theocracy (theocracy) wrote in regulation, @ 2008-03-19 20:47:00 |
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Current music: | "We Suck Young Blood" Radiohead |
Entry tags: | backstory, draco malfoy, harry potter |
Are you hungry? Are you sick? Are you begging for a break?
Who: Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter
What: Old rivals meet rather unexpectedly and in unpleasant circumstances when Harry's obliviator unit is called into the prison to confirm the authenticity of a memory for a court appeal. An odd exchange occurs.
When: February 2001
Where: Azkaban Prison
Rating: PG
A flash of silver signalled for the guards to clear the room. They brushed by the small troupe of Ministry workers, so close that Harry swore he could feel the brush of their tattered robes against his ice cold flesh. He swallowed several times as he held his breath, steadying himself like he might get rid of the hiccups. The corridor was long, and once the dementors were gone and the rushing sound no longer plugged his ears, the shufflings and scrapings and murmurings of the inmates were at once audible. An acrid scent was in the air- one of the trainees had pissed himself.
The auror escort stood some ways down the way, gazing into the sixth or seventh cell from the entrance. No one else was moving, so Harry led the other Obliviators, including his Boss, Pfaffenroth, to meet Harris. The men assembled silently, until one of the others murmured to the other, "So this is the wizard prison... did you hear...?"
Over the conversation, perhaps in warning to the inmates during their brief respite, Harry thought he heard the sound of the dementors breathing.
"Liat," someone was saying through the gloom, "This is Richard, the Kirk lad..."
"Bit of a sorry state he's in," Harry heard his boss murmur, "How do you intend to confirm the memory belongs to him?"
The auror grunted. "That's for you, miss."
"Harry," Liat Pfaffenroth pressed her cloak into Harry's right arm. "Give me the vial."
A memory discovered in Northwich. A memory lost. A memory that might redeem. The vial was made of crystal, and it nearly slipped through his fingers as he pressed it into Liat's much smaller hand. He noticed that her skin was clammy, cold, and trembling almost imperceptibly. "Very good, Potter." He stepped away, deeper into the corridor, too preoccupied and sick to watch.
It was almost considered a blessing when people came to visit Azkaban. Real people - humans. Wizards. Not cloaked skeletons that exhaled ice and fear down the throats of the prisoners, who rattled the bars with their slow, meandering sentry. No - the Dementors were pulled clean off of the premises when Wizards were present. Lawyers, Obliviators, Healers, Ministry staff - they brought with them not just smug superiority and wrinkled noses, but a sense of calm, of warmth - at least for ten or so minutes, anyway.
Draco Malfoy's cell was roughly the size of two single beds pushed together; on one side lay a crumpled mattress on top of a rickety cot, a barely-working sink and toilet were crammed into the corner of the back wall, and a stool that not even a five year old could sit comfortably atop lay next to the iron bars, piled with a handful of ratty, well-thumbed books. Draco had had to do some rather unsavoury things to obtain those books, and now that he'd read them all cover-to-cover and upside down, he couldn't wait to see them disintegrate so that he could just forget that he had them in the first place.
He sat atop the old mattress with his legs dangling off of the edge, the laces pulled out of his boots to stop him from hanging himself or some such nonsense. He had no inclination of attempting suicide - he wouldn't give anyone the pleasure, nor could he find it in himself to face death under such dire circumstances. He had no idea if that was a cowardly decision to make or not; he couldn't bring himself to care anymore.
With the moments of bliss that the warmth brough him, he let his head rest back against the solid stone, his limp hair falling away from his eyes as he closed them.
Their conversation died down. Liat had stepped into one of the cells, and 'Richard' had begun to squeal, so long and so high that Harry wondered when he would draw a breath. To do anything but listen to it, he glanced about the corridor, and found himself staring into the cells. One cell to his right housed a woman, her eyes clouded and her face slack. The next, someone more familiar, or who would've been recognizable to him under the flash of red and green spells, the golden light of flying curses- but who was no one to him now.
He walked slowly, each footstep careful, each bringing him further from where he was, somewhere in the past, to smells of gasoline and windshield fluid. America: hamburger restaurants surrounding the gas station somewhere out West... somewhere that bloomed beneath the warm sun. Every week he would apparate to Boston or Salem, sometimes New York City to attend seminars in Memory Charms, learning all the ways to ethically and legally change someone's history, to change their perception of their own life.
