The Ultimate Revenge

The Ultimate Revenge
Prologue: The Past

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
- Ali ibn-Ali-Talib

Draco Malfoy remembered Harry Potter altogether too much. He remembered the flushed eleven-year-old in Madam Malkin's, and the boy who rejected him for Weasley on the Hogwarts Express.

But most of all he remembered the sad, angry seventh-year, a full-grown man with a boy's sad green eyes and a vague smile that twisted into a half-hearted sneer whenever Draco was near. And Draco's already-white-hot hatred burnt stronger for it. That damned boy did not care that he was the reason that his life had been ruined, that his father was in prison and his mother in hysterics. The Malfoy name meant nothing because of Potter. They had been the best of the pureblood families, and then Potter stuck his nose into the mix and they were traitors and murderers, not worth the time of day.

And Harry Potter didn't care.

Draco liked to think of his hatred as a bruise. At first, it was dark and burning and angry, and stung to the touch. But six years without Potter had let it fade to a sickly shade of green that still stung if he hit it the wrong away.

Six Potter-less years.

Not even the Weasel and Granger had been surprised when Harry Potter had disappeared on the last day of the seventh year.

The whole school had spent most of the year wondering what Potter's end-of-year adventure (and they were always at the end of year, Draco noticed) would be this year. Generally consensus had said that it would be something truly spectacular for his last year at Hogwarts.

As the end of term approached, the students (and many of the staff) had held their breath, waiting for the invasion or explosion or Potter's sudden appearance bandaged to the nines in the hospital wing. Instead, Potter had just never turned up to the Leaving Feast. Granger and Weasley had sat at the Gryffindor table, managing to look glum even as it was announced that Gryffindor had won the House Cup for the seventh year in a row, and Draco had been torn between laughing at the Gryffindors for losing Potter and glowering at them for winning the Cup.

Draco had boarded the Hogwarts Express the next day with a smile on his face, while Hermione Granger had looked frantic and Ron Weasley sick. It had only been at noon that he had realised that Potter had gone, when he had already wandered halfway down the train in search of the infamous Trio and had realised that he wanted to trade insults with Potter, not a Mudblood and her as-good-as-Mudblood boyfriend.

Two days later, they had found the two bodies. It seemed strange to Draco that after twenty years of plans and plots, the War (such as it was) had come down to three men in a musty room with peeling wallpaper and bad lighting.

It gave Draco shivers of something that might have been delight to picture the frail, grown-up boy that was Potter, standing alone in a dark room, throwing all of his so-called might against the greatest wizard of the age.

And yet Scarface had won, to an extent. One body had been that of a man who was sixteen years dead but only two days rotted, limbs curled in on themselves and face screwed up in agony. The other had been indubitably Voldemort's, pale and sickly and barely human. Draco's own mother had testified that it was, indeed, the body of the Dark Lord, and those bastards at the Ministry had even made her suffer the indignity of Veritaserum.

The pile of ash they had found with the bodies was even more peculiar. One spell had been enough to confirm that it was, indeed, what remained of the Boy Who Lived.

And now Draco's nemesis sat in a jar in the Ministry foyer, above a plaque that said something that was equally trite, arrogant and idiotic. Perfectly suited to Potter.

But the peculiarest thing (Draco knew that wasn't a word, but it was the one he used in his head anyway) was what happened to the Dark Marks.

To start with, the day after Potter pulled his vanishing act, at around dinner time, every Death Eater's legs had given out and they had collapsed en masse but separate, incoherent and clutching at their arms. And, in Narcissa Malfoy's case, knocking the pumpkin soup flying.

No few secrets had been uncovered that night. Even Draco had not suspected Tom, the grouch who owned the Leaky Cauldron, and Draco knew exactly what to look for.

Then they had started to convulse, and that had scared the shit out of Draco. His mother and Aunt Bellatrix, thrashing on the polished dining room floor, arms and spines bending to unnatural angles. His mother's arm had cracked sickeningly when she smashed it against the oak table-leg, and there had been blood trickling out of his aunt's nose, and neither of them stopped writhing as they hurt themselves. Draco had summoned servants to restrain them, and then had gone and lost his celebratory welcome-home dinner down the nearest toilet.

The piercing wails had brought a still-pale and shaking Draco running back to the dining room. The two women had their backs arched, arms out as if in supplication.

Then the Dark Mark that each of them bore on their left forearm had... caught on fire, or something like it. The clothes that encased it had charred without burning, falling away from the Mark like a tiny black snow-storm. And then the Mark itself had burnt itself away from their skin, and Draco had found a new use for the soup tureen as the foul smell of burning flesh filled the air.

The spontaneous combustion of the Marks had convinced Draco that Voldemort had really gone. Of those who had once followed him, Draco was amongst the few who had admitted that he was gone. Narcissa Malfoy had gone quietly, knowing that she would soon be with her husband.

