There was a muggle tape recorder between them and a quill floating in the air above, taking down every word, every stuttering breath. “I know what I did was wrong.” His voice was thick with the tears when he spoke. “But you have to understand that I never intended to do any of that. I never got a choice, and then all of a sudden it was kill or be killed.”
A pause.
“And I chose myself.” The breath that Draco takes is more like a shudder. “I just wanted to survive.”
Chapter 14
Draco
The last time he saw his mother was during the war.
He had been fighting, spells flying all around him, people running, sobbing, screaming, the walls collapsing all around them and the dust from all the chaos filling his mouth and coating his teeth. Draco had just given in to the thought that this is it, I am going to die here, a traitor to everything I ever thought was right when she came out of the dust, an avenging angel that sent everyone blasting away from him with only one spell.
Draco had always thought his father was the strong one, but he was wrong, because in that moment Narcissa Malfoy was a woman made of fire, and he collapsed into her, letting himself be weak for a second. She held him like he was a little kid again, using her thumbs to wipe away the tears he didn’t know he was crying and pressing a kiss to his forehead. “We have to go,” She had told him, eyes wide with fear. “We have to leave before it’s over.”
He had thought that this meant that they were losing. That they were running from the ministry, and from the Order, and from Harry. That someday, he would be pretending to be someone else in a house equally as nice as the one as he was in, a comfortable but paranoid life, and in the middle of Sunday dinner Ron, Hermione, and Harry would beat down his door.
It wasn’t until later that he realized it was the Dark Lord they were afraid of.
Draco followed her. And then, when his mother insisted that they all turn themselves in, consquences be damned and his father fought against her, he followed her then, too, all the way to the ministry, where he handed over his wand and sat in the interrogation room, waiting for someone to take him to Azkaban.
In the end, though, his father was the only one who got sent to Azkaban. His mother was given a heavy fine and had to do community service, try to pay reparation to the families who lost loved ones. Draco got probation.
He hasn’t seen his mother since.
It’s Harry that talks him into it. “If I had a mother,” He had said, eyes intense and voice quiet. “Nothing would stop me from seeing her.”
Draco had wanted to scream at him. To say that he was wrong, that he couldn’t keep saying things like this and thinking it was fair. That this time, he didn’t know what it was like. But Draco still found himself visiting her anyways.
She lives in a flat in Paris, renting from some muggle woman who was trying to be a painter but wasn’t quite making it there. The whole thing smells like paint fumes and scented candles, and the steps are so twisted and narrow that he isn’t sure how she makes it up them, but its still a nice place, just as comfortable and expensive looking as the manor.
She had a certain way of life, his mother, and she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a war standing in the way of how she wants to live.
“Draco.” His mother breathes out his name, and then she is hugging him, crushing him. The guilt threatens to swallow him when he thinks of all the letters he did not answer, but even now this is too much, too soon. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Me too.” Because he was. He loved this woman, even if she was wrong, even if she only did the right thing because of the need for the family name to survive. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”
She does not tell him that it is alright, or that she forgives him. He doubts very much that either of these things were true. She does, however, move aside and let him come in, to this house with its too many candles and strange paintings. Draco lets her give him the tour, looking at the picture frames showing the image of a family he cannot remember ever being and the misshapen pottery on the mantle.
“Do you like it?” Her voice has a forced brightness about it, and he does not know if it is because of him or if she simply does not have the same energy that she used to. “I took up pottery. Abigail talked me into it.”
Abigail was the girl downstairs, the one with paint stuck under her nails and colored scarfs hanging from a rack in her kitchen. He had to walk through her flat to get to his mother’s.
His mother, though, was not someone he knew. The woman he remembered would not be seen taking a pottery class, and would not display them out where anyone can see them. It was strange to know how fast things can change.
They have tea.
She cooks for herself now. It seems like she’s spent these past six months trying to find things to create, and she’s been going to cooking classes, so he gets fed little cakes and tiny sandwhiches and the tea has a taste that he cannot put his finger on, which makes him think it was from leaves that she grew herself.