"You." His mouth had spoken before his mind had caught up with him. Who was that there, in the cell? He knew and discovered simultaneously.
Before he could stop himself- he thought there must be some regulation against speaking to inmates without authorization- his hands were on the bars, Liat's cloak slipping to the floor wish a dry-wet shush of fabric. There must have been a disconnect between his instinct and his memory, for even as he both knew and did not know who sat before him, his chest clamped shut and he did not breathe. I know you.
Draco's eyelids snapped open with the interruption, his peace splitting in two like a log of wood struck by an axe. It was sharp and quick and he felt the burn of it surge right through him, replacing any residual coldness that the guards had left behind. His eyes honed in on the man behind the bars and he scrambled to his knees on the mattress before sliding away from close scrutiny. He would not be checked today by another Healer. He was fine.
"Go away!" he demanded, before a beam of light from a window in the corridor rushed past the figure like the quickest sunset he'd ever seen. In its wake it left messy black hair and dark green eyes: haunted eyes. Draco's heartbeat thundered up into the base of his throat and he was rendered speechless for at least half of a minute. The last time he'd looked into those eyes, his own had been covered in a thin film of visceral red; his fingers automatically lifted to his chest and he traced the scars that he knew lay underneath his robes.
"Potter." The word was whispered hoarsely - almost a question, the last syllable trailing off as the heat inside of him subsided and twisted into something far darker.
Swallowing the surname with a murmur. "Draco. Don't..." Make so much noise? The command died. It was for Draco to decide whether he continued to shout and give Harry away; the reprimand was beyond comparison, beyond the boundaries of their present reality. He thought he had heard that Malfoy had been put in Azkaban with the others, with some of the stragglers left who hadn't yet been killed or captured after his last battle. His, Harry's last battle with Voldemort. And Draco knew as little about the cause of his change in circumstances as all of the others that Harry had refused to tell.
He felt sudden apprehension. Why, of all the Death Eaters he had either killed himelf or put away or simply dueled until, exhausted, one or the other had retreated, did he feel bound to this one's fate? Not because of Dumbledore, surely. "How long? How long has it been?"
The blond's breaths left him in panted whistles as he struggled with his reply, with his reaction to this entire... whatever it was. What the hell was Harry Potter doing in Azkaban? Visiting his long lost grandmother? Curling his hands into fists, Draco fought with the initial emotions that wanted to burst right from him that moment. He knew what his place was here. He knew what would happen if he went rushing to those bars and stuck his arms out of them, grabbed a handful of Harry's robes, brought their faces close and...
And what? Strangle him? Scream at him? Sob? Ask what the fuck he thought he was doing, calling him by his first name and staring at him with those big doe-eyes the colour of chartreuse that all at once made him want to punch him and crawl under him at the same time?
Draco stayed very, very still. He'd left his bedclothes in a crumpled mess from pushing himself into the corner of the cell and his knees were bent, ragged prison robes stretched over his too-thin body. His hair was the same length as it'd always been at school, but it was limp and unwashed. His skin was sallow, pale, scratched with marks along his jaw from the blunt razor he kept between the pages of Over Ganymede and Back Again and took out every other morning to scrape off what little stubble he could grow.
"Nineteen-ninety-nine," he whispered stiffly, after a pregnant pause, his grey eyes hollow.
Anger and hostility inexplicably boiled up in the back of Harry's throat. Down the corridor, there was a scream and shouting, followed by the swift clanking of metal and the sounds of a scuffle. They were far away, and he ignored them as he might've ignored the sound of wizards firing curses until he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up from magical current.
Draco had been in here the entire time Harry had been overseas then, and was still here after he'd transferred back into the United States. Draco went nowhere; Harry went everywhere, moving endlessly, moving mindlessly. He could see the deliberation in the other man's face: the attempt to keep himself shaved, the books...
"Have you been before the Wizengamot?" The conversation seemed disconnected from some other form of communication running between them that was, somehow, more relevant.
Draco wanted to ask Harry what kind of fucking question that was, and why he was asking it. But he stayed alarmingly still, allowing the words to flow over him as he fought to mould back the pieces of his calmness back together. The Dementors would be back soon and he didn't want to waste this opportunity just because a ghost from his past decided to wedge his way back into his world. Potter didn't belong here; he belonged outside, shaking the Minister's hand, kissing babies, teaching do-gooder brats how to be even better in life.
