Children of the Revolution

chapter one: heaven on their minds.

[17 August 1997.]

Daylight streamed in through the crack in the curtains, the summer sun of the moors rendering the room into a series of stark contrasts of light and shadow, and making everything clear to his bleary eyes. It was just another thing that Draco, with typical alacrity, hated. He sighed, and managed to raise himself onto his elbows, blond hair spilling over his forehead and into his eyes, the fringe getting in the way. The sunlight even managed to shine through the thin light grey fabric of the curtains, casting a sharp illumination over the large bedroom.

Apart from the rich dark oak of the chest of drawers and four poster bed, with vibrant green bedspread and hangings, everything else in his room was grey. The walls and floor were grey. The carpet was grey. The tiles in the en-suite bathroom were grey. It was all very grey, much of a muchness, and it had been his father's decision when Draco had been accepted into Slytherin. To remind Draco of his affiliations, his place in the world. As if Draco ever had any opportunity to forget.

With a soft rumble in his throat, he peeled back the covers of the bed and thrust his feet out towards the floor, toes wriggling as if somehow that would keep them warmer, or at least make sure he managed to get into his slippers on the first attempt. His feet landed on said slippers, and muttering to himself, he shuffled his feet back a bit, and slid them into the footwear. Draco stood, and stretched, making his way over to the windows in his boxers, and pulled open the curtains to look out at the moors, narrowing his eyes at the sharp glare.

Normally, of course, an elf would have done this, and been waiting with his robe, but what was normal had changed of late. The moors were desolate, uninviting; about as cheery as he felt. Snarling, Draco wrenched the curtains shut again, and clomped over to the wardrobe, yanking open the door and finding his robe, a luxuriant dark green like the bedspread. Slytherin green.

Putting it on, and tying it closed, he took a few moments to examine himself in the mirror next to the wardrobe doors, critically pulling at a dry strand of hair, poking at the dark circles under his eyes. He'd been sleeping badly ever since Christmas, although at least Tom had stopped walking his dreams. There was still a vague sense of being watched, of looming danger, but it wasn't the specific threat from Voldemort that used to make him want to scream like a girl and hide in the attic, refusing to sleep ever again. Thank Merlin it was the holidays, and he didn't have to face anyone beyond his own family. The usual parties that his Mother would have thrown were gone now, as she was no longer compelled to play the part that had been allotted to her.

Lucius Malfoy's body had been discovered in a ditch just outside wizarding Newcastle a week into June. Not that Draco expected much better when his father didn't return home. The funeral had been a cold, empty affair a few days later, with Lucius being buried in the Malfoy family vault on the estate. Many people attended the service for the best of social reasons, and Draco shook the hand of the Minister himself.

It didn't especially matter, of course; it didn't bring his father back, and to be perfectly honest Draco didn't want him back. Whatever the choice his father made in the end, it seemed to loosen Voldemort's hold over him. He hadn't been brought before the Dark Lord, and indeed, there hadn't been any contact made by any of his father's associates since the death - at least, Draco presumed there hadn't, as his mother wasn't upset or worried over anything.

There was a plaintive desperation about his shuffling gait, one foot in front of the other, eyes tracking the weave of the carpet as it got trod underfoot. The door, swinging open, and the corridor revealed. Grey and sullen, defined by the paintings on the wall, the staring visages of generations past, sitting in judgment upon the present. More walking, head bowed, not making eye contact. Silence, echoing around, the loudest sound of all. This is what happens to a house when it loses its heart, Draco thought. Now there was just Draco and his mother, and neither of them quite fit here, amongst the centuries of history that was not their own.

Every morning since the funeral, Draco would act as he did now, waking late and roaming in search of some breakfast. He would busy himself pouring through the textbooks, already bought for his seventh year, not quite focusing on the print on the page for several hours until even he had to admit his own boredom. Most days he would go for a fly, busying himself in loops and jaunts over the windswept moors, as if daring Mother Nature to come up with a gale strong enough to knock him off his broom.

