This pretty much came out of nowhere. Well, okay, not really. The title's out of nowhere, though...
So, I saw the HBP movie (one word: EPIC!), and when I got home that night, I was uber-inspired and I stayed up until about... 3 or 4AM, writing this out (summer vacation; I can do that). I think I initially planned for a lot more editing before posting this, but then I thought, "...nahhh." After all, I think I've been spending too much time revising my stories over and over again in the past year or so; I want to get back to the days when I would just write something and post it without a second thought. While that might not be a wise approach, it's more liberating to be able to write without the worry of having to go back and fix it all up later.
And this is getting long enough. Basically, I watched the movie and Draco's li'l saga and I thought "OMG SYMBOLISM!!" I'm sure this is something that lots of other people have done already, as it's not exactly a symbolism that's easy to miss, but what the heck. Someone out there won't mind reading this.
I went out on a couple limbs here; I haven't read the books over since "Deathly Hallows" came out, and I never gave much thought to Draco's character anyway, so it's possible that he's OOC. Please forgive me.
I OWN NOTHING. Although I do finally understand why so many fangirls wish they owned Draco. Kudos to Tom Felton for shoving me in the right direction. ;)
There really was no point in keeping caged birds in the hallway like that. Hard to get to. No need to have canaries for detection of toxic gases, even if these weren't in any way canaries. Toxic gases... And it wasn't like they were real songbirds anyway. One black, one white. No way to tell if they were a nesting pair, but it wasn't like birds were scarce.
So, naturally, Draco felt no real harm could come of snatching one bird from the cage. Besides, he would put it back later.
It had taken a bit of work, getting to the creature. First carefully levitating the cage of its hook in the ceiling, then lowering it in such a way that made little noise and did not startle the birds into a shrieking hysteria. Then there was the ordeal of putting the cage back in its place with the squirming white bird clutched in his hand, tightly but not too tightly.
Oh, Draco supposed he could have opened the cage from afar with magic, extracted the bird, then gone on his way, but if the black bird got out, then he'd have to put it back. He felt certain he would need another test subject. And even if he didn't, well, the assurance was nice to have.
The bird twittered, tiny heart fluttering restlessly under the pad of his thumb. Peering down at it, Draco tightened his grip carefully.
Beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbe-- No line between the pulse and the fade of an enraptured life. Jaw set, Draco entered the expectant Room of Requirement.
The clutter poured from the walls and heaped in jumbled stacks. Not a single shelf; just piles and piles of accumulated junk that lay hopelessly missing or completely forgotten. Still, jagged paths cut through the wilderness where many desperate students had scrambled to find a place to hide whatever item was destined to get them in trouble. Only one path saw no dust, rubbed away by trials of stalking footprints to disturb the air and keep it from completely settling. This path Draco walked, hand still fisted around the soft, warm body that squeaked erratically. It had stopped squirming, resigned to its fate.
With a practiced flourish the old curtain pulled away from the top and sides of the tall cabinet, metal trim gleaming on the panels. Hindered by the allowance of only one hand, of course. The bird started again at the sudden rumpling sound, the rush of air over its feathers, but Draco was deaf to its discomforted tweeting. Taking a breath, he placed the bird inside the vanishing cabinet, hoping it wouldn't immediately fly out. Instead, it seemed to be quite curious about this strange wood-walled environment, and it hopped around on the floor panel and darted its little black eyes at the shifts in light and shadow. The door closed.
A tiny muffled flutter of wings. Draco uttered the spell and the flutter vanished. He checked to be sure, and the box was empty. Closed the door. There was something held between two of his fingers and when he lifted his hand a single, pure white feather, small and fringed delicately at the root, wisped between fore and middle finger. The short hairs wafted lazily from the movement.
Draco remembered being not more than five years old and wandering his family's extensive estate to cure a desperate boredom. Even the very grass surrounding the Malfoy mansion seemed cold and black and sharp-edged. Gleaming with chilled silver. To him, nothing was soft in his life. Oh, his bed was comfortable enough, and the couches and armchairs were only the finest leather and luxury that a person could sink into, but there was nothing nice about the materials. Hard and uncomfortable, or smooth but unsettlingly reptilian and cold. No one to play with. No servants that got more personal than "Master Draco".
Everything in that house made him feel starkly unwelcome if he stayed around it long enough. Over time he would become desensitized and learn to ignore it, pretend to embrace it because his father felt that nothing less was suitable, to desire anything less than what they had was borderline blasphemy. But to a small child, everyone about it just seemed wrong. Nothing was there that smiled and invited him in. So Draco took to going outdoors when he could, under the careful eye of a spare servant that happened to need to do some yard work anyway. The yard was like the house, black and bare and imposing on a sensitive young mind. But he could at least try to breathe here, and run around and not get scolded for endangering the floor, or the rug, or whatever else was apparently very important to Mother and Father that it remain intact.
Draco had no friends. No real friends. Father's coworkers very occasionally brought their children over, but he could rarely manage to find common ground sufficient enough to establish a real connection. When alone, Draco played simple mind games with himself, or tested his strength in magic on whatever he could find.
A glimmer of brown in the fluid grass caught his roving eyes and he focused on it. A stripe of color stretched six inches across the blades. After a careful glance at the supervising servant, Draco bounded the short distance to the color and squatted on his heels before it. It was a feather, he knew that much from watching his father slide quills across parchment in letters he could still barely recognize. But this feather wasn't a uniform color, jet black and firmly straight like the highest quality that his father preferred and insisted on. Much of the feather was that same color he'd spotted at first; a pretty, glistening russet, but that shifted into stripes of kiwi green, deep red, and sunflower gold. It was a pheasant feather, though Draco didn't know that. He just knew that it was prettiest, softest, nicest thing he felt certain he had ever seen. The spine curved gently and was flexible under his experimenting fingers. When Draco ran the fur under his chin and across his jaw it gave him the most delightful tickle. Black tipped the edge and he dusted this down his nose again and again. He wanted to giggle. Wanted to.