He sneered. For the first time in three years, Draco Malfoy felt that familiar tingle at the corner of his top lip as it curled. "My next trial is in three months," he said simply, quietly, feeling the prickle of anger from the other man like slow fingers running their way down his spine.
"I didn't know there'd been a first," Harry said, feeling increasingly a disconnect between his mind and his mouth. Ashamed at his building rage, one that was directed at nothing, he looked down at the stack of books, staring at the titles. He remembered when Sirius told him about the newspaper Cornelius Fudge had given him while he was in Azkaban, and he pushed himself suddenly, sharply away from the bars. He did not want to draw that sort of parallel between Draco Malfoy and his late Godfather.
"Wh- I'm sorry to hear that; Did you try to... What are the charges?"
Draco snorted. "What, don't you know?" He squinted at the other man, cautious as he seemed to jump away from the bars. Carefully, and very slowly, the blond pushed himself away from the corner he'd managed to cram himself into and slid forward on the bed, until his boots were flat on the floor. He looked up at Potter through wayward strands of white-blond hair, his grey eyes no longer sparkling with that childhood cruelty that he had possessed for so many years. Letting his elbows rest on the points of his knees, he relaxed his arms.
"Malice, treason, this." He stood up and walked closer to the bars and yanked the sleeve of his robe up as high as it could go around his bicep, revealing the Mark on the inside of his left forearm, crude as a drawing from the pages of a fairytale book. His face, no longer impassive, was twisted into a darker sneer, a world of pain igniting behind the grey of his eyes.
Someone called his name from the other end of the corridor.
"I've been in England for two months. I didn't know," he replied. The Mark was an unwelcome, and he looked at it with unconcealed revulsion because it was outlined on flesh that hadn't seen a decent meal or exercise in months. It was so much more difficult to hate Draco in here; perhaps Azkaban was one of the in between places, where the ideals attached to men, the biases and the dry rot of the status quo fell away and their souls were laid bare. "You were quiet for the last years... I thought you'd left Voldemort." No, that wasn't true. "I hoped you'd left them," he said in admission.
"Harry?" He closed his eyes. Liat, give me another moment.
Trembling fingers fell away from the inside of his arm but Draco did not cover it again. Instead he wrapped his hands around the bars that seperated them and brought his face close, the tip of his nose grazing the rusted iron, hair pushing into his eyes as he pushed his forehead against a horizontal barrier. "They think I killed my mother, Potter," he whispered through clenched teeth, and each word sounded as though it was pulled from him by the Cruciatus curse. "They think I helped him." He suddenly snorted again, but there was no humour in the sound. "Just like I did old Dumbledore, right?"
There were footsteps approaching. "I'm sorry, Draco," he said with a growing sense of urgency as his superior came toward them, aware now of what was happening. "I'm not supposed to... we can't speak to inmates when it's not authorized. Do you have any evidence? Any memories?" He approached the bars again, and felt sick at what he was doing. "Memories aren't often admitted if there is a lack of memory, because they can be hidden. If you have a conclusive memory of your- of your mum... or of Dumbledore..." Had Draco even known that he was there? "If you have a conclusive memory, then that would improve your case, but not on the charges of treason."
Draco was broken out of his sudden influx of energy when he caught sight of another figure walking toward his cell, right out of the corner of his eye. His hands slipped away from the iron bars and he walked slowly back to the other end of the cell, the back of his legs brushing up against his cot. While his eyes held that familiar light of hatred, they also shone with an odd sense of panic. He didn't answer the other man's question.
"See you around, Potter." An overwhelming sense of deja vu flooded his nerves and memory, and suddenly he was sixteen again, standing over an invisible form, the tart smell of coppery blood sticky on the heel of his boot. "Or not."
Liat swept down upon him like a tigress, and Harry had to pull his eyes from the cell like a barnacle dislodging from the slime of a ship's underside. She looked from Malfoy at the back of the cell to Harry's washed out frame under the prison lights with dawning comprehension. To display her disgust, she picked up her cloak from the floor and said curtly, "Outside, Potter. I want you in my office immediately after Disapparation. Move along."
He did not look back. Liat stood on the spot, watching a retreating Harry with thin lips reminiscent of a schoolteacher. Then she followed after.