Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

Coventry

They threw him a farewell party the night before he left for Hogwarts, and Draco, whose birthdays had passed unremarked for ten years, was floored and flattered and a little uncomfortable. He had not grown used to being liked for himself, or despite himself; he did not really understand what it was they wanted from him--or if they wanted anything. Altruism and friendship do not mix, not in his experience, and the whole thing left rather a sour taste in his mouth.

At the end of the night there were gifts--not the kind of gifts given by his father's friends, which were designed to reflect the giver's wealth, power, and generosity--but small things picked especially for him. He had never been given anything before, by anyone outside of his family; there was, after all, nothing he could possibly want that he could not afford to buy for himself. Malfoys were firmly at the top of the food chain--or had been once. Implying otherwise was, of course, an insult, but he was aware that they meant to be kind and so he tore open the brightly wrapped presents with (he hoped) every indication of pleasure.

Granger's package contained a copy of Hogwarts, A Revised History, which for some reason made the others, particularly Ron and Potter, laugh hysterically. She frowned severely at them, but there was a new softness to her that took away the edge from her expression. Motherhood might suit her after all. Potter gave him a shirt that read, "Seekers Always Mark Their Man" and Ron gave him a lumpy maroon sweater with a lopsided "D" embroidered on it. Draco, aware of the troubled glance Potter shot Charlie Weasley, thanked him as solemnly as possible.

In the morning, Draco woke early, and went into the bathroom to shower and dress, leaving Harry to sleep heavily, and if truth be told, rather drunkenly. His eyes stared back at him from the mirror, wide and pale and anxious. He put on his new robes and smoothed his hair, feeling like a child playing dress up. The black of a Hogwarts master suited him, rather more than it had suited Snape, say, or McGonagall.

Snape, of course, was another worry entirely--a far different animal than the others. Dumbledore might have him killed (and in fact probably would if he could do so and avoid blame) but Snape would break Draco if he wished to. Snape was fond of the small cruelties only Slytherins knew were not incidental. Snape had not trusted him enough to reveal that he was a spy; it was unlikely Draco's subsequent betrayal would have further endeared him to the man.

Draco frowned at his reflection, daring the mirror to make some smart remark. He and Snape had been close, once; they had been close as any brothers, as even the Weasleys. A part of him wanted that closeness back, but another more rational portion of his brain had accepted that if he were to survive he would be far safer without such connections. He would be lucky if Potter didn't kill him, or drive him mad; he had a feeling he was hovering on the edge of the second already. He did not need to go looking for complications.

It was hard to pretend to be normal, when since the World Cup he had been treading water and was now beginning to sink. For Granger, Ron, even Potter, this was all a bit of a lark: pack the Death Eater off to Hogwarts, and let him make an ass of himself, why not? But it was Draco whose body had betrayed him, Draco whose life this was. It was Draco who leaned, shaking and sick, against the sink, aware that whatever it was that awaited him at Hogwarts he would have to face it alone.

In the bedroom Potter waited for Draco, snoring slightly. His face was tired and a little drawn, and there were lines around his mouth and eyes, threads of gray in his dark hair. His body was a Quidditch player's, still, but unlike Draco he had put on weight. It was not enough to diminish his appeal, not even enough to be visible unless he lay unclothed as he did now, all defenses down. Draco, looking down at him, felt half glad and half guilty to be leaving him. Suddenly cold, he lay down beside Potter and pulled the blankets up, ignoring the fact that his robes were sure to be rumpled. Potter rolled toward him, a heavy, solid ball of warmth, and they curled round one another almost without meaning to.

Draco had begun to doze when the doorbell went--one of the few Muggle inventions Potter had adopted, and it constantly took Draco by surprise. He and Potter scrambled up, Draco frantically trying to straighten the crushed fabric of his robes (normally they were made from polyester but he'd had his done in linen, and changed the cut ever so slightly as well) and Potter fishing an old stained t-shirt from the floor and cramming it over his head. While Potter got the door Draco stopped in the bathroom to check his appearance and gather his nerve. He had not seen Dumbledore since his trial, and he was displeased to notice that there was a red sleep mark on his cheek.

