Of Doves and Dragons

Chapter Thirty-eight: The Judgement

"My past has tasted bitter for years now, so I wield an iron fist. Grace is just weakness, or so I've been told. I've been cold, I've been merciless; but the blood on my hands scares me to death. Maybe I'm waking up today."

-Jaymes Young, I'll Be Good

Draco couldn't stand the distrustful looks. He understood them, deserved them, but couldn't quite take the rush of undiluted shame that followed them. So he took himself out of the equation and sat alone on the bench by the front door of the cottage, smoking a cigarette like it was his only saving grace.

To know that his childhood home had jailed not only himself and Ember, but had captured lives needlessly and thrown them into their cellar; was nauseating. When Ember had found the cellar all those months ago and accused it of being a dungeon...turns out she hadn't been so far off and had only been foreshadowing what it would come to be.

But that wasn't the only reason why he subjugated himself to the bench. His father had looked at him as if he was a ghost; no less disappointing, just less material. Lucius had placed in the key that had always turned Draco's thoughts back in line with his only to find that the gears had been changed. This time, he had snapped back like a viper and his parents had the audacity to blame Ember.

Sure, she was a big part of it. She had pushed him to resurface when he hadn't known he had been drowning in falsities. False promises, false beliefs, false praise. And now as he stood on the opposite side of the looking glass, he was branded a traitor by both offended parties.

Draco was no idiot. There was no way he could right all the wrongs of seven years. He wasn't sure if he should even try. It would be so easy to drift away from this situation, so easy to pretend like none of this mattered. He could go far away, way up into the uninhabited North and try to live his days in peace, but he knew that peace would not find him. His sense of peace was carried inside the heart of a small girl with the courage of a lion and she would stay in the face of this hardship. But it wasn't just her that kept his feet from pounding the pavement.

His world had been cracked and shattered to reveal nothing more than beautiful landscapes covering egregious wrongs, and now that the hoax was up the world that he wanted to be a part of was being threatened with extinction. All his new dreams, that were little more than seedlings, didn't yet have the wingspan to take off. This was the problem of dreams in the face of adversity, it is so much easier to snuff them out before they take hold. To ignore them is to resign yourself to the land of what if, where you live blandly and wait for differences. But any dream is only worth living if you have the strength to pursue it and fight for it.

So he would stay and perhaps they would cast him out, as they should, or send him back to the Death Eaters, but he would stay knowing that in the end, when no one thought he could, he had aligned himself with the good and had tried to redeem whatever there was left of him.

He heard the door open and looked up from his fingers to find Ember gazing at him with and understanding look. "Are you going to be okay?" She asked softly as if her voice was touching glass.

She was always perceptive and had grown out of those awkward naïve stages that came with her as a side-effect of her upbringing. He appreciated that she hadn't asked if he was okay, because of course he wasn't, but asked if he was going to be okay; as if he was still going to have a future to look forward to.

He tried to give her a convincing smile, but she easily saw through it. Taking the few steps to him she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him into her torso as if whatever courage she had could be pressed into him.

Sighing, he sunk into her embrace, wrapping her tightly in his own, breathing in her comforting scent. They stayed like that for minutes, just breathing each other in and listening to the water lapping against the banks, pausing in the whirlwind, completely unaware of the eyes watching them through the front window.