𝒜𝒻𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓂𝒶𝓉𝒽 | 𝒟.𝑀.

27 | ﴾ Made A Fool ﴿

Draco returned to his room feeling defeated that Friday evening after overhearing about Madeleine and Theodore secretly meeting up in the Ministry. He decided that he in fact could not bare to see her that evening purely so he would not end up shouting hatefully at her.

Instead, he would process the information for the evening and then make inquiries over the weekend to the other Slytherin boys, in the off chance that they had seen Nott recently and knew anything of the matter.

The energy in the Manor was off-putting and eerie. They both seemed to be suddenly hiding in their rooms despite having had no communication to change their plans.

After slamming several drawers while getting ready for bed, he decided he couldn't sleep and approached the spread of parchments covered in runes on his wall. He clicked the watch on and analyzed the final remaining markings with inquisition, pointing his wand at it to stimulate the analytic coding before him.

The watch face obediently provided the stream of complex numerics. He worked, sitting on the floor cross legged until he'd finally written the last few lines down by four in the morning.

It was done. The coding had been written, now he just needed to decipher the thousands of pages of written characters into a chain of usable words.

He spent an additional few hours rearranging the sheets appropriately, drinking by himself with his cat like an alcoholic. When the sun was beginning to rise he was sure he had the answer. His eyes were red and dry and his vision blotchy, as he typed in the sentence Nunc scio quid sit Amor.

Now I know What Love Is.

The watch hummed loudly in a digital tone and the screen began displaying a portion of the interface he'd never seen before. The option to open files appeared and he challenged it, followed by the invitation to a compendium far beyond his expectations.

There were folders characterized by year and once inside those one could select any random month. Deeper still in each month were files with names that clearly described events by location and description in the headers.

He blanked, hovering over files from years ago that all read Madeleine. There was so many of them he was genuinely flabbergasted by how much effort he had gone to in order to preserve his memories of her.

He stood, almost slipping drunkenly on the carpet of rune parchments and ran to his bed. Even though he was beyond exhausted from not sleeping all night he was determined to play with the new toy that was the unlocked watch. He rubbed at blurry eyes and pushed back into the black pillows on his bed with his knees up high. He was going to skip the day and watch everything.

He paused to first command the thick curtains shut, growling at the blistering sunlight that had been assaulting his exhausted mind. The room grew black, save for the floating imagery of the watch interface before him. He relaxed with his hand over his mouth, unsure of where to begin.

He went back several years until he'd hit August where Madeleine's name disappeared, giving way to Astoria's. He made a mock retching noise of disgust and flipped forward to a random date the previous year and pressed on a memory named War - Hesselø - Granger.

The holograph before him was now providing exceptional quality with the watch having been unlocked properly. The memory flickered on, to depict the image of himself with a black hood over his long hair and a Death Eater mask covering his face, walking down a dimly lit hallway with pale green paint peeling off the concrete.

Behind him drifted Blaise Zabini, appearing pale and tired, and Greggory Goyle with an empty expression of stupidity. Draco was holding what seemed to be the lifeless body of Hermione Granger in his arms, darned in torn and filthy clothing from an evident life of poverty. Around her neck, the darkening bruises of strangulation were already beginning to form.