Other Lives

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[AN: Hey, guys! I'm coming at ya with a new story to ring in the upcoming new year! I hope you like it! P.S. If anyone would be SO KIND to make a cover for this, I would APPRECIATE IT SO MUCH!]

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Goyle told them it was real gold—it had to be, what other way would they mark the occasion?

Draco had scoffed at his wide-eyed, pink-faced naivety as he brought it under the light of Zabini's wand, a satisfied laugh coming out as bursts of air at the way it glimmered. Draco might have been sat across a large glass table, victim to shadows and their empty dinner plates in between them, but he knew it was not real gold. He wanted to tell Goyle just that so he would stop twisting and turning it in different angles trying to find its worth, but if Zabini could keep that dim smile on his own face, holding his tongue as he pointed his wand in whichever degree Goyle needed, then he, too, could let their friend believe their lives actually mattered to the world around them.

Pouring another drink into his glass, Draco rubbed his thumb over his own yellow coin in his left hand. He pressed his skin deep into the ridges of the Ministry of Magic emblem, covering the X on each scale. He raised the glass of whiskey to his mouth, swinging it back just as he released his thumb over the coin. The imprint was now on his skin—XX. He reached for the bottle again, filling his glass as he narrowed tired, silver eyes at the mark that was already starting to disappear.

If only it had disappeared from the rest of his skin that easily—if only it had disappeared from his mind that easily, too.

But it was not about forgetting, it was about living despite it.

XX. Twenty years.

That was the accomplishment.

That was what the Ministry of Magic was commending when early morning it sent out hundreds of owls carrying gold coins to the ex-Death Eaters that had been reformed for twenty years now. It came with short, condescendingly eager notes from the Minister of Magic Percy Weasley and Head Luna Lovegood of the Department of Rehabilitation For Former War Criminals (Death Eaters)—eager for them to maintain the righteous, just path they had embarked on since the defeat of the Dark Lord, eager for them to remember they were fortunate to get a second chance, eager for them not only to never forget who they could be, but who they had been before.

"We don't need a sobriety chip for that," Zabini had said to Draco after Goyle had gone through the Floo in the Malfoys' drawing room. He tossed the metal coin in the air, catching it with the reflexes of their Quidditch days playing for Slytherin House. When it landed in his palm, the smirk that had tugged at the corner of his mouth disappeared, the bright jade in his eyes darkening to a forest green that sometimes haunted them in their sleep from the monsters that had emerged from within. "We know it's been twenty years. After all, we see the devil every time we look in the mirror."

"What do you think Goyle sees?" Draco had laughed, the sound and grin on his mouth thinly veiled to let even Blaise Zabini see through what he actually wanted to say but was still too much of a coward to say after two decades.

It was only after Zabini had secured his cloak on his shoulders and walked through the Floo that Draco allowed himself to even think it: they were prisoners sentenced outside of Azkaban. And the coins were a reminder of how much time they had been serving.

But the joke was on the Ministry—Draco wore the reminder every day. They couldn't see it, couldn't materialize it into a fake gold coin heavy enough to represent the weight of the last twenty years. Yes, he saw the devil in the mirror every day, but it was in his sleep, too—in the darkened halls of Malfoy Manor, in the silver scars his body never properly healed, in the pictures of his youth that survived the fire he lit one drunken night, in the way Goyle still talked to Crabbe as if he stood beside him, in the thick, black blotch of a Dark Mark Draco tried to carve out during another drunken stupor, in the way fear abruptly takes his lungs hostage, subduing him to a shaking mess, in the way people still walk around him like he's a plague, never lingering too long in his same space, in the cellar of Malfoy Manor, where he can still see the faces of prisoners lined up to get tortured or killed by the other devils, in the way he can still smell the stench of death after he was made to move the bodies, in Luna Lovegood's blue eyes that he can still see bruised purple and red, consequence of being brave, in the way Rolf Scamander still pulls her to his side when Draco encounters them, dutiful, protective husband until his last day, in the way he aggressively washes his hands, one, two, three, four times under burning water that still runs red from his own blood and all the others', in the way the Department of Rehabilitation promised it'd get better, but grief is a monster of another magnitude that knows no defeat, in the walls of the drawing room in Malfoy Manor that are still stained with blood and echo the cries of Innocence's death.