Obliviate (Chapter 19: The Simple Musings and Wonderings of Draco Malfoy)
There was no time. No time to process everything that had just happened, because Blaise snapped his head up at the streams of sunlight passing through the scattered trees and whispered, “We’ve been gone too long.”
That pulled Draco and Pansy back in—Draco by the smallest fraction, his mind still boiling with the flames of fury and icy waves of narrowly suppressed dread. He immediately let himself fall into his own head, allowing his consciousness to tumble down an endless spiral staircase.
“Remember the chase. Remember the spells. Forget the faces,” he said in a monotone. “They got away. We didn’t see them.”
Blaise and Pansy nodded, and let their eyes glaze over to the smallest degree off-focus. Draco walked backwards a few steps before he whirled around. “Strengthen the wards,” he called out coldly. With the voice of a Death Eater. Let him see what he needed to.
Within ten minutes, the three Slytherins had shoved the memories of the past hour into the threads of carefully bound pages, tucked into the furthest corners of their minds, and apparated back to Malfoy Manor.
He wasn’t waiting for them when they returned. He never waited. You had to go to him, because he was the Dark Lord.
In the early hours of the morning, the trio found him seated comfortably at the head of Draco’s dining table, Nagini resting about his shoulders as Antonin Dolohov continued with his report. “There was no sign of them, my lord,” he grunted, side-eyeing Draco and his friends. “Yaxley and I checked every square inch, as well as their place of employment. No one knew of the mudblood, and the parents had disappeared.”
The Dark Lord hummed as he stroked Nagini. “That will be all. You are to return to Geneva by midday.”
Dolohov nodded sharply and straightened his shoulders, licking his teeth as he spun around and stalked past the three youngest Death Eaters.
Draco stepped forward before the monster had a chance to wait—to contemplate killing them for a moment’s hesitation.
“My lord.” Draco tilted his head as he addressed him. “Whoever they were, they were gone the second we arrived. It’s likely they realized where exactly they had landed.”
There was not a flicker of emotion on the creature’s face. Of course, Draco’s tucked consciousness was never surprised by this. A sociopath is incapable of such feelings.
The Dark Lord lifted his lips, and the world shuddered. “Then what took you so long?”
Immediately, he responded with their practiced truth. “We were looking for any sign of who they might have been or what they were doing.” Draco clasped his hands behind his back nonchalantly. “We scouted the perimeter and reinforced the wards. Even added a few underlying hexes on the boundaries.”
Behind his back, his index finger twitched.
This was still a failure.
Draco wondered if Theo would wake up to an empty room. Not just today, but every day for the rest of his days, if the creature lashed out. Draco wondered this each time he stepped foot into his childhood home. If he breathed wrong, without steady confidence… or if he glanced at Blaise when Nagini was sent at the throat of some Light-preaching Hufflepuff…
Would he wake up to an empty room? Theodore Nott, who was terrified of being alone, yet never let the confession leave the abyss of his mind?
Draco waited for an Avada, and found himself praying for a Crucio. That, he could come back from.
A throbbing. A slither, a background ache. The Dark Lord probed through their memories, through them quickly acting out Draco’s lie in a section of the warded forest. In their head, it lasted an hour.
To their deeply cloaked and collective relief, the living snake said nothing. He simply raised his chin in dismissal and returned to caressing his pet as Igor Karkaroff stepped in to take their place, delivering his own report.
The three of them turned the corner into the foyer, cloaks billowing, when the doors to the manor swung open to usher them out.
A departing note. He is watching them.
Draco didn’t let a single step falter. He blew past the doors, thinking as loud as he could: Too early for Zabini and Parkinson to screw. Maybe now I can get some fucking sleep.
As they reached the apparition point just outside the wards of Malfoy Manor, Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy snapped into the space before Draco. His mother’s face crumpled in mournful joy at seeing her son, but a squeeze on her wrist from her husband muted the expression quickly.
Draco was too far into his own mind to feel much of anything at all. A part of him wondered how similar he might be to the current occupant of his home.
“Draco…” his mother breathed.
He nodded in greeting. “Mother. Father.”
“Oh, my darling,” she started, pursing her lips. “You must come back. Stay close to us.” Narcissa put her hand on his arm. “We can make sure you’re safe then.” Her eyes pleaded with him, hooking into tucked-away-Draco and yanking him to the surface.
Lucius clicked his tongue. “Cissa, go inside, my heart.”
She snapped her head back. “What?” she demanded, aghast at the thought of being in their home without her husband.
He touched her shoulder gently. “I’ll be right behind you. Go, now,” he reassured her. Lucius held her gaze for a fleeting moment before she yielded and walked past the group, not before grasping the side of Draco’s neck and kissing his cheek.
In that moment, he watched his parents. The shells they had become. Proud Lucius and elegant Narcissa, stripped down to barely-hidden tremors and taut voices. He wondered if the war would do that to him. To Blaise and Pansy, who were also still stuck inside their heads.
