It had been seven months since the Battle of Hogwarts. Hogwarts castle, gutted by magic that had crumbled its ancient walls, had been restored. Children were returning to school, paging through their textbooks and scampering around the hallways as though nothing had every happened, as though no one had ever died there. The Ministry had quietly ended its Muggle-Born Registration Committee, which was quickly commissioned as an example of what happens when wizards go bad by those magical historians who tried to make a moral lesson of all of this. Everyone was beginning to forget and to rebuild... to bury the dead and the memories of those horrible things done in a time of war... Draco's world, however, had somehow stayed nearly exactly the same.
Draco actually hadn't found house arrest to be particularly terrible. The conditions of his agreement with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement stipulated that he couldn't leave the perimeters of Diagon Alley, but he hadn't found the lack of freedom to be particularly burdensome. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to be. His home had been raided by Aurors months ago, and every semblance of a personal possession had long been stripped away as evidence of his parents' war crimes. Azkaban was fuller than it had ever been.
The dingy room the Ministry had rented out for him to stay in whilst he awaited his trial wasn't luxurious, but he preferred it to the cold and dark room that he had to himself in the Manor. He would often lay on the molding mattress and listen to passerbys as they passed his inn. Sometimes, he would pretend that he was out there with them. Sometimes, their laughter and gossip was the only thing that would let him sleep.
And on this particular day, Draco dragged himself from his room in search of a meal. Sometimes he forgot to eat and sometimes he didn't eat on purpose. He wondered how long it would take before he rotted away. He wondered how long it would take until they would find his body.
He dropped a few sickles on a counter in front of him at a restaurant he didn't care to know the name of. The man behind the counter seemed to recognize him and brought him a sandwich without saying a word. Draco brought it quietly to his mouth, chewing for a moment before a startling thought popped into his mind.
His trial was a week from now.
He swallowed hard, unsure of how this realization should make him feel. A sort of numbness had long ago creeped into his bones, and his only thought was whether the Wizengamot would show him mercy and let him pick a cell in Azkaban next to his parents.