Twelve Steps

Chapter Eight

"Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all."

-Al-Anon Family Groups

* * * * *

"Malfoy! What are you doing in there?"

Draco stood rooted to the mouldy floor tiles, studying the empty cup in his hand and waiting for something fundamental to change within him. The salty, bitter tang of the potion still lingered in clumps along his tongue. A stray droplet of green sludge rolled down the side of the cup and landed on his index finger. He stared at it, mesmerised.

"Malfoy! Draco! Draco Malfoy! Are you all right?" came Potter's voice again, laden with anxiety. Draco took a moment to savour the strange feeling that crept up his spine at the thought of Harry Potter worrying about him. When he realised what he was doing, he resolutely shook off the sensation. Any minute now, his magic would return, and he would have no further use for Harry Potter or his confounded Gryffindor guilt complex.

"I'm just splendid!" he shouted through the door, dropping the now useless cup into the rubbish bin next to the sink. As he splashed water on his face, he took the opportunity to survey his reflection in the mirror. Even in the dim illumination of Muggle electricity--'Fluorescent light,' Potter had informed him--there were dark shadows under his eyes and hollows beneath his now prominent cheekbones. Strands of his lustreless hair stood up at attention, unwashed, and his fringe was so overgrown that it masked the aristocratic curve of his brow. A puckered scar caught the beam of the overhead light as he tilted his head, fraying the smooth line of his jaw into meandering fragments. Only the narrow, pursed line of his mouth remained unblemished.

Draco looked into the mirror and an unkempt Muggle stranger returned his gaze.

Repulsed, he abandoned his personal scrutiny in favour of returning to the bedroom. As he slammed the bathroom door outward, Potter was propelled into the opposite wall. There he stayed, nursing his bruised elbow with a wounded outcry, whilst Draco stalked past him toward the bed. Crouching on hands and knees, he painstakingly ran a hand through the mess of dust bunnies underneath the mattress until he located a fuzz-encrusted strip of wood.

Clutching the wand in his left hand, he levelled it at Potter.

"Stupefy!" he screeched.

For all of the energy that Draco had channelled into the spell, the magic should have been gushing forward from the wand in a veritable avalanche. His fingers tingled with the force of it, and the muscles of his abdomen clenched apprehensively.

Potter stared at him in stupefaction, but it was entirely mental. He was still leaning against the wall, his sore elbow crooked at an odd angle, the other hand outstretched.

"Stupefy!" Draco squawked again, his voice ringing in frantic desperation. It should have worked! Potter should have been crumpled in a pathetic heap on the carpet, eyes wide with shock as he finally understood that Draco was no longer a defenceless, etiolated Squib. Instead, he merely gave Draco a look of mute inquiry mingled with something else that Draco refused to acknowledge as sympathy.

He waved the wand again with his eyes squeezed shut, half-heartedly willing it to function. Nothing happened, of course, and it stopped in mid-air. When his eyes opened, he saw that Potter had seized the tip of the wand in one hand. The lone feather at its tip gently brushed his thumb.

"Malfoy, you've got to stop this," said Potter, as though he were explaining the Gryffindor House rules to a first year. Slowly, he pressed Draco's hand down until the wand and his arm both flopped uselessly at his side. Too drained to resist, Draco let his fingers fall slack, and the wand clattered onto the floor. To his surprise, Potter bent down to retrieve it.

"Here," he said, offering the slim piece of rosewood up on the palm of his hand. Draco ignored it, swaying slightly on his feet, his thoughts running in frenetic circles. I'm going to be here forever. I'm not even a Malfoy anymore! I'm a bloody Muggle--how in Merlin's name did I ever think I could work a Potion with broccoli in it? Have I gone completely mental? Bugger all, I can't even stand looking at Muggles; I certainly will not subject myself to their presence for the rest of my life! Oh, sod it, what if I only have a Muggle lifespan now? But perhaps that will be a blessing after all. There is absolutely no way I will reduce myself to crawling back to Dumbledore like that deplorable Squib Filch--

"Malfoy!" Potter exclaimed insistently, interrupting Draco's internal diatribe. He still held the wand, but his other hand was halfway between Draco's hand and his shoulder. It vacillated back and forth, as though unsure how Draco would respond to further encroachment on his personal space. Finally, his fingers settled in a tenuous grip on Draco's upper arm, rubbing his skin lightly through the coarse pyjama sleeve. "Listen, I know this is a bit of a shock, Malfoy, but..."

