The best way I can describe my first three years at Hogwarts is to say that I shuffled through them like a zombie. I spent most of my time in the library, buried up to my eyes in books and hiding from the world in general. Between all the reading and hiding I became a very good student, my homework always well written, usually longer than necessary, and always done on time. But out of class I was sunk into a funk that only broke at home on Christmas and Summer holiday. I know he was still grieving too, yet somehow being around Dad just made me feel a little better, a little more like things could go back to normal someday. Dad kept me human for at least a few months those three years, and in case you forgot, he’s the real hero of this story.
Back at school, I made no close friends in Hufflepuff, but at least I made no enemies either. My housemates did not know what to do with me and my general state of indifference. However, being Hufflepuffs and thus having some greater measure of compassion than other people, I was mercifully largely left alone. I was not so lucky when it came to the other houses.
I’d always been aware that people carried an old prejudice against my family, but naively I had not expected to find it among my classmates. I was rudely disillusioned my first day when a pair of Gryffindors cornered me in the bathroom and proceeded to give me a bogwashing because, “the toilet’s where little shits like you belong, Malfoy.”
When they let me up at last and swaggered off laughing I was half-drowned, furious, and completely and totally ashamed. The experience was not to be my last. Nasty messes found their way onto the seat of my chair or into my bag, ruining my homework and covering my books. My elbow would be jogged as I tried to write, feet stuck out to trip me in the halls. Jinxes and hexes flew my way with astonishing regularity.
There were too many tormenters to fight, and I had no desire to run crying to Scorpius or Jenny, so I retreated. I spent my days under the safe if watchful eye of Madam Pince in the library, or near professors who more often than not would stop things before they got too out of hand.
I knew that my siblings had felt small acts of prejudice, but it seemed like the school had really been saving itself up for me. By my fourth year, Jenny had become Head Girl, and was rather universally loved by the professors. It probably helped that she was from Mum’s first marriage and therefore not a “real” Malfoy, although she would have decked anyone who dared to suggest that. Scorpius continued to float through school with astonishing ease. He had never been the best of students, but everyone liked him. He had a silver tongue that could charm you within five minutes, and he could talk his way out of any trouble he fell into. The twins, too, were largely left alone. Perhaps it was because Arthur had been named a prefect, or it could have been Gawain’s status as a Beater for Ravenclaw. Or perhaps it was simply because both boys were tall, stocky, and built like trains. All of which meant, if people wanted to take out their hostility on a Malfoy, I was the logical choice. The fact that I looked like Dad was just an added bonus for them.
I had expected Isadore to be the worst of my problems, but he had difficulty rallying the Slytherins against me because of Scorpius and Jenny. My real difficulties came from the Gryffindors. The ringleader of the little group of my tormentors was Bernard Creevy. He had lost his uncle during the Battle at Hogwarts, and although he had never met the man, he had learned to idolize him from his father. And with me being a Malfoy- well, obviously that made his uncle’s death all my fault and it was his duty to see that I pay.
Of course, Bernard was never alone. He was usually backed by Sam Hepplewhite, Douglas Singh, and Ryan Johnson. The older Gryffindors were no better. For the most part they turned a blind eye to their housemates. Only Rose Weasley would regularly intervene on my behalf, telling off the others for fighting in the halls. “Just like her mother,” I heard James Potter mutter once as she scolded him for being a prat. But even Weasley couldn’t be everywhere at once, so I hid and bore whatever happened, and generally lived in a tiny shell of misery without letting on how awful everything was.
Looking back on it now, I can still hear Jenny’s incredulous “But why didn’t you tell us? We could have gone to a teacher, stopped it all!” I suppose that would have made sense. Only I was too worried that even the teachers would affirm I was not worth saving. I didn’t want to tell Dad and worry him because I knew how much he hated to be touched with the shadow of his past reputation, how he hated us to be touched by it as well. The only person I could have told was Mum. But she was gone. So I decided to wait it out, and dispassionately counted the days until school would be over and I could leave this hell permanently.
By the time I reached my fourth year, I had no hopes or illusions that anything would be different. And it certainly began in the same way. We had barely been back a week when Bernard caught me just outside the Great Hall, his friends at his back, and a grin like Christmas had come early.
“Well, what have we here? Did you miss me dreadfully, Malfoy?”
