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Cuba, 2011
Two hours later, bathed (of course there'd been a shower, and a bath, and he'd taken advantage of both), clothed and fed, Draco leaned back in his chair and looked at Harry. He wasn't the only one who looked older than his years, he realised.
"Were you ever going to come back?"
"Hm?" Harry looked up from contemplating his Calvados. "Come back?"
He rolled his eyes. "Honestly, could you just pay attention to me for a few bloody minutes?"
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry." Harry set his glass down and made a big production of placing his elbows on the table, chin resting on entwined hands. "There, you have my undivided attention now. Better?"
He rolled his eyes. "As I was saying. When you left, did you actually believe it was just going to be a vacation? Did you really intend to come back?"
Harry considered the question. "I did. Still do, I guess." He leaned back in his chair, taking the glass again.
"Thirteen years is a damn long time for a vacation, Harry."
"Mm-hm," Harry hummed non-comittedly around a convenient mouthful of liquid.
"Prat."
Harry looked at him quizzically. "What? I didn't do anything."
"Exactly. You disappear for more than a bloody decade and you don't even have the decency to ask me what's been going on back home."
"Would you believe me if I said I simply didn't know where to start asking?"
Bluntly, "No."
"Damn." A pause. "All right, then, here's a question. Why did you join our side?"
Bastard.
Azkaban, 1999
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Ron, fretting, and if you'd have told either of them three years before that Ron Weasley was going to stand outside Azkaban worrying about Draco Malfoy going in to visit his parents, both of them would have agreed wholeheartedly that you were crazy.
"I'm quite sure I don't want to do this, actually. But he is my father, and if I don't go now, I never will."
"All right. Just ... be careful. I'll wait for you out here."
There were no Dementors in this part of Azkaban, and the cells didn't have walls, just bars, so the guards could monitor the prisoners and abort any suicide attempts. No Death Eater was going to escape their just desserts.
"Traitor!" The word echoed off the walls like a whiplash, and he clenched his jaw. It took him a few seconds to identify the voice, even though he'd heard it countless times in the common room and on the Quidditch field. Flint.
"Traitor!" Higgs, just that little bit more vicious than Flint, because of course Flint hadn't been thrown off the house team because Draco's father had the money to buy seven state-of-the-art brooms.
"Traitor!" Bole, who'd broken Draco's arm once, calmly and deliberately, for no other reason than that Draco'd missed the snitch, again.
"Traitor!" Crabbe Senior, who blamed him for the death of his son, even though Vince had died at the hands of an Auror, and Draco hadn't even heard of it until two weeks after the facts.
His father said nothing, just stood, looking him in the eyes. "Draco."
"Father. You wanted to talk to me?"
"I did. I would ask you to sit down, but ..."
Part of him felt as if he were twelve again. Just a boy, believing every word his father said, infinite trust, unshakeable faith that Lucius Malfoy was, or soon would be, the most powerful man in the world.
"You're still calling yourself Malfoy, I hear?"
"It is my name."
"It was your name. I raised you to be worthy of it. Why, Draco? You could have been the most powerful Death Eater--"
"And I still would have had to kneel and grovel before Lord Voldemort. I wasn't raised to kneel."
"And yet you kneel for that Potter boy."
"He never demanded I kneel for him, father."
There was no answer.
Full version up till now can be found here.
And now, a poll! I'm starting to detest the working title of this story. Help?
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