Gathering his bags and a last armload of books, he marched toward the door, keeping his back straight and his chin up. Potter and Dumbledore were standing in the doorway, waiting; wise of Dumbledore not to come in, when every surface in the living room overflowed with empty bottles and spilled ashtrays. Draco wondered, a little sadly, who would clean it up, when he was gone. Would Potter bother? Would he replace Draco with a younger, less handsome boy? Or would he just go on as he had done, not even noticing the filth until someday... "I'm ready," he said, more harshly than he had meant to do.

Potter glanced at him quickly, and than at the floor. Dumbledore smiled, showing teeth like an ancient crocodile's. "Well, Mr. Malfoy. My carriage awaits."

Draco turned to Potter and searched for words. In the end, inspiration failed to appear and he could say only, "Goodbye, Potter. Thank you for everything."

Potter's mouth opened and closed several times. At last he found his voice. "Malfoy, wait." Draco, who had not moved, raised an eyebrow. Potter whispered, "Malfoy, I'll miss you. I think--I think I might love you. If you want--if you want to come here sometime on the weekend, maybe, I'd like that."

Best not to give hope where there could be none; it was best to walk away now. Yet, Draco, to his amazement, heard himself answer, "Yes, I'd like that too." Numbly, he followed Dumbledore out to the great coach. There was a lurch as the centaurs stepped into the harness, and Draco caught himself against the door. When he turned to look, Potter was gone. He and Dumbledore sat in silence, side by side, all the way to Hogwarts. Once Draco lit a cigarette but Dumbledore put it out with a wordless flick of his wand.

He had always rather fancied Snape's cozy quarters in the Slytherin dungeon; he had enjoyed living there with Blaise and, perhaps unconsciously, had expected to be assigned something similar. Instead he had been given a room high up in one of the emptier towers. It was large and almost empty, furnished entirely with castoffs from the dorms. The view was magnificent, but the wind blew through cracks in the stone and the fireplace smoked. The bath was enormous, all cracked and waterstained white marble, and carved gargoyles lurked high up in each corner. It was not a particularly comfortable room, and Draco thought he'd caught Dumbledore smirking as he handed over the key.

Still, it was private, and clean enough. On the desk lay lists of the students in each year that would be taking his class. Flipping through it, Draco was surprised at how many names he recognized. There was a Weasley in third year--perhaps Charlie's? Or a twin's? There was a Parkinson--that would be Pansy's youngest half-brother. A Goyle, a cousin of Greg's; and his mother's goddaughter in seventh year. And, in fifth year, one of the names he had been dreading. Ista Flint, Marc's daughter, whose mother Draco could remember killing. She had been so young, Fleur, and so beautiful, her belly swollen with her second child. They had all been so young then. He threw the papers down on the desk and went to have a bath.

Arriving fashionably late for dinner, Draco fell into his seat and looked around. He knew perhaps half of those seated at the high table with him--Snape, McGonagall, Pomfrey, Trelawney, Flitwick, Filch and Dumbledore. Summoning his most charming smile, he prepared to meet them, but familiar and unfamiliar, they all stared past him coldly and silently.

Draco turned his focus on the students, ignoring the Sorting (Thank Merlin, he would not have to teach first or second years). They were an unprepossessing bunch, from the red haired and squinting Perry Weasley to the scowling Darien Parkinson. He could not tell which of the Slytherins was Marcus Flint's daughter and in the end he turned his attention to his plate. He had discovered that although House Elves would not serve him, he could, if he were quick and a bit grabby, take the bowls of steaming food directly from others' hands. It was not an ideal solution but it was the best he had been able to come up with. Now he managed to get mashed potatoes from McGonagall and carrots of some sort from Dumbledore, and suddenly ravenous, he began to eat.

