Draco By Trial

Outside the dawn is breaking

But inside in the dark I'm aching to be free.

The show must go on

Queen - The Show Must Go On

As Draco Malfoy entered the courtroom, complete silence descended. His two wizard guards escorted him to the only chair at the front, the dementors had long ago been dismissed from ministry employment. So the ministry said anyway, Draco knew that they'd simply gone straight back to Voldemort as soon as they'd heard of his return. The chains attached to the arms and legs of the chair wound around him as soon as he sat, holding him captive. This was no more than he'd expected. There were no windows in this room and the dark atmosphere seemed to seep into everything. Draco would have been intimidated had he not been here before for his father's trial, and if he actually cared about what happened here today. Dim light filled the room, torchlight reflected on row after row of faces, all looking down at him. There was disgust and hatred in some of their eyes, fear in others, and some looked painfully betrayed. Some.

He really didn't care what any of them thought though. He was here for one purpose, and one purpose only: to tell the truth, or the truths that he was expected to tell. In some ways, he thought it would be relieving to finally be able to tell almost everything that had happened, every thought he'd had, but it didn't stop him also wanting to run away screaming. He found it comforting that soon he would be taken away to a cell in Azkaban to waste away in peace.

He felt nothing now, no more fear or hatred or love, only a wish to get this over with as soon as possible. He just wanted to be left alone now. He could make out the outline of a man standing far above him, and the voice of Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic, floated through the room.

"Draco Malfoy, you are accused of the murders of Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini, and of the attempted murder of Harry Potter. You are also accused of withholding information about possible Death Eater activities. How do you plead?"

Draco could almost taste the anticipation in the room and a ghost of his old smirk appeared on his face. He could sense a collective holding of breath and decided to put them out of their misery before they all turned blue from lack of oxygen. In a clear voice, which rang through the room, he said,

"Guilty."

*

Draco didn't bother to look for his mother, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. He knew she wouldn't be there. She'd sent him a letter explaining that she was far too embarrassed by the spectacle her son had made of himself to show her face in public. Always the consummate socialite, Draco thought grimly that she must be completely mortified. He could, however, see Weasley and Granger. He could even make out the pure hatred in Weasley's eyes. 'That's not going to be pretty later,' he thought glumly. The disappointment and betrayal he saw in Granger's eyes bothered him much more than Weasley's fury though. 'That's going to be even worse.'

Fudge was droning on as Draco's mind drifted, something about the purpose of this trial being to do with the wishes of the victims' friends. 'Bollocks to that! More like Fudge creating this media circus to reinstate his authority.' Draco tried hard to ignore the self-satisfied tone of Fudge's voice. All of this felt a bit much for him. His mind conjured up the image he had desperately been trying to banish for months: too-bright green eyes, pupils dilating in fear, a feeling of complete powerlessness, his arm rising....

"Mr Malfoy!"

Draco was jerked back to reality, momentarily confused because a wizard was standing in front of him, holding a vial of clear liquid.

"The veritaserum, Mr Malfoy," Fudge said sharply.

"Oh. Yes," Draco said faintly. He obediently opened his mouth to accept the potion. The initial taste was strongly metallic, but it faded to a sickly sweetness that coated the back of his tongue, making him thirsty. Draco resented being made to take this potion, but he supposed that, in the Ministry's eyes, it was necessary.

"Now, Mr Malfoy, I shall begin by asking you to reveal the nature of your relationship with Harry Potter, as this seems to be the catalyst for your crimes."

Draco faltered immediately; he'd expected some sort of build-up to this question. The potion in his veins forbid him from lying, but he didn't know the right way to answer the question.

"Harry and me, it's complicated. I don't really know how to answer that."

"You were enemies, weren't you?"

"I suppose you could say that, yes. This year though, not so much. Not at all."

"But still you tried to kill him? You used the Avada Kedavra curse on him?"

"Yes, yes I did." There was a gasp from the audience. Draco nearly snorted 'Well it's not as though you didn't already know!'

"So the...dislike between you diminished?" Fudge continued, ignoring the reactions of those around him, obviously determined to get his answers.

"In a way," said Draco, still unsure of the answers he was giving.

"You keep a diary, do you not Mr Malfoy?" Fudge asked, making, in Draco's opinion, a complete u-turn in his line of questioning.

"Er...yes. So what?" he asked, immediately on guard.

"Well, I have here a quote from your diary, if you would allow me to refresh your memory." 'Bastard!' Draco thought, as Fudge began to read aloud some of Draco's innermost thoughts; thoughts he never wanted anyone to know that he'd had.