“About as much as I’d miss a boil,” I muttered, staring at my toes and hoping that whatever taunting he had planned would be over quickly.
“Isn’t that a shame, especially since I went to such trouble to get you a present,” Bernard replied with mock sorrow. He reached into his bag and pulled out a brightly colored book. “Since you’re in the library so much I got a little light reading for you,” he snickered, thrusting the book under my nose.
I pulled back slightly and the title swam into focus, Murderers or Madmen: the Secret Lives of the Malfoys Revealed by Rita Skeeter. No sooner had my eyes adjusted to the words than the book pulled back and Bernard flipped it open.
“Read it,” he commanded, shoving it once more under my nose.
The insidious words crept across the page, and I choked slightly. My eyes fixed on the top of the page which read, “…and at the tender age of sixteen, Draco Malfoy, who had already revealed his true nature committing heinous crimes against Muggleborns and the savior of the wizarding world, the Boy Who Lived, eagerly joined the evil ranks of He Who Must Not Be Named…”
I knew this book. I remembered when it came out, I was eight, and Grandfather Lucius had died just one month before. Dad was furious with Skeeter’s gall in tormenting a grieving family, Grandmother Narcissa was almost hysterical. Only Mum remained calm, refusing to be worked up by “some cow who has the misapprehension to call herself a writer.”
In fact, on the day the book was due to appear, Mum got up early and apparated down to Flourish and Blots where she proceeded to buy the first copy they sold, along with several quills and a bottle of red ink. Bringing them home, she sat down in her favorite chair and read the book. Anyone passing by that afternoon would hear the scribbling of her quill in the margins, punctuated by comments such as, “goodness, don’t tell me she doesn’t even know the rules of comma application,” “couldn’t you come up with a better epitaph than that you mangy harlot?” and “that’s the thirty-second time you’ve used the word evil, are you trying to prove you have a limited vocabulary or do you simply not know how to work a thesaurus?”
Several times she would call out questions to Dad, then carefully correct some fact. At one point she had glanced to where I sat playing with the dogs and said, “Emrys, dear, I’m afraid we’ve been wrong for years. Skeeter seems convinced that we named you Ermine, and as you know, she’s quite the authority.”
Shortly before dinner Mum finally finished the book, her spidery red notations running up and down its margins. Taking her finished work to Dad, she let him page through it- he laughed heartily at some of her more florid phrases- then asked him to duplicate it for her. The next morning her annotated version was sent to Skeeter’s publisher. There was no reply, but the highly anticipated second printing of the book was abruptly cancelled, and for the next few months, Skeeter’s articles in the Daily Prophet were much more subdued than usual.
The other copy of the book we kept, taking turns adding in our own annotations. It became a peculiar ritual in our family that the best cure for a bad day was to take it out on the book. I wondered what had happened to it now; none of us had touched it since Mum died. Without her the humor just didn’t seem to be there.
“Read it,” Bernard snapped again, dragging me back to reality.
My eyes flashed, angry at being pulled away from any memory of Mum, and for the first time in years I felt as though she was standing beside me, egging me on. My tongue loosened and words began to fall from my mouth of their own accord. “Really, is that the best you can do? For starters, he was seventeen, not sixteen. And that is an awful run on sentence; did no one ever teach her how to write clearly? And wouldn’t nefarious be a better descriptive than evil, or do you not know that word because you’ve never opened a bloody dictionary!”
Bernard stared at me, mouth agape, as though his pet kitten had suddenly roared like a lion.
Flushed with victory I shouted at him, “You’d do better to find a book written by a credible source, or at the very least a literate one!” then turned on my heel and dashed out the castle door.
As soon as the first wave of fresh, crisp air hit me I ran, not sure what was happening behind me, not sure if anyone would give chase, but only knowing that I needed to get away from them all to hold on to what happened.
Mum had come back.
For a glorious moment I had felt her standing right beside me, and I was terrified that I would lose her again. So I plunged headlong into the one place that I knew would guarantee me privacy, the fringes of the Forbidden Forrest.
Now, you may be thinking that that was a terribly stupid thing for a young, distracted wizard to do, and you may be right. However, I was careful. I made sure I could see my way out, see the clearing at the edge of Hagrid’s hut, and reasoned that with Fang patrolling the area, not too many monsters would come this close.
