Title: Draco
Malfoy and the Secret Underground Vampire Bureaucracy
Disclaimer:
All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling
and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Pairing(s):
Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, (mostly past) Harry/Ginny
Summary:
In which there is an obsessed Potter, conspiracy theories, bonds,
hormones, far too much self-help, and, of course, a secret
underground vampire bureaucracy. None of which is as important as the
fact that this is not Draco Malfoy's fault.
Rating:
NC-17/MA.
Warning(s): Vampirism, sex, profanity, light
bondage, DH spoilers (EWE).
Word Count: 18,500.
Author's
Notes: This was written for Beren in the most recent round of the
hd-holidays fic fest on LJ. Beren's kinks were leather, light
bondage, toys and she requested creature fic (nothing like a
good veela or vampire), bonding, hate sex that turns into twu wuv (I
can't help myself, I'm a romantic), mpreg. This story has the
vampire, the bonding, and the bondage—maybe the hate sex, too, if
you really stretch the definition.
Thank you to my betas: Byaghro, Ravenqueen55, Raphsody606, Msarden, and Angyslmuse.
Draco Malfoy and the Secret Underground Vampire Bureaucracy
Draco sighed.
The person whom this horrid place took the liberty of calling a welcome witch didn't look up.
Draco shifted and sighed again.
This time, he attracted the attention he wanted; the witch glanced at him. Her polite, uncommunicative smile showed no teeth and remained the same as it had been five minutes ago, and a half-hour before that, and an hour before that. "Yes, Mr. Malfoy?"
"Look, Bones," Draco said, deciding that he might as well abandon the courtesy he'd used so far, because it hadn't got him any better results. He and Susan Bones had known each other vaguely in school, though she had vanished over the summer before Hogwarts reopened, and most people had believed she was dead or had left the country. Now Draco knew it to be the former, and they shared the same predicament, so she ought to offer more apologies than she had so far. "I just want to know how much longer I'll have to wait before I see this Zabrina Gloriosa or whatever the fuck her name is. It's a ridiculous name, by the way."
Bones narrowed her eyes, and stood up. "Strange thing for someone with a name like Draco Malfoy to say," she murmured. The sweetness had gone from her voice, and now she showed her fangs, as though she thought they could intimidate him. Draco showed his own back, except that he still wasn't used to opening his mouth around them and therefore cut his own lip on one of them. He yelped and lifted a hand to his mouth to cover the trickle of blood. Vampire or not, he saw no need to walk around wearing stained robes.
"You don't understand, Malfoy," Bones said, sounding amused again. Perhaps his social blunder had restored her confidence—which it shouldn't have, Draco thought, probing sullenly at his fangs with a careful tongue. He had already spent several days with that cut and talking in a way that had made some of his mother's carefully-chosen guests ask if he'd recently returned from a foreign holiday. "You're a vampire now—"
"That was sort of hard to miss, Bones," Draco snarled around his hand.
"And that means that you're exactly the same as any other new vampire who comes into contact with the bureaucracy," Bones said, and shrugged, and sat back down. She looked paler than she had been, but otherwise not substantially different. Vampirism, Draco had already learned, was least hard on the looks of those people who had been blonds or redheads before they died. "You don't have any special privileges. You've yet to show us that you can behave around humans and recognize your new status in the wizarding world. We don't know much about what talents and special needs you might have gained from your sire—because we don't know who bit you, and for what reason—and we need to research that. All of this takes time and questioning. I'm surprised you haven't realized that sitting out here patiently, and not demanding to see Madam Gloriosa just because you're a pampered, spoiled child, is a test of its own. One that you've resoundingly failed. I'm only telling you that because I feel sorry for you, by the way. This is so obviously not your world."
"I doubt that you know much more about it than I do," Draco said. He took his hand cautiously away from his mouth. The blood had stopped flowing, he noted in relief. One of the few benefits of his new status was that his blood did clot quickly, as he couldn't afford to lose that much of what kept him alive. "Since I didn't notice you biting that many necks before last summer."
Bones smiled a little. "I prefer wrists, actually."
Draco shuddered. The Vampire Association for the Management and Protection of the Species was supposedly keeping him under severe restrictions, making him drink animal blood until they could find out what kind of human volunteer would be best for him to bite, but of course his mother had taken to drawing her own blood out in vials and sharing it with him. Draco would have expected no less of her. He had found, nevertheless, that his gaze always went to her neck first.