Just as Draco was reaching for a roll (and yes, he had been taught better manners, but in a situation like this there was nothing to do but lean and hope for the best) Dumbledore stood and began to introduce the teaching staff. Hastily, Draco snatched his hand back and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. When his own turn came he stood slowly, very aware of all the eyes on him. He was a Malfoy, and bred to the spotlight, but he had been a fugitive for a third of his life. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be stared at so intently. And, of course no one clapped for him, not even the handful of ragged Slytherins who had cheered Snape. Well, fair enough--one way or another he had betrayed all of their families when they were very young, and in more recent memory been responsible for losing the damned World Cup. Popularity would have been rather a lot to ask for, and, like Snape, he required only that they respect him.

Draco's first class, fourth-year Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, dragged on interminably. His carefully planned lesson neither caught, nor held, their attention. And the worst of it was, he suspected he was rather a good teacher. Certainly he was a thousand times better than Vector, his own teacher, had been. Yet none of his students responded to even the simplest of his questions. Could they be so far behind, or had judicious inbreeding caught up with the wizarding world? At the end of the period he dismissed them and sent them on their way, and sat down rather hard at his desk.

He was dismayed to find himself shivering uncontrollably. Pacing the classroom, Draco folded his arms over his chest and clenched his jaw so hard it ached. One of the little bastards must have hexed him on the way out. He would almost certainly have done something even worse, given such a target at such an age; now if he had not been the target he might have found it funny. Even erasing the blackboard is difficult, when one must do it the Muggle way, and when one's teeth are chattering. The knock at the door startled Draco so much he dropped the eraser anyway. Biting back a curse, he opened the door.

Severus Snape, lounging elegantly against the wall, straightened hurriedly. "Really, Malfoy," he drawled, "must you always be so...sudden?"

Draco raised an eyebrow. "Snape. Must you always be so obvious?" The other man laughed, caught himself, and turned his expression to a sneer. He followed Draco into the room and moved distractedly about, picking things up and setting them down in slightly different places. Draco, still shivering with cold, cupped his hands to his mouth and blew half-heartedly into them.

Severus peered curiously at him, eyes piercing beneath the thick black fringe. The last ten years had been good to him, surprisingly good given his mixed blood. There were faint traces of gray in his hair, a few more lines on his face, but he could have been thirty-five and not fifty. He had put on weight, enough to make his presence solid; he was an imposing figure--rather like a darker, blurred version of their father at that age. "Surely you're not cold, Malfoy," he asked now. "Not even you could be so thin-blooded as that. Which one of them was it that did it?"

"I don't know," Draco answered, a little sadly. "But I'll find out, and have its head."

Severus laughed. "Should I take the spell off or let you suffer, I wonder?"

"I'm not such a martyr as that; you'd best take it off before my next class comes in, at any rate.

He had gone back to prowling restlessly, but suddenly the relentless burning cold was gone as if it had never been. Draco lit a cigarette and was gratified when Severus spun as though the click of the lighter had been a gunshot. One way or another they were all still bleeding; Snape simply hid his wounds better than most.

"Filthy habit, Malfoy." But Severus came closer, drawn like a moth to a flame. He put out a hand and Draco took it:

pale thin fingers, and a palm ridged with callus; but for the potion stains it might have his own hand. "I've missed you, you greasy git," he whispered.

Severus--no, call him Snape--drew back as if he'd smelled Death herself. "Malfoy. We can't--I dare not--."

"You don't want to be associated with me." Draco swallowed the absurd lump in his throat. "One Death Eater has a certain rarity value, but two together mean a plot."

"There is more at stake than you realize," Snape said softly. His eyes were soft, direct; they were the eyes of a man who could betray you to your death with a smile and never let on how much he regretted it. "There is trouble brewing, Malfoy, a war such as we have never seen."

Draco turned away. "I knew there was something wrong. I knew! It was like it drew me back. It will be very bad, then?"

"May." But Snape's voice was too even, too controlled; he lied too well to be believable. "There may be such a war coming, but there is still time to turn the course of our world. Time, for a man they believe they can trust, to influence those who must be influenced. This is not Voldemort's little reign of terror, nor Grindelwald's small rebellion. Next to what I fear is coming all our history of death and disasters will be only a pleasant memory.

"Fair enough," Draco said, and his own words were calm but the butt of his cigarette burned his fingers and still he held it.

