分卷阅读17（1 / 2）

Harry

He knows he shouldn’t be listening.

Percy had come two hours ago, walking through the house with the same authority that he used to have when he was a prefect. He had a bag slung over his back and a binder tuck under his arm, ink stains already splattered on his fingers. and then he and Draco disappeared up into the library.

Harry knew that if Draco wanted him to know what was being said, they would have done it in the kitchen of the living room. Still, that doesn’t stop him from pausing outside the door when he goes to bed, watching them both from the doorframe.

Neither Percy or Draco sees him. Harry knows he should walk away, but he can’t, not when Draco’s shoulders are hunched in like that and there are tears streaming down both his and Percy’s cheeks. He wants to storm in and tell them both that the interview is over, because he does not want to see Draco in pain, but that is not his choice to make.

“If you could tell people one thing,” Percy says, and Harry gets the feeling that it’s almost over anyways. “One thing about what you’ve told me here today, what would it be?”

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.