"I couldn't survive drinking out of wrists," he said.
"You might have to," Bones said, and flipped through another pile of parchment on her desk, humming under her breath, "depending on what kind of sire you had."
Draco shook his head. "I don't understand that at all—"
Bones murmured something that sounded suspiciously like, "Of course not." Draco chose to graciously ignore this.
"How can it matter what vampire bit me? I mean, any vampire can make any other kind of vampire, right?"
Bones shook her head at him. "Of course not. Do human parents always have the same kind of children? There are certain traits, sometimes to do with special talents, sometimes with the kind of blood you can drink and the kind of people it's best to feed from, that get passed down from sire or dam to Risen One." Draco made a face. He hated V.A.M.P.S's term for new vampires. It made him sound like some sort of phoenix. "It's not an exact transference; it combines with the talents and weaknesses you already have. But that just leads to the need for more careful research. I've known several Risen Ones who were susceptible to certain kinds of blood diseases, for example, because they weren't healthy in life and their sires or dams hadn't been careful enough about which humans they fed from. They had to be very careful that they weren't drinking from someone with that particular kind of blood disease. It could kill them."
"I wasn't sickly," Draco muttered.
Bones just shrugged, and went back to her paperwork. After a short time of standing in front of her desk like an idiot, Draco decided he should sit down. He did, though he still grumbled under his breath just in case Bones thought she had got away with cowing him. He didn't like how smoothly she managed to ignore him.
Another hour of silence passed, and then the ivory clock that hung above Draco, the only ornament on the bare stone walls, chimed twice. Bones glanced up at it, smiled, and said, "Madam Gloriosa will see you now."
Draco tried to give her a menacing scowl as he stood and strode around Bones's desk towards the door behind it. She only flashed him her fangs in answer.
Draco frowned. He hadn't yet figured out when vampires had a mocking edge to their smiles, given that they had an edge from their teeth more or less all the time.
"But he must have gone somewhere."
"I'm with Hermione by now, mate," Ron said, poking a weary head around the book he was holding up in front of him. "I'm sick of hearing you talk about Draco sodding Malfoy. I don't know where he went. No one does. All I know is that he was missing for a little while, and now he's back in Britain. That should be enough, shouldn't it?"
"But—"
"Harry," Ron groaned, and ducked behind the book once more. Harry scowled at him and folded his arms. He knew he was right, damn it.
And you'd think that Ron and Hermione would pay a bit more attention to my intuition after I turned out to be right about what Malfoy was up to in our sixth year, and again about the Hallows, he thought, and flopped back in the chair behind him, to show the ceiling his scowl instead.
The flat he, Hermione, and Ron had chosen to share after they left Hogwarts had many good points—it was close to the Ministry, where all three of them were in training to enter the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and it was unexpectedly roomy for the price—but looks were not its strong suit. Patterns of cracks ran along the ceiling. Old burn marks and the stench of lingering spells clung to the walls despite Hermione's numerous attempts to charm them out. She had Transfigured the carpet completely, but Harry thought a trace of the former lumpy green was apparent around the new blue. Odd noises still echoed through the bedrooms and kitchen at the dead of night. And Harry was convinced there must be a poltergeist, since they always woke up to find water running or an old fire that none of them remembered lighting dwindling down to ashes in the hearth.
Harry tried to distract himself by counting the cracks in the ceiling, or trying to find the picture of Dumbledore's face that Ron swore was up there, but his mind returned to Malfoy, as it always did. Malfoy had just vanished abruptly a few days after they took their NEWT's. And then he'd returned to England a month or so later. How could that not be suspicious? Especially since Lucius Malfoy had fled not long after the final battle and his whereabouts remained unknown. Draco's vanishing probably had something to do with his father, and if only they investigated him more closely, they could probably find one of the few remaining Death Eaters at large.
To Harry's frustration, though, no one in the Ministry shared his convictions. And Ron and Hermione just accused him of obsession and went on about their ordinary lives.
Harry wasn't obsessed. He knew he wasn't. He just wanted all the Death Eaters locked up in Azkaban or dead for their crimes, thank you very much. He didn't think that was an unreasonable thing to want, given that Fenrir Greyback and a few others had tried to assassinate him during his last year at Hogwarts.
He wanted more than anything to put the whole business of the war behind him and just concentrate on becoming an Auror. His best friends knew that. The Weasleys knew that. Ginny, um, well, she knew that when he explained it to her. Anyone who thought differently was just someone who had read and believed too many of the scurrilous stories that the Daily Prophet kept right on publishing because they made it money.
