One day Draco Malfoy woke up and knew he had to leave. Others would call running away from your problems a form of cowardice, but Draco preferred to call it strategic retreat. Either way, the former Slytherin didn’t care. Ultimately, he had, no, needed, to get away from the anti-pureblood sentiments the entirety of the Wizarding world had adopted right after Harry Potter defeated the Dark Lord. He didn’t know where he was going but the incident in Diagon Alley of a week before had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back: he and his mother were spit on and openly attacked two years after the fall of the Dark Lord. It only proved to Draco that he and his family would never be forgiven for the sins of his father. And Draco had bore a lot of crosses in his short life, but this…it was just too much for his young and tattered soul.
After the dust of the war settled, the Malfoys were one of the first families the newly reformed and supposedly not corrupt Ministry of Magic persecuted. Their assets were frozen until proof could be shown that their money wasn’t used in war profiteering, in less than questionable investments, or in the advancement of the Dark Lord’s army. This proved to be nearly impossible what with Lucius’s involvement as a Death Eater. And Draco would never understand why records were kept of all the questionable negotiations that were made to assert their future and positions in the Wizarding world by his ancestors. War reparations costs were enforced upon his family, and overnight the Malfoy’s weren’t as affluent as they once had been. In one rash decision, made many years before his birth, the Malfoy’s lost everything they had worked hard to attain, even if those means had been vile and cruel.
Their home was thoroughly searched and partially destroyed by Aurors, and all dark objects confiscated. They weren’t allowed to move back into their once regal home until all traces of dark magic had been eradicated or vanquished by the Ministry.
Lucius was thrown in Azkaban without a trial, never to see the light of day again, the tattoo on his forearm more than enough proof of his wrongdoing. Draco would never see his father again as the proud Pureblood patriarch of the Malfoy line. His status was ripped away from him, and thrown in a dark and dank enclosed space where he would stay caged in until his death. To say that Draco took this hard would be putting it lightly. It was far worse than the time in fifth year when his father had been captured breaking into the Department of Mysteries.
Draco and Narcissa barely escaped imprisonment mainly because Harry Potter spoke on their behalf.
They were much more lenient on his mother than they were to him. She was put on probation, and her wand under a powerful monitoring spell with which the Ministry knew the exact spells she used every day.
Draco had scowled at the four-eyed git as he spoke during his trial. The former Slytherin felt his cheeks burn with shame, feeling worthless as a wizard, and knowing that he owed the Saviour of the Wizarding world at the very least, two life debts. He felt further humiliated that Potter would speak on his behalf but it didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate it or was ungrateful. When he was found not guilty for Dumbledore’s murder, Draco felt relief wash over him. But when he heard the punishment for his brief association with Death Eaters, Draco felt that they might as well just have thrown him in Azkaban and called him murderer.
He wasn’t allowed to purchase a new wand for a year, and was put under house arrest for the same amount of time. His only crime was falling victim to the lunatic demands of a psychotic murderer in order to protect his family.
He spent the following year locked up, a prisoner in the house that the Dark Lord had used as his headquarters. His childhood home was tarnished and painted in blood, and nowhere that Draco escaped was he free of the images of the atrocities that occurred in there. He often woke up screaming in terror the first couple of weeks after moving back in.
If he had been allowed to return to Hogwarts, or take his NEWTs early, perhaps Draco wouldn’t have felt like such a prisoner. He understood why the new Headmistress declined to offer him correspondence courses but it still stung, nonetheless. He was given alternatives though. He could finish in Beauxbatons or Durmstrang instead. Except neither school wanted him either. The stain of being a Death Eater was too much for the Malfoy name. It was tarnished beyond repair, it seemed. Draco began to feel useless and fell into a deep depression.
Therefore, he spent most of his time in the gardens of the fields surrounding his house, at the edge of the wards that would alert the Ministry if he tried escaping his house arrest.
He would stare longingly at the great green fields beyond his reach, and enviously glance at the birds with their freedom to roam the sky. Sometimes he allowed himself to cry, curled into a ball amongst the grassy fields. He would cry in anguish at all the mistakes he had made in his lifetime, and despair at the errors his forefathers had done for him and their family.
