the_debt_of_time

pain, and angrily throw things—and he did—afterward when the Mark was still not
completely gone.
Bitter, Draco unstrapped his arm and pulled it to his chest, hissing at the pain. He
glared at Mia, despite knowing that she did not hurt him on purpose.
She handed him the awaiting Pain Relief Potion, which he swallowed immediately.
"What was he like?" Draco blurted out when the silence was not being filled with
shared thoughts on Ministry regulations or arguments over the best way to approach
Advanced Arithmancy or rune translations.
Mia looked up at Draco, surprised by the question. If there was any one person she
had reconnected with since her return who never asked about the past, it was Draco. Sirius
and Remus loved to talk about the good old days. Harry wanted to know every detail about
his parents. Even Ron asked about the past, though it was usually in reference to whether
or not she had ever met Galvin Gudgeon, the current Seeker for the Chudley Cannons,
who had apparently attended Hogwarts three years ahead of her.
But Draco never asked. Not about the past, and certainly not about Lucius. Not
until now.
"He was a bastard," she said without filtering any of the truth. "Originally, I thought
he was a lot like you'd been the first few years. He picked on the younger years, held his
prefect badge as authority to do what he wanted, which meant being cruel to even those in
his own House."
She noted the look of distaste on Draco's face. If there was any one redeeming
quality about the younger Malfoy in the early days of their Hogwarts attendance it was that,
while awful to everyone else, Draco was abundantly loyal to Slytherins.
"It wasn't until he and Narcissa were betrothed that things really took a bad turn.
Sirius suspected it for a while and tried to talk her out of marrying him, but with what
happened to Andromeda... Lucius tried to kill her, you know... your mother."
"She told me." Draco nodded angrily, clenching his right fist into a tight ball. "What
about Snape?"
Mia quirked her lips. "He was a first-class prat. But he wasn't a monster. He wasn't
like Lucius. There were some Death Eaters I went to school with back then... you could
tell they didn't want to be a part of it," she said thinking of Snape and Regulus and the