But he had to tie up the loose ends of the war first. Certain things had to be done, always, before the normal business of life could proceed. He had to take his NEWT's before he could become an Auror. He had to find some way to explain away his strange reluctance to date Ginny before he would be free to go on and date someone else. And he had to find out where Draco Malfoy had gone before he could be sure that there wasn't an obvious trail which led to Lucius Malfoy that they were ignoring.
Then he sat up, his breath catching.
"What are you planning, Harry?"
Hermione had just stepped in through the door of the flat, shaking snow off the umbrella she'd enchanted to create a protective shield around her when she had to walk. She'd been to visit her parents again, and Apparating in and out of the Grangers' house was considered using magic in front of Muggles, because they might have guests over. She gave him a sharp look now, and flicked off a few flakes that had managed to land on her hair.
"Who says I'm planning anything?" Harry asked, trying to look as innocent as Teddy did when Harry picked him up for play dates.
"The expression on your face does." Hermione hung up her umbrella and set about removing the complicated cast of heavy garments she wore outside every single December day. "You're not as clever about hiding your emotions as you think you are, you know."
Harry decided Hermione was wrong. Not just because she was, but because she didn't seem to know a single thing about Harry's changed feelings towards Ginny.
"Yeah, well," he said, leaning back to look at the ceiling again. "Ron was telling me that I ought to give up on finding out what's wrong with Malfoy. And I reckon he's right. I mean, the Ministry did investigate it, and they found nothing."
The words caught in his throat like a hot potato. The Ministry had barely made an effort. They had probably come to some understanding with Malfoy's mother, Harry thought bitterly. Narcissa Malfoy had saved his life, but he knew she had done so because she would do anything to protect her son, and that would certainly include bribing Ministry officials to stop inquiring after him, if she had to.
"Hmmm," said Hermione, and gave him a skeptical look as she walked past him into the kitchen. A moment later, her disgusted voice drifted out. "Ron, I told you that I'm not going to do all the cooking! Get in here and start dinner the way you were supposed to, already."
Ron grumbled and moaned and pulled himself away from his book as reluctantly as though he had Hermione's study habits. Harry shook his head as he watched him depart, and then grinned up at the cracks, thinking that maybe he saw Dumbledore's face there after all.
He had been trying to persuade his friends to listen to him about Malfoy for so long that he had forgotten he had another option. He had investigated Malfoy's Death Eater activities on his own three years ago. Why couldn't he do it again?
And Harry knew just where to start. Certain inquires about Malfoy had passed through the hands of a minor Ministry undersecretary with a crush on him; she had mentioned it when she was trying to impress him into going on a date with her. Harry would use a bit of judicious smiling on her and see what else she might be willing to tell him.
He felt a little strange using his face and scar for something like that, but, well.
It's for the greater good, he defended himself. And not in that twisted way Dumbledore meant it, either. This really is. If Malfoy is innocent, then he shouldn't have anything to fear from an investigation. And if he's doing something nefarious, then I should find out, so that the rest of the wizarding world and I can live in peace.
Besides, once he had found out what Malfoy was up to, maybe he could stop thinking about him all the time.
"Welcome, Mr. Malfoy. Please sit down."
Draco froze, staring in disbelief. Almost without realizing it, he had conjured a picture of Madam Gloriosa in his mind as some gypsy witch, with long dark hair and long fingernails and a crystal ball that would presumably work much better than Professor Trelawney's.
The woman facing him now was small and fine-boned, with features that looked French. She had brown hair worn in a plain, simple coil on the back of her neck, and watery blue eyes that peered at him with the help of glasses. Her robes were fine, and blood-red, but Draco would still have passed her without a single glance in the street.
This was the leader of all the vampires in Great Britain? The person who was supposed to be in charge of him until he could be "trusted" not to drain humans to death? The one woman who had the right to deal with the Ministry of Magic and speak for all British vampires?
Draco took his seat in front of her desk, but his gut was churning with anger. Madam Gloriosa peered at him one more time, then picked up a file from her desk and consulted it. At least the desk was mahogany and appropriate to her status, Draco thought, elaborately carved with depictions of vampires biting swooning witches and wizards.
That was as it should be, he thought. He had been forced to give up so much when he became a vampire, from his wand to his ability to walk around in the daylight like a normal person (and vampires like Bones wanted him to give up on considering himself human, which would happen only over Draco's undead body). He had at least hoped that there would be some compensation in power and terror.
