The Ultimate Revenge

The Ultimate Revenge
Chapter One: An Inventory of the Dead

For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed, and bareness everywhere.
- William Shakespeare

An owl with wings like snow swept through the night, a slash of white against the infinite darkness. Draco watched it fly, flew with it, saw it bank around trees and flit under the darker, tree-cast shadows, and in his head his mother was singing the lullaby that had always been Draco's, and Draco's alone.

The owl lunged forward suddenly, its wings stretching out to catch the air, and its talons wrapped around a branch, sinking deeply into the wood.

Its head swivelled unnaturally, its luminous eyes meeting Draco's as he watched it, and... the eyes were bottle-green and wore Harry Potter's glasses.

Draco woke up. Harry bloody Potter was infiltrating his dreams now, too. (Of course Draco wasn't dreaming of Potter; that was simply ridiculous.) And instead of getting out of Draco's head, he was burrowing deeper. For a dead man, Potter made a nuisance of himself. Not that it was anything unusual, at least in the wizarding world, but Harry Potter was no corporeal ghost.

Now there was a nasty thought. To be really, truly haunted by the Boy Who Lived for a While.

Draco opened dry eyes to stare at the canopy of his bed. It was a shade of green that brought Harry Potter's eyes to mind. Yeurk. That would have to go, Draco decided, and then realised that he'd just let Potter make an interior design decision for him. The canopy would stay, and Harry Potter's eyes be damned.

Draco closed his eyes again, and wished for a moment that he wasn't such a morning person. He wanted to go back to sleep.

But he couldn't, and after a minute of contemplating the back of his eyelids he was fully and irreversibly awake. Which was entirely Potter's fault, for hijacking his dream - his favourite dream - and using it against him. Annoying dead bastard.

The room was filled with the standard sort of depressing grey London light that meant that today it might rain, or gust, or just be blustery and overcast the whole day. Draco hated London, but Grimmauld Place was far better than the cold, echoing emptiness of Malfoy Manor.

He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, stretching as he unfolded. His back popped, and Draco made a face at the flare of pain that went with it.

He wandered into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror before rummaging in the cupboard for a razor and shaving cream. Not that he couldn't have done it with magic, but at least one Malfoy had died in a shaving accident (his ancestors, Draco noticed, never died boringly), and Draco had no desire to be the second.

He showered, scrubbing at his skin with the rough, cheap, apple-scented soap. He had the money to buy far better, but he liked the feeling as it scratched along his arms and across his chest. His scalp felt itchy and grotty, and so did his skin. He scraped the soap across the back of his neck as if trying to rub away the feeling, and pushed the shampoo through his hair hard enough that it hurt.

He scrambled through the laundry bin for a moderately clean towel. There was still something weird about doing all of his own laundry, but he was getting better at it. And it meant no servants to hang him over his shoulder and remind him of who he had been. Or to spy on him.

He towelled himself off meticulously (blond hair didn't dry well; it made little clumps which sent little trickles of water down his spine so he had to dry his back again), and slid into a pair of dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. His father would probably be rolling in his mausoleum to see Draco wearing Muggle clothing. Not that Draco cared. He didn't. Not a bit.

He forewent socks for the moment, and padded down to the kitchen. He opened a window with a flick of his wand, and scrambled for a Knut when the Daily Prophet owl swept in immediately, hooting and shaking its leg at him. He gave the damned beast his Knut and took the Prophet from him.

Breakfast was a not-quite-burnt piece of toast scraped with butter and plum jam, eaten while perusing the front page of the Prophet. Other mail arrived half-way through the toast in the form of an extension of credit from Gringotts (as if a Malfoy would ever use anything as vulgar as other people's money), and a pamphlet of House Elf rights (as if Draco cared. He didn't have any of the daft blighters, anyway, not at Grimmauld Place). Draco went back to the Prophet.

It was quite boring, really. It seemed to Draco that not a single interesting thing had happened in six years. It was quite depressing. Not that exciting things were necessarily better.

What was that old Muggle curse? Ah, yes. May you live in interesting times.

This, in Draco's opinion, was hardly a decent curse. To start with, it left all arms, legs and other paraphernalia attached, and secondly, it was just stupid. Draco had spent most of his life - well, a good part - living in interesting times. And he had enjoyed it immensely, excepting the last six months of it.

Now that he came to think of it, the whole of his existence had become positively banal. He was researching another book, on Merlin himself, with an unprecedented dearth of success. Wizards of the time did not seem to have a single thing to say about the greatest wizard in all Britain, and Muggle resources were all secondary, filled with one modern romanticism after another.

