should be—until you arrive. Too quickly, too suddenly, without reason or regard for propriety. With that arrogance of yours, which makes you think you have any right to witness such an intimate moment.

You have no right.

Draco clearly isn’t well enough to throw you out, so I do it for him. But when you leave, startled and irritatingly meek, I see darkness and shame in my son’s eyes. He looks at me, and when he speaks, I can hardly recognise his voice.

‘Potter saved my life, risking his own. I’d be grateful if you showed him the respect he’s due, Father.’

Of course you never breathed a word—martyr and chosen one, always at your post, yet staying in the shadows as long as possible.

If you had told me, if you had reminded me every day, if you had tried to gain anything from it, to elevate yourself, or to humble me with it… If you had done anything that might let me despise you, it would have been easier to bear. Easier to understand, to accept. Instead, your image torments me at night, and our clashes return by day when I have too much time to think.

Your cruelty lies in your kindness. It is your mercy that is the true torture, dealt out to your enemies with a small, sick smile.

Draco remains under Pomfrey’s care for a few more days; then we leave Hogwarts, which is still in the process of healing its own wounds.

A week later I receive a summons to return.

A splendid joke.

As McGonagall shows me round the castle, speaking of the progress and plans for rebuilding, somewhere between our words your name escapes my lips—unbidden, without cause or warning. McGonagall seems surprised.

‘Potter hasn’t worked with us for a good three weeks. And he’s done more than enough already, considering how much else he has on his plate.’

You’re not working on the rebuilding? Then what were the ever-bright suns in the vase? What was I meant to see in the way you appeared in the hospital the moment Draco woke? Why do you chase after me like a thundercloud when all forecasts say you should be thundering elsewhere?

I begin my sentence hoping that work will free me from the thoughts that keep circling back, but no; you are with me in every moment. In the red and gold with which we decorate the Hall of Remembrance, just as in the green and silver. In the distant outline of the white tomb I pass each day on my way to the castle. In the eyes of the orphaned infants I must visit in the foster home overseen by Mungo.

One of the boys has green eyes—warmer in shade than yours, yet close enough to torment me with every glance.

He loves chasing chocolate frogs and catching the butterflies I conjure.

I loathe this work, and everyone knows it. When Kingsley sends you to supervise me one day, I try to convince you that I am no good at it. I could do far more by re-entering the world of politics, rebuilding connections, forging links where none existed, and dependencies that would force the entire wizarding community into cooperation regardless of their blood or their beliefs.

You frown and wash me clean of illusions with the chill of your eyes.

‘Many of those who died weren’t good at hiding and running, or at fighting. Or at killing. They were forced into doing something they never wanted. So you’ll repay your debts to them in the same way.’

Then you watch me for over an hour as I play with the green-eyed brat.

Draco also comes with me one day, though he himself has been cleared of all charges and is a free man. When he sits in silence, watching my efforts and my clowning, I can think only of how barren his own childhood was of the attention I must now give to the brats of anonymous strangers. Bitterness, pain, anger, jealousy—he has a right to all of it. Yet when I finally dare to look at him, his lips curve in a sort of smile I’d never have believed possible on his face.

The war has turned us into people we don’t know.

You never again join me on visits to the foster home, but you return to the work of rebuilding Hogwarts.

No one expects you there. You have other duties, in the world of adults, not in the broken sanctuary of magical childhood. And yet I see you every day, as if you were a ghost—forever returning to the same place in vain search of something that might bring its soul peace.

‘I appreciate your work,’ you say one afternoon, after watching for a long while as I rebuild the burnt enclosures by the edge of the forest. The smell of fire still clings to the air; the whole castle is steeped in it despite our progress. Or perhaps it is a curse meant to follow me everywhere, to remind me of the ruins I left behind.

Your words don’t reach me at once, drowned in the hum of magic and the birdsong, veiled by the mist of weariness, the dew of sweat on my brow. When at last they do, I have no time to think them through, for you leap down from the fence and draw your wand.

‘Take a break.’

You carry on with my work, not questioning my methods or choices, but repeating step by step what you’ve observed. There’s no grace in it, but there is effectiveness. When I sit down on the grass, you send me a lingering look whose meaning I cannot fathom.

The heat presses down on me. I cannot think clearly. The sun burns in the sky, bright and merciless, and my magic throbs and shudders like my weary, aching muscles.

I don’t know where the cool breeze comes from, that touch of comfort which lets me close my eyes and breathe with relief. The sounds of your work blur into something half-real; I drift in space and time to past booms and flashes, to whispers and cries in dreams that ought to be nightmares, but are not.