But, no, V.A.M.P.S. controlled all vampires so sternly that there was no hope of that. There were all sorts of rules about who could be bitten and who couldn't, how often vampires were to intrude into wizard-controlled areas, whether they had the right to enter Muggle-controlled ones at all, what magic potions and items they should be able to use in lieu of wands, and how much contact they should have with former friends. Draco had recognized all the regulations as chains the first moment he heard about them. Bones could chirp on and on about how they were necessary in order to soothe human fears and let vampires survive without persecution, but Draco thought they had traded their freedom for a very minimum security.
"Ah, yes," said Madam Gloriosa, pulling Draco's attention back to her. She blinked at the parchment in front of her, and then glanced up at him, looking pleased. "We believe that we have identified your sire at last. Very, very unusual, this one. He hasn't sired another vampire in more than two hundred years. Someone must have approached him and offered him a substantial amount of money to make you Rise."
"Wait," Draco said. "Someone offered him money to make me a vampire? Why would anyone do that? I thought he was just hungry, found me wandering along the edges of the Forbidden Forest, and took a bite."
"Well, yes, that was probably what you were meant to assume," said Madam Gloriosa kindly. "But we gathered samples of your blood soon after you awakened, do you remember?"
"Vaguely." What Draco mostly remembered was an immense hunger that had eaten out the bottom of his stomach and seemed destined to eat out the bottom of the world, combined with thrashing and screaming that he didn't like to recall in any way, since it was so undignified for a Malfoy to have done it.
"We found traces of a potion. It's called Noctambulism." Gloriosa shrugged and turned the file towards him. Draco glanced down, but the spiky, cramped handwriting gave him a headache, and he looked away again. "It's useless, really. All it does is make a person sleepwalk. But we think someone administered it to you to get you out of the school and close to the edge of the Forbidden Forest—where the Night King was waiting."
"Wait, wait," Draco said again, and spread one hand. He was gratified to see that Madam Gloriosa paused. So even she has to recognize the power of a Malfoy. "Night King? Bones told me vampires don't have any royalty."
"Oh, we don't. But we find it politic to respect whatever titles our older members choose to call themselves by. It's all about freedom of expression."
Draco grimaced. This kind of thing was what he hated most about V.A.M.P.S. They seemed to feel that people like Draco should be genuinely happy about being vampires, and they used all sorts of cheery catchphrases and pamphlets and brochures to make it sound like jolly fun.
"So someone paid to have me made a vampire," he muttered. It didn't sound any less incredible when he said it. "Do you know whom?"
"Vampires as old as the Night King must be approached carefully." Gloriosa gave him a sympathetic smile. "I'm sure that you'll be more interested in learning to live your life with the powers that the Night King granted to you with his bite. For example, did you know that you will probably become a bonded vampire? That happened to his last Risen One we have records of."
Draco frowned. "A bonded vampire?" Bones had chattered on to him, and so had the lesser functionaries of Madam Gloriosa he'd dealt with, about vampires who drank from various places on the human body, who could be hurt by the sight of moonlight, who were all but immune to common spells, but he hadn't heard of anything like this. "I can conjure ropes?"
Gloriosa laughed. Draco wondered if it was his imagination that it sounded a little forced. Perhaps he was getting to her, and she was being forced to realize that she had to deal with a Malfoy more respectfully than she had to deal with your ordinary Mudblood vampire. "Not at all! It means that you can establish a bond with one particular human that will enable you to read that human's thoughts and emotions, even from a distance. You're luckier than most, in some respects. We have to spread our feedings carefully, and our donors can become nervous and withdraw their blood from us at any time. That rarely happens to a bonded vampire. A human finds the sharing of thoughts and emotions significant. They will become friends with the vampire who approaches them, sometimes lovers. It takes a lot to make them stop contributing blood. And it's a perfectly legal and harmonious arrangement, long recognized by the Ministry, without the complications of consent that we need to go through with ordinary donors." She looked faintly wistful for a moment.
"I sense a catch coming up," Draco said darkly.
"Why would you think that?"
"Because this—this has been weird," said Draco, and folded his arms. "There has to be a catch. Nothing that actually makes my lack of life any easier can be what it seems on the surface."
"I do wish that you would stop referring to it as your lack of life," Gloriosa said reproachfully. "Vampires are differently alive, not dead, or we could not exist at all. Susan tells me that you have continually used uncooperative phrasing, and seemed unwilling to attend group meetings for new Risen Ones that would help you engage with your new existence."
