Disclaimer: None of it's mine—all belongs to J.K., Warner Bros., whoever else. This is my first HP fanfic in a LONG TIME… be gentle :)

Any Destiny At All, However Long and Complicated

()()()

At that time he must have considered himself happy, though profoundly he was not. (A luminous, fundamental night, still secret in the future, awaited him: the night on which he saw his own face at last, the night on which he heard at last his name. In all truth, that one night exhausts his story; or rather, one instant in that night, one act in that night, for acts are symbols of ourselves.) Any destiny at all, however long and complicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man once and for all knows who he is.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz"

()()()

Because her hearing had deteriorated so severely in the past year, the sound of the immense oaken door closing was vague, muzzled as if she were underwater, but it yet seemed decisive. The vast anteroom—it had always seemed to her too large, far too gargantuan for the scope of their lives—rang in the quiet as if the absence of noise were a tangible thing. After the presence of the varied voices of her children and grandchildren, after the hum of their concerned chatter, the sudden, silent solitude left her both relieved and bereft. She moved slowly these days, so the journey upstairs was a leisurely one, and she took the time to reflect on the evening.

They worried far too much. The house (She had never accustomed to calling it a manor. The word itself denoted pretension and she had always been cautious of any manifestation of it in her person.) was very empty, of course, but she didn't feel alone in the slightest. They often forgot that she did actually have friends, companions with whom she frequently spent the afternoon sitting in one of her favorite cafés. She very much enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren, and made sure to set aside an afternoon each week to visit with at least one of them. While her activity within the wizarding community had certainly diminished as the years wore on, she still had select causes which coaxed her from her routine. A routine, she had discovered, became increasingly vital in one's old age, but every now and again she found herself the recipient of some honor or the celebrated guest at some function, and her schedule had to be adjusted. She did not complain—it was more a privilege than a burden.

Their concern was touching and she was grateful for it, even if it exasperated her. She wasn't going to fall down the stairs, she wasn't going to slip in the bathtub. If she'd felt she needed additional alarm wards she would have erected them herself. Her brain had been spared the corrosion that her ears had so suffered, and she hoped they didn't need reminding that she was still the magical genius she had been in her youth.

She yet moved with some of the grace she had so enjoyed as a young woman, but surely slower. Her knees creaked only slightly as she lowered herself into the desk chair in her personal study, a small room that had once been the house elves' quarters. She had delighted in forcing him to transfigure it into something else, something different just for her, an additional victory after her liberation of the elves themselves, and until the ownership of house elves had been banned altogether she had lorded it over him like an insufferable twit.

A smile flitted across her creased lips as she remembered his sulking pout as his reluctant wand enchanted the ceilings higher, the walls into bookshelves, a dumpy bed into a gleaming mahogany desk. She yet felt the presence of his magic in the varnish as she smoothed her palms over the wood, musing over the papery, age-spotted skin that seemed to collapse against the tendons and bones visible on the backs of her hands.

She still preferred the use of parchment and quill, even after wizards had adopted muggle word-processors. Quills were nearly impossible to find nowadays, but she liked to imagine that her patronage kept in business the small Diagon Alley vintage calligraphy shop she visited every month. She picked up one of the objects in question, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger expertly as she smoothed a curling sheet of parchment before her.

Starting had been something she had been dreading for months. Memories, even after all the years that had passed, still caused her pain that was not insignificant. One never really stops mourning the passing of her soul mate. But so he had instructed, and so she began.

A false start, an ugly blotch of ink soaked into parchment by too-shaky hands, but yet she endured.

()()()

Hermione Granger was not a stupid person, nor could she be classified as ignorant (she tried to convince herself) simply because she preferred to propagate her own ignorance of the fact that her two closest friends had indeed become friends with Draco Malfoy. It was an easy thing to ignore—they seemed to be actively hiding the development from her, and she was not foolish enough to shatter the illusion when it was working out so nicely for all of them.