His sobs eventually subsided after a couple of weeks, morphing into shame for crying so much and anger at the humiliation his family had experienced as of late.
He was a Malfoy and a Black!
He had suffered enough humiliation to last him two lifetimes. Draco resolved to not be the victim of his environment. He had been a Slytherin after all and he knew better than others that it was choices not chances that determined his destiny. If the bad choices of others had ended in this situation, he would fight his way out of it.
He was going to be a fully qualified wizard even if it was the last thing he did. But first he needed a wand. As much as it pained him, Draco owled the Potter and inquired about the hawthorn wand that had once belonged to him:
Potter,
I know you’re in possession of my wand. And although the Ministry stated I could not purchase a wand, they never mentioned that I couldn’t have my old one back. You can deliver it to me at the Malfoy Manor.
D. Malfoy
Draco didn’t think that he would receive a reply back, much less a polite one, explaining that Potter couldn’t just “give” him the wand back since it was taken by force in the first place. And so Potter came to the Manor just so Draco could “snatch” his own wand away just so it would be considered as returned. He had stared incredulously as the Boy Who Lived explaining wandlore to him. Draco promptly told him he didn’t care to hear about it and to remove himself from his presence. He got punched in the face for that favor and called a “slimy Ferret.”
When the Ministry barged into his house a couple of hours after he tried a couple of Summoning charms, Draco smirked in triumph at the loophole he found in their own punishment. The Aurors confiscated the wand in the end saying that while he had used a Slytherin method to get his way, his punishment clearly meant no wands of any type: former or new.
Draco felt his anger rise sharply and a retort begin to form. He had barely gotten out the words, “my father” before he promptly shut up realizing the phrase held little threat. He swallowed his pride and instead glared at the Auror as he broke the hawthorn in front of him. It felt like Draco’s own soul was being snapped in two as well.
“I don’t need a wand to get what I want,” he informed the smirking Auror. “I’m a Malfoy!”
“You’ve got some cheek on you there, boy,” growled the Auror. Draco narrowed his eyes at the man, and stuck two fingers up at him. Screw social upbringing. The Malfoy name was already dragged through the mud and some other muck, he might as well remake it from the start. That, and Draco Malfoy was just tired of taking the piss for the past seven years.
He couldn’t help but skulk for a couple of days after that incident though. How was he supposed to practice for the NEWTs without a wand? And then he received an infuriating letter from Potter.
Ferret face,
I thought it was a smart loophole though I’m not surprised they broke it. You didn’t really think they’d let you keep, right? I’m sure you can find others though.
Luck,
Scarhead
He wrote several replies, many of which started with the word “fuck” but in the end, he never sent any. Draco was tired of losing his patience, and letting his temper get the best of him. He decided not to accept the bait and deemed Potter not worthy of a reply. Instead, Draco spent many hours and days staring at the books in the library trying to find a solution to the wand-less problem. And one day, it hit him, quite literally. He was walking outside the gardens for some fresh air, when he ran into a tree limb. As he scowled at his own clumsiness, he noticed all the twigs lying about the ground. Feeling rather smug, Draco grabbed a branch and tore off the leaves. He waved it about. It was a stupid looking stick with a spiral but Draco reasoned all he really needed was to know how to do the movements. He figured that the magic would just follow when he bought a real wand.
Feeling much more confident Draco began studying by himself for his NEWTs. He knew he would be allowed to take them next summer, and he was determined to show everyone that Draco Malfoy may have been a lot of things in his short life, but he wasn’t a quitter. If anyone had the determination and will power to study, it was he.
Draco would drag textbooks from the library to the grassy fields outside and spent hours contemplating his life between bouts of studying. It helped that none of this former Slytherin friends visited “ not that they would associate with him now. They were all probably under house arrest too, in another country lying low, imprisoned, or dead.
When summer turned to autumn, and autumn to winter, Draco was forced to spend more of his time indoors. He would wander the halls of the Manor late at night and scowl at the portraits of his ancestors. He hated the way they sneered down at him though they never spoke to him either. Perhaps they knew that their family name had been dragged through the mud and blamed him for it.
