Breaking Free (Book 3 of the Lost Potter Series)

Sixth Year Revisited

Draco's school year could not go any worse if he tried. It was his sixth year, a usually stressful but celebrated one, but Draco had even bigger assignments to vanquish.

One of his tasks that had carried over from his summer work was his constant brewing in order to provide Olivia with her potions. He ended up making a large batch of Amortentia once a week and a large batch of a special potion designed by Snape to dampen the girl's abilities once a month, since the ratio was four parts Amortentia for one part other potion. Of course, Draco had never been horrible at potions, but with all of this practice he was soon the second in his class. Second to Potter, of all people. Typical.

His next assignment was on an even larger scale. It was the ultimate assignment, his specific task granted to him by the Dark Lord.

And it absolutely terrified him.

He knew he was supposed to be honoured and ecstatic that he had been chosen. He was supposed to throw all his support behind Voldemort and never question anything. But Draco was no fool— he knew that he had only been chosen because his father had managed to destroy the fully intact prophecy (though the Dark Lord has his sources otherwise) in the months prior. Otherwise, it would've gone to someone much less suspicious, like Zabini or Parkinson, who were equally as capable (debatably) to carry out the deed. Nevertheless, the task fell to Draco to not only get Death Eaters into Hogwarts, but to kill the almighty Albus Dumbledore.

It took quite a few failed attempts in the end. The necklace failed due to student idiocy, and the ale due to Slughorn incompetency. Finally it built up to one last altercation at the Astronomy tower where Draco disarmed the headmaster and...

...And Draco found he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Despite his fear that the Dark Lord would do something to him or his mother or Olivia or anything like that, Draco couldn't muster up the courage to perform the spell. Thankfully for most involved, Snape stepped in to cover for him and ended Dumbledore himself. Draco just stood and watched as the great wizard was taken down by a simple spell. It felt wrong, and it wasn't the first time Draco didn't like what he was forced to do.

And yet he ran off the grounds with Snape and the Carrows and the rest, for he knew there was no going back anymore. The mark was ingrained in his flesh, and he had just attacked Albus Dumbledore on the orders of Lord Voldemort. There was no recovering from this— from any of this.

~

As Remus had predicted, Sirius' arm never recovered completely from the curse. He wore it in a sling most days, for it still hurt whenever it accidentally banged into cabinets or headboards, but he couldn't move it to get it out of the way. The emergency first aid after the battle had kept his arm from being amputated on the spot, but Mad-Eye continuously reminded him that the spell wouldn't hold that off forever. As if he didn't have enough to worry about without an arm that could go off and suddenly begin spreading dead tissue around his blood stream— an in-system time bomb to make his life even more miserable.

With the injury crippling his wand arm, him being locked away in this godforsaken house again, and the Order being no closer to finding Olivia than the moments after her abduction, Sirius fell into a depression.

He had been depressed before, of course, with his tormented childhood and stint in a maximum security prison, but usually he would cling to his friends and bounce back eventually. But even those resources seemed to be scarce at this moment in time.

Conveniently, Dumbledore had found another task for Remus to complete in late December through mid April, just when Sirius had caught an illness and really needed the attention.