A/N: Hey! Thanks for taking the time to read this. I was mildly inspired by the movie Infernal Affairs (the movie The Departed so lovingly ripped... er... adapted) and the idea of being trapped in a continuous hell. I started to ponder what it might be like. A potential for a relationship between Draco and Hermione always intrigued me so this explores the aftermath of that. I delve into the mind of Draco after everything falls apart. "Avici" is the name for the lowest hell in the Buddhist view.
Anyway. This is my first HP fanfic, so any constructive criticism would be very welcome. Please review!
Avici
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The worst of the eight hells is called the "Continuous Hell." It has the meaning of continuous suffering. Thus the name.
- Nirvana Sutra, Verse 19
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Sometimes, when I'm laying on my back staring at the ceiling, I think that I see different colours flash across the cold grey stone. It's there for a brief instant, a flash, a breath… and then it's gone, no matter how hard I try to hold it.
The truth is, I haven't seen any hint of colour besides grey, brown, and black. I'm not sure I remember what colour even looks like anymore.
Nor do I remember sunlight. I wonder why light has always been equated with good and darkness with evil. Maybe it is because most are born with a fear of the darkness. In the dark, it is impossible to see, impossible to look ahead and know what is coming. Some remain frightened all their life, many conquer this fear, and others embrace it. It is strange to think that they have chosen darkness as another torture mechanism, or whatever you might call it. If we, the prisoners, truly are evil incarnate, shouldn't we feel at home? No. I yearn for sunlight, to feel the rays kiss my skin and warm my body. No, light is not about goodness. It's about life. It's about feeling alive.
I wonder what the weather is like outside. I've lost track of days, but I think we're somewhere in April. I imagine the sun is shining brightly in a clear blue sky, streaked with a few white feathery clouds.
The Dark Arts never seemed wrong to me, maybe just a different way of going about things. Perhaps it is due to the fact that it was all I knew growing up – but what is "wrong" anyway? Who decided that? People insist on defining right and wrong, light and dark, good and bad as if they were as easily discernable as black and white. But the fact is few are as extreme as that; most lay somewhere in the middle. Most of us are grey as the stone around me.
Wars seem to cement the concept of a division in this world. Everyone was categorized as "good" or "evil." There is hardly ever a middle ground for anyone to stand. All are pushed to the two extremes. Wars cause divisions, and in these cleavages, conflicts emerge, and from these conflicts, wars are born. It's a vicious, bloody cycle.
This war will end soon. It hasn't yet; I'd know it, if it had. But I know it can't last much longer from the murmurings I hear and from what I remember from when I was free. Potter will defeat the Dark Lord - a conclusion I came to almost a year ago. But the outcome has little bearing on me, an outcast in both realms. To the Order of the Phoenix, I shall always be the son of Lucius Malfoy, the one who tried to kill Dumbledore, and to Potter, I shall always be the smirking, arrogant ferret. To the Death Eaters, I am nothing but a turncoat, a blood traitor.
Draco Malfoy – a man without sides.
Not that I mind that. The truth is I prefer to have no allegiances. I have always been, and always will be, on my own side. There is no greater interest to me than my own interests.
At least, that's what I believed… until she came along.
After my failed mission, I had no one. Snape was hailed as a hero and shunned me. My mother could hardly look me in the eye. My father was far away then.
Ironically, if he were alive today, he'd be just down the hallway.
But, perhaps it was then I truly realized that I never had anyone. Potter had Weasley and Hermione, and even the Dark Lord had his humble servants. But I was merely Draco Malfoy, a pitiful excuse for a human being to both sides. And I knew that I could hardly be accepted by the Dark Lord the way I might have been had I succeeded. Father had fallen out of his good graces, and I too, was quickly following my father's footsteps, and I would soon be alone. And it was just at this pivotal point that Granger stumbled across my life.
I knew that the Order could accept me. After all, their ideals were of love and forgiveness, in contrast with the Dark Lord's. Still, I assure you – it was not easy. I had to convince them I had truly had a change of heart, but many of them had long histories of hating Malfoys. I never really thought of how many people my father, my family had crossed in order to assert our superiority. The Weasleys – all nine of them. The daughter of my mother's sister… I suppose that would make her my cousin. Lupin, the werewolf who taught us Defense against the Dark Arts… third year, I believe it was. Potter, of course, hated me. And every Muggleborn witch or wizard, by association.