It was impossible, however, to pretend ignorance of the massive help he had been during the war and of the substantial risks he had taken—not unselfishly, she liked to remind anyone who mentioned it to her. Harry and Ron seemed continually surprised that she did not, in fact, consider it brave to defect to the light in order to shirk inevitable defeat. A small, secret, ashamed part of her occasionally admitted that playing the double agent had probably been an unnecessary risk that might have won them the war, but she tried to repress these annoyingly impartial thoughts as quickly as they arose. Someone who had been such a vile, bratty, vicious human being in his youth deserved no forgiveness in return.

(She had seemed unaffected, she knew, by that horrible, demeaning word, by the stark and unmerited hate in his eyes, but words leave scars in places even friendship's concern cannot see.)

So when she apparated to Godric's Hollow one Saturday (the war had ended—finally ended, not one of those pretend endings that were really just more beginnings—a scant few months before and she became unaccountably nervous if she did not see her friends and family every day), she could not help but react badly when she saw the three of them sitting around a television set watching muggle football. Her mouth seemed caught between dropping open and frowning disagreeably, and she could do nothing but stand there, unnoticed, as Harry explained, rather exasperated if she were to judge by his tone.

"So the signal is broadcast at the station and it travels through the air to us. The telly picks it up and shows it on the screen. It's really quite cool how muggles go about things without magic, right?"

Malfoy looked extremely skeptical, although he seemed to be managing to keep his customary sneer at bay. "Why don't they just go there instead of pretending like they're there? It's really stupid and dishonest, if you ask me. They're changing a real experience into something anyone can see if they have this machine." He added, resentfully, "And this is nothing like Quidditch, Potter."

Ron was smiling in a dazed sort of way as he watched the match. Harry appeared to be considering Malfoy's opinion. "Transportation is much more difficult in the muggle world, they can't just wave their wands and go someplace. Honestly, I've never thought about the integrity of television, and the fact that you've been the one to bring it up is downright bonkers if you ask me." He was grinning, but Hermione noticed that it didn't touch at all the heavy shadows that had settled in his eyes in the past year.

She felt a little uncomfortable eavesdropping and cleared her throat just loudly enough that they noticed but not with enough force to startle them. The last time she caught Ron unawares his curse had nearly taken off her right arm. She noticed Malfoy jerked in his seat anyway. "Hey Hermione," chimed her two friends.

"What's with the telly?"

"Draco'd never seen one before."

"Honestly." Her tone was disdainful, and she saw from the corner of her eyes Malfoy's gaze narrow unpleasantly and noted that the sneer had returned.

"Shut it, Granger." She suspected he was restraining the vehemence of his language for the benefit of the two boys (men) at his side, who studiously ignored this interchange with the air of a pair who'd had a lot of practice.

"Prat."

"Twat."

She thought it rather charitable that she decided to take that as an insult to her intelligence rather than as a commentary on her anatomy, and with a huff went off to the kitchen for something to eat. Arguing with Malfoy always worked up an appetite, and these days she found that she was eating an awful lot.

"You know, just because I saved your life once doesn't mean you should put all that effort into civility, Granger. We wouldn't want you to strain yourself." The sheer quantity of sarcasm in his tone was impressive, and she attempted to roll her eyes at him without turning around so as to avoid further conversation, craning her neck awkwardly and only succeeding in making herself feel more idiotic. He had left Harry and Ron to their game, clearly uninterested in any activity that didn't include death-defying heights and murderous inanimate objects.

She hated when he brought that up. It was a secret they shared, clandestine and particularly mortifying for them both, which he only occasionally mentioned when he wanted to really persecute her. Each chose to avoid any unnecessary association with the other, and acknowledgement of their unlikely history was in absolute opposition to this unspoken pact. She knew that only when the temptation of doling out harassment was especially strong did he resort to mention of the event. She must have done something to really piss him off.

