A/N: Novel length DHr. Let's see how this plot works out!
Disclaimer: Not mine. Doesn't get any simpler.
Draco Malfoy stood before the silent grave of his mother.
He stood empty handed and pensive, staring down at the words engraved on her white marble tombstone. He remembered fighting his bastard of a father for the decision of what to put on her epitaph. Lucius had won. All that was left of his mother's earthly remains had been entombed under a mass of near incomprehensible Latin words…but Draco had the last word.
When his father had died, murdered at the hand of the very master he chose to serve for failing a mission, Draco had made sure that one more word was added to that pristine slate of stone.
Mother.
He never needed to say more. Simply said, Narcissa Malfoy had always been, first and foremost, his mother.
The rest of the wizarding world might have thought of her to be the same cruel and vicious kind of person that Lucius had been but to Draco, no woman could have ever compared to her. No other woman could ever surpass her kindness or her beauty.
He felt that same void of despair as he thought of her buried in the cold ground, her grave sheltered only by tall Grecian pillars of the temple, in this desolate graveyard. Her only company were generations of long dead Malfoys each as cruel as the next, fixated on pureblood mania, just as his father had been.
The corners of his lips curled in a snarl as his eyes slid to his father's grave. Right next to his mother's. Even in death, it seemed, Narcissa Malfoy could not escape the grasp of Lucius, a man who had destroyed both her body and her soul.
Teeth clenched, he forced away the tears that threatened to fall. She shouldn't have died but she had refused to give up her son, her only son, to those maniacs, refused to allow Lucius to take him to kneel before that over-rated half-blood.
Draco had been saved that night.
The dark side had long been fighting the losing battle, you only had to look at Lord Voldemort's track record and it became rather obvious who would succeed in the end. Not one to disappoint, Potter had indeed out done himself, not only defeating the dark lord but rounding up most of his followers in one foul swoop. The feat accomplished mainly because of Granger's ingenious mind.
All that time, all the time that the second Great War had raged, while his mother had been murdered by Lucius and he in turn murdered by Voldemort, all that time, Draco had been in Italy, with Blaise at the Zabini family estate.
Wisely, both Slytherins had chosen to stay neutral, neither wishing nor willing to take a side in a war which devastated the English wizarding community. That year, muggles were alerted to the existence of the magical community. How could they not be aware when one half of the London Metropolis had been devastated by an explosion of atomic proportions? The order did a magnificent job of covering it all up though.
A meteor.
Thrown off course by a collision with another meteor somewhere in space.
So for muggles, 2007 became the year of hysteria and mourning, just as it had for the witches and wizards of England and all that time, Draco had dwelled and brooded under the warm Florentine sun, all the while wondering if his fellow housemates had chosen the right side, whether they had survived all the small skirmishes which came before the final battle.
When it finally ended, when the silence had stretched across the ancient grounds of Hogwarts, after the dark lord had fallen and his followers captured, he and Blaise had listened to the live broadcast on the wireless wizarding network and all they had heard was that same eerie silence experienced by those on the battlegrounds, they had known the answer.
