Unforgiven

Unforgiven

Draco Malfoy sat bolt upright in bed, shaking. The sheets around him were damp with sweat, and he could feel the after effects of an adrenaline rush still coursing through him, causing his heart to beat wildly, and his muscles to tremble uncontrollably. His rapid breathing sounded harsh against the near-silent air of the dark dormitory, and he was suddenly, violently glad, that the bed hangings would hide him from view anyway. He couldn't have borne it if any of his peers had seen him at that moment.

Trying desperately to calm himself and regain his usual composure, Draco lay back against the moist sheets, now uncomfortably chilled and clammy, and listened to the blood in his temple pounding its song through his veins. It was the third time only that week that he had had the Dream, and it was beginning to take its toll on him. He felt emotionally drained, as though he had lost someone close to him, someone who he had loved and lived with, but who had been torn from him, and could never come back. But Draco knew that such a thing had never happened to him, and he when he woke he could never remember what he had dreamt.

He kneaded his eyes with the heels of his hands. That was what distressed him most, really, the way he couldn't remember anything. It had to be a fairly horrific dream, he knew, because of the effect it seemed to have on him. He had stopped paying attention in class, had stopped talking with his friends, he had even stopped taunting Gryffindors. He just sat in the corners of rooms, staring into space, trying desperately to recapture the Dream, but always to no avail. Recently, he had started to go off food.

Sighing, Draco pulled back the hangings of his four-poster bed, and crossed the low room to the back wall. There was no window in this room, as it was in fact an old dungeon, just one of many in the network that lay beneath Hogwarts. However, there was a painting of one, which looked out across a fantasy landscape that seemed to be comprised solely of rolling hills. At that moment the sky in it was velvet black, and Draco supposed it was still extremely early in the morning. It didn't surprise him. He seemed to be quite the early riser nowadays.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead with one pale forearm, Draco reached out with the other hand and lifted the pewter water jug from the floor. Ignoring the goblet beside his foot, he drank straight from the jug, water pouring down his chin in two silver rivers. He drained the entire jug before dropping it to the cold, thinly-rugged floor, and crawling back to his bed.

Once there, Draco drew the hangings back around him, and curled up under the blanket once more. He was exhausted, but reluctant to sleep; he knew what he could expect if he did. Unhappily, he tried to remember when the Dream had begun.

The first one had come the night before he returned to Hogwarts, at the end of the Christmas holidays. This Christmas hadn't been too bad, really; there had been no distant aunts, uncles or cousins coming to stay, which had been surprising. Draco normally dreaded Christmas in the Malfoy Manor, because of all the strange, cold relatives he had to entertain, who inevitably looked down their noses at him every time he entered a room. But this year had been much more enjoyable.

And yet it had been far more boring, mainly because Draco hadn't known what to do with himself. In the absence of any entertaining duties, he hadn't had anything to do; within the first two days back he had done his homework, cleaned his room out from top to bottom, terrified the house-elves, and then - that was it. He had been alone in the huge Manor, with no one but his parents to talk to, and that idea was laughable.

And therefore alone.

So he had taken to wandering the Manor by himself. Although Draco had now lived there for sixteen years, he only knew about a quarter of it due to its size; the rest of it was a veritable labyrinth of dusty stone passageways and dark, uninhabited rooms, and he set out to explore them, each day going a little further. He often wondered at the size of the place, but he knew the reason for it. In centuries past, the entire Malfoy clan would have lived there, and each room would have been filled with light, and voices. But now it lay dark, just a crypt of memories of a time long gone. But to Draco's mind it was an enigma just waiting for him to solve it.

Then with three days to go, he had found the Paper Room.

It was fascinating. Draco didn't know what decorations the room had, because he couldn't see the walls or floor, or even a window. Towering stacks of paper filled the room, floor to ceiling; loose papers, papers roughly bound to form books, official-looking documents, papers casually scribbled on, rolls of parchment, flat parchment, new papers still clearly legible, old yellow papers, so old, in fact, the ink had all but faded and the corners had worn away. And all had a story to tell. Sometimes it was boring; a family tree, or part of the history of the Manor, or a Gringotts bank statement. But others more than satisfied Draco's interest, and especially the Diaries.

It seemed to Draco that every family member ever born had a diary here. He recognised the people that some of them belonged to, which was most of the newer ones, and he spent all day reading them. His family had lead quite interesting lives, it seemed. He wouldn't have thought it of them.

The older ones were from people he had only heard about, or seen mentioned in one of the extensive family trees. They were falling apart, mostly, with much of the writing obscured by age, and one or two disintegrated as he touched them. Draco would have loved to have used a Renovation Charm on them, but he knew that that just wasn't possible; his only attempt at a Renovation Charm, just before the holidays, had resulted in the parchment in question returning to goat's skin on the table. Besides which, he was underage and outside of school. Although really, that wasn't a consideration.

And then, on his last day, he found the most intriguing of them all. It wasn't so much a diary as a single entry, and judging by what Draco could see of the handwriting, it had been hurriedly written, as though the Author had something on his mind, but not much time to write it down. It was one of the oldest papers there, and he could only make out the occasional phrase:

...n't have...nsience, I am a Malf.........ut the guil......ane...

...ad to......illed me othe......I h...kille...er...

Over all, Draco got the impression that the author had been struggling with something he had done. Weakness, Draco thought. He was just putting it down in disgust when a phrase at the bottom of the page caught his eye:

...Helen, my Helen I am so sorry, an...ac...too...

It meant nothing to Draco. And yet, for no reason he could fathom, he carefully pressed the entry between two sheets of newspaper from a back issue of the Daily Prophet, and took it back to his room.

That night, the Dream began.

Now, in the darkness of his dormitory, Draco turned to his trunk, and carefully removed the newspaper envelope from beneath his robes. Checking to make sure the bed-hangings were tightly drawn, he pulled out his wand, whispered "Lumos," and gently removed the decaying parchment from within the newspaper.

Not for the first time, he stared at it frustratedly. Who was Helen? What was her significance? So far, Draco had deduced that the Author, who was a Malfoy had probably killed her; and this had caused the Author some kind of extreme guilt trip, but beyond that he knew nothing. Why had Helen been killed? And why such a strong reaction from a Malfoy, for God's sake? Draco found it hard to imagine his father behaving like that, and his father was the best Malfoy he knew.

But that wasn't what really bothered Draco. He supposed that everyone had a weak spot, everybody was vulnerable in some way, and although it was difficult to do, he supposed that even a Malfoy was only human. Although a better breed, obviously. But despite his disgust, it was the first question that really bothered Draco.

Because he could feel the nagging certainty, growing inside him day by day, that he had once known Helen.

And the even worse certainty that he knew her killer.