Draco glanced at the date below the curling Prophet logo, and was startled to see that it was the twenty-third of September again. Time to visit his parents again. A year had passed without Draco even really noticing. Maybe life wasn't as boring as he had thought.

He dropped his mug and plate into the sink and dug a pair of socks out of the pile in the laundry, taking the time to find a matching pair. He dragged them on, and his shoes after them.

He dragged the huge wrought-iron guard away from the fireplace in the entrance hall and propped it up against the wall. It, like many of the Black accoutrements, had a motif of writing snakes, running up the three think uprights. The Floo jar was centred on the mantelpiece, and... well, not actually a jar. It looked rather more like somebody had filled a goblet with sand. A king's goblet, no less.

"Incendio," whispered Draco, and a tiny, flickering flame appeared on the hearth stone, barely large enough for the Floo to work, and an odd, sickly yellow colour to boot. He cast the Floo powder before him and said "Diagon Alley," as clearly as he could with the thick smoke curling around him.

Draco hated the feeling of using the Floo Network. It was like flying, which was absolutely fine by Draco, but he had no control over his movements, which definitely was not fine by Draco. It have him shivers just to think of losing control of his broom - not that he would, he was no Potter - and Floo was a hundred times worse, because not only was he not in control, he'd never actually had it in the first place.

It was a horrible feeling, but tradition was tradition, even if it was just Draco's little thing. And another exercise in model citizenry, although Draco would have done it no matter what situation he was in.

Diagon Alley, though Draco, was probably the only street in the world with its own fireplace. He had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded good, and it wasn't as though he was writing something for one of his books. In his own head, Draco would make Tuesday purple and purple Tuesday if he felt like it.

The fireplace didn't look out of place. It was far wider than it was tall; a monstrosity in wood that looked as if it would have caught fire in an instant if somebody lit a flame in it. It didn't, though, and the fire in it was charmed to never go out or dwindle (and just yesterday Draco had seen that accredited to Merlin, as well. As if Diagon Alley had existed longer than Hogwarts.) It fronted straight on to the bustling street, and Draco stepped out smartly, brushing past a witch who was carrying so many bags that she couldn't throw the Floo powder properly. Draco remembered why it was so much easier to go shopping with servants. And a car. And a wand. Why wasn't she using hers, he wondered.

Draco stopped for a moment to orientate himself. Flourish and Blotts loomed on his left, and Gringotts teetered on his right, eternally on the brink of collapse. Goblins were good bankers, but they weren't made to build things. Too short, for a start. However, the whole of Diagon Alley was ramshackle, and Gringotts fit the mould. The only new building on the street was Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, and that had suffered its own unique damages. Half the street was probably only standing due to magic.

Syrinx's Blooms was easy to miss, jammed between Ollivander's and a second-hand robe shop. Draco edged past the Devil's Snare and the Snapping Dragonbells to get to the counter. He bought a bunch of Eternal Cherry Blossoms, smiling and nodding as Syrinx commented in a reedy voice about what a nice day it was. It wasn't, but Draco had been brought up to be nice to the help.

The Field of Bones was in a corner of Diagon Alley that was so far from everything else that it wasn't really in Diagon Alley. Draco knew for a fact that it hadn't been, originally, but the two had grown until they were the same place. Draco took his time, thinking as he walked.

He was nervous. Why was he nervous? He had long ago got used to the fact that his parents were dead, and they were hardly ghosts to haunt him (and Merlin be thanked for that, came the traitorous thought).

It was his filial duty to honour his parents, Draco told himself, and Draco did not shun his duties.

The gates of the Field of Bones, the largest wizarding graveyard in all of Britain, towered well over Draco's head. They were made of two huge slabs of something too yellowed to be ivory. Draco rather suspected they were bone, though he didn't want to know what had bones that big.

He pressed his outstretched hand against the gates and pushed, watching as they swung back easily at his touch.

Gravestones extended in orderly rows, their full extent hidden by the roll of the land. He could see the mausoleums clustered in what might have been the centre of the graveyard, a hill away.

Draco started walking. It always took a while to arrive at the right grave, no matter which you were looking for. Once he had tried to trick the graveyard, looking for one grave when he wanted another, and he had found them both tucked in the farthest corner of the Field, where they had never been before.

He could see other people in the distance, but none close enough to make out details. He walked slowly, not looking at the graves he passed. He didn't want to see somebody he knew; there were far too many of them buried there, and today he was here for his parents.

The Malfoy Mausoleum was quite impressive, and Draco found himself stopping to look at it from a distance. It loomed over the surrounding gravestones, a baroque monstrosity that was set slightly apart from all the other mausoleums. A grotesque leered at Draco from above the door.