‘Come on. Let’s get some dinner.’

I open my eyes and your hand hangs before my face, waiting. The sun has moved across the sky and though it still stands high, its inevitable fall towards west has long since begun.

I never dine in the castle, but today I have no strength left to protest. I take your hand.

In the Great Hall I find myself moving towards the Slytherin table without a thought. You follow and sit at the far, empty end, as though you truly don’t care. Then you pour me pumpkin juice and slide the dishes closer. I must look a sorry sight indeed, if you feel obliged to serve me.

‘The enclosures look ten times better now than before the fire.’

Why choose this moment to start handing out compliments? Why bother talking to me at all? Why ‘ten times’ rather than simply ‘much’? How can one measure how well something looks, and how can it be multiplied?

Your words are nonsense all over, still they bring me comfort.

‘Even the worst evil can serve some good.’

I can’t follow your line of thought. I don’t even know why I try. I ask if it’s me you mean. Your brows draw together in a look of incomprehension and absurd concern.

‘You’re not evil.’

You say it with such conviction that at once I want to ruin it, to disappoint you thoroughly, to strip you of every illusion. Better sooner than later, since it has to happen one day.

But what if it doesn’t?

You set a slice of cake before me, and suddenly with blinding clarity I realise that I want this—cake, pumpkin juice, your hand and your help, your certainty where I’m gnawed by doubt. But I don’t want your concern to be charity given to a beggar.

I want you to look at me not only when I am weak, defeated, and pitiful. I want to convince you I am more. I want to convince myself.

The monstrous realisation lodges in my throat and behind my eyelids. I can’t swallow and I can’t lift my gaze from my plate. In the warped reflection of my face I see fear.

‘You all right?’

I leap to my feet and head for the exit, meeting no one’s eyes, fleeing from the cursed revelation that holds me and won’t let go. Only at the doors do I realise you’re following a few steps behind.

When I step onto the grounds, the evening breeze brings no relief. It still carries the day’s heat, heavy and saturated with scents. My legs give way, a haze blinds my sight.

‘Hey, hey. Easy. Sit down.’

The grass, your touch, the smell of smoke, the blaze of my thoughts—all merge into a single image, painted in green and sienna, ochre and grey on the inside of my eyelids.

When I open my eyes, the colours blur into the shadows of your face.

‘You’ve pushed yourself too far today. Maybe you should take a day off. I’ll let your supervisor know.’

I want to say something, something about how unnecessary this is, and how there’s nothing wrong with me, or perhaps about how I can inform the supervisor myself, if I ever chose to—but then my gaze falls on the little bundle abandoned in the grass at my feet.

‘Your cake,’ you explain, picking it up and setting it in my lap, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that the Chosen One should run after a former Death Eater with a half-eaten dessert.

Unpredictable. Mad. Dangerous.

You are an anomaly that turns my life into a lunatic’s tale.

I try to rise; out of nowhere your arm is there, strong and steady, like a support that lures with the promise of stability, only to collapse the moment you lean on it, casting you into the abyss along with your damned, foolish naïveté.

‘I’ll send for Draco.’

Your hand still rests on my shoulder.

No.

I shake off your touch and head down the slope, determined not to fall. You catch up in a few strides.

‘Then at least let me see you to the gate.’

Whatever I say, you’ll do it anyway, so I press my lips together and keep walking, ignoring the wind that scatters rumours into the ether about how weak I am. You walk beside me, looking straight into the sun. You don’t even squint. There is no brightness in this world that could ever intimidate you. Meanwhile I have to turn away both from the sun and from you, for my eyes burn.

‘Will you manage to Apparate?’ you ask as we stop at the gate. The winged boars bare their tusks, mocking the irony of the moment. I turn my back to them.

Why wouldn’t I manage?

You shouldn’t forget so easily that I am not some boy who has just passed his exam. You shouldn’t forget that I am a man more than twice your age. Nor how many times I pointed a wand at you, ready to harm.

You shouldn’t look at me like that.

The words sound entirely different when I speak them aloud, but it doesn’t matter, since we would never understand each other anyway.

A crease appears between your brows, one I’ve learnt to recognise, and which I know ever better how to provoke.

‘What’s your problem? It’s nothing. I’d do the same for anyone.’

I brush your hand aside.

I don’t want to be anyone.

Your face blurs into a whirl of colours, and a moment later I’m alone again, in the safety of my own spells, guarding me from everything unforeseen—including you.