*

There is an extraordinary intimacy found in hating someone; in focussing your entire being on making that one person who you have deemed important enough to completely hate, absolutely fucking miserable. But what do you do when that line gets blurred; when the intimacy takes over and pushes the hate aside like an inconsequential thing? Love and hate are not opposites. The antithesis of both hate and love, is apathy. But this also doesn't mean that hate and love is the same thing. There are similarities, like how much you obsess over the other person, or like how you sit on your own and think of clever things to say to them, and how you always want to impress them; but they are essentially different. So what happens when you get confused? What happens when you find yourself not wanting to hate anymore? What happens when your dreams about administering a crushing defeat, somehow change and morph so that you're crying with them, and it's not in pain, but in ecstasy?

There are so many extremes in life, and we are constantly looking for them; believing that we feel them. Love never turns to hate, hate does not turn to love. There is an in-between ground to these emotions; a place where most of us exist. We are not all Romeo and Juliet; God and the Devil. Dislike can turn to affection; an intense fondness can turn to loathing. The shades of grey that shroud us seem to distort our thinking. We are rarely passionate, inspired, overtaken by the sensation of emotions flooding through the veins. We are hormones and sexual impulses, the product of our social environment and genetics. We live for the mundane day-to-day life, abhorring upsets to the schedule.

But sometimes we have no choice. Sometimes a person enters our life and shifts everything off-centre, so that nothing feels right and you know that nothing will be the same again. That is when you know that you are more than just an intricate, organic machine. That is when you know you are more than just a collection of learned responses to stimuli in the environment. That is when you know that you have free choice, that there is something more than this, and that love and hate aren't opposites.

That is when you discover what magic really is.

When this happens, we take comfort from the coolness of living in the shadows. Too often we shy away from the intensity of these feelings. We lock ourselves away in small dark rooms where our impulses cannot go, and we hide in the dark because it's simply too much to bear.

*

In the silence that followed, Draco sat, stunned, feeling that hearing Fudge speak those words in his cold, monotonous voice was somehow a betrayal of the feeling behind them. He'd almost completely forgotten writing that, but the memories came flooding back now. How he'd felt when writing it, so afraid and confused; experiencing emotions he had never expected to feel. It was just the day before... He mentally shook himself, unwilling to think about those things again; about things which should never have happened. Everything was his fault, and he didn't need this trial to establish that.

Fudge was talking again.

"Now I shall ask you again Mr Malfoy, what was your relationship with Harry Potter?" This irritated Draco no end.

"As I've already said, it's complicated," he snapped.

"Mr Malfoy! If you persist in making these evasive answers we will give you the full dose of veritaserum which will erase you of any conscious thought and make this all go much quicker!" Fudge was getting angry, but this was nothing compared to what Draco was feeling.

"Look," he nearly shouted, "it's not my fault you're asking the wrong questions! If you'd just let me start from the beginning, I'll tell you everything and you can make up your own mind." Fudge was clearly disgruntled by Draco's disrespectful words, but was forced to concede.

"Fine, Mr Malfoy, we'll do this your way for the moment. When was the first time you saw Harry Potter this year?"

"On the Hogwarts Express, on September 1^st. I was sitting alone..."

As Draco spoke, the memories of the first day of his sixth year at Hogwarts played like a movie in his mind. How much simpler things had been then; how much easier.

*

Draco sighed heavily as he settled himself down into the last empty carriage on the Hogwarts Express. It was September 1^st and he couldn't think of anywhere less he'd rather be at that very moment in time, than on his way back to Hogwarts. It was the first day of his sixth year at school, and he was alone. Literally and figuratively. He had had to make his own way to King's Cross that morning; he'd had to do so many things on his own recently. After his father's imprisonment in Azkaban just before the end of his fifth year, his mother had completely withdrawn into herself. Draco presumed she missed her husband and longed for his return to Malfoy Manor. He hadn't really bothered to find out if this was the case because, personally, he hoped Lucius would rot there for the rest of his life. Due to his father's indiscretions, they had had to suffer the indignity of the Ministry of Magic searching their home for Dark Arts artefacts and for clues of Voldemort's whereabouts. Draco had been outraged, but there had been nothing he could do. They hadn't found anything, obviously, Lucius had always been so careful about that kind of thing.

Draco was doing his best to avoid his Slytherin housemates for as long as possible. Thanks to his father, his family's name had been dragged through the mud that summer and the last thing he needed to see were their gloating faces. All those pathetic sheep had been waiting for years for a Malfoy to trip up and make a mistake. His entire family put such importance on pride and not letting anyone see their weaknesses; kinks in their armour that those in their social circle had been just itching for the chance to pounce on for years. 'Fucking vultures' he thought bitterly. He did not fool himself into thinking that he would receive any sympathy from them on the loss of a parent.