He would lose himself amongst the corridors of the Manor, finding nooks and crannies and corridors that his father had forbidden him to enter, pull back the covers, shake out the dust in rooms that hadn't been visited for decades. At first his mother would summon him to the parlour for a quiet talk, whiling the afternoon hours, but Narcissa had soon learned that his father's death did not dismantle his bitterness and distrust towards both his parents. If anything, it seemed to intensify it, create a constant reminder that he could never get back at his father now, never quite manage to impress him. So he directed his cold hate towards his mother, and refused to bend. Two weeks into the holidays, Narcissa gave up the attempt after having discovered a stubborn pride even greater than her own. Sine then, Draco's afternoons were his own again.

At any rate, Narcissa was busy most of the time reacquainting herself with the family holdings, all of which had been turned over to her as per Lucius' will. The Malfoy family had a great diversity of investments, many of which she had planned out with Lucius following their marriage, and Draco's own birth many years ago. Now, rather than giving advice which was either completely ignored or grudgingly accepted, Narcissa was the public and private face of the family, complete with all the power that implied. She held meetings with the family solicitor, accountant and financial manager on a regular basis, and if she was perfectly honest she would have admitted that she was glad Draco's stony resentment left her more time to deal with things she could come to grips with, rather than a son she had never fully understood and left behind many years ago.

As he continued searching for something to eat, Draco took a small, sullen comfort in the fact he would not be disturbed by neither mother nor roaming house elf. Narcissa had halved the house elf staff, claiming that her husband liked to have them round in order to show off at the best of times. Her own studious abstinence, as befitted a Ravenclaw and her own proud Welsh heritage, started to show again. Neither she nor her son could afford to lounge about in idle comfort from this point on. Draco merely sighed when his mother told him this, and gave no further reply.

The death of his father brought all sorts of correspondence in; Hogwarts' alumni, friends of his fathers, current students who had barely spoken to him in years, if at all, suddenly seemed to have a need to share a grief that Draco didn't even feel. As duty called, he responded politely and perfunctorily to each and every letter in his usual smooth, if somewhat overly florid, hand. From the beginning of the holidays, one of his few consolidations was his friendship with Pansy Parkinson. They would owl each other several times a day - probably working their owls to death, in retrospect.

There was teasing in those letters, and the occasional plaintive bitching about one's family, and more teasing, and jibes subtle and not so subtle, and as Pansy forbade him to even mention Harry after the first week, they generally did not get too bitter or vitriolic. Last week, Draco had hung around his room all day waiting for Pansy to owl back from the previous night. Finally, relenting to his own hunger, he allowed himself to be summoned for dinner.

Narcissa had gently informed him that Pansy Parkinson's body had been discovered in her bed that morning, dead from strangulation. She had attempted to draw him into a hug; Draco had resisted, and returned to his seat. At somewhat of a loss, Narcissa had wrung her hands and given him the details: Pansy had been strangled with a silken cord, still found tightly wrapped around her neck. It was an old and ritual punishment allotted to wizards centuries ago when they still counted as something of an aristocracy to medieval Britain, devised so that none of their precious blood would be spilt and their skin would be marked as little as possible.

It had been revived over twenty years ago by one singular wizard with a vision and purpose grounded in history. The Dark Lord had used it to kill traitors to his cause; presumably either he, or someone high up in the Death Eaters had given the order, especially considering the very public aid Pansy had given him in the final few months of the school term. Her parents were suspected of aiding the murder, if not actually committing it themselves, although there was no proof. Probably trying to paint themselves as good little acolytes, in Narcissa's opinion, her voice brittle. That was all she would say on the matter, then called for the soup course to be brought in from the kitchens.

Draco took the news with a shrug, almost impassive. He was hardly surprised, as Professor Snape had been found in a similar condition the week before. Stubbornly refusing to budge following Dumbledore's death, he had locked himself up in his rooms at Hogwarts and refused to come out for anyone. Obviously, someone had managed to get through the numerous wards and kill him right under the newly-appointed Headmistress's nose. The Death Eaters were not afraid to make their move openly, and Draco figured he was only a short while before they made some decisive strike beyond this whittling down of targets. McGonagall might have owled every parent personally to assure them that Hogwarts would be opening again for the new school year, but Draco wondered exactly how many would return, now that even Hogwarts - even Dumbledore - had proven to be vulnerable.

