Chapter Text
August, 1999
There were two guiding principles Draco Malfoy came to live by in the months after the war. The first was to, in all situations, do as close to the opposite of what his father would do as he could imagine. The second, along similar lines, was to do the thing that would most upset or confuse his sixteen-year-old self if he were to steal a Time Turner.
Leaving the Manor was a given: it fulfilled both briefs. Before the Aurors had led him away to serve life in Azkaban for forty-seven counts of attempted murder, accessory to murder, treason, affiliation with terrorist groups, and use of Dark magic including the Imperius and Cruciatus curses, Lucius had put his hands on Draco’s shoulders and said, you are the Lord of Malfoy Manor now. Guard it and keep it well, for your children and your children’s children. No I love you, no I’m sorry, not even a look after your mother, just the order to mind a crumbling and bloodstained legacy. Draco had watched him go, head bowed in a display of contrition for the court reporters, and hoped he would rot.
His own trial was little more than a formality; everything he had done while under the age of criminal responsibility had been added to his father’s charges instead. He and his mother were convicted of concealment of known Dark wizards, fined five hundred Galleons each, and faced no further restrictions. You are free to travel abroad, the judge had told him, and I suggest that you do.
He’d gone home, spun the globe in his father’s study until his finger landed on somewhere that seemed far enough away, and started packing.
The Statute of Secrecy largely predated Britain’s age of empire, and the Sacred Twenty-Eight had always accordingly seen the whole imperial venture as something crassly and essentially Muggle. Even the globe, which had belonged to Draco’s great-great grandfather Hadrian Malfoy, was an oddity: dating from the mid-nineteenth century, it charted a world far more known and mapped and named than the seventeenth-century atlases in the Manor’s library that Draco had grown up reading. Only with them side by side did he realise that the vague shape of New Holland and disjointed sketches of Staten Landt coastline were Australia and New Zealand.
Most of the Sacred Twenty-Eight had at least one eccentric ancestor who took an interest in the colonial world under the guise of prudent investment; the Parkinsons’ was widowed matriarch Emily Parkinson, who left her son and heir with the estate and sailed to the Americas in 1733. She had bought property, including a house in upstate New York which had stayed in the family for two hundred and fifty years and which Pansy’s parents moved into soon after the war ended. The Malfoys’ was Hadrian, whose interests lay in the Antipodes; his fascination had lasted some forty years until the death of his second son in the Victorian goldfields in 1862, at which point he entrusted his property investments to the estate manager and never spoke of it again.
Pansy stayed behind until Draco’s trial was over and spent her last night in England at Malfoy Manor helping him drink with intent.
“Sydney,” she read, swirling Firewhisky in a glass, a ledger of Malfoy estate holdings open on her lap. “I’ve heard of that, at least. One hundred and seventy acres pastoral land near Goulburn. Where the fuck is Goulburn?”
“No idea,” Draco said, tapping one of the Sydney property entries. “We’re selling this one; apparently it’ll cover all the fines.”
“Bowral,” she continued. “Do you think that’s bow like take a bow, or bow like bow and arrow? You’ve got fifty acres there, either way. Where do you think you’ll go?”
“Fucked if I know,” Draco said honestly, peering over her shoulder. “Well, that one was divided up in 1890 for my great-grandfather’s sister, so I’ve actually only got twenty acres in Bowral.”
“Sydney has a Floo terminal and a Portkey authority,” Pansy said. “I’ve seen it on the lists in Magical Transport. So it must have a decent wizarding population, at least.”
“Aren’t you scared?” Draco blurted from his alcohol-loosened tongue. “Leaving. The unknown. All that.”
“Shitless,” Pansy said, matter-of-fact. “But it’s better than the known, isn’t it?”
They stared into the flickering glow of the fireplace. It was warm outside, the wrong time of year to have a fire at all, but something cold had embedded itself into the heart of the Manor and it was always freezing within its walls. A reminder of what they were leaving behind and why; the necessity of it.
“Blaise and his mum are going to Milan,” Pansy said, watching the flames. “Theo has cousins in South Africa. The Greengrasses left for Canada a few months ago. I don’t know if any of us will see each other again.”
“I think I’m going to change my name,” Draco told the flames. “Disappear.”
“You can change it to Harry fucking Potter for all I care,” Pansy said, “but don’t you dare disappear, not from me.”
“Never from you,” Draco promised, and they clasped hands like they’d done as children, playacting at Unbreakable Vows.
A week later, Draco woke up in the Manor for the last time. He had an early morning Portkey to Sydney, an address on a piece of parchment — one unoccupied flat in a building owned by the Malfoy estate — and a backpack with an Undetectable Extension Charm that contained everything he could possibly think to want from the life he was leaving behind; it barely needed the charm.
The study was bathed in soft light when he entered, still hesitant as though it didn’t fully belong to him. There was one task left, which he’d left to the last minute because he had no fucking clue — the nomination of someone to manage, care for, and profit handsomely from the estate in his absence.
For reasons he didn’t understand at the time and wouldn’t come to understand in the years following, Draco picked up his quill and wrote, in his cramped teenage cursive, Harry James Potter.