Lucius stepped close and trained his eyes on his wife’s retreating form. He gripped onto Draco’s bicep, and the latter gritted his teeth at the all-too-familiar motion. He waited for some lecture on his many failures. Draco wouldn’t have been surprised if Lucius had managed to hear about the escapees he reported to the Dark Lord already. But instead, he muttered, “Never drop your occlusion. The longer you practice, the more seamless it is.” He inhaled through his nose, then said, “And stay where you are. Come only when you are summoned.”
With that, he walked away to catch up with his wife, who slowed in her steps the closer she got to the manor. Draco turned half a degree to watch his father pull his mother’s hand into his, and lead her inside a home where he no longer lived.
It seemed Lucius Malfoy’s priorities had shifted.
Draco, among all his occluded musings, wondered one last thought before he apparated far from Malfoy Manor—what had his father come to witness to bring upon that void in his eyes? To lose sight of climbing the Dark Lord’s ranks?
Every time he thought the war had reached its peak, something else took its place. Draco felt another wave of dread coming, and he smothered the hopelessness of being able to do nothing as snapped out of his childhood home.
Theo was still peacefully asleep when they returned, and Draco realized the sound of his best friend’s steady breathing was the last remnant he had of the world before the world.
He would kill if he lost that.
Pansy, Blaise, and Draco all looked at each other in exhaustion, and Draco accio’d three small vials of Dreamless Sleep potion from Blaise’s bathroom. “After,” he said, passing them a potion each. Blaise and Pansy readily accepted them with a grimace.
They would talk after they slept.
As Draco headed towards the bathroom, his friends clinked their vials together and drank. Both dropped into their beds, kicked off their boots, and joined Theo in some distant realm of peace.
He shut the door behind him and paced the large chamber. Some part of him did intend to sleep, but the more he thought about the night’s events, the further the desire for sleep slipped away.
Draco sat on the edge of the tub and turned the small bottle in his hands. He pulled the cork off and squeezed it with his fingers until it catapulted out of his grip and hit the mirror. He dropped the vial on the ground. His hands shook uncontrollably. Bringing them up to cover his face, he took in a breath, trying to control the last bits of his lingering occlusion. “Fuck,” he mumbled.
It was all spilling over.
He pulled his wand out and silenced the bathroom, before screaming, “FUCK! ”
The lights popped and fizzed, and Draco threw his wand at the door. He slid into the bathtub and leaned his head back.
Why didn’t he do anything? Why was he so incapable of doing something? Time and again, nothing, nothing, nothing.
He swore unto his soul that there would never once come a day where he stood and did nothing.
As the pull of fatigue wore his drained mind down, the last musing of Draco Malfoy was of Hermione Granger’s wild hair.
“Merlin, Nott!” Blaise hissed as Theo smacked him in the head.
“What?” he asked innocently. “It was a loving good morning caress, dearest.”
Blaise scowled. “Well, dearest, keep your wet hands to yourself.” He rolled his eyes, but smiled when Theo looked away. He pushed the jam to Theo’s side of the breakfast table as he pulled out his chair.
Draco sipped his coffee and flipped through the Daily Prophet while Pansy ran through the different radio channels, seemingly bored. Everyone knew she was listening for news of Geneva. Draco and Blaise knew it weighed on her even more after hearing the Dark Lord order Antonin Dolohov, one of the most ruthless Death Eaters under his command, back to Switzerland.
There was no hope for that stronghold.
Draco glanced at Blaise’s watch. Half-past noon. He looked at Pansy, who followed his line of sight. Her mask slipped just a bit, and he caught a glimpse of grief in her eyes. Dolohov would have been well settled away from Wizarding England. With Millicent.
Theo eyed the three of them, ever-quiet. He cleared his throat. “You lot slept like fucking hibernating dragons. I, for one, woke up hours ago. Had to wander about like a dead Victorian child.” He raised his brows at Draco. “Care to explain why I found you in the bathtub mid-piss?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Draco muttered, shaking his head.
“No, really,” Theo pushed. “Did you all have a rager without me? Get blackout pissed while little Nott was tucked away in bed?”
Blaise smirked. “Yes, something like that.”
The look of betrayal on Theo’s face at the confirmation of his joke was enough to keep Draco going for days.
Just as he raised the salt shaker to throw at Blaise’s nose, Pansy reached out and caught his wrist. “Stop it, Theo. We were called to the Manor late in the night, that's all.”
He let Pansy bring his hand back down. “You were? What happened?” He looked to Draco and Blaise. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We did just wake up, Nott,” Draco drawled.
