Chasing April

Freedom. I was spared and now I have it. Freedom from the dementors and the pain. freedom from memories so deeply buried I had not known they were there. Freedom from crazy women singing muggle songs and freedom from the monotonous and unceasing passing of days without a trace. Freedom from all of that and yet I have become another kind of slave.

I do not know how it happened. I was just turned out. No explanations or apologies. Nothing. Not a word. But I never questioned my fortunes. I had escaped the dementor's kiss which I had begun to think was inevitable. Cast out like they hadn't stolen the past six years of my life. Like it was all just nothing to them. Like it was nothing to any of the damned so-called heroes. Self proclaimed keepers of their twisted idea of peace. But then again, to them I suppose it was nothing.

So I ran into the night without a back thinking question or a second thought. I never looked back for what was there to see? I didn't ever want to look back and see the past six years of my wasted life. The past I'd left behind? No. That lay ahead of me. I wanted to pick my life up right where I'd left off. But could I? I had been with HER at the time of my arrest. Would she still have my daughter? Part of me prayed that she would and the other part of my soul dreaded it being true. She was a whore in every sense of the word and I didn't want my child growing up like that.

Felicity was the only one who ever listened to me. Not that she really cared. I didn't care either. She was nothing more than a two dollar whore to me but she still listened. I paid her and she did just about anything I wanted. She even cultivated my seed inside her to give me the single shining light in my life in the form of a tiny daughter. But she still meant less than nothing to me... And yet I went to her funeral. Perhaps because I saw my year with her as the only time in my life up till now that I didn't regret or hate myself for living.

I told myself I wouldn't think about her but then again I also said I wouldn't go. Funny how we lie to ourselves like that. I don't even know how I knew she was dead or where and when her funeral was. My muggle inclined acquaintances would tell me it was love and those who are magically inclined in my life would say it was a second sight. (Note that none of the implied above are referred to as friends.) But Magic or love or loyalty or whatever, I went.

The world seemed to slow and was concentrated on that cold clear spot in Whitechapel cemetery. It was as if the world had stopped for this single spot on the face of the earth. This blemish of men who had fed so many lies to their spouses over the frail form shut up inside the coffin.

She inspired many lies and just as many poems regaling her charms. What she lacked in looks she made up in other ways that are not suitable to be printed from impressionable eyes. But be it... whatever it was, she drew us all her to her graveside that sunlit cold February morning. We regarded each other with veiled hints that if we had known each other when she was alive we would have hurt one another. But for now we tolerated each other's presence as a tribute to another whore lost to some sexually transmitted illness that one or more of those of us standing about now carried inside themselves. Myself excluded from those who did. The first on a very short list of blessings.

Some one got up to speak. I don't know who he was but there he stood with his back strait as a book binding and his face long with age, illness, and grief. "I was told once that when we die, we are not truly gone so long as we have people left behind to cry for us in our passing. If we are blessed with such a tribute from our loved ones then our sprits will never truly die out. Looking around me today I see that the sprit of Felicity Aleene Bohalian will go on for all time. Every tear we shed for her will add another year to that time and so we bury her not with earth and flowers which can be done by any uncaring soul, but with tears.

"She was a loving person who spread her wealth and hospitality with any lonely soul she came across. We were all there. On the brink of suicide or some other form of depression and she was the one who brought us each back to ourselves as we were meant to be but might never have been before. She told me once that she had been there once before and some one had taken her in. Given her what she wanted and then set her out in the world. 'Not,' she told me, 'to face the rest of humanity alone but to fly and help others.' And so as we commend her to the earth and bid her farewell for the last time, may we go forth and spread her message of hope and cheer to those we touch. And may we each, as we step finally from her gentle hands at the end of the road, may we be able to fly." There was not a dry eye in the area.

I had not known that about her and I saw the men around me with different eyes. We all did. We saw each other with more respect and on some level, more hatred for being some akin to our own sheltered selves. But none of us spoke to each other and as her casket was lowered and men began to drift away slowly, I stood there with the image of her pressed in my mind. On that last day of the month I said goodbye to February the bringer of April.

I found out later that as benevolent as she was, she had given my child up for adoption. She had decided that she could not provide for the child as well as keep up her activities of love, healing, and sex. All she knew and all I was able to wrangle out of my informant was that the child had been adopted by a loving family somewhere to the west. But to the west of me was the whole bloody world and I had no way of knowing when the west once more became the east.

And so I left my comfortable little room that I had rented with the money one of my anonymous captors/liberators had slipped into my pockets and set out. I assumed that but 'out west' she ment some place in the states and so I boarded the cheapest flight I could out there. I landed in a town call Providence RoadIsland where I saw an ad for a beach house in a tiny town called Narragansett.

And so I found myself living in a small but comfortable two story white house on Kingston. I got a job at a local shop selling jewelry made out of shells the shop's owner found at the beach a few steps away. From the window in the back office you could see the summer beach goers swarming the water and sand for a space to get a tan and show off.

I awoke early each morning and went for a walk on the beach. I liked it this early. Four or five O'clock. No one was ever there and I could sort through my thoughts with the ease only solitude can bring. At seven I would walk back to the house and shower then go to work. I think that the reason we so many customers was due in part to my accent. Many of the teenage girls would come in and giggle after every sentence I spoke. They'd lean on the glass counter tops peering at necklaces that we both knew they'd never buy asking to see this item or weather that bracelet would be a good gift for a friend. And with no trace of my former Slytherin malice I would answer them with whatever they wanted to hear.