Mudbloods. Strange, how ambivalent I am toward that word now. Part of me rebels, hating it with every fiber of my being, and yet, there remains a part that revels in it. Old habits die hard.
I wish I could say that Hermione changed me for the better, turned me from the dark to the light, made me want to be a good person. I think it is rather obvious that if that were true, I would hardly be here right now, staring at the same grey ceiling I have been staring at for the last few months. But she changed me. Loving her changed me.
Maybe I never loved her. Shouldn't I be good if I really loved her? Maybe it was something else that made me want to protect her, to always be with her, and to save her from death.
Maybe it was merely selfishness.
We hated each other for six years. Hers more justified than mine, I suppose. I hated her on the premise of her blood. And the fact that she humiliated me by punching me. But her hate, no matter how much more justified than mine, was much more quickly replaced with feelings of love and kindness much sooner than mine were.
Not to say that it was quick by any stretch of the imagination. Six years of hating someone doesn't go away in a week. Or even a month. After I convinced the Order I was on "their side" by providing them extremely valuable information on the Death Eaters and some of their whereabouts, as well as the Dark Lord's plans, it became clear that my life was very much in danger. Instead of leaving me to face my fate, the Order decided to protect me, despite the fact I was pretty much no longer useful to them. I was to live with Lupin. Granger was chosen to be my personal bodyguard and escort. The natural choice. Potter had more important things to do, and Weasel was clearly too stupid. So, it was Granger.
Neither of us took to this arrangement well initially. There was a lot of swearing, objects broken, and curses thrown, but somehow both of us remained alive. Perhaps it would have been better if I had died then, ignorant of what love could be.
They say hate and love are barely different, and that could explain why we eventually shifted from one to the other. I would have never imagined falling for Hermione. Why was it that I loved her? Even now I am not sure. Perhaps it was simply because I did not fool her. She saw through my façade when no one else could. She saw me. And she accepted me. I never had to pretend, to lie and be someone I was not around her, for fear that she'd shun me.
It should have been bliss. It was, for a while. I lived happily, as happily as I ever had. Slowly, members of the Order also came to accept me. They did not like me, nor did they put me on a high pedestal as the Boy-Who-Lived, but they accepted me. They allowed me to be part of them, something I had unwittingly longed for since I could understand what it meant to be rejected.
But my past haunted me. No matter what anyone says, you never escape your past. It's very much a part of who you are. It shapes you. People are like marble – there is no undoing or going back once the chisel has made its mark. I should have known that soon, they would come for me. That my past would find me.
I was fool enough to believe all that Hermione told me. For a moment in my lifetime, she made me believe in good, that I could be good. She made me believe all her own damn ideals. She showed me what it meant to wholeheartedly care for others. Cliché, but true. And now that I know what it means, I know better than to do it again… not that I'd ever have the chance.
In this place, I constantly relive the moment I lost it all. The moment I lost Hermione and love and my belief in the good. I see myself there, standing with my wand in my outstretched arm over a fallen Hermione. Potter and Weasley and Tonks bursting in. A flash of green. Screaming. Realizing that my weakness had caused all of this.
My weakness is what made me lose Hermione. Everything. I lost everything in that one moment. I can still see Hermione's broken body, lying in front of me, her brown hair splayed across the ground, and her chest, barely moving up and down. I can still see her figure slowly getting smaller as they dragged me away.
No, Hermione did not die. But the Hermione that loved me did. And I was the one who cast it out with one simple spell. My weakness in that moment, the moment that Hermione's love should have strengthened me for, is why I am not now by her side, holding her, taking in her smell and her wondrous presence. She expected too much from me. A few months of love could not undo what years of fear and hatred did, no matter what she wanted to believe.
They found me. They found us. We were supposed to be safe, but they found us anyway. They called me a blood traitor, sleeping in the bed of a Mudblood. They handed me my wand. They gave me a choice to live… and I took it.
I know I'd relive this memory constantly even if the place were not flooded with dementors. The Death Eaters told me I could regain my honor, that I could have everything I had before and more. I knew I wanted more than merely honor. Hermione had shown me that there was much, much more than just honor. But at that moment, I believed them. For sixteen years, I had believed them, and now they were offering me all I had dreamed of for sixteen years. The first step back, they told me, was to Obliviate Hermione's memory.