The other constant was Harry, who stubbornly continued to owl him nearly every day of the holidays: to see how he was, or offer him support or condolences. Draco just as stubbornly refused to respond to any owl, and made a mental note to push Ginny Weasley down the stairs on the first day of term. Harry had finally got the hint -surprising, Draco thought, considering how thick he was - and entitled the parchment he'd sent Draco in the last week of July 'my final owl'. In it he apologised yet again but assuring Draco he would leave him alone completely from then on, both out of or during school.

Draco had flushed the letter down the toilet, with the rest of them. Now, as he approached the kitchens, the smells of baking wafted into his nostrils; yet despite this, the near overwhelming weight of Harry's presence, loomed darkly in his mind, yet again, turning his appetite to a dry, withered thing.

Grumbling, Draco turned back the way he came, and decided to have a shower. His lost appetite was just another thing he could blame Harry Potter for.

* * *

Harry woke drowsily, smacking his lips together, groping blindly about himself in his morning daze, and reached over the body curled up against him to fumble for his glasses and slip them on.

Taking care not to wake either of the twins, Harry gingerly shimmied over the sheets to let his body slide off the end of the bed, hitting the carpet with soft footfalls. Fred and George were still snoring contentedly, and as Harry slipped from their room, he looked back to see Fred swing his arm over George's to curl and spoon up behind him, taking the place Harry himself had vacated.

The first month in the holidays had been spent drifting as if in a dream through the cosy warm space of Remus and Sirius' small house outside Hogsmeade. None of it seemed entirely real; not Dumbledore's funeral or the news of Lucius Malfoy's own demise, or really for that matter, the whole year. He'd been comfortable in that daze, able to mull over things without paying them much real thought. The constant rejection of his overtures to Draco hurt less and less, and Harry began to feel cocooned from abject reality by his own disaffection.

Then annoying reality had finally intruded: Dumbledore's death had brought many people a keen awareness of the uncertainty of the near-future, and this, coupled with the Ministry's own acknowledgement that You-Know-Who had returned, meant that many of the wizarding corporations that Sirius had contacted at Dumbledore's behest were most definitely reconsidering their initial polite noncommittal stance. After going through their mail, Remus had sharply observed that one Cameron Matheson had not send Sirius a letter, and Sirius had grunted in response. Harry had no idea what that particular comment was in aid of, but he'd shrugged it off and gone back to his solitude, despite the nagging voice in the back of his head. That small house had been deluged in owls - as Sirius was their middleman - and he had been invited to return to America, and treat them with more detail as to what Dumbledore had planned.

Of course, Sirius' first reaction was a mixture of shock and stonewalling - Dumbledore was dead, and his plans had died with them - but after two days of nagging from his own desire to win, if nothing else, and running through the memories newly planted in his head, Harry had addressed both his guardians over dinner. He sent them calmly packing off to America, with instructions to give him progress reports on a regular basis.

Harry had owled Ron and had been assured he could stay out the remaining four weeks of holidays at the Burrow. And so Remus and Sirius had left for the new world, and Harry had settled into the sleepy summer routine of wizard familial domesticity. After his first week, the twins had invited him into their room for a chat. They still talked, although other activities were soon considered, and then acted upon. Harry certainly didn't mind the comfort their company brought him, and spent most nights there now before slipping out in the early morning so that Molly wouldn't catch them. Sometimes they merely snuggled, tracing each other's bodies with fingers and lips and every touch possible, and sometimes they did more.

