The Implications of Forever

Choices

——Chapter 4: Choices——

- - - 1998 - - -

The world moved in slow motion as Draco Malfoy watched Bellatrix Lestrange trace a knife across Hermione Granger's face like a paintbrush on canvas. Granger let out a soft sob. His aunt cackled and dragged the blade lower, down Granger's arm, to her wrist. Draco averted his eyes as Bellatrix positioned her knife in the center of Granger's forearm. He didn't need to see much more.

Bellatrix was going to carve a word into her arm and he feared he already knew what the wound would say.

"Stop! Please, stop! I'll tell you–I'll tell you what you want just sstop ! " Hermione Granger wailed.

He had never heard her scream before. Never seen her cry. She'd healed him after the Secumpsemptra incident with dry eyes and held him when he was the one sobbing. She was too strong to cry, he always admired that.

But here she was nearly limp underneath his aunt on the drawing room floor screaming in a way that shattered his body from the inside out. Soul, to heart, to muscle, to bone–the ache spread like cancer. There were twelve daggers in his chest and gravity was beginning to drag them down his spine. He stood in place–motionless.

He did nothing. He acted unfazed.

The world was not kind to blood traitors, but it was worse to their co-conspirators. The hypocrisy in the Sacred 28 meant that you were worthy of redemption if you simply came to terms with your wrong-doings and eradicated any evidence of it. The pureblood line had grown so small that shaving another name off the family tree was like admitting it was a dying race.

Draco's paternal grandmother courted a mudblood in her fifth year. The portrait of her looming over the man's rotting corpse was one of his grandfather's prized possessions. Like other paintings, Medusa roamed from frame to frame in the manor and shouted demeaning things at new guests, but the mudblood's body never moved. It was motionless, speechless: dead. Imprisoned on the canvas as a trophy that pure blood reigned supreme after all.

"Please, please, stop!" Granger's cries were guttural now.

His family would make him kill her. If he moved from this spot–if he breathed any harder than he already was–if he frowned–if he reached out for her–if he ran to her and held her in his arms like he so desperately wanted to. If he showed signs of concern or screamed at Bellatrix to get the fuck off of my witch you bloody psychopath –he would seal Granger's fate. Here in this moment, as she screamed for help and choked on her tears, the only way to save Hermione Granger was pray that Bellatrix got bored before she was dead.

"Stop! Please! Stop!" Granger pleaded. There was a boulder in Draco's throat now and he hoped no one else could see. "I didn't do anything!"

"Oh shut up, you filthy bitch." Bellatrix giggled. "I'm just having fun!"

"Please––" Granger croaked. Like she was calling out to him, and only him. He felt her voice in his bones.

Draco fought tears.

If he didn't kill her, they would kill him, and then he would be dead and Granger would be alone with no one to protect her from the world Voldemort was building. He had no choice. If he didn't kill her, she would want to be dead by the end of the war.

Draco feared the end of the war, because it meant total destruction of anything good in the world, or eternal damnation for himself and his family. Anyone with the Dark Mark would be guilty of treason in a post-Voldemort world, and anyone with a speck of joy in their eye would be guilty of vainglory in a post-Potter world. One day Draco would have to make a choice between the two futures and fight for the better option. But currently neither world would end well for him.