It goes good, for as much as they don’t talk about the things they know they must talk about. They talk about other things instead, like Draco’s newfound success in potions (I read it in the paper, I’m so proud of you) and the herbs growing on the windowsill (yes, well, I’m trying my hand at gardening, and those seemed easiest). But in the end, the conversation turns to his father, as he knew it would have to.
“Have you been to see him?” She takes a sip of her tea, purses her lips and levels her stare at him. Draco hates that, how she can stay so calm and he himself be so upset. “I assume you haven’t.”
“No.” Draco did not want to see his father, and he certainly didn’t want to see him in chains, dirty and defeated. He did not want to have to lay eyes on him, because then he would be forced to deal with the question of how one man could be so wrong.
“Haven’t had the time?” Her voice is high, purposefully light. The game of politeness.
“It’s been crazy.” He was stumbling over excuses, like he was five years old again and she was asking why he hadn’t returned the fire message from the overly nosy neighbor next door. “With the potions project…and Weasley’s collection…and Harry, of course, I had to get used to that.”
“Your own father,” she said, leaning back and folding her hands together. There was ice in her voice and he stares at her hands instead of her face, looking at the perfectly manicured nails. “And you won’t even see him.”
And you, mother? Where have you been? Sitting in this apartment, pretending nothing ever happened?
“What do you want me to do?” He shouldn’t have asked that. Shouldn’t have taken the blame onto himself, like he had done something wrong. What Draco should have done was demand why he would want to see a man like that, who led his only son down all the wrong paths. Why he should care about the man who ruined him.
“Help him.” She was still strong, but he was stronger. That’s what Draco realized, sitting there, as she reached across the table to clutch at his hands. There were tears in her eyes, and he couldn’t tell if they were real or a charade to make him play by her rules. “You’ve got powerful friends now. Use them.”
He does not want to be the kind of person who makes friends only to collect favors, but Draco does not bother explaining that to her. It is not the world she lives in.
“I’ll ask,” He promises her, pulling away from her. “But I can’t make any promises.”
If Draco has learned one thing, it is that promises are rarely kept.
Harry
When he gets back from coffee with Hermione, he finds Draco standing in the kitchen, holding a mug of tea in his hand and staring out the window.
“Hey.” He keeps his voice neutral on purpose, when really he wants to demand to know how the afternoon meant. “Did you get to see your mom?”
Harry knows that the situation was complicated, so he wasn’t expecting Draco to come home and be happy about it. But he didn’t expect Draco to turn and put his fist through the wall, either, or immediately cry out and double over after he makes contact, clutching at his hand.
“Holy fuck,” Draco swears, because Draco likes to say the f-word a lot when something surprises him, then shakes his hand out, laughing. “I didn’t think it’d be a solid wall.”
“What did you think would happen?” Harry’s already getting a wash rag out and wrapping ice cubes up in it, because in his head he is still that muggle boy licking his wounds on his own, and it never occurs him to use magic. Draco could probably get rid of the pain in a moment, but he is too nice to turn down Harry’s help, so he just stares at his hand in dismay and then accepts the makeshift ice pack.
“I thought it was plaster. that my hand would go right through it,” He winces, curses again, and then throws the rag in the sink, keeping one ice cube to run over his knuckles. “And then I could just repair it.”
“Ah.” Harry jumps up onto the counter, and Draco leans into him. He almost doesn’t notice when his hand goes up into Draco’s hair, carding through it. Even when he does notice, he doesn’t stop. “So I take it things didn’t go as well as you were hoping?”
“They did.” Draco’s voice was very surly. “And then she asked if I had been to see my father.”
He hadn’t. Harry knew he hadn’t. Or maybe (and it was horrible that this was the first time that Harry had this thought) he had been going to see him and just not telling anyone, because who would give up on their father, no matter how horrible?
“And?”
“And she asked me to help him.” Draco was biting his nails, which was a bad sign. “Asked to get you to help him.”
Draco doesn’t say anything, because now he is thinking of that night in the graveyard, when all the masks stared down at him and Lucius fell at Voldemort’s feet.