"Malfoy." Snape shook back the sleeve of his robe to reveal his wrist, unmarked but for the scar Draco himself had put there. No trace of the Dark Mark he had born for twenty years and more; when he had lost the Dark Lord's favor it had disappeared without a trace. "Five years, at the outside. More likely it will be two." Draco, without meaning to, ran his thumb over the matching scar on his own wrist. Snape continued, "I have never forgotten what you did for me. No one has ever been willing to die for me but you."

"It was nothing," Draco protested, but he let the cigarette drop, and raised his burnt fingers to his mouth. Snape crossed the distance between them with a stride, pulled Draco's hand down and away from his face, and pressed his lips to Draco's pulse. Draco closed his eyes and when he opened them Snape was gone as if he had never been.

So much for adolescent lust--the one thing Draco had wanted more than life itself at fifteen was still as much out of reach as ever. But life went on; where once there had been Blaise now there was Harry Potter. And was this what unrequited love tasted like? How had Blaise stood it? How did Harry stand it? He brought his wrist to his mouth, smelling Severus on himself. Once it would have seemed like a miracle to him, and now it was nothing, was empty. That was something else Potter had ruined for him; now sex smelled of cigarettes and sweat and cheap beer and not of incense and Obsession, or exotic potions ingredients and blood.

In his next class there was Ista Flint, and when Draco took roll he watched for her. Fleur had been beautiful, with a cruel narrow face heart-shaped as cat's; Marc had been square and hard and brutally handsome. Ista was a lumpy, plain, fat child, dark and sour and clearly desperately unhappy. Draco, young enough to remember how hard it was to be fifteen or sixteen, could not even imagine how terrible her life must be. The worst of it was that she was bright, very very bright, and powerful. In ten years she might be passable though she would never be pretty. But he could see already that she would not last that long; she was too fragile, too easy to break. If Hogwarts did not destroy her the real world would. He wondered looking at her if this was what his father had seen in Tom Riddle sixty years before--this same potential for self-destruction. And how was it that no one else had seen it? Oh, the girl was a Slytherin, but that did not justify looking through her as if she were glass.

At the first faculty meeting of the year, he brought it up. What does one do if one of one's students seems a potential suicide? (Well, he phrased it a bit more tactfully than that; he was a Malfoy after all.) The meeting went on as if he had not spoken; the other teachers simply raised their voices, spoke over him. They were not speaking to him; effective but so childish he could not stop himself from laughing, though he covered it by coughing hard and was very nearly sick. They practically strained their necks not looking at him.

The chubby, slack-jawed cherub would not let him into his rooms until he showed it his arm, still clear of a Dark Mark. Draco found this funny the first few times it happened, but when the guardians of all the doors began to do the same, he quickly lost patience. None of his fellow staff members acknowledged his existence; the House Elves hated him and the artwork made fun of him. The single Quidditch match he had refereed had ended in disaster when both teams refused to allow him to rule in their favor.

And then, Potter wrote him letters--sometimes three or four a week, despite the fact that Draco had yet to write him back. They were interesting letters, too, though they were not always nice. They were love letters, written by a man who did not really know what love was; they began, invariably: Malfoy--.

And generally continued, in Potter's blind man's scrawl, skirting the edges of literacy and legality. Malfoy--I want nothing more than to fuck you against the wall, white skin against dark wood. I want nothing more than to make you bleed. Or, Malfoy--I wish you were dead. I wish I could tear your heart out and eat it. I wish you were part of me. I wish you were here. No one had sent Draco letters since his father died. No one had ever sent him letters like these; they were barely legible, written on scraps of paper torn from case files, on napkins, on letterhead from cheap Muggle hotels. They were sealed with gum, shoved in stained envelopes hastily licked shut, rolled and tied with strands of hair.

Draco wondered, at first, if Potter knew that Dumbledore opened all of his mail. After awhile he decided it didn't matter; if Dumbledore wanted to know what it was Potter thought, more power to him. Sometimes he caught the old man eying him speculatively; perhaps he was trying to picture the things Potter wrote about. Perhaps he wanted to know how Draco would look, chained to a bed, how he would feel in the dark. It didn't matter. Let him dream. Draco was used to being watched.