"Well you make it so easy with your pleasant discourse," she retorted, attempting to curb the venom in her voice. Her dislike for him was so palpable that she became visibly flustered, and the knife with which she had been slicing cheese ended up slicing her finger instead. She stuck the cut in her mouth and sucked. "Ouch."

He was grinning unpleasantly as if he took a special brand of joy in her pain. She glowered at him, and he seemed to restrain himself. In fact, he began to look decidedly uncomfortable—shuffling his feet a bit in an uncharacteristic way, shifting his eyes about like a large, nervous dog—and her curiosity peaked despite herself. "Look, Granger," he said in a more reasonable tone, lowering his voice and casting a shifty glance over his shoulder to where the TV blared as someone scored a goal, "we don't like each other and we probably never will, but I'm really trying with Scarhead and Weasel King, all right? And I'd appreciate it if you left off with the grimacing and whinging while they're around. Those particular charms of yours can really suck the enjoyment out of a room."

She was so astonished that she just blinked at him for several seconds before a thought that seemed to her both very funny and horribly sad occurred to her.

He has no one else in the world.

A rise of traitorous pity rose in her breast and she tamped it down with her customary stubbornness. She knew he had been left in an odd limbo after the war, neither side really accepting of either his criticisms or his aid, but she now realized she had not understood the true circumstances of his situation at all. Recovering, she reacted instinctively: "Well you could start by not calling them Scarhead and Weasel King." It was said haughtily but without rancor.

He appeared to be mollified by her lack of malice, and relaxed visibly. "Pet names, Granger. Just be glad I don't call you—"

She felt suddenly like choking on her own breath. "Mudblood?" She spat the word out as if it burned her throat and tongue, as if it were turpentine.

The teasing glint fled from his eyes, and his mouth snapped shut into a thin, white line. They stared at one another for some time, eyes locked over the span of their conflict and their prejudice, before he spoke, quiet and spiteful, with a smooth, predatory air that reminded her of his father. "No. No… I was going to say Insufferable Bookworm, but if you'd rather the other, I might oblige—"

The knife made a clatter that was almost riotous when it hit the tile counter; she had thrown it with such force that it actually chipped an area of yellowing grout. Staring evenly at him, ignoring Harry and Ron's sudden silence in the next room, she disapparated into an accusatory crack, into a void.

()()()

From the desk of Hermione Malfoy, April 14, 2069.

The account I presently relate has been transcribed from the personal writings of my late husband, Draco A. B. Malfoy. He asked that before his death, upon the event of the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Lord Voldemort (sheer coincidence demands that I forsake any premeditated relation to the unhappy fact that this year also marks the fifth since Harry Potter's death), I release to the public a story that has been both much speculated on and frequently exaggerated to ridiculous proportions.

I am well aware that over the past three-quarters of a century the events leading up to and including the Horcrux War have transformed into a sort of mythology. A combination of the varying authenticity of history textbooks and the Wizarding Britain's cultural memory has molded that terrible time into a kind of communal scar that we display proudly as if it raged across our foreheads, as if we all carried the mark my old friend was made to suffer since infancy. But here Draco has lain bare the facts, his facts, and nothing more. It is my most fervent hope that they are taken as such and not as dogma, pretense, or politics.

The entirety of Draco's adult life may be considered an attempt to rectify the harm he believed himself to have caused as a young man. I profoundly believe that renewed analysis of his many donations, foundations, and the overall dispersion of his wealth throughout his lifetime is pertinent in light of this heretofore unknown recount of a particularly dark period of life, a period that, as far as I know, he shared with another soul only one time in his long-short, happy-tragic, terrible-wonderful life.

()()()

She clutched the pieces of her wand in crabbed fingers. Her flesh was near frozen, the rain sucking warmth from her like it had lungs. She ran hard, her breath stinging along with her eyes, frantic as she looked everywhere for them: the roofs of looming shops, down alleyways, in the mottled reflections in puddles. Hogsmeade bore none of the charm and memories she knew from what seemed like her childhood, even though she recalled smiling and linking arms with her friends as they walked these cobblestones not two years before.

