Need [ dramione ]

Prologue

6 September 1998 - Full Moon

Stepping off of the train, Draco looks around, expecting someone to meet him, to escort him up to Hogwarts. Instead, the platform is eerily empty, save for a single lamppost that is lit. There is no boat waiting to take him across the lake to the school. There is no carriage waiting to take him up the road through Hogsmeade.

Instead, it is oddly silent, the only sound coming from the cold night wind gusting through the trees.

He waits, for what he does not know, perhaps a burst of inspiration, or for someone, anyone. He can't Apparate closer to the school, since he doesn't have an Apparition license, and he can't fly, having not been given one in the trunk that the ministry kindly packed for him. The only option left to him is to walk.

And so, ten minutes after the train had arrived at the station, he begins to do just that.

His trunk, he levitates, with everything still packed safely inside. Everything he owns, for as long as the Ministry is searching Malfoy Manor and his numerous vaults, is in this trunk.

He tries not to think about that as he begins the dark walk, but it's impossible not to. That's all he has done, for over four months. Think. Think while sitting in absolute solitude.

And then, the Wizengamot had pulled him from his cell and acquitted him. That had been two days earlier, and now, as Draco walks, he can finally think it through.

Acquitted. It doesn't mean he's innocent. Innocent implied they recognized that he had done nothing wrong... and Draco has to agree with them. He had made a thousand mistakes along the way, and yet - was there ever another choice? Was there ever another path for him?

But guilty... was Draco guilty of being a Death Eater? He had feared them, hidden from them, been marked as one of them, yes, but he had also been tortured by them. Death Eaters killed and attacked and tortured and destroyed, and what had Draco done?

You're the reason Dumbledore is dead , he reminds himself.

And that is enough for him. Because of his direct actions, a wizard had died. He may have not been the one to cast the spell, but he was the one that brought them all there.

Acquitted. Neither innocent nor guilty. There was simply no way to prove either way.

I could have shown them the truth , he thinks, remembering the threats, the promises really, of what would happen to his mother if he had failed.

But they didn't ask for evidence. There wasn't even a trial. Draco was simply dragged from his cell and placed before the court to hear his sentencing. Acquittal. Probation. A tracker.

After going through what felt like a whirlwind of emotion, from anger and rage to sadness to begging to depression to acceptance of his lack of a future... to hear that he would be allowed his freedom...

Except, it comes at a cost. A cost he is now paying, as he walks alone in the darkness, towards Hogwarts. A cost that, now as he stands, looking towards the castle, illuminated in the distance by the glow of the full moon, feels far too high.

A year at Hogwarts, to complete his final studies. Two years of a Mastery. Two years at the Ministry. And then, he would be a free Wizard.

But at what cost?

Because, within Hogwarts, he knows he's not safe. Hogwarts is where students had been tortured and attacked by Death Eaters. Where classmates had been killed. Where Crabbe... Where the war and all of the loss and death finally ended.