He sighed again and looked out of the window. The train was just pulling away from the station, exposing the dreary September weather outside. It had gotten extremely cold very early that year. A signal of things to come, probably. If Draco was to be completely honest with himself, the real reason that he was dreading returning to school, was that he was bored there. His lessons were uninspiring, depressingly so, and the people there were even duller. There was Dumbledore and all of his stupid Gryffindors, not forgetting precious Harry Potter, the jewel in the crown of the wizarding world. Draco's face twisted into a bitter grimace at the thought of Potter and all those gullible, predictable, boring Gryffindors. But then, the Slytherins were just as bad. The only real difference was that they blindly followed someone other than Dumbledore and his band of do-gooders.

The door to his compartment opened, and Crabbe and Goyle lumbered in, grunting their greetings. Draco wondered fleetingly if they had even heard what had been going on over the summer, and about the drastic fall his social stock had taken. Then he remembered that it was extremely doubtful that the two could even read, so it would probably be slightly out of their depths to try and grasp the concept of Death Eater politics.

It really was too depressing for words.

*

Draco was desperately trying to break patterns this year; to do different things that would break the tedious monotony of life at Hogwarts. However, there was one ritual that he simply couldn't give up; he got far too much pleasure and satisfaction from it. It was because of this that, halfway through the train journey, Draco took a deep breath and, steeling himself, stood up and left his carriage. The corridor was blissfully Slytherin-free as he sauntered along, head held high as he glanced into each compartment.

When he reached the one he was looking for, he paused momentarily before making his entrance. Laughter spilled from the compartment, rolling over Draco like waves of some foreign liquid he had long forgotten about. For a moment, he thought back and realised he couldn't remember the last time he had laughed. Weasley and Granger were sitting together, both grinning idiotically. Draco quirked an eyebrow when he noted how close together they were sitting. 'Interesting.' His gaze then fell on Potter, who was sitting by the window, looking gloomily out at the miserable weather. He turned his head back to his two friends as they addressed him and grinned widely, running a hand through his hair and momentarily exposing the scar that seemed to define him. Draco noticed that Potter didn't seem to have changed much over the summer. He had the same stupid glasses, the same unruly hair, and that same gangly air that he never quite managed to lose until he got on a broomstick. 'Still the same. Nothing ever changes,' he thought glumly.

As he gazed in on the Trio, he was struck by the intimacy they shared. It wasn't just the burgeoning relationship between Weasley and Granger; there was a sense of safety and trust between all of them. As they sat and laughed, Draco almost didn't want to destroy the moment. He merely wanted to revel in something he would probably never have: Slytherin's haven't been known for their numerous friendships. Then, the Weasel's eyes fell on him and they flashed in anger and irritation, immediately losing their mirth. Having been spotted, Draco was now compelled to enter. He buried his doubts and slid the door to the compartment open, placing his patented 'Malfoy Smirk' on his face. It felt odd there, as though it wasn't quite right for this situation, but he shook off those thoughts and began the ritual, feeling the anger stir within him and letting it run free to the surface.

"Well look who's here." Draco drawled, managing to infuse just the right amount of sarcasm into his voice. "My three most favourite people in the world."

"What do you want Malfoy? Just sod off," Weasley snapped, a slight pink shade colouring his cheeks.

"Now, now, language Weasley. You'll offend my innocent ears," Draco chided, feigning indignation. Weasley snorted. "Besides, that's not very nice, I haven't even said anything yet!"

"Don't bother," Weasley muttered. Draco ignored him, instead a knowing smirk found his lips.

"So how was your summer Weasley? Did you get any from the Mudblood here, or did even she refuse to visit that shack you call a home?" Weasley was on his feet instantly, his fists balled at his sides. Draco sighed internally, even this was too easy.

"Take that back you disgusting-"

"Ron!" Potter had risen and placed a placating hand on his friend's shoulder. "Ron, sit down. You know he's only doing it to get at you." He turned to look at Draco, his look appraising. "What do you really want Malfoy? Why are you here?" Draco bristled, intense loathing pumping through his veins.

"How's the conscience Potter?" he sneered, landing on the most obvious thing he could think of to taunt Potter with. "All those deaths must weigh on you. How many more father figures and friends do you think are going to die because of your carelessness? How was your summer?" However, Potter didn't get angry; didn't pull out his wand or raise his fists. He smiled. Weasley was practically growling in the corner but both Potter and Draco ignored him. Potter continued to smile, and Draco grew more and more infuriated.

"What?" he finally snapped irritably.

"I was just thinking that my summer probably wasn't as bad as yours was Malfoy," Potter said. "After all, I'm used to not having a father around. How're you finding it?" Draco glared angrily at Potter. He would not give that bastard the satisfaction of seeing how hard it had really been. He simply wouldn't, especially when what had happened to his father had been Potter's fault.

"It's strangely refreshing actually," he snapped before turning on his heel and leaving, feeling that Potter had still gotten one over him.