Aftermath (Drarry)

Chapter 3: "Maladies Of The Mind"

DRACO:

It was a few weeks into the new term and Draco was feeling worse and worse by the day. Guilt was weighing him down like the infinite darkness of a black hole. Everywhere he went he was greeted with glares and whispers. A small part of his brain begged him to take up McGonagall's offer of someone to talk to; the rest of it knew that doing that would result in the loss of the little dignity he had left after the war.

"I'm going to the library. See if I can finish that potions essay Slughorn wants by tomorrow," he told his friends one Monday night at dinner after he had finished his food.

"Draco Malfoy without his Potions done? Maybe the end is nigh after all," Blaise said as Draco stood up from the table. Draco rolled his eyes at him and left the Great Hall. The truth was, he had finished the essay days ago. He was going to the library to find any books that would help him stop feeling enough guilt for all the death eaters combined. Not that most of them felt any guilt about what they had done, of course – most of them were safely locked up in Azkaban without any regrets at all.

When he reached the library, he discovered that it was not as deserted as he'd hoped it would be: there were three Ravenclaw girls that looked to be in their first or second year sat at one of the tables in the Potions section. It's a good job I've done that Potions essay then isn't it, he thought as he walked past them.

He chose a table as far away from them as possible and put his bag down. He wasn't quite sure what exactly he was looking for, so he started looking in the household section of the library. These shelves contained books such as Magical Methods Of Maintaining Milk (Draco had no idea why a school library needed a book about breastfeeding) and Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide To Household Pests (Draco also had no idea why anyone would read that).

After he had looked through these shelves a while longer, the only book Draco had found that even looked like it would be any use to him was Common Household Ailments and How To Fix Them but, upon an inspection of the index, he found that this book just contained things like headaches and minor burns. Draco, knowing he wouldn't find anything else of use in this section, moved on to the Divination section. Most of the books here were rather woolly and there was nothing that could help him.

Draco knew when dinner was over because a trickle of students started to arrive at the library to work on last-minute homework before curfew. He wandered around the library looking at the names of the sections, trying to decide where he would find a book that would help. Eventually, he decided that the healing section might yield some results and went to look in there.

The books in this section were a mixture of old and new. He flicked through a promising looking book about injuries of war, but it was very dated and, from what he could make out from the worn and yellowing pages, it looked like all it contained were faded drawings of gory injuries. Draco shut the book in disgust and carried on looking. Next, he picked up a relatively new book about head injuries and flicked through it. It was all about cracked skulls and brain damage and the 'delicate art of healing the brain' which, although he thought it was quite interesting, wasn't quite what he was looking for.

Eventually, in the very corner of a shelf, Draco found a book entitled Maladies of the Mind which said on the back that it was about 'the topic of mental health that is so taboo and yet so prevalent in the wizarding world'. Draco flipped it open to the index and read the chapter titles. The chapter that caught his eye was the one entitled Dealing With Your Feelings. That looked like exactly what he needed so he took the book (along with the one about head injuries which he vowed to read later) back to his table and sat down.