You stop coming to Hogwarts. For a month you exist in my life only as an image and a voice in my thoughts, as a name caught from overheard conversations and the headlines of newspapers. My sentence becomes routine, a ready-made excuse repeated to myself at every opportunity.

I don’t need to care about social ties, for I have no time for them.
I don’t need to answer correspondence, for I have nothing to write about.
I don’t need to worry about politics, for it is beyond my reach.

So convenient. A handful of excuses no one can challenge, and my life veers off its old tracks into wilderness—rough, unknown, tempting with possibilities. One of them, which I would never have dared consider before, is stasis.

I indulge in this standstill of my life until the day the green-eyed boy finds a real home. I speak with his new parents and hand them a stock of Chocolate Frogs. I don’t tell them about the butterflies. I cannot simply give it all away. Better to be a hazy memory that fades with the years than nothing at all.

Other children begin to disappear as well, often swept into the arms of those who have lost someone themselves. Filling a void is no worse a reason for building bonds than any other. I speak with most of the foster families, and I’m struck by how few faces I recognise. I suppose I never truly realised how much my world had shrunk since I began to look at it only through the lens of fighting for my own importance.

Perhaps I always looked at it that way. Perhaps my whole life I lived inside a crystal ball, seeing only what was a reflection of myself. The ball has finally shattered—and I along with it.

I stop visiting the foster home. Only Hogwarts remains. The August winds drive the stench of burning from the castle; the heavy rains wash away bloodstains where our magic has not reached. I stop avoiding dinners in the Great Hall, for my house feels hollow and depressing ever since Draco went away. Tiredness has become my salvation. The comforts and luxuries of our estate repel me; I fear sinking into them, drowning once more in the past.

September draws near, and the day comes when only one task remains: to renew the castle’s magic, to fill the gaps left by destruction. To weave it back together with the effort of all who respect the school and what it stands for.

I don’t even know when I became one of those people. Perhaps I respect only my own effort put into its rebuilding—but I’m invited to take part in the final, most vital act of renewal. It is naïve to think there is something symbolic in it, but I allow myself that naivety. Payment will come later.

It is that day that I see you again.

You appear at the far end of the corridor assigned to me. I look at you, since that is my duty—to ensure nothing stands in the way of the spell connecting our wands in a straight line. On the landing stands a witch whose name I don’t know, though we’ve passed each other countless times in recent weeks. I exchange a nod, first with her, then with you. You nod to someone I cannot see. We are ready.

The spell requires nothing of me beyond raising my wand and opening myself to the flow of power set in motion by the four Heads of House. Magic streams along corridors and stairways, crosses courtyards and climbs towers, leaping between witches and wizards united in one purpose. I know this sense of power that comes from acting as one, for a result greater than individual ambition.

For a moment I don’t feel so dreadfully alone.

Then comes the final wave, and the spell slowly fades, like the light of the sun sinking beneath the horizon. For a moment longer I feel its warmth and brightness; I don’t move, fearing to chase away the last glow. Magic whispers around me, enlivened; the whole castle shimmers with it, pulsates and breathes.

Then the sensation dies away.

I don’t know why I look in your direction and not in every other. I don’t know why you look in mine. Or perhaps I do, and that is the most disturbing part.

We meet halfway down the corridor. Your hair has grown. The skin of your face has taken on a golden hue. There’s a new gleam in your eyes, one that almost resembles joy.

‘Good to see you.’

Why?

Why do you sound so sincere saying something so absurd?

‘I heard Draco’s gone away. How are you holding up?’

At least for questions of this sort I have a practised answer. Over the past weeks I’ve had to respond to them often enough. Most people can’t work in silence, even if the only person to open their mouth to is me.

‘Last day, eh?’ Your eyes meet mine and linger. I have almost forgotten what it feels like when you pierce straight through me with your gaze. ‘Glad it’s over?’

What kind of question is that? How could one not be glad at the end of a sentence? That’s my first reaction, before I stop to think.

Am I glad?
No.

Am I sad?
Also no.

Am I afraid?
Yes.

‘Easy to lose yourself in work like this,’ you say, as if reading my thoughts.

You hesitate. You want to add more, searching my face to see if you’re allowed. Your eyes soften.

‘I think I saw you losing yourself in it. That’s why I’m asking. We haven’t talked in a while.’

Now I understand the behaviour—the caution, the restraint. The good old sense of guilt. Tugging the reins just enough to steer people back onto the right path—except I always chose the wrong roads and ignored the pain.