Mother called him in to dinner and Draco showed her the feather. It is pretty, I suppose. Don't rub it all over your face, there could be diseases on it. Don't bring that dirty thing into the house. Draco placed the feather in the grass by the steps; maybe he could sneak it in later when Mother and Father weren't looking. When Draco came back out after dinner while his parents were discussing Father's work, the feather was gone. Blown away.
Draco rolled the cotton-white spine between his thumb and forefinger. This time he could resist the urge to brush it – even just once – under his chin. Five-year-olds take everything their parents say seriously and they remember it years later in spite of themselves, if they are raised right. Draco often wondered now whether he had been raised right, but he nevertheless knew that it was wiser to heed his parents' word rather than risk learning about the consequences for not doing so the hard way. Even if they never would have found out.
Two minutes had passed.
The apple had worked. Came back with two bites in it before he let a minute and a half pass. Inanimate objects worked. The bird had been gone long enough. The feather drifted to the ground and Draco took the latch and pressed it down and pulled. For an instant he ducked behind the door in case the bird soared straight out. For a moment his eyes glanced around the interior, before settling.
He swallowed, hard. Smooth, white, soft body, dusty pink shadows under the limply drawn wings and head softened onto the floor. A natural angle. The neck hadn't been broken. A trembling finger landed on the tiny chest.
Beat....beat.......beat..........beat........................
...
The bird had just... died. Something had happened before disappear and reappear that ripped life from it in a way that allowed it to fall so gently into death. Mockingly.
All of a sudden, it was too much. Tears welled up and he scrunched his nose. He tore himself away from the still-warm body and trudged away down a dusty path. He'd killed the bird, and the worst part was that he was getting upset over it. The real worst part was that it made him afraid.
I killed it.
If he got this pansy over a little bird that there were millions of in the world, how could he possibly hope to do what he had been ordered?
It had done nothing wrong and I killed it.
He stopped against what he thought was a bookshelf, but it was the vanishing cabinet again. He had come full circle around the room and his feet had led him back to it. The door still open. The bird still lifeless inside. Draco slid down until he sat against it, leaned his head back on the cabinet and let the tears fall, let the sobbing hitch in his chest. The feather blinked at him in the light out the corner of his eye and he reached for it. Brushed it up between two fingers.
Two days later he had found a dead pheasant at the edge of the field. He had cried then, too. Something so beautiful never deserved to die.
The feather slid once down his cheek and clung to the tears on his skin. Draco threw the feather away and closed his eyes, sobbed again.
I can't do this.
--
Draco sent the carcass to Borgan and Burkes again. Let them figure out how to dispose of it. As he left the room and passed under the cage, he glared up at the one, black bird.
"It should have been you," he glowered. First sign of insanity. The bird hopped a few times on its perch, more likely of its own volition than in response to Draco's threat. And he meant it. Had he instead taken this remaining bird with the same result, he felt certain he could have shrugged it away more easily. Not much effort would be needed in seeing it as a crow, a bird universally disliked for its wickedness and carrion diet. Only a chaste 'good riddance' would suffice to end everything.
White birds were too easily seen as doves. Doves were innocent, soft-natured, pretty, associated with hope and joy. In other words, an abomination to kill.
Neither bird was a crow or a dove, but Draco couldn't help seeing them as such. Trying to see them as otherwise only served to make him feel even worse.
--
He had gotten angry with himself that night in the privacy of his four-poster bed and the dark emerald hangings. Merely a minor setback, his father's cold voice deadpanned inside his head, sounding like it was trying to comfort but only making his back tense. It can still be fixed.
Yes, Draco thought, fists clenching the slippery sheets as he exhaled. Yes, it will be fixed.
Nothing stopped him from arming himself with the certainty of the words and marching up to the Room of Requirements that next day during the lunch break. He searched the cabinet, cast spells, ran his hands down the dark wood, anything to figure out what was still wrong with it that would take a life. After a twenty-minute examination, he thought he might have found the malady, and he fixed it. Almost instantly he thought of the little black bird, the crow, swinging naively in its wire cage. No, he thought, pressing the cabinet door closed, not yet. Later.
Several weeks later, Draco felt the pressure mounting for a success at last. He passed the cage again. This time, he extracted the bird from afar with a flick of his wand. Took it to the cabinet and placed it inside. The flutter. The absence of the flutter. The returning spell. The silence in the cabinet.
Draco didn't want to look. After all of that... he still hadn't done it. He ran.
Days later he went back to the Room of Requirement, with another apple, to try starting from the beginning again. Times were anxious; he could feel it in the burning pulse of his Mark. They were depending on him to get this right. As he pulled the door open, a feathery black bullet shot past him and out the window. Draco stared after it a moment, stunned, and then depressed, before he closed the door and let his feet carry him away from it.
He didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to complete any thoughts on the matter, but he did it anyway.
Live in the light; survive in the dark.
He ground his palms into his eyes and grit his teeth, tried to compose himself before he left the hallway and ran into anyone. There was a message that shouldn't have been there, that he didn't want to see, but it glared at him no matter what he did.
This is the death of innocence.
So, basically, if you told me to write something and gave me no chance to thoroughly proofread it, it'd be something like this. Well, okay, I did look through it for spelling and grammar errors, and I added a sentence here and took out another there, but this is for the most part as it was when I went to bed that night. Huzzah.
I know the ending's a bit out of left-field, but that was the thought I had in my head when I started this, so I had to put it in. I'm just weird like that.
Thank you for reading. You know the drill. ;)