Draco had been forbidden any action. He had no Dark Mark, nor the remains of one: that had been to happen in a week. But now, never. "Keep the house," his mother had said, and Draco knew what that meant. Marry well, continue the line, and ensure that the Malfoy estates remained the Malfoy estates. His mother had not said goodbye, and Draco hadn't cried. They were Malfoys, and it was not done.

In the end, not a single person who had worn the Dark Mark remained free. His aunt had chosen to die rather than be sent back to Azkaban, and she had not been alone.

And Draco alone of the remaining Malfoys had been free.

For a given definition of free. Draco Malfoy, it seemed, had too many dangerous connections to be wandering free. But nothing could be proven, though the Ministry tried, and Draco became used to acquiring a discreet entourage of one whenever he went out.

That was not the only change in Draco's life. Keeping the house turned out to be a lot harder than he had thought. The Ministry made it quite clear that the slightest hint of unlawfulness would find Draco in New Azkaban with his parents.

The Malfoy name was no longer something to be proud of, and certainly not a name to coerce and seduce with. Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy had been murderers and traitors, they said, and the apple never fell far from the tree. Certainly not in this case.

So Draco Malfoy became a model citizen. That thought, that image, was still enough to make Draco grit his teeth, but Draco knew his duty.

Narcissa Malfoy had died after only four months in New Azkaban, separated from her husband and family. Draco had not visited his mother in prison (it would reflect badly, he told himself, although that did not make it easier), but he attended her funeral at the family mausoleum in the Field of Bones. The crowd of mourners had been small, and that had made Draco furious, but he swallowed his anger and listened to the simple service. No eulogy was read.

Other changes had already gained momentum before Draco became aware of them. The discovery of Peter Pettigrew's body with Voldemort's had surprised many people. Questions were asked. In the end, it was decided that Sirius Black had, in fact, been innocent. And when it came out that Black was already dead, Draco suddenly found himself master of the Black estates.

Draco had never really considered the possibility that he might inherit the Black estates. He had been aware, in a vague way, that his mother was Sirius Black's cousin. But Aunt Bellatrix and Sirius Black himself had always stood between Draco and the Black estates, and they had been in Azkaban for almost as long as Draco had been alive.

But their deaths, along with his mother's, meant that Draco found himself in possession of number 12, Grimmauld Place, amongst other things. He was not merely guardian of the estates, as he was with the Malfoy estates. It was his.

Many people had objected to the idea. Sirius Black had become a sort of post-mortem hero, and many people did not want to see the estates of a good man fall into the hands of somebody like Draco. But the law was the law, and Albus Dumbledore himself had handed the deed to Draco (although Draco did not know why that was so). Draco had smiled at the daft old man, and then gone home and let the Black estates continue to rot for another three years. Draco hated having to be good.

Draco got the closest thing to a job that he could cope with. He certainly didn't need it, but he wanted it, and it was exactly the sort of thing that a good citizen would do. It kept his mind off his mother, rotting in a stone grave, and his father, who was doing something similar.

Quidditch had lost its relish when he could no longer compete against Potter, so Draco wrote. History books. He spent a lot of time in the all but untouched family library, reading books and manuscripts that his family had bought for centuries because it was the thing to do. Most of them had never actually been opened.

His books were not really anything special, but they sold well, to his delight. After the first, he discovered a shelf full of his ancestors' journals, containing enough material to fill several books. More model citizenry: his books never showed a bias towards either side of the stories he told. (Although Draco thought that he was breaking the mould on that point. Not that he shared that theory with anyone.)

Lucius Malfoy was interred beside his wife, five years after his imprisonment. Draco had only seen his father twice in that time, once at his trial, and again at his mother's funeral. He looked even more arrogant in death than he had been in life. For a man who had spent the last five years in prison, he was remarkably unchanged. Thinner, perhaps, and with split ends, but he still had an arched eyebrow and cheekbones like boomerangs.

Draco went home after the funeral, and was given a nasty shock by the butler, who greeted him as Mister Malfoy, and handed him three keys. Twenty-two years as Master Malfoy, and Draco had forgotten that when you became head of the family, you got the keys to the family secrets and the full honorific. (And Draco tried to ignore the fact that he was only head of the family because he was all of it that was left.)

The exploration of the family secrets was not a pleasant task. The first key turned in the lock on the trap door under the rug in the Green Parlour. The lock glittered, and turned smoothly, and yet Draco got the impression that if, say, Potter had tried to open that lock (not that he could, being dead), he would have ended up rather inventively dead. The Malfoys had never been pleasant people.

Underneath was not damp but very dry, and just breathing seemed to send little clouds of dust swirling around. The things that were stacked shelf upon shelf were unimpressive, in a way. They all smelt - stank, actually, and Draco imagined that he could feel the power emanating from them. But Draco had seen things like them all his life and he did not understand why these were locked away.

After a little exploration he found another door with another lock, almost hidden between two shelves. And through the door was a narrow room that must have run the length of the West Gallery. The room was filled with manuscripts and books, bits of parchment and bits of something Draco rather suspected was skin. He pulled them out at random as he walked down the length of the room, skimming them. Some were records of less-than-legal transactions. Others were instructions, and a lot of them went back on the shelf as soon as they were pulled out. The rest were accounts, the truly secret histories of the Malfoys. The historian in Draco sat up and drooled at the sight of those.

