Chapter Text
It's a rough summer.
Draco's parents alternate between giving him the cold shoulder and pleading with him to get resorted. His mother laments their decision to send him to Hogwarts instead of Durmstrang, and his father lectures him on family and duty.
"I'm doing this FOR the family!" he tries to explain, but they won't hear it.
He gets letters from everyone but Harry, and it worries him. The other boy had been so eager for communication last summer, and he worried that something was wrong. Ron, Hermione and Neville haven't heard from him either.
There's also Sirius Black.
"Why don't we go visit Aunt Bella?" he suggests, during an argument. His parents are taken aback.
"What?"
"Well since the old ways are so great and my elders know so much better, I want to hear it from her! How glad she is to have followed in her family's footsteps." he hisses. "Surely you're SO proud of her and what she's made of herself?"
"My sister is NOT the same as us!" his mother retorts, then fumbles to explain away Bellatrix's failures. "She... got lost in her passion. Lost all sense of discretion and... proportion."
"No, come on, let's visit her." he insists. "No regrets right?"
His passive-aggressive strategy is pretty clumsy and doesn't work, but it was all he could think of.
Eventually though, he gets lucky. His parents are invited to a gathering and leave him behind as a gesture of disappointment, and he takes advantage of the situation. They'd never suspect that he knows how to visit Azkaban.
He grabs a wand from the old spares in the library so he doesn't have to use his own with the Trace on it. As he picks through the options, he remembers the time-turner experiment that had started everything.
Better safe than sorry, he thinks, and hides it in his room. Who knew what would happen if someone else got their hands on it?
Draco makes sure that the house elves aren't watching, and grabs a pinch of the Floo powder in their receiving room.
He knew what to do from memories of future visits to his parents, but he's not sure what reception he'll have as a child. Oh well...
Draco throws it in and steps forward, saying "Azkaban!"
Draco steps forward and spells the ash out of his robes with a flick of his borrowed wand.
He's emerged in a small reception outside of Azkaban proper. The atmosphere is already oppressive, with a chill in the air that couldn't be warded against with thick cloaks or the warming spell Draco casts.
Occlumency helped a little with the presence of Dementors, with how it shielded the user's mind. While he couldn't avoid their emotional impact entirely, he could hold back bad memories and dig up buried good ones much more easily than someone unshielded could. It should really be taught at Hogwarts, he thinks.
A Dementor enters the room. It pauses at the threshold, then gestures to the sign-in book. It doesn't seem to know or care that I'm a child, he thinks with relief.
He approaches the guest log book, and picks up the quill, one enchanted to force the writer to reveal their identity. Draco Malfoy, he writes in the guest column, and Sirius Black as the visitee. The ink shimmers and then settles on the page, accepting him as a visitor.
I suppose no-one thought that putting an age block would be necessary. Or... do I register as an adult with my borrowed magic from my older self? He makes a note to himself to find out.
Either way, the Dementor beckons and escorts him up to the fortress.
He's made to surrender his wand at the entrance, then climbs the stairs and walks past many cells. Most of the prisoners are too depressed to even look at who was passing through, but the ones that do stare at him so intensely that his skin crawls. This hadn't happened in his borrowed memories.
"A child. I haven't seen a child in ..." one mutters, and he realizes that that's probably what is garnering him so much attention. It eases his paranoia a little.
The Dementor finally stops and waves him towards a cell, then leaves to wait at the stairwell. Draco approaches and finds a filthy bearded man slumped against a wall.
"... hello, Mr Black." he greets.
The man peeks up through his greasy hair, eyes wide and confused, but says nothing.
"... I'm Draco Malfoy. Your cousin, once-removed." he continues, undaunted. "My parents are Narcissa Black and Lucius Malfoy."
He thinks there's a little recognition in the man's eyes, and suspicion as well.
Draco smiles a little. "I'm sure you're wondering why I'm here."
Standing over the man doesn't seem conductive to a friendly conversation, so he sits on the floor as well and leans a little against the cell bars. "Well, I just started Hogwarts last year. I got sorted into Gryffindor."
There's a pained wheezing sound from Black, and Draco is alarmed until he realizes it's a laugh. More cynical than amused, but it was at least a reaction.
"Yeah." he agrees. "I'm sure you can imagine the reaction my parents had. And I'm trying to fit in and make the best of it. But that lead me to you, eventually, since you were an unexpected Gryffindor from a pureblood family too. I wondered where it all went wrong, why you changed your mind. But... I couldn't figure it out. It doesn't really make sense, what they say you did."
There's a steady silence, then...
"You want advice?" Black asks, his voice raspy and disused.
"I'll take some."
"Forget Gryffindor. Finish school. Go to France. America. Somewhere neutral. Start over." he gets out, bit by bit, his voice growing a little stronger as he practices.