I spent my evenings on the computer searching for any reference to my missing April. I learned little except that the child was living somewhere along this coast. I found my self searching the beach patrons for the sight of a child the right age and coloring. Though many came none had the crystal clear blue eyes I was searching for. And I spent two years searching with no trace of her.

It was April again and the child's eleventh birthday loomed ahead of me. Another one that I would miss but some how this one weighed just that more heavily upon me. She would receiver her letter of acceptance into Hogwarts soon. I hoped. If not would she go to an American wizardry school? It might be better that way. She would be able to grow up without my name hanging over her like a stone ready to fall and crush her.

I had made many friends in the sleepy little town and my search from April ebbed off until my searches were perhaps once or twice a week. I search school web pages every Saturday and the first time I missed this by first over sleeping and then going out to have a beer with a few friends of mine, I stayed up most of that night crying but still went surfing on Sunday. Surfing being one of my newer hobbies. But now it was April again and there was still no trace of the child.

I wanted so badly to send an owl to some one at Hogwarts but the fear that I was a wanted man in that part of the world stopped me. Fear kept me from owling wizardry schools in my current country as well. For what would I do if I did find her? I was angry with my self for getting over her but could do nothing about it.

That morning I sat on the shore watching the waves as they rolled the rocks from my feet to the great vast ocean before me. Every wave took something from each stone making it smoother and smaller. Taking bits of it and making it anonymous bit of sand. what few shells washed up were no where near as pretty as the smooth stones and I found my mind concentrating on everything but my daughter. It had come to the point where I was to afraid even to think about her. She old enough now to have formed an opinion of her distant father and I was afraid of whatever that opinion might be.

What if she hated me? What if, because I was so far removed from her life, she hated that fact that I had deserted her? That was how I would have felt.

Another wave rolls in and the icy water reaches for my toes but stops just short. Did you know that there are thousands more waves coming towards the shore than we really see? They start out small. Way out in the ocean but as they creep nearer to the shore the larger ones start gaining speed and soon take over the smaller ones. Engulfing them and building up more and more of these tiny waves until it all becomes to much and they all lose any semblance of power and crash into the rocks or the shore. Kind of like people.

We are so small, each of us. But soon we get swept up by who we associate ourselves with and lose what little identity we might have once had. We each fight our peers and so-called friends for power over our little groups and then it all becomes to much. We bust apart send the shards of our companionship into the wind.

Blaise received the Dementor's Kiss. Crabbe was killed by Voldemort for disobeying orders. Goyle had gone good and married some little muggle and was working for rightness and truth. And me? I step back mentally for a moment and look at myself.

I live in a run down house with warped wooden paneling and spend my days flirting with teenagers and my nights getting drunk with a bunch of men that, had they been sorted by the Hogwarts sorting hat, would have each been in Gryffindor or Hufflepuff. I had not had a relationship with any woman in eight years and I had little money and no direction for my life to take.

For all I knew my daughter hated me and I was too afraid to take any realy steps to finding her. The truth was that I was not getting over it but I was getting too close to finding her and that scared me more than anything. It left me afraid that I would find her and not know what to do with the information.

Would I go to her? Could I face her? She was the past I thought I had left behind. Would she accept me? She was like Harry Potter. The whole of the wizarding world knew the Malfoy name and she was starting a new school and the pressures of the name I'd given her would be too much to take.

But was it also wrong of me to stay away? I didn't know if she was being beaten or mistreated by her new family. Hell, I had no proof that she was even still alive. But all these tiny fears had amassed into one great wave of fear and worry and threatened to crash down around my ears if I allowed my mind to linger on the possibilities.

I was so afraid that If that wave did break over me that I would go and find her and be terribly hurt or disappointed by the child I'd find. And I didn't want to be my father. I didn't want to be disappointed by my child. I wanted her to be perfect and my fear that I would become my own father and that was the single fear that kept all the other fears in check.

And then I cried. Draco Malfoy, Hogwarts bully and former inmate of Azakban fortress, a grown man, sat there on the shores of the Atlantic ocean and cried. The tips of the wave were turning white with the threat of breaking against the shore and forcing all of those fears laid bare by the surf.

I had wanted so badly to be a father. I would do everything right. I would be proud of her. I would support her decisions. I wouldn't be disappointed when she acted her rightful age. I wouldn't hit her. I would be my father.

And as the tears fell faster and faster I realized something. That my fears of becoming my father were slowly turning me into my father but with out the same moral hang up. I knew that if I had raised the child then I would have been that man I'd hated all my life. And I would have hated myself for it.

As I cried, the worlds spoken at Felicity's funeral swept over me. "When we die, we are not truly gone so long as we have people left behind to cry for us in our passing." I realized that I was all alone. My fears had driven me so far from the self centered buy I had once been. They had driven me away from those would have possibly wept by my graveside. I was so alone on this empty beach on some content I'd lived on for two years but hardly knew outside this town.

And now, who would I leave behind? Would any of my surfing friends care if I didn't surface after going under a wave? Would they cry for me? Would any one?

I am the dragon of Slytherin. I am cold and alone. Will any soul left walking this earth shed a tear for the dragon? Or must I search on for the every elusive April who haunts my dreams. I wept for her mother but will she weep for me? Is a dragon in need of the tears of others? Yes. This one is. And alone I will fly from the hands of February into the face of unpredictable April with all of my fears. I would beg her for tears but expect nothing. For who could truly cry in the wake of a dragon's passing?