She was fucked, and she knew it. Death Eaters enjoyed populating Hogsmeade heavily, as if gloating over their recent successful invasion and subsequent occupation required corporeal reminders. It had seemed a simple reconnaissance mission—get in, look around, note their numbers, and get out—but they had underestimated Voldemort's manpower and were now paying the price dearly. She had been separated from the others (George Weasley, Lupin, Tonks, and Kingsley) nearly half an hour back and was starting to panic. She heard Death Eater voices echo through the crooked streets of the town and ran harder, turning towards the outskirts and aiming for the moors so she could lose herself in the heath and heather.

She turned a corner and had to stifle a shout when she saw a cluster of dark-robed men at the end of the alley. The rain disguised the sound of her footsteps but not the paleness of her face, and she saw one of them sniff oddly and then move his head towards her, wolf-like and predatory. His yellow eyes lit upon hers; recognition and dread drained her face ashen.

Greyback.

She didn't bother with stealth, just spun and ran flat out, instinctively aiming her ruptured wand over her shoulder and rasping a curse. It shot pathetic gold sparks in her wake and she heard their laughter and footsteps behind her.

She was not athletic and they were gaining on her. A blockage rose in her chest—she couldn't tell if it was breathlessness or a sob or some combination of the two. She thought she was crying but with the rain it was impossible to tell.

Just as she was about to resign, about to turn and fight with whatever she could, with her fists and teeth and flesh, she turned down another alley in time to just barely see a dark arm shoot out and grab the neck of her jacket. She was jerked nearly off her feet as someone dragged her into an alcove, one of the many architectural misadventures of the village, and cast a hurried but effective disillusionment charm over their location. She opened her mouth to scream but the beginnings of the sound were muffled by a cold hand that clapped over her face. She bit it, hard.

"Fuck, Granger!" It was whispered but he managed to convey his significant displeasure all the same.

Draco Malfoy looked terrible but he certainly fit the part. His black robes hung, lank with the rain, from his shoulders and that distinctive mask dangled down his back from its string around his throat. The familiar garb repulsed her, and she stepped away from him in her incredulity. "M-Malfoy?"

He seemed to be reinforcing their position, erecting what she thought were wards of some kind. He was clenching and releasing the hand that she had bitten, his left. "Yeah," he said lowly, obviously as unhappy about the situation as she was. "Who was after you?"

"Um… Greyback… Mcnair?" She thought, adrenaline clouding her memory as she breathed in gasps, in soft, traumatic whimpers. "Dolohov and Yaxley, I think."

"There are thirteen more, including Bellatrix and my father. What were you thinking, coming here? Monumentally stupid," he spat angrily, accusing as he glared down at her, meeting her eyes for perhaps the first time. "They like to linger after a victory. You're just lucky The Dark Lord isn't here."

"We thought—"

"Why didn't anyone check with me beforehand?"

"Ask Harry," she ground out, irritation finally eclipsing her fear. "It was his idea. We thought that after a week most of them would be gone, and we wanted to assess the damage and their numbers."

He still looked furious, but apparently opted for relative peace as he took in her disheveled, terrified appearance. "We'd best stay here for a while, until they calm down. Where are the rest?"

She shook her head, entirely forlorn, and to her absolute horror she felt an unbidden burning in her retinas. He either pretended not to notice or the rain masked her affliction, and he turned his attention from her to stare strangely into the adjacent alleyway, tense like a tracking hound.