He vanished the portraits he didn’t like to the cellar or basement, and others to be covered with curtains because they couldn’t be removed. Damn sticking charms. When his mother questioned his motives, Draco shrugged in a very un-Malfoyish way, before replying, “I don’t need the weight of my ancestors on my shoulders anymore.” But words are always easier said than done, he would learn.
Time seemed to slow to a standstill as the New Year approached, and when the clock struck midnight he made himself a goal to find happiness within on his own terms as his own person, and not be defined by the actions of others.
As the winter turned to spring and flowers began to bloom, Draco found himself sitting at the edge of the wards again, studying intensely for the upcoming exams. He reckoned his studying and revising would have rivaled Hermione Granger’s. He had always admired her ambition, persistence, and know-it-all attitude, even if she was a Mudblood. It was too bad that the Weasel and her were dating, he mused after reading the society pages of the Prophet. He didn’t fancy the Mudblood whatsoever, but he really figured she’d be smarter than to date the red-head. He shrugged and continued his silly wand waving with the stick he found many months ago. Draco had also found a textbook on wandlore, and how to make a wand. It intrigued him. Perhaps, he would consider picking this up as a profession.
After his year of probation was up, he was allowed to purchase a wand as long as a monitoring spell was put on it. Draco chose to buy his wand from The Goldentree Wands a wand-maker from America who took advantage of the deplorable economy in the British Wizarding community to establish itself and make a profit.
Damn Americans, thought Draco snidely, opportunists to the core. But even he could respect a business man, if anything, he was taught that.
Unlike his first wand, Draco was surprised that instead of another hawthorn, his magic vibrated wildly when the smug American with his hideous accent handed him a 10 inch butternut with a Hippogriff talon as the core saying that “this is definitely your fit, pal. Generations of Smiths can’t be wrong.”
He sneered at the American who grinned like a loon before paying the grotesque amount asked, with the annoying monitoring spell on it like he was an underage wizard, and walking out with a brand new wand. At least the man had looked sheepish as he cast the monitoring spell.
The first bit of magic Draco did after buying his wand was Apparating home, and promptly sending himself to St. Mungo’s for Splinching his toe off. After he was released, Draco decided to Floo home instead. He had a month to perfect his spells before taking the practical part of the exam and continually splinching himself would only hinder his plans.
Draco’s confidence grew with each NEWT level spell he mastered and he felt slightly more like his old self the day of the examination. He walked into the Ministry of Magic one sunny morning in June, and was headed to the appropriate department to sit his NEWTs when he bumped into the Weasel. Draco had always known that forgiving and forgetting was easier said than done, but he had never expected the Weasel to hold a grudge for so long. So when he was punched in the face for no reason or warning, his aristocratic nose making a sickening crunching noise, Draco cried out in pain and anger at forgetting so easily the pain his family had caused others. He and the red-head ended up having a full blown scuffle in the halls of the Ministry before they were pulled apart by Aurors who found the entire spectacle quite amusing if not downright ridiculous.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Malfoy?” spat the Weasel while tugging at the hands of the Auror who held him back.
“I’m here to sit my NEWTs, Weasley, not that it’s any of your concern. Now if you’ll excuse me, I do not want to be late,” he replied, brushing his robes off for any dirt and pulling away from the vice-like grip of the Auror holding him.
“I can’t believe you actually showed up, Malfoy! Do you honestly think you’re going to get a fair examination?” bellowed Weasley as he walked down the hall. It had occurred to Draco that perhaps the examiners would be biased, but he was hoping they could see past his mistakes. Except that the encounter with Weasley left him a bit nervous and doubtful.
It had been too easy, while semi-exiled from the Wizarding world, to forget that his family wasn’t liked. It was too easy to forget that he was a Malfoy and no matter how much he fought or wanted to change, this society would not let him. And worse, it was too easy to fall back into old habits.
Over the Rainbow by mgle_teacher
Story Notes:
This story was inspired in part by the LJ Community dhr100's Summer Prompt 2008 table. And the rest of it was inspired by my friend doglover4_life of LJ who fell in love with the first drabble I wrote for the dhr100 Summer Prompt table, and demanded I write the "expanded" version.
This story is dedicated to her. Thanks, hun!
Chapter Notes: Thanks to CakeorDeath of MNFF for betaing this for me. Also thanks to Laceymoibella of MNFF for her consultation on Draco's characterization.