Indeed, it’s been a while since we talked. But if you’d wanted to talk, you knew where to find me. The thought slips from my lips, unbidden.

‘I couldn’t.’

You couldn’t? So even the Chosen One cannot do everything? The words ring like a failed spell, wrong and jarring.

‘I realised I’d stopped coming here for Hogwarts. I felt like an intruder. Rebuilding the castle had become for people an act of penance, mourning, gratitude—a seed of hope. My own reason was… inappropriate.’

What’s inappropriate is what I imagine from your ill-chosen words and from what I think I glimpse in your eyes. You toy with the cuff of your rumpled shirt; you fold your arms. Your fingers clench at the fabric, dig into your body, rub, tug, deform. Once again I’m your single-member audience, watching in utter bewilderment as you perform the play of unconscious gestures.

You glance at me from beneath dark lashes.

‘You look well.’

Was it not enough that you once more began to undress me with your damned curiosity? Must you disarm me too with your sincerity? Expose yourself in this theatrical drama?

You’re so greedy.

When I answer that you too, you have the audacity to look as though you hadn’t expected it. As though there could have been another reply. As though nonsense did not provoke nonsense. I ask if you’re staying for supper—something real, suitably down-to-earth, to banish the madness hanging in the air. At least that’s what I think until you react with a flush on your cheeks and a fleeing glance.

I hadn’t even noticed when you pulled me onto the stage.

‘Yeah. I think so.’

You give me a cautious smile.

Of all the disastrous mistakes in my life, this has the potential to be one of the most spectacular.

This time we sit at the Hufflepuff table, since the others are crowded. Some greet us as we pass. Some still pretend I don’t exist, though it proves harder when you walk at my side. I respond in kind.

I don’t notice what I put in my mouth, but I do notice the freckles across your nose—a proper honorary Weasley. I notice your furtive glances, and the way you carefully lick cream from the prongs of your cake fork.

You speak of trials of people you assume I care about, and of your friends as though they are supposed to also be mine. You rail at some article in the Prophet. You recount a Quidditch match you attended with an obvious presumption that I cannot tell the back of a broom from the front.

You provoke me with your every sentence, and before I realise it, I’m telling you about everything we’ve managed to accomplish over the past month.

About the wards monitoring the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
About the modernisation of classrooms and the expansion of the greenhouses.
About evacuation passages that imitate the workings of the Room of Requirement.

I tell you many things nobody was there to listen to.

You listen.

The sky above us drapes itself in the colours of sunset. No one joins us, as though we form our own small world to which others have no entry. Malfoy and Potter. The most ludicrous duo in history.

When I rise, you rise with me.

‘Merlin, I’m stuffed.’

You should rather feed your ego, if you intend to thrust yourself into the world of politics.

My remark amuses you. So I have the right to your laughter? To the wind in your hair and the red of the last glow of sunset across your cheeks? To the quiet question, almost a whisper at the gates, that carries the weight of all that is left unsaid?

‘Heading back to yours?’

No.

I don’t think so.

You’ve got other plans after all.

I finally know what you want. You want to take me to a quiet place, away from witnesses, careless of their opinions, trampling every rule; to strip me of what secrets remain, to bare me and inflict on me the most elaborate of tortures.

I could have expected it. You are, after all, the cruellest person I know. Why, then, does it surprise me? Why do I stare down in disbelief when your trembling fingers close around mine?

I suppose it never occurred to me that I could get so far under your skin that you would turn all your attention on me. I missed the moment when you stopped seeing me as a thorn in your side and began to view me as a target you must claim.

Should I run?

Your eyes say yes, yet your hand doesn’t let go. You draw me closer, against every voice that might ever have something to say on the matter. You laugh at your own lack of restraint, wild as the wind in your hair, intoxicated with your boldness as I am intoxicated with the colour of your eyes and lips.

And then we vanish from this world, which slowly breaks down in the scent of overripe fruit into the simple hues of the coming night. We step into the stillness and silence of faded walls and fill the emptiness—the one within us and the one around us—with gesture and with voice. I never knew there was so much in me still to be said. I never thought anyone would want to listen.

‘Same here,’ you say into the sliver of air between our mouths, though I no longer know what you’re answering. Whatever I spoke has already been driven away by the touch of your fingers on my skin and the prospect of what’s to come, sweeping us up with the force of a tempest.

You came like hail in the height of summer. I had nowhere to run.

You laugh into my mouth at the nonsense I mutter, and drag me up some stairs, across some threshold, into a room that smells of night.

You are the breath of cool air in this stifling life I so desperately need.

I breathe deeply.