The third door was set in the back wall of the document-room, and it turned out that behind it was nothing more exciting than the family gold. Draco couldn't help but laugh at the fact that the gold was more important than the sort of thing that could get you a life sentence in Azkaban. His laughter sounded eerily hollow in the stone confines of the vault, though, and he stopped almost as soon as he started.

When Draco clambered out, the butler asked if Draco would be continuing his father's fine work. For an answer, Draco moved to Grimmauld Place and took the less disturbing part of both libraries with him. The butler resigned, and Draco let him go.

Perhaps he had been a bit hasty in his decision to move to Grimmauld Place. It was a nice house, or had been, but now it was infested with... well, everything. Some of the rooms were cleaner, as if somebody had disinfested them more recently, but the rest were positively crawling.

Draco called in the staff of the Manor to clear the house of its more undesirable inhabitants. What might been found in the rooms was hardly appropriate for a common exterminator, even a wizarding one, after all. What Draco had seen as a week's worth of work turned out as two month's hard work, and that was just to move the things that crawled. The actual house cleaning Draco did on his own, sending his staff back to the Manor against their subtle protestations.

The first thing to go had been the giant portrait of Sirius Black's mother. Draco had taken one look at what lay behind the curtain and had hexed it - or her, rather - into an indignant silence. Then he had pulled apart the spells that held it so firmly attached to the wall with reluctant help from the portrait itself, but not before hearing an interesting remark or two.

"At least he's pureblood," she had muttered, "and of the house. Not one of those filthy muggle-loving brats with carrot hair."

Draco wondered what the Weasleys had been doing at Grimmauld Place as he rolled the portrait away in the attic.

The rest of the Black collection turned out to be quite as bad as the Malfoys', and Draco spent about the same amount of time investigating them before he locked the door again. On the whole, he decided, his ancestors had seldom actually committed any crimes, mainly by expedient of finding artefacts and methods that hadn't been declared illegal yet.

It took a mere three weeks for Draco to make a decision. He approached the Ministry, very carefully, and opened both of the collections. On the condition that only the illegal items would be removed. All the other documents were to be left behind.

Draco had realised some time ago that there was no way to go back to being what he and his family had been before... well, before. But when the men from the Dangerous Artefacts Disposal Squad came tramping in, he had realised that this was the point where he was no longer really a true Malfoy. But he convinced himself that, as the last living Malfoy, he didn't give a damn. He was the bloody definition of Malfoy-ness, now.

Besides, he would never have been able to use those things himself. He could have kept them for his descendants, but he didn't. That would have been a crime, and Draco tried to ignore the implications in the fact that he cared.

When his father died, Draco realised that he was twenty-two and still a virgin. Once, he had expected to be well on his way to marrying by twenty-two. After all, his parents had started looking for suitable matches when he was ten. He hadn't seen a single one of their selections in almost four years.

In fact, he had seen almost no one in four years. So he went out. It was difficult, at first. Most of the people he had been friends with at school had retreated into their own cocoons. A few, including Crabbe and Goyle, were in New Azkaban for their own crimes (and how had he missed it when his two best friends went to gaol?) In fact, it seemed to Draco that he was the only Slytherin who hadn't secluded himself in one way or another.

He made new friends, and discovered that the simile of his bruised hatred could be extended to his love as well. But Harry Potter had always bruised him best, and Draco shied away from the simile after coming across that particular revelation.

Potter was dead, true enough, but all that meant was that Draco's imagination had to supply Potter's comebacks. In his head, Draco was still at war with the Boy Who Had Lived.

In fact, Draco had a theory about Potter. It had taken him seven years to insinuate himself into Draco's brain. And seven years would be all the time needed to undo the invasion. Seven Potter-less years.

Draco spent rather a lot of time inside his own head, thinking.

Moving in the real, now world meant that Draco had to catch up to events again. He had read the Prophet for a few months after he had left Hogwarts, but at some point his subscription had lapsed and he hadn't even noticed. And then he had got distracted.

The Weasleys had acquired a house only a few streets away from Grimmauld Place, which gave Draco a nasty shock. (There was something very wrong about the Weasleys being the darlings of high society.) The Prophet gushed over the Weasley conquests: one was favoured to be the next Minister, and the Weasel himself was an Auror. The twins had just bought out Zonko's, and Draco thrown the paper across the room after that.

Draco searched the pages of the Prophet for mention of a Slytherin, and found one (one!) in the sports section, detailing Marcus Flint's ban from professional Quidditch.

Another theory never to be shared. Fucking, fucking Potter and the Ministry. Trust Potter to move at exactly the wrong time. A week later and Draco would have been in New Azkaban with his parents. And that would have been better, somehow.

In Draco's opinion, Harry Potter was a lot better dead, where Draco could hate his memory in peace.