Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this, sadly.
Author's Note: A little one-shot inspired from the quote from Louise Dudley. Draco/Pansy with lots of heavy introspection from Draco. It's a slightly new style that I am trying and I would really appreciate feedback as to whether it worked well to create an atmosphere or not.
The Avoidance of Thoughts
'Thinking is the hardest work in the world; and most of us will go to great lengths to avoid it.'
~ Louise Dudley ~
The look on his mother's face – the tension in her facial muscles, the tightness of her lips, the glittering lights of worry in her eyes – he thinks they will be forever etched in his grey ones. It feels like every time he opens them or closes them, every time he looks through them, he can see his mother, so controlled that nobody but those closest to her would realise that she is on the verge of falling apart.
Draco's always known that his parents loved each other. Never one for outwards displays of affection, he'd seen it in the small things they always did for each other. He's never, ever doubted their love for each other but the day that his father is locked up in Azkaban and the Dark Lord takes residence in his house is the first time he's realised just how deeply they do love each other.
He wishes that haunting look would leave his mother's eyes, if only for a second.
The days slip by faster than he'd like and the worried look in his mother's face continues to grow. He wonders sometimes if it will ever go away, if she'll ever be able to express any other emotion without the worry. He's working on plan after plan, discarding one idea and then another until he thinks about the vanishing cupboard.
The practically nonexistent worry lines from his mother's face fade a little bit. They return the closer the time comes for him to return to school and when he's boarding the Hogwarts Express, she smiles so brightly for him, skin stretching, eyes softening, teeth gleaming. He was able to see through it all, the worry festering underneath it all.
For a moment, on the train, it doesn't feel all hopeless. Blaise is predictably disbelieving and Vince and Greg are typically supportive, despite most of the conversation going over his head. It's Pansy that jars the journey back to school. He sees no incredulity, but there is fawning either. There's worry on her face, anxiety and it twists his insides into knots he can't hope to undo. He didn't want this. He was hoping to escape from it but it's like a disease, spreading into every area of his life, growing, mutating and becoming more virulent with each passing day.
The days trickle by, faster and faster than he'd like and most of them find him in the common room late into the night. It's on one such night that finds Pansy coming down, an hour after she had gone up to her dorm room.
'It's true, isn't it?' Her steady voice breaks the silence he had shrouded himself in. 'You really do have an assignment from...' Her voice falters over the name. 'Is there anything I can do to help?'
Draco looks up, his grey eyes taking her in. She's not particularly slim, her dark hair falling to her shoulders in stormy waves but in the dim light of the fire, the shadows dancing across her face makes her look identical to his mother. The worry, the anxiety ever present – was this how it was during the first war?
She steps closer and the fireplace creates shadows that dances across her face, showing and hiding crevices that he didn't know existed. Part of his wonders what she thinks, what would happen if she found out what he was trying to do and whether she would understand what's at stake. Part of him thinks it doesn't matter.
She sits next to him, her voice surprisingly low in the dark as she speaks, asks, requests... He allows the words to float around him, soothe his tired soul just a bit but he never replies. His weakening hold on his sanity might crumble if he does.
She comes down from her room night after night, as days stretch into weeks and eventually months. He knows he's losing weight and that it's unhealthy but his body's rejecting food like nothing. Mind over matter, the words haunt him. Words his father had uttered, telling him that nothing was impossible if he focussed all his thoughts and energy onto it. It wasn't working so well this time, he thinks. He wishes his father was here so he could yell at him, throw all his venom and bile in his face, break him down and tear him into pieces. He wishes his father was here, full stop. Not rotting away in a prison that would drive someone mad in a day or two.
He wonders which of his parents will have less sanity. He's not convinced it'll be his father.
He knows his losing weight but he also knows that so is Pansy. She's getting thinner, the shadows dancing across her face, originally from the fireplace, have taken up a permanent residence now. She still comes down every night but she doesn't always speak and the concern on her face changes her features grotesquely. Or maybe it's his thoughts falling apart at the seams, crumbling into dust in his mind. She'll never be as slim as his mother, as graceful or have quite such beautiful or perfect features, but as the days trickle past, her likeliness to his mother grows.
It's the concern, the anxiety.
He doesn't think that night. His thoughts are far too fragmented to really allow any logic. He just acts. Lets forth all the venom and hatred dripping in acid that's been growing inside of him, turning his doubts and despair into anger and resentment, and wrapping all of it in a bow made of something far too similar to insanity in his opinion.
He watches her with a certain amount of detachment. Watches her pretty little mouth fall open, her eyes glaze over with salty tears and he imagines that any colour she had left in her face had drained. That's the end of their relationship then, he thinks. His chest hurts more than his throat and he thinks this is heartbreak. He wishes he could let it be all consuming but his got a mother he doesn't want to waste away and a father he'd prefer back sane, so he directs all of these new emotions into completing his task again.
Days continue to pass away but he can feel that he's nearing the answer. His body is slashed and he argues with Snape and things carry on, a never ending circle of desperation surrounding it all. Pansy doesn't sit next to him when she comes down in the dark. She doesn't speak either but during the day, her eyes are on him and during the dark, her eyes are turned away. Draco never knew that heart break could be quite so suffocating, quite so, well, heart breaking. But he wants more for Pansy, more than what his mother has lived through and is living through. He wants something where she won't have haunted expressions behind carefully crafted facades.
He wants more than a life of Malfoy for her.
He does it. He finally does it and the horror is all the more pressing. He's completed the task and late in the night, the Dark Lord's followers will come through and he'll have to kill the senile idiot that runs the school. It shouldn't bother him. The dithering fool has made it clear abundantly, time and again, that he favours Gryffindor or, rather, he dislikes Slytherins. He doesn't think he'll be able to kill him, regardless, but for his father and mother, and somehow tangled in this mess, for Pansy? He'll have to force himself to.
It's less than an hour before they'll come barging through and he grabs Pansy. Her arm feels a lot thinner in his hands than they did a few months ago and she doesn't have the voice to even yelp in surprise. The colour from her face has been fading, angles jutting out that shouldn't and she looks like his mother. His voice rushes out, hushed and hardly loud enough for her to hear but he warns her away. He presses her to promise that she won't leave the common room and squeezes her arms tight enough until she nods one curt nod. It's enough. He's holding her to it as a promise and she recognises it as such.
He turns away to complete the task, focussing on thoughts surrounding his parents and an old man he has to kill. He stubbornly pushes away any thoughts than linger in the Slytherin common room.
He's there to complete the task but his hands are shaking ever so slightly. Thankfully Snape turns up and kills the man and they both run away. He rushes to his mother, who looks strangely young and rejuvenated now that the immediate threat to her son is gone and his father returns, not insane, even if the disturbing look in his eyes don't quite fade away. And in the calm after the storm, he can't hold his thoughts away from the common room any longer, or the relationship he has thoroughly screwed up. Even if he had thought things through, he's not sure he would have made any other decision but his thoughts nevertheless remain with a girl who looked completely different to his mother, until she didn't.