"Maybe because I never wanted to be a monster!" Draco leaned forwards. His objections had made no impression at all on the lackeys he'd dealt with before this; they'd been trained to smile and chirp cheerfully at him no matter what he said. Madam Gloriosa was high enough up that it might make a difference to her. "I wanted to be human! And now my wand's been taken away, and I don't know what I can do and what I can't, and someone's trying to govern every detail of my life, and I don't see why vampires can't attack humans the way they want to when we obviously have the greater power—"
Gloriosa's eyes narrowed, and Draco abruptly found himself pinned to the far wall of the office with her hand around his throat. Draco choked; even though he didn't need to breathe any longer, she was still crushing the skin and near to mangling his windpipe. And he hadn't even seen her move.
"You are being more than uncooperative," Gloriosa said. "You are being stupid. We exist at the Ministry's sufferance, Mr. Malfoy. We come up with our own laws and regulations because the ones they would create would enchain us even more effectively. We fight for our freedom slowly, using tactics that humans don't notice because they don't live long enough. But our numbers have always been small, and smaller still since only rogues and vampires old enough to escape most retribution make Risen Ones now.
"I will not let you risk everything we've worked for because you're a petulant child. I promise, while I will not destroy you, I know nearly everything possible about making a vampire's existence uncomfortable. I'm six hundred years old, Mr. Malfoy, and you know nothing about me and the powers I wield thanks to my dam. If I decide to tame you, you will come out with even less intelligence behind your pretty little eyes than you have now.
"Adapt to this, and survive."
She tossed him to the floor. Draco cried out as his skull banged against it, and then closed his eyes and did his best to concentrate on manipulating his neck back into shape.
When he looked again, Madam Gloriosa was sitting behind her desk and checking quietly through his file once more.
"You are right that there's a disadvantage for bonded vampires," she said, not glancing up. "Only certain kinds of humans with certain characteristics will do. For example, children of the Bone Queen can only bond humans born on Tuesdays when the moon is full. With the Night King as your sire—well." She showed her fangs at him in what Draco was finally certain was not a smile. "You need to find someone who has returned from death. Good night, Mr. Malfoy. Susan will show you out."
Harry pushed Malfoy's file irritably away from him. It nearly tumbled off the desk the undersecretary had let him borrow, and he scrambled after it and caught the edge before it could fall on the floor. He knew that he would never get the papers back in the proper order to make it seem as if no one had been scrutinizing them at all.
The file had actually told him very little. The Ministry had noted Malfoy's disappearance, and sent two Aurors to Malfoy Manor to question Narcissa. Her report was "satisfactory," they said, and confirmed that Draco Malfoy had not left the country. Then there had been a few desultory scouting expeditions abroad in Albania, supposedly Lucius Malfoy's first destination, and then nothing.
It didn't make sense.
Unless there were factions in the Ministry who didn't want the free Death Eaters caught.
Harry drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. Of course he knew that things hadn't just changed miraculously for the better when Kingsley took over. But knowing that was one thing and coming face-to-face with it was another.
The door squeaked. Harry jumped up and turned towards it. The undersecretary had assured him that the old wizard who used the office was out sick for the day, but this wouldn't be the first time Harry had had a plan involving the Ministry go horribly wrong.
He reached for his wand, but then heard the familiar voice of the undersecretary calling, "Mr. Potter? Are you done with the file? Only I should return it as soon as possible, they're doing all sorts of new filing checks and it'll be missed."
Harry relaxed and picked up the file. "I'll be out in a moment, Katie," he called, casting a spell that Hermione had taught him which removed all traces of his magical signature from the file. No reason for someone to get curious.
I'll be glad when I get Malfoy off my mind. All this concern over him is making me paranoid.
He unlocked the door and stepped through—nearly into Katie's arms. She gazed at him with horribly dazzled eyes, even compared to the way that Ginny used to look at him.
Harry swallowed. He hated it when people treated him as if he were some sort of great savior. He'd just done what he had to do, and it had been more dangerous and threatening and messy than anything else. He handed Katie back the file, dodged her when she would have grasped his wrist, and said, "Thanks for letting me look at it. I might have found the information I needed to stop Malfoy."
"Really?" Katie sidled a few steps nearer, a slight glamour spell sparkling off her earrings. They were kittens, which reminded Harry nauseatingly of Umbridge. "How wonderful."