Other pureblood families had their private Mausoleums on their nouveau riche estates out in the country, so the Malfoys, who were not nouveau riche, had theirs moved to a public graveyard. Another piece of brilliantly flawed logic from one of Draco's ancestors, doubtless.

He was about to step towards the Mausoleum when he realised that there was already somebody standing in front of the door, staring at the names engraved on either side of the door. At the last two names. His parents’.

Draco considered the other person from a safe distance. A distinctly masculine frame was otherwise almost completely concealed by clothes that were neither wizard nor Muggle. The hood of his tan cloak was drawn up so that nothing could be seen of his head without looking him directly in the face. Draco frowned. At any other grave, he could have just been another mourner. Except that the only person who had ever actually mourned his parents' deaths was Draco himself. And certainly not three years later.

A vandal, perhaps, except that the field didn't let vandals in. Not when it could result in the dead walking. He might be a fellow historian, or an interested student. Whoever they were, Draco decided he was being overly paranoid. There was certainly no way that the person could mean Draco any harm.

Draco moved a bit closer, and stopped again when he realised that the other man was talking to himself under his breath, a sotto voce litany of names in a sad monotone.

"...and Luna Lovegood, Nymphadora Tonks and Kingsley Shacklebolt. Petter Pettigrew and Tom Marvolo Riddle. Bellatrix Lestrange, and Narcissa Malfoy and Lucius Malfoy..."

The list continued, but Draco stopped listening after his parents were listed. He recognised enough of the names - and where was he heard Nymphadora Tonks before - to realise that it was a list of the dead. Those who had died in the war, a full accounting. Except that the mystery reciter had skipped Harry Potter.

The inventory of the dead stopped, and Draco found himself holding his breath so as not to break the silence.

The hush extended, reverential. Draco had never been to a Muggle church service, but if he had, he would have recognised the peculiar brand of silence as the sound of prayer. Then the mysterious mourner turned, and the moment was broken.

The mysterious mourner turned, heading straight towards Draco, his head down. Draw saw him step closer, watched as the head came up in surprise.

Harry Potter's brilliant green irises were narrow bands around shock-distended pupils.

The shock came slowly, like the tide crawling up a shore. Draco found himself staring. Those were Potter's eyes, for sure, and the face was Potter's, too. Older, but six years did that to people and he still looked like the eleven year old, really. But no scar, thought Draco, and he was right: where there was always previously been the scar, the oh-so-famed scar, there was nothing but plain skin, slightly freckled but otherwise bare from eyebrow to hairline. The Eternal Cherry Blossoms slid out of his hand and thumped on to the ground, but Draco was to busy looking at Harry Potter to notice.

His startled examination was interrupted by Potter saying "Malfoy," (coolly, but Draco can hear the nervous warble) and that was Potter's voice, and before he could think he was answering.

"Potter," he said.

And Draco got the feeling, somewhere in the depths of his thoughts where his mind was still working, that they were both talking on automatic to cover the frantic thought-processes on the inside. So he said the first thing that came to mind.

"You're dead." It was a statement, not a promise. And again, louder, when he realised that it was exactly right: "You're dead! I saw... everyone saw your..." He trailed off as realisation dawned.

It took him a moment to scramble for his wand, but he pulled it out and it was in his hand and his hand was pointed at Harry Potter. Who was close enough that the tip of Draco's wand was almost prodding him in the chest.

"Reveal your secret," hissed Draco. Nothing happened, but Potter was staring at him distantly, as if he didn't really understand what was happening, and didn't want to. "Show yourself true." Nothing again. There was a spell to break Polyjuice Potions, but Draco couldn't remember it and why would anyone want to be Potter for an hour?

"Finite Incantem," came next, and this time something did happen, though it was not what Draco expected and hoped for. There was a moment of blurriness, and then the lightning bolt was back in its place on Potter's forehead.

It looked like Potter, it talked like Potter, it acted like Potter, and it was wearing the expression of somebody who's only just got the joke.

"It's really me, Malfoy," he said, and in his head Draco disagreed. It couldn't be Potter. Potter was dead and ashes, entombed in a glass case in the foyer of the Ministry of Magic.

No. I've finally gone mad.

Could mad people tell when they were mad? Draco was neither psychologist nor psychomancer, but he guessed that they could. Which didn't make him feel any better, and his knees didn't seem to be working properly. He was not going to collapse in front of Potter, even if he was a hallucination. He sat himself down carefully, wondering if there was a body six feet below him, and looked up at the boy... man... who had been his arch-nemesis (although Draco had never been Potter's, and that had hurt), and then had been dead, and now was neither.

Utterly mad.