They didn't force me to do anything. Looking back, I know I made the wrong choice, but at that moment, when all my emotions were so confused and convoluted, their argument just made so much sense. It appealed to everything I had grown up believing. I should have known that they would never have accepted me, that they were merely trying to destroy me. But as much as I was a fool for believing Hermione, I was a fool for believing them.
As soon as Potter and Weasley found me, I knew it was over. The Death Eaters had completed their mission. I had cast the spell with my own wand. It was only a Memory Charm, but it was enough. I was the one who inflicted damage on Hermione. Even my pleas meant nothing. The only credible witness had her memory destroyed by me. Potter and Weasley had never accepted me as Hermione had. They merely tolerated me as a favor to a friend. Now, here, they saw what they had always suspected and hoped to be true. I imagine that they applauded themselves for saving Hermione from further damage at my hands, perhaps even death. Years of prejudice worked against me, and I was arrested and thrown into Azkaban.
Like father, like son.
I saw Hermione briefly at the trial. She stared at me with such burning hatred, and looking into her brown eyes that I had so often gotten lost in, I could only see the hatred that I so deserved. I brought this upon myself.
I was convicted as a spy for the Death Eaters, despite the lack of proof of me actually passing off any information to them. I suppose their presence in my place and my spell on Hermione was enough evidence for the courts that so hated the Malfoy name anyway.
Now, I have nothing. No friends, no acceptance, no honor, no love… nothing. And I have no one to blame but myself.
The Ministry intended Azkaban to be a living hell, and in many ways it is. The low living conditions, the solidarity, the confinement… Azkaban's inmates are robbed of their minds eventually. Some go sooner than others. Some hang on to consciousness by the barest thread, slowly losing their sanity while being fully aware of the terrors around them. What does it say about me that I'm envious of those who have lost all sense of reason already? But I hardly need Azkaban. I have built my own eternal hell, and I'd be living in it no matter where I am. Nothing we do is erasable. Some mistakes can be overwritten, forgotten, and deemed minute. A wrong ingredient in a potion may temporarily ruin it, but another ingredient could easily remedy that error. But the fact that your potion is now correct does not change the fact you put in a wrong one before that. Lying to someone and then later telling them it was just a joke doesn't change the fact you lied five seconds ago. Nothing we do ever goes away. It becomes part of us, shapes who we are and what we do.
I'm losing Hermione. I know the Hermione that loved me is gone. After I obliviated her memory, she forgot everything that happened between us since Dumbledore's death, remembering only how I tormented her for six long years. No one would tell her that I loved her, or that she loved me once. No, they chose to "protect" Hermione by shielding her from the unbelievable truth that she could love someone as terrible as me. It was for the best, they reasoned. After all, I was a spy and would be sent to Azkaban. It would be better if she could not remember. I had done her a favor, they believed. There is no hope of winning her back. There's too much water under the bridge already, and even if I had a chance, Potter and Weasley would make sure that that disappeared. She believes I deceived her and tried to take her life. She has gone back to hating me, and that alone destroys me.
Even the beautiful memory of her is slipping away. The dementors steal every happy moment, sucking the joy out of me. When she told me she loved me. Our first kiss. Our first night together. Running around Diagon Alley trying to avoid the rest of the Golden Trio. Any time I think of how I felt when she wrapped her arms around me, I can feel the warmth from her caresses being pulled out of me into a vacuum. I'm losing her, slowly but surely. Soon, she won't even be a distant memory. She'll simply cease to exist, except for that look of hatred that seems to be burned into my mind.
The Dark Lord was wrong when he said there is no worst fate than death. At least in death, there is peace and division from the physical world. Is there suffering? I do not know. I only know that any afterlife could not be as unbearable as this perpetual state of misery. Every day that I live knowing that I threw it all away is worse than an eternity in any hell. Sucking out my soul or simply killing me would not be punishment but showing me mercy.
There's a bit of a leak in the corner. Sometimes when it rains, a trickle of water flows down the wall. A puddle is forming on my floor, and it's starting to seep toward me. I guess the sun isn't shining today after all.