"Don't call me that!" Draco pulled back abruptly, the inexorable truth of his plight spreading over his consciousness at long last. He sank to the ground as though pulled by an imaginary weight, heedless of the cracked wall plaster that scraped narrow gashes along his spine. If he buried his head in his hands, the world almost seemed to vanish, leaving him alone to contemplate his fate.

"Mal--"

"If my father were still alive," Malfoy retorted, his voice muffled by the fingers pressing against his lips to blunt the cry of despair that threatened to break through, "he would have disowned me anyway."

Potter said nothing, at first, and Draco could hear a rustling as he stepped away and then returned. When he spoke, the other man sounded apologetic. "I've set your wand down on the dresser. I know it doesn't work, but you might want it as a memento."

"My wand is a duffer," Draco said dully. "And so am I. So just sod off. Toss it out, if you feel like it. I certainly don't give a skrewt's arse what happens to it."

The faint pressure of Potter's arm against his knees alerted him to the fact that Potter had knelt down beside him. Although he knew that the nurses would soon be arriving to conduct their daily physical examinations, Draco could not bring himself to move. The room seemed to be smothering him, the thick air scented with an overpowering aroma of evergreen that one of the Muggle maids had termed 'air freshener'. His shoulders shook as he fought back what might have been a whimper. His father's words drowned out Potter's concerned whisper: 'A Malfoy never cries unless there is some benefit to be reaped by exaggerating his misery. As long as you remember this, you will never truly be in despair.'

But a faint, forlorn noise escaped his lips as he felt Potter's thumb on his cheek, tracing what would have been a tear track on anyone else. Draco's face, however, was dry. The movement was so gentle that he almost attributed it to an air current; then he felt the scratch of callused fingertips on his chin. Irrelevantly he wondered when Potter, who had been so oblivious to his Mudblood girl's yearning gazes and Weasley's all-consuming envy, had become so attuned to the distress of others.

Again, the room was silent but for Potter's steady breathing and Draco's hitched attempts at evening out his own respiration. Potter then began a series of disjointed pieces of dialogue; he appeared to be working out what he might say that would sound comforting without risking Draco's ire.

"Listen, you're--"

"Mal--err, sorry. I'm not supposed to call you that, right?"

Draco ignored him.

"I just think that--"

"I know you must be gutted..."

Fine, Draco thought, belittle and minimise my grief.

Potter's hand lingered on his chin, and it was growing uncomfortably warm. He shifted away, but Potter's fingers accompanied the line of his jaw as though they were attached by Spellotape. Finally he murmured, "Draco, you know you're not alone in this..."

In a flash of indignation, Draco slapped Potter's delusional attempts at commiseration aside. Scrambling to his feet, he aimed a livid glare at the man who was, even now, impugning his dignity. Potter was an ickle bee, buzzing happily back to the Muggle hive, with no conception of the stigma that was heaped upon those who lost their standing in the wizarding world. As if he could possibly understand!

"Potter, since you haven't noticed, I have always been alone." He found that his voice was warbling slightly and struggled to make his pronunciation emphatic. "Now, if you would leave me alone, we will get on brilliantly."

With that, he stomped toward the door and almost collided with the incoming nurse.

The plump woman who took his 'vital signs' was less than pleased with the state of his arms, but the resulting pillage of his room yielded nothing. When Draco was finally allowed to return to his room to change out of his pyjamas, Potter had already left for breakfast. Although the Laurel Centre had stationed a nurse in the doorway to supervise him, she was soon distracted by a Muggle lunatic who began to bang his head against the walls of the outside corridor.

Still only half-dressed, Draco wasted no time in extracting the nail-clippers from the back of Potter's picture frame. Cackling mentally at the incompetence of the nurses, who had done only a cursory search of the other man's belongings, he slipped into the shower and situated himself beneath the icy spray. Again he had the sensation of time and space distorting around him, as though he were being subjected to a variant of the Imperius. Rivulets of crimson trickled down his knee, and it seemed that some of the tension drained out of his clenched fists with each droplet of red that mingled with the clear water from the tap.

I'm making another potion, that's all, Draco told himself. This led to the realization that he ought to be collecting his blood for such a project. He drew back the shower curtain to retrieve his polystyrene cauldron, but the Muggles had already emptied the rubbish bin. Cursing his lack of forethought, he returned to the shower and decided to wash his hair. I suppose I'll have to do this again, then, he thought. At this rate, I'll run out of skin soon. How utterly revolting.

Mesmerised, he watched his blood as it swirled down the drain.

* * * * *

As Draco was occupied with the task of appeasing the Muggles, he had no trouble evading Potter for the rest of the morning.