On the weekends, of course, there was Potter himself. He was still a lousy fuck, still too rough, too fast, too inconsiderate for Draco's taste. Yet Draco found himself more and more willing to be hurt, taken, scorned. And, more rarely, there was Potter lying still and quiet beneath him, too ashamed to acknowledge that this aroused him. Those were the times Draco was most at peace, buried in Potter's warm soft body. Heartbreakingly, Potter had even tried to clean, the first time Draco came to visit.

During the long September and October days, when he found himself sympathizing with his mother, remembering her disgust at his slowness, Draco lost himself in Ista Flint's hard black gaze. She was the smartest of his students, by far; she was one of the few who paid attention when he taught. The others were fools beside her, or were fools at any rate. She was unpopular, unlikable; she was falling apart before him and no one listened when he said so. On Halloween he caught her crying in the corridor, her face swollen and blotchy, and she ran from him. Something in him recognized, then, that there would be no saving her. The deathwatch had begun.

Early in December, when the other children began to panic about exams or O.W.L.S. or N.E.W.T.S., when they came crawling to Draco begging for forgiveness and tutoring and extra credit, Ista Flint broke. He was not there when it happened; he did not see how it began. When he came into the Great Hall in the middle of the afternoon, it was deserted except for a handful of students, huddled together at one end. Deserted, except for them, and Ista, and the crumpled body at her feet. He felt as much as heard the word she hissed. Crucio. And whoever it was before her screamed in agony. Oh, the spell had not worked; there were guards put up at Hogwarts, that prevented the Unforgivables from taking effect. But merely the attempt would be enough to damn her.

Draco had never been particularly courageous, either physically or morally. He avoided pain at any cost, and he generally stayed well clear of danger if possible. He would have liked to stay well clear of this. It was crazy, he thought, there was nothing he could do. No wand, no magic, no sword, even. Against a girl who was poorly trained and clearly desperate and extremely strong. One of the girls screamed, a high, half-hearted sobbing scream that made him think of Pansy and without meaning to he took a step forward.

Ista turned to face him and he felt her focus shift. All at once he was not her Arithmancy professor but the man who had murdered her mother. Her rage had a presence all its own. Draco stared her down as one stared down a mad dog, a charging bull. He dared not blink, dared not even breathe; she could destroy him in a heartbeat if she chose to.

She did not, it seemed, choose to: after a moment she looked away, and the moment passed. "Ista," Draco said as gently as he could. "Run."

When she was gone he turned his attention to the children shivering on the floor. The broken body of a handsome boy he nearly recognized--but there was nothing he could for that one. "Are you all right?" he asked, and one by one they struggled to their feet, pressing as close to him as they could. "It'll be okay," he heard himself promise, and all the while he was remembering other children, for whom it had not been okay. He could not say that to them: that they were lucky to have survived, that they were better off without their innocence, that everyone had to grow up sometime. Instead he said, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," as he did his best to wipe up their tears.

When the wounded had been patched up and order restored officials from the Ministry came to meet with Dumbledore. Draco was summoned but forced to wait in the corridor. Potter, passing, gave him a tight, unhappy smile, and Black touched his shoulder briefly. After they had gone by Draco let himself slide down until he was sitting against the wall. He could feel himself beginning to shake, and made no effort to quell his terror. What had he done? How could he have let her go? And yet, what else could he have done?

Ten years ago the war had been about survival. He had not given much thought to what it was he had done; he could not, after all, have done otherwise. He had killed Ista's mother while Potter killed her father. He had helped to set her on this path. And what was Ista, but another Voldemort, another unwanted orphan unwelcomed by their world. What chance had she had? What chance did anyone have?

Sirius Black opened the door to Dumbledore's office. "Draco, could you come in please?" he asked.

Draco, startled, scrambled to his feet. "I'm coming." Black's face was unreadable; no telling what lay in store. There was nothing for it, he would have to face the music. He remembered Dumbledore saying "I only know that the world will be better without you." What would they do to him, now that he had let Ista Flint loose on the world?