"Er, yes." Harry took a few quick steps and managed to get around her. He didn't understand why he felt something like panic welling up in his chest. It couldn't just be the star-struck look; he'd managed to live with the fact that Ginny had a crush on him for being her hero.
Although she's looked at me like that a few times since the end of the war, and that was when my discomfort with her started…
Harry shook his head. He had enough thoughts that he couldn't explain floating around his head, he didn't need more.
"Thanks," he repeated, and then did something which, had he been less manly, would have been called fleeing.
He steadied himself as he walked to the lifts that would carry him out of the Ministry. He had a perfectly good excuse for being here. His training sessions had been separate from Ron's lately, as their mentors tried to accustom them to working with different partners, and so Ron didn't know for certain what time he was supposed to be home.
His course of action was depressingly clear now, though. He would get no answers except by going to Malfoy Manor himself.
"I don't really see how it's the end of the world, darling."
Draco groaned and draped his arm over his face. He didn't need to sleep during the day if he didn't want to, but even with the black curtains pulled tight around the windows of his bedroom and muffling spells doing all they could, he fancied he still caught bright, stinging sparks of light that hurt his eyes. "Because I don't know anyone who came back from the dead, Mother," he said. "And if that's the person I can best feed on, then it seems I'm having no better luck as a vampire than I did as a human."
"But of course you know someone who came back from the dead," Narcissa said.
Draco rolled over and dragged his arm from his face, staring. His mother sat on the edge of a chair, her hands shuffling through papers that represented the latest attempts by various people harmed during the war to claim attention and money from the Malfoy family. A small lamp sat next to her to provide light. She glanced up with a raised eyebrow when she felt Draco's gaze. "What is it?"
"I don't know anyone—"
"Harry Potter," Narcissa said, and then made a moue of distaste at the parchment in front of her. "Oh, dear. You would think that this awful woman, this Louise Fleming, would give up. I know very well that Lucius never targeted any half-bloods during the month of August 1997, because he was in the Manor with me."
"Harry Potter," Draco said in a tone of heavy sarcasm, determined to make her pay attention to him and his problems. They were serious, damn it.
"Yes, of course." Narcissa scratched a mark on the parchment with her quill, and then glanced at him curiously. "I was right there when the Dark Lord cast the Killing Curse. I saw it hit him. It did not bounce, as it did when he was a baby. It left no curse scar. But when I checked him for signs of life, he was breathing."
"That doesn't mean he actually died," Draco said with some asperity.
"You will forgive me, Draco," Narcissa said, narrowing her eyes a little, "for believing that I know what death by Killing Curse looks like."
Draco glanced away. He had forgotten, for a moment, how many prisoners his mother had seen tortured and then killed in front of her during the months when the Dark Lord lived here. It was something he always swore that he would never forget, but he always did. Becoming a vampire had changed his priorities immensely.
"But I—" he said, and then shook his head. "Even if that's true, it's even worse, because there's no way that he would agree to bond with me."
"How do you know that?" Narcissa turned over two papers and then made an exasperated little noise as they stuck together.
"He's my enemy, Mother," Draco said, and had to look away again, because the light of the lamp was making his eyes water. "Even during that last year of school, he never looked my way. He didn't fight with me, but he made it clear that he had no time for anyone who had fought on the Dark Lord's side."
"Of course you would expect him to feel that way," said his mother, and pulled the papers apart. "But you have suffered a horrible fate—although I do not think it is so horrible as you make it out to be—and your choices are rather limited. He's a hero, Draco, in the strictest sense of the term. He will respond to an appeal for his help better than he would respond to a bribe or antagonism."
"I don't think he can forget what we were like together, as boys," Draco whispered dejectedly.
"He is a young man now, in Auror training. And I don't see that you can do anything but ask him."
Draco sighed gustily. "Of course I can't. I'll write to him tomorrow."
His mother stood and came across the carpet to him, kissing his forehead gently. She had never shown any sign of flinching or distaste that his skin was now cold most of the time, and for that, among other things, Draco was intensely grateful to her. "That's my brave boy," she said, and patted his shoulder. "You've moped quite enough. Time to move on to other things now."
When she left, Draco scowled at the wall. It wasn't his fault he had become a vampire. It wasn't his fault that he was rather upset about his life changing so drastically.
But try as he might, he couldn't better the description of moping for his actions in the past several months. Maybe it was time to stop.