The Muggle mental doctor, Swillington, once again looked upon him in reproof and bemoaned his lack of participation in the group therapy hours. For the morning session, he was given a choice between art and dance therapy. Filled with horror at the notion of learning Muggle footwork, Draco volunteered for art therapy. There he drew a plethora of meaningless squiggles with the red and black felt-tipped pens with which he had been provided. When he had finished, the instructor gave him a look of vapid adoration and pronounced the final product 'exquisite'. 'Oh, Damien, you express your pain so clearly through the jagged edges and swirling madness of your art!' she had moaned in an ecstasy of poor taste. Then she had the gall to insist that he present his glorious work to the doctor at their next meeting.

Lunch was a tired, stilted affair; he sat as far away from Potter as possible, next to the bulimic woman and one of her alcoholic chums. The man was in a stupor, munching slowly on a pile of carrot sticks that he had somehow dipped into his ketchup, and the woman seemed too astonished by Draco's presence to venture into conversation. She glanced at him from time to time, fleetingly, and then looked down at her plate as though humiliated by his gaze. With all of her missing teeth, it was a wonder that she could chew.

Though he had originally planned to skive off group therapy, he now found himself viewing the session as a welcome refuge from Potter. The man could not speak to him directly, after all, unless he wanted to bring Rain's merry wrath down upon them. He entered the room early, the dratted 'painting' from his art class tucked under one arm. Scanning the room, he saw that Potter had not yet arrived. As he turned toward a seat that was comfortably nestled between two Muggle patients, however, someone bumped into him. In his effort to avoid stumbling into the wall, the paper slipped from his grasp and tumbled to the ground. He turned with a vague sense of dread, and his suspicions were confirmed when he met Potter's flustered gaze.

"Oh! I'm sorry!" In a flurry of movement, Potter bent to pick up Draco's paper and the paperback volume that he had been carrying. During its fall, the drawing had slipped from its rubber band and now lay unfurled, the doodles and fractured lines clearly visible. Potter paused, running his hand along the blood-coloured squiggles until Draco felt his cheeks begin to flush.

"Clumsy oaf," he muttered under his breath.

But Potter wasn't paying attention; he was occupied with a detailed analysis of the drawing. "Look at that," he remarked, with a touch of mirth. "Isn't that my scar?" He pointed out a line that vaguely resembled a lightning bolt with one half-gnawed fingernail.

"It most certainly is not!" Draco huffed, stooping down to retrieve the paper. "You are not of enough importance to figure into my visionary artwork, Potter."

Unfortunately, once Potter had an idea in his head, he clung to it with Gryffindor tenacity. "It is," he said persistently. "See, and that's my hair. And look over there," he added, sweeping his hand across another nonsensical scribble. "That's you! I'd recognise that pointy chin anywhere."

Fuming, Draco tugged at the paper, but Potter continued on in his artistic vein. "Gee, isn't that a Bludger in your hand?"

"Shove off!" Draco hissed, finally wrenching the paper away from Potter. He balled it up into a crumpled sphere and tossed it across the room, where it landed in the rubbish bin.

Shrugging, Potter ambled toward the circle of chairs a few feet away. During their brief altercation, Draco's chosen seat had been taken, and he was once more obliged to take a seat beside Potter. As he sank into the worn armchair with a grunt of dismay, Potter offered him a bemused grin. Again Draco was struck by the gaping fissure between Potter's daytime persona and the vulnerabilities he unveiled at night.

"Well, at least you haven't lost your aim," Potter told him. Draco noticed that he carefully skirted around any use of his surname.

How, he sputtered internally, can he act as though nothing has happened?

He lost his chance at further verbal sparring when Rain called the therapy session to order, clapping her hands together with a loud thwack. Every noise she made had a cheerful twang to it; Draco imagined that she even sobbed gleefully.

"All right!" she chirped, once they had dutifully repeated the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions that they were expected to follow. Draco had skimmed over them on the first day of his imprisonment and dismissed them as idiotic Muggle tosh disguised by gratuitous jargon. Turning his will and his life over to a fictional being up in the sky? Honestly, he would rather debase himself in front of the Dark Lord again.

"As I mentioned the other day," Rain continued, "we will be discussing Step Eight today. I hope you've all made your lists and are ready to make amends! Just remember, the most important person on your list should be yourself! Now, Hugh, since you've already shared a wee bit with us, would you like to begin?"

Oh, bollocks, Draco thought, his rancour receding only to be replaced by incipient boredom. If he's going to list everyone that he imagines to have somehow injured, we'll be here for weeks!

Shifting his benign smile in Rain's direction, Potter began to speak.

* * * * *