His dislike for her was tangible, and she abruptly wondered why he had intervened and was even tempted, despite herself, to ask him. Hermione now took the time to note the subtle changes in him since she'd seen him last, at the end of their sixth year, before. His hair was longer, no longer meticulously trimmed and parted as it had been in their school days. He was taller and the lanky boyness of his limbs had filled out. His sturdier build seemed stark against the angularity and shadows of his face, which told of sleepless nights and appetite loss. She was astute enough to discern the exhaustion with which he leant one shoulder against the brick wall of their hiding place.

Hermione knew that both Ron and Harry, along with other, more senior members of The Order, were in frequent contact with Malfoy, but she had fortunately been spared that particular pleasure. The information both he and Snape provided was invaluable, so when Malfoy showed up on The Order's doorstep thirteen months before and convincingly renounced his allegiance to the Dark by offering his services as a double agent they had—after admittedly much argument and near physical confrontations—accepted his proposal. The physical toll of the job was evidenced before her eyes, but sympathy, usually so quick to rise in her chest, lay dormant. She preferred to forget Malfoy even existed, even if the information with which they planned and strategized their actions was often his. She'd been rather successful so far—she'd not seen him once in the two years since war broke out—but the reality of him was, needless to say, an unavoidable concession as he had just saved her life.

She realized abruptly that her knees were shaking and she slid down against the wall to sit unceremoniously in the middle of a puddle. He shot a side-glance in her direction but his customary sneer was absent. She almost wished for its appearance, if only for a brief streak of normalcy, of something from before, in the hectic, broad brushstrokes of her life.

"Why didn't you curse them?" he asked suddenly.

She realized that she still held the useless bits of her wand in her clenched fingers and showed them to him with a sigh that turned into an embarrassing, hitched blubber. It was like she could feel the magic sifting from between her fingertips, like her essence was escaping along with the threads of Dragon heartstring that splayed over her palm.

His face was neutral, but she knew no wizard could remain completely impassive at the sight of a broken wand. "How?"

"One of them cursed me and I hit the wall." As she mentioned it the sharp throbbing of her shoulder resurfaced and she grimaced, bringing her hand up to flutter uselessly over the aching region. She pushed down the collar of her shirt to see the florid, purple-green bruise already spilling over the entire dome of her left shoulder. She looked up to find that he was watching her, but he turned his face away after barely a moment's eye contact.

A thought occurred to her as she righted her shirt. "Are you in communication with Snape, by the way? Moody has been trying to reach him—he said he had some information for us last time he contacted us but that was three weeks ago…"

He looked at her strangely, as if he were attempting to determine whether she was intentionally trying to fuck with him. "None of you have heard? He's in The Dark Lord's dungeon, awaiting questioning." Upon seeing her confused stare, he continued. "He suspects."

"Does he suspect you?"

"Of course not."

His tone was sure, even cocky, but she thought perhaps it was a front that would break under more scrutiny than she was willing to give. He seemed to perceive her disbelief and dropped his eyes. "You're sitting in a puddle, Granger," he said, an almost cruel humor in his voice.

She hadn't noticed, and abruptly rose, shivering as the frigid water dripped down the back of her thighs and calves. The silence between them was extraordinarily uncomfortable, and she almost (almost) wished for the return of his pseudo-colleagues just to break the thickly accumulating tension. In her periphery she saw him raise his left hand to pass it over his forehead, perhaps wiping away the raindrops or something else, and his sleeve slipped down.

She stared at the black, necrotizing stain against his white skin that this movement revealed, her eyes frozen and repulsed. She all at once felt ill, and he must have sensed her disgust because he turned his face to her. She watched his jaw work under the skin, watched the tension and pull of the joint there, but he lowered his hand so that necrosis was hidden from her once again.

And she didn't like to be reminded, and she hated the sight of it, and she wished he would go away.

"I think I hear them calling your name," he said, half to break the line of their discomfort. She trained her hearing into the harsh patter of the rain but it was useless. He had fished from a secret pocket in his robes a familiar, large coin and tapped it with his wand. Moments later George and Tonks appeared at the end of their alley, looking anxious. Invisibility yet shrouded them and Hermione made to step from that concealment, but Malfoy grabbed her elbow with a grip that stung. "I wouldn't, not yet."

