Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Pairing: Eventual Harry/Draco; Drarry.
This story deals with post-traumtic stress, mental illness, etc. If you feel this may trigger something, please do not read.
The reasons my insides are swollen
Is I spend too much time ghosting
With the likes of you and yours
Ghosting; Freelance Whales
Deep breath, Draco, deep breath, he tells himself.
Pale feet glide over hard, dark stone, and as he walks he feels the cool grey silt of dust and decay cling to his toes like unwanted ghosts, and he muses bitterly that the house is not the only thing that is falling apart here.
No, not bitterly. To be bitter would require conscious thought, and to call Draco Malfoy conscious is a joke in and of itself.
He is as conscious as he is alive; just barely.
He doesn't know when or how he picks up the Penseive but he doesn't question it. They've happened before, these rolling blackouts – here one moment and gone the next, one minute in the ministry and the next dragging himself out of the darkness and blinking into Potter's office as he's told his next assignment, who he has to find and why.
He takes it in stride as just one more sign he's losing himself. No, he's already lost himself, and this knowledge makes him that much more expedient.
He makes no attempt at carrying the bowl upstairs. He's far too weak these days; not even his magic could levitate it that far – and isn't that so sad, just a few years ago he was practically invincible – but instead manages to float it t o the archaic dining table. The wood creaks in warning but he pays it no heed; he has waited far too long to be discouraged now.
Shaking hands dip the tip of a wand into the swirling mist-water.
He recants the spell he's written and rewritten and memorized so many times that ink is stained into the pads of his fingers. It is short and simple and quick, the way his life has never, ever been.
"My heart is my sacrifice. Banish my thoughts and my sorrows; take my mistakes and my heart ache and my follies. Relieve me of my nightmares. Leave me whole."
The mist is swirling around his wand, then his forearm, and then it is everywhere, slick and whirling about him in a cloying cloud. Draco's last thought is freedom, and then he thinks nothing at all.
Just like he's always wanted.