Second Chances (Drarry)

Post War Decisions

A muggle therapist.

It was ironic. Scratch that, it was absolutely ridiculous.
Draco Lucius Malfoy, sitting in a clean sunlit room, listening to a bunch of Muggles telling him their ridiculous problems. Him, Draco Malfoy, giving THEM advise on how to manage their lives, while his own had fallen apart during a war they weren't even aware had happened. He advised them to talk to someone, to HIM, when he himself refused to do the same. He advised them to face their fears, when he kept avoiding his own.

It was a punishment, of sorts. The kind he had chosen for himself. It was only appropriate, considering all the things he had done. Or rather the things he hadn't done. It was a punishment and a redemption in one. It was an odd sort of balance he had created for himself, as he tried desperately to atone his sins.

Death eaters hated Muggles, didn't listen to them, didn't care for their problems. They killed them. They laughed at their problems, their feelings and their deaths. Draco bore the same Mark, like a reminder and a warning. But the Muggles didn't know that, did they?

Draco was trying to face it. His prejudices, his mistakes, his sins. To understand where he went wrong, he needed to change perspective. Only to find that the people he used to look down upon went through similar horrors as he did. They went through losing people, being abused and violated by family and friends, being tortured, kidnapped and abducted. Surviving wars and losing their homes. Most of the time, it weren't even the results of war. He had so much in common with them that at some point, he found the lines blurring.

It was eye opening. In a sense that it shouldn't be. Draco had always known there was something off about the ideology he had been taught as a child. Despite the fact that he had clung to it, to his privileges, because they made him feel superior to others. If he was by nature better than Muggles or Muggleborns, then he didn't have anything to fear. Turns out, being privileged and rich didn't mean you were safe.

Muggles were living beings, too. They weren't even aware of the magical side of the world. Of the war that Draco had been in. They knew little to nothing. And now they considered themselves safe in his presence. They had no idea what he'd done. What his past self would have tried to do to them.

It was healing in the same sense that it hit it home. His mistakes, his choices, his pain.

Eventually, Draco had to realise that he wasn't alone. And it was the people whose trauma he had caused that made him feel like he belonged.

His patients were mainly muggles sent to him by the St. Mungo. Some of them had been obliviated, and Merlin, did Draco suffer after the first time he met one of them. Turns out, amnesia doesn't always last forever. Turns out their perfect, magical cures destroyed those people's lives! Once the magic had somewhat faded into normalcy, the trauma would resurface without the memories. These people suffered and had no chance to figure out why. Without the why, there was no because, and with no because, there was no solution, no way to cope. There never would be, because the healers at St. Mungo's thought that ignorance is bliss. It's a curse, and it was protected under the laws meant to protect the magical community from being discovered by the no-mages.

Draco often had to swallow around his own pain when he faced a new patient. Had to remind himself that he was here to make amends. Not, to make them bear his own burdens.

Even when Harry fucking Potter himself had invited him to become an Auror alongside himself, he had declined.

Saint Potter.

Draco's relationship to Potter, the hero of hero's in the magical world, was a difficult one. Draco's own actions against him were more than questionable. Potter's however, Potter's actions were beyond honourable and in Draco's case entirely undeserved.