He began to murmur spells that Hermione recognized as highly advanced, and she felt the enchantment melt from around them, felt the shimmer of his magic dissolve. She looked at his face, rather close to hers now, and faltered. "Er… thanks, Malfoy."

All at once he looked, for the first time that night, like the awkward teenager that he was, and she felt a creaking pain, unpracticed and illogical, in her chest. Looking everywhere but her, he replied, "I have to get back. They'll be wondering." And suddenly he disappeared with a sound that made her start despite its familiarity.

George and Tonks asked her how she had gotten away from them, and clucked sympathetically when she showed them the hopeless flotsam of her wand.

()()()

September 2053, Wiltshire

It's not as if I don't know what's been said about me. In the near sixty years since the night my true life began I've been both exalted and—horribly and perhaps rightfully—slandered, depending on who you talk to. I write now not to continue this trend nor to further inflate my own already stout ego, but to instead tell a story, the true story, of my redemption. The word "redemption" seems silly and theatrical, but I know of no other word that accurately describes my experiences.

They keep telling me to write an autobiography, to go through my life step-by-step until it's hashed out in excruciating detail. I always reply that not only do I find that process entirely unnecessary, but also that the only sort of people who'd want to read such a thing surely belong locked away in St. Mungo's. It is an uneventful life except for a few select years in the middle, entirely boring save for the circumstances into which I have been thrown.

I read once somewhere (the source escapes me in my ever-advancing age) that our idea of a biography may be redefined to encompass only the one instant—a night, a moment at dusk, a particular Sunday morning—in which our destiny presents itself to us. What came before and what comes after is secondary and accidental, except that which is necessary knowledge for our comprehension of the moment. The choice we make and the measures we take upon this manifestation of our destiny are what determine us, what determine who we are. Those who witness a man at this moment, this all-important instant of his life, may know him better than his wife, his children or his mother, simply because who he is is defined and revealed in that time. So a biography in the traditional sense of the word is superfluous and self-indulgent, when all that really matters is what we do in a miniscule fraction of our life span.

My story lends itself particularly well to this theory. Before that night in the astronomy tower in June of 1997 I was one person, and after, another. What came before were the misadventures of a silly, over-eager, ignorant boy; what came in the years after was the gradual realization of an emerging young man, neither of which are particularly interesting or essential information. To me, what counts and what I will enumerate in the coming pages is the instant, the mere seconds during which I realized, with my wand trained on Albus Dumbledore, that I could not kill for the cause to which I had thought myself so devoted.

And that—not my service to The Order during the war, not falling in love with my wife, as so many have speculated—was the beginning of the frame-shift, of the revolution.

()()()

A/N: This is a bit of an experiment. The story told in the present (or future, as it is) is inspired entirely from Borges, from the multiple, layered narrations (as can be seen in "The Garden of Forking Paths", among others; I actually drew a diagram to sort everything out in my head because I'm a dork) to the tone to the theory Draco lays out at the end. You can all thank the Borges seminar I'm taking this semester for this weirdness. The bits in italics are kind of the antithesis of Borges: more emotional, eventually more romantic. I know I've been inactive in this fandom FOREVER, so I hope you guys enjoy this. I have more written so chapters shouldn't be too long in coming, and you can probably expect it to be around 5-6 chapters long unless I get carried away.

I've been looking back at my old fics (cringing, mostly), and it's very interesting to see how much my writing has changed since, for instance, The Niezsche Classes. Possibly more pretentious and less instinctual, now, I think.

If y'all are looking for a new fic in a new fandom to explore, I'm also writing Time Immemorial, a Bourne fic, that's really fun.

BTW I'm kind of ignoring the idea of wizards living so much longer than humans because it creeps me out :). Sorry for such a long author's note.