And so they did. About Granger, the idiots, how the Weasel attacked her, how they had to hide their memories and fabricate new ones in just minutes. Draco could barely allow himself to address what he had witnessed just hours ago, because he would simply spiral in a way that would end them all. He would allow that voice to awaken—the voice that ran in manic circles in his head about how he needed to find out where she was, how he needed to slaughter the Weasel, how he needed to make sure she never tried to trespass the Dark Lord’s wards again.
Time and again, he had to suffocate that fool in his own mind. He had to remind himself that this was war. It was bigger than him and his schoolyard infatuation. The leaps he wanted to take for a woman who would put him at the bottom of her list would end with his mother’s head on the gates of the Manor and his father writhing on the floor before him. His friends, this small little world he had, would be decimated. Just as she once said.
By the time he was caught up, Theo was clenching his jaw. He stood up and dropped his dish in the sink with an unnecessarily loud clatter. Pansy’s fingers twitched. “You know,” he began, running the water over his plate, “we had plenty of opportunities to take Weasel out these past few years. Makes me wonder why we never did.”
Blaise grunted in agreement. “I never cared much for the swot, but seeing that shit…”
Theo paused in angered contemplation. “So, you’re saying she didn’t even fight back.” He placed his hands on the countertop beside the sink. “He beat her—” Draco winced, but Theo plowed on, “—and she just took it?”
Before anyone could comment, he plunged in the knife. Glared straight at Draco. “He beat her and none of you did anything?”
Pansy snapped her head up. “Theo—”
“Why are you looking at me?” Draco questioned, the kitchen deadly silent.
Theo lifted his chin, unwavering. “You did nothing—”
“I get that you fell in love with her all of a sudden after a crying session and a painting night but you don’t get to assume shit, Nott.”
“No one let me help her! Hell, even she didn’t let me! She put up a shield to keep me away!” Draco stood up, fuming as his chair scraped the floor behind him. “Don’t fucking put your own twist on this—do not ever assume what I would do for her.”
He stormed out of the kitchen, out of the wing, out of the manor, and disapparated with a broken crack.
Blaise knocked his head back with a groan. “Really, Nott?”
Theo gaped at him. “How was I supposed to know he’d throw a diva fit and run off?”
“It’s Granger. That’s a given.” He sipped his tea. "And truly, we couldn't have done anything. We could barely hide what happened as was. Interaction just solidifies the memory."
Theo turned back to the sink and stared through the window above it.
The three continued on with their afternoon. Pansy slept once more in one of the Zabinis’ living rooms as Blaise and Theo played several rounds of wizard chess on the ground beside the couch she laid on. It was during Theo’s third defeat that Draco returned, taking a seat at Pansy’s feet.
The other two boys made no remark on the events of their breakfast, but Theo twisted his lips to the side in an apologetic grimace. Theo lifted a queen as a peace offering. “Blaise plays like he’s you on a broom in First Year. Get over here and let me fight like a real man.”
Blaise ordered his pawn to slide over and pummel Theo’s king. “If you knew how, your king would never have been caught dead within one square of three enemy pawns, you absolute fool, Nott.”
Draco smirked. “Really, Theodore, how does that even happen?”
“Fucking fine, you lot can play then!” Theo tossed the queen at Draco, who caught it with quick fingers and slapped it back.
Blaise threw a rook at Theo, reprimanding him on flinging pieces. Theo shook his head, saying, “You are a hypocrite of astronomical levels, Blaisey. As-tro-nomical—”
Blaise’s next piece flew past Theo and hit Pansy’s slumbering form straight on the cheek. The three boys stopped all bickering and held their breath.
One breath, two breaths, three breaths.
Just as Blaise sighed in relief, she opened her eyes. “I,” she murmured, setting her brows low, “will slaughter you, Nott.”
“Me?” he exclaimed in disbelief. “I’m sick of all of you—”
“Yes, Nott, you really shouldn’t have done that,” Draco chided, shaking his head. Blaise nodded in agreement, smothering his grin with a disapproving frown.
Pansy sat up slowly, reaching for her wand. Theo scrambled backwards. “Fucking traitorous socks—”
Thunder crackled in the distance, and it was only then that Draco realized how abnormally dark it was outside for the early summer evening.
Pansy shuttered her approach. Theo looked to the large window overlooking the gardens with the rest of his friends. “A storm?” he asked, unsure.
Pansy’s shoulders fell. “No,” she replied, nearly moaning in fear.
Draco stood up. So did Blaise, who said, “Not possible. Wizarding England is climate-controlled from large storms and disasters.”
Draco’s teeth ground audibly. “It’s an attack.”
“It was just like this in Geneva,” Pansy whispered. “I was there.”
“Wait,” Theo said, turning to Draco. “If it’s an attack, why weren’t you all called?”
Anyone who had known Draco Malfoy at any one point in his life would have easily remarked upon his muted display of emotions when not considering anger. His friends knew this to be especially true. So when his eyes blew wide open in shock and brimming realization from Theo’s comment, everyone in the room knew they were truly fucked.