So I curled up at the base of a large tree, nestled into a large gap in the roots, cushioned by a blanket of fallen leaves. And then I sat there, and as hard as I tried, I felt Mum slipping away from me all over again. My eyes closed on my hot and angry tears- the first I had cried since Mum had died, and my world was falling to pieces all over again.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, the world had suddenly gone dark and heavy drops of rain were falling from the leaden sky. I blinked as the fat drops of cold water burst upon my face.
No sooner had I taken two steps from the shelter of my tree when the storm broke in earnest. The wind howled as it rushed through the trees, buffeting me this way, then that. The rain sheeted down, obscuring all vision, and then wind bounced the water up my nose and down my throat until I felt I had fallen under water. Soaked to the skin and half drowned, I stumbled back to my enclave in the roots of the tree and pressed my back as close to the rough bark as I could without sinking into it.
Leaves and branches whipped around above me, and I would jump as some of the larger limbs fell to the ground with crashes that were all but swallowed by the hungry roar of the storm. Once a tree not too far away plummeted to the ground, and for a moment my heart was in my throat as I prayed that my own tree would not do the same.
I don’t know how long the storm raged around me. To me, cold, wet, and afraid it seemed to go on for hours, yet looking back I know it could have been no more than a half an hour at best. I suppose the exact time hardly even matters, now. Anyway, as quickly as they had come, the howling winds pushed the storm away, and the rain and wind dwindled down to nothing.
I uncurled form my hiding place, pushing wet leaves off my hair and robes where they had stuck. My left leg had fallen asleep where it was curled under me, causing me to stagger as I stood. Steadying myself against the trunk of my tree I tried to shake some life back into it, wincing as a pins and needles feeling replaced the former numbness.
Shivering, I remembered my wand and cast a drying spell I had found during one of my library retreats. My memory must have been somewhat off, or the spell not terribly effective, for while my clothes became at least a good deal less damp than they had been, my hair and skin remained as wet as ever. Resigned to my cold and somewhat sopping state I hoped I could slip back to the Common Room unnoticed before a professor, or worse, Jenny, could tell me off for staying out in the storm.
I picked my way over the forest floor which was littered with fallen branches and slick with patches of glossy, wet leaves. I was halfway over the trunk of the newly fallen tree when a croaking squawk startled me into falling over to the other side. As I tumbled head over heels, a flash of bright red among the green and brown detritus caught my eye. Rubbing what I was sure would become a sizable lump on my head, I staggered over to the leafy top of the tree and peered in among the large and cumbersome branches.
A pair of beady black eyes stared desperately back at me.
I stood rooted to the spot by the most heart-wrenching and beautiful creature I had ever seen. I knew at once that it was a phoenix, although the brilliant orange-red plumage was lackluster despite the pearlescent film of water that coated it. A heavy branch trapped the bird in the rubble of what must have once been a formidable nest. Worst was the awkward position of the phoenix; I knew at a glance her neck was broken.
The other odd thing I noticed right away, and I couldn’t tell you how, was that the phoenix was female.
She gave one more strange musical croak which I felt wash through me with the faintest feeling of warmth, relief, and approval. Then her black eye closed, and I knew she was dead.
I should have left then. I was cold, wet, tired and bound to get in trouble as it was. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had just walked away. But I couldn’t. Seeing her lying there, all I could think of was Mum.
So I grabbed the end of the branch and pulled, feeling the rough bark scrape the palms of my hands. Slowly, inch by inch, the heavy wood rolled over until all the dull red plumage was exposed. Tentatively, I reached out a hand and stroked the soft feathers of the phoenix’s head. They gave way gently, but felt as stiff and lifeless as the broken body. Sliding down my other hand, I gently cradled her, then lifted her as carefully as I could.
She was heavier than I expected, and I half staggered over to the hollow in the tree roots where I had sheltered. Carefully I laid her down and covered her with glistening wet leaves. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, not really sure of what to say. “I’m sorry.”
Turning, I prepared to go when the faintest cheep met my ears. Whipping my head back around, I stared at the pile of leaves where I had buried the body. But nothing had been disturbed. The noise sounded again, but fainter this time, and I threw myself back at the fallen branch. Half buried in the wreckage of the nest and fallen leaves a second pair of black eyes stared back at me amid pieces of broken eggshell.
The phoenix had a chick.