He lost his virginity during the second week of August, first to George and then to Fred - or so he thought, he wasn't entirely sure - spending days mucking about with Ron talking Quidditch, or listening to him mildly bitch about the owls Percy was sending back, and how much Molly loved Oliver, and kept hinting that Ron should get back with Hermione. Harry could see the pain in Ron's eyes at that, and would reach over and squeeze his wrist before giving him a slow grin and dragging him out for gnome-tossing or mock Quidditch, sweeping in slow loops about the fields that surrounded the Burrows and whiling away the time that way. He also chatted to Ginny at least once a day, finding to his own surprise that he had a knack for helping her in Charms - a subject she was only vaguely passing in. On a slow day he even managed to aid Molly with the cooking.

Sirius wrote owls at least once a week, all of which were terse and somewhat nervous and aggravated at the same time. Harry would read, and then break out in a smile at the accompanying owl from Remus which explained that yes, everything was going brilliantly, and Harry needn't worry - Sirius, Remus explained, hadn't learned patience twenty years ago and was clearly not about to start now.

After checking the coast was clear, Harry padded along the Burrow's convoluted passageways to slip unnoticed into Ron's room and snuggle into the mattress laid out for him there, eager to catch a few more hours sleep. Arthur was supposedly going to try barbecuing for lunch today with a real-live Muggle barbecue, and Harry wanted to be at his least drowsy in case someone got set on fire.

As he drifted off to sleep, he thought about the slow teasing heat of the sex he'd had last night, bent over on hands and knees in the twins' room and being shared between them. There was a certain joy in surrendering like that, a consolidation in not having to think, or choose, just do and obey. He'd lost any claims to the moral high ground several months ago. Harry had no idea what they got up to without him; he asked no questions and they told him no lies.

* * *

London. In the sweltering heat of August, most of the city's inhabitants were content - if not welcome - to stay inside, turning air conditioning (or cooling charms) to full blast. Some, claiming the necessities of shopping or business, wandered amongst the streets, darting into buildings and out of the heat for as long as possible, typically wearing floppy protective hats and thin, cotton clothes.

A few passers-by stopped in their tracks, watching a small smudge sail across the London sky. It looked too small for a plane, so what could it be? The wizard inhabitants looked up at the same sky and saw it as well, and knew it for what it was, outraged. How dare a wizard violate their secrecy by flying on a broomstick in clear view of the Muggle population? It was unheard of! The Ministry would come down hard on this one, they were sure.

* * *

The bell jingled-jangled throughout the cold expanse of Malfoy Manor, and it always did set Draco's teeth on edge. Pressing his lips together, he pushed back a loose strand of hair from his forehead and made a mental note to get a house elf to trim it sometime later today. There was certainly no-one scheduled; no-one for him anyway, although his mother still had the occasional solicitor or advisor type stopping in from time to time to either congratulate her on her bold business vision or declaim that she was completely and utterly mad.

Draco already knew she was mad, of course. You had to be mad or you wouldn't be here. But she was his mother, and the only thing he had, and so he indulged her madness, especially as her growing obsession with capitalism took her out of his hair. Indeed, his mother swept by the small study where he sat, all long flowing gown and house-elves in train with only a knowing glance for him to keep quiet and out of the way as she dealt with whoever it was. Since his father's death, Narcissa Malfoy had gone all Lady of the Lake; and whether or not that made Draco Mordred he didn't especially care.

But Draco always was a curious boy, and he never listened to his mother, so he eased himself out of the large reading chair and family heirloom - it was old, worn leather and made him feel like a midget besides smelling of dead cow - and crept along hallways and down corridors until he came to the entrance hall, and Mother tastefully smoothing down her white gown and donning an appropriate amount of costume jewellery for as yet unknown visitors.

The entrance hall expanded into the chief staircase, with the two wings of the Manor going off in either direction. There was an old oak table to one side of the cupboard under the staircase, and Draco paused for a moment behind it before he pulled open the door and slipped into soft and welcoming darkness, and the musty smell of fur. Clearly this was where Mother kept her old mink coats.

The door opened, and Draco held his breath.

"Augustus Rookwood," his mother said pleasantly, "and Walden Macnair." There was an undertone to her voice that Draco knew well. She was not pleased to see the visitors, and Draco was not so stupid as to not know why.