"... why?"
"Because it doesn't matter. Who you are. What you do. What you sacrifice. Don't kid yourself. They'll never forget who your parents were. The second a finger points at you, it's like it all never happened."
Draco turns to fully face Black, grasping the bars of the cell. "So you didn't do it."
Black does his wheezing, painful laugh again.
"So if it wasn't you that betrayed the Potters - " Draco reasons. "- then it must have been Peter Pettigrew. That's why you killed him?" If so, accidentally blowing up a street full of Muggles as collateral damage in your rage certainly explained why he was in Azkaban, even if the coverup of Pettigrew's betrayal was still odd.
"I didn't."
"Didn't?"
"Kill him."
"... he's still alive??" Draco asks, horrified. "He faked his death?"
"Yep. Rat animagus. Unregistered. Sacrificed a finger."
That all added up, but... "How did this not come out in your trial? They said you confessed."
"What trial?" laughed Black.
"You... you didn't get a trial... "
It was insane, outrageous. Even the worst cases of ministry overreach during and after the war, everyone had received a trial, even if it was a group trial. No-one would stand for less.
For Black to just disappear into the system like that... there had to have been not one person on his side.
For a moment, Draco's resolve wavers.
His aunt Bellatrix is somewhere in these cells, in the exact same state as Sirius. Despite their radically different paths and values and actions, and the different people they surrounded themselves with. Like Sirius said, everything he'd ever done hadn't mattered one bit, in the end.
It's hopeless... hopeless... he despairs, slumping against the bars.
Wait a minute... no. Fucking Dementors, he curses to himself. It's probably not hopeless. He couldn't fully trust his emotions right now.
Can it be fixed?
... it hadn't been Draco's fate in the first timeline, had it? Because of Harry Potter. Harry came to his trial, testified on his behalf, even though he didn't earn Harry's trust in that timeline. Then he won't abandon me this time, either.
"The Potters must have trusted you, though. If they wanted to make you secret keeper." he points out.
"James... Lily." Black sighs. "I should have just done it. Why didn't I just do it?"
"I'm saying, they wouldn't have abandoned you." he insists, trying to keep Black from slipping into his own despair. "Listen, I'm going to try and get you that trial, get you out of here."
"What's the point? There's nothing left out there for me. No one and nothing."
"What about Harry? Harry Potter?" Draco asks. "You're his godfather, right?"
"He's better off without me." he says dismissively.
"I don't know about that. He really seems to hate his aunt and uncle."
Black's brow furrows for a moment. "Lily's sister? Uh, something with a P... a flower too... Pansy? Petunia!" His eyes widen. "He's with Petunia?"
"Yeah. And her nasty husband." Draco nods encouragingly.
"Why isn't he with the Longbottoms? Alice was his godmother!"
"Oh. You don't know?" Well, it did happen after Sirius's arrest. "They were... interrogated by Death Eaters after You-Know-Who died. They've never recovered, can't look after their own son let alone Harry too."
"Shit." Sirius looks grieved. "And I lumped them in with all the others that left me here to rot. I... wait... was I wrong? I - " he grips his hair in frustration.
"You're not going to figure it out here, around the Dementors." Draco reminds him. "They'll just work you back into despair sooner or later."
"... you're right." the man relaxes a little. "You just do what you think makes sense, once you're out of here."
"I will." Draco promises. "I don't know if I can visit again, or if so when, But I'll be out there, working on it."
Draco returns to the stairwell and allows the Dementor to escort him to retrieve his wand and then back to the Floo. "Malfoy Manor!" he announces, and steps back into his home.
His parents are fortunately not there, but his father's house elf hurries into the room as he arrives.
"Master Draco? Where'd you go?!" Zeeky asks, distraught. "I was thinking you're in your room."
"I went to visit a family member." he tells her, then shivers a little as the summer warmth finally starts to sink back in. "Zeeky, can you make me some hot chocolate?"
Zeeky pops away to the kitchen, and soon Draco is sitting a nice hot cup of chocolate to ease the effects of being near so many Dementors. He wishes he could have given Sirius some chocolate, but nothing could be brought in for the prisoners.
Speaking of which - he needed to get that man exonerated. Not only did he himself in Sirius, but he needed the Light to be better than this if he was going to join them. If he was okay with that kind of treatment he'd have stayed with Voldemort.
His aunt Andromeda could be an ally in this, with the mutual family interest. There was also Lupin, supposedly close to Sirius back then, though that made it worse that he'd believed the lies. His parents were a future obstacle if anything.
And Harry. The boy would care for Sirius but he'd need to be exonerated first, and besides, Harry was also just a kid.
A kid who hadn't been answering his letters. He's going to have to check on him. After today, Draco's learned the value of loyalty.