"Madame Malfoy," one said, and kissed her hand - Rookwood from what Draco remembered: he wasn't the most generous of men, but unfailingly polite, and hardly the sadist that Macnair was.

"You know why we're here," said the other, a gruffer, more guttural voice.

"I'm afraid I don't," his mother sighed, all calm innocence and unruffled surface. Draco could imagine her standing there, looking open and surprised, her right hand toying with a bracelet or the bauble at her neck.

"We have come for your son, I'm afraid," Rookwood said, and he sounded almost sincere in his reluctance. Draco choked back a snort of laughter and tried not to wet himself in fear.

"I was given to understand that our Lord wished to have him several months ago," she told them simply, "and as he was not claimed then I presumed he would not be needed."

There was a pause. "You know better than to make presumption about our Lord's needs, Narcissa," Rookwood said, oily with just a hint of anger, and clearly 'Madame Malfoy' was gone.

"And what of my needs? I need my son."

"That doesn't interest us," and there was a sudden thud, like someone jamming their foot against the doorframe. His mother blocking the way? Perhaps, but it seemed so gauche of her.

"Narcissa" someone warned, and his mother spoke two words, the world dissolving in a flash of green that highlighted the door that lead out to the entrance hall and brightened up the darkness in which Draco hid, if only for a second.

Avada Kedavra. He'd never heard those words being used; never needed to. And then there was another thud, something heavier; probably a body falling onto the tile. A gasp, and a cry; something got thrown and hit the table to one side of the front door, the vase falling from the table to shatter loudly. That vase had been crystal, an antique from France, but now it was no more and his mother had probably been the thing that had knocked it.

"You stupid bitch," Rookwood snarled. "Crucio."

His mother screamed, and Draco took in a deep breath and belted at full speed out of the cupboard under the landing and down the corridor to the kitchens. He didn't even see what had happened to his mother; couldn't stop to see as he darted along familiar halls and passageways, fingers clutching his wand. There was a curse from behind him, and something exploded just over his left ear - Draco ducked and went another way - something else happened, and it sounded as if someone had grabbed Rookwood's foot and tripped him up and Draco had never been so glad to have house elves in his life.

Another door and Draco pushed it away with a sudden burst of strength, ignoring the cries from behind him. It seemed as if Rookwood had gone back to punish his mother, but he couldn't think about that, wouldn't think about it, and burst from the main corridor into the kitchens, dashing around house elves in disarray and open ovens and boiling pots and knives chopping to stagger out through the back entrance and onto the gardens. He paused only long enough to fling his wand back at the Manor house and cry out "Accio, broomstick" and without even checking to see if it was following, made his way across the finely landscaped lawns, the gnarled old trees, and out onto the cold and lonely moors.

He just kept running and running and running over heath and hill and heather, and when his broomstick hovered obediently overhead, Draco grabbed it and kept running, not wanting to be too obvious a target as he would in the sky. He made it over a rise some distance from the Manor, finally able to believe he wasn't being followed, and fire flashed in the sky some distance to the south. Draco stopped, pausing for a moment to consider what it was, and after drawing a blank, he started running again.

* * *

Millicent Bustrode knew what she was getting into when her parents approached her to consider completely a great and very important task for their Lord. Sitting her down in the family study, they told her of the sacrifice she would be making, for them and for the cause, and both of them cried with pride when Millicent nodded, fully aware of what she was accepting.

She was only a Beater, after all, and unused to the fancy flying Seekers were accustomed to, but she could hold the set distance of one kilometre above the London skyline.

At thirty twenty-three p.m., Greenwich Mean Time, on Sunday the Seventeenth of August in the year commonly designated as Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Seven, the small nuclear device that had been stolen from Greenham Common U.S.A.F. Base and strapped securely to her broomstick was detonated by the charm strapped alongside. The explosion engulfed her and created a chain reaction which bloomed down on Central London with a force equal to four times that of the bomb used at Hiroshima in 1945.

The second war had well and truly started, and Lord Voldemort did it in style.