...just like his mother.
draco stared glumly at the bottom of his glass.
this wasn't exactly what he'd expected when he'd graduated. the world ought to have been his. after all, he was the malfoy heir, brilliant and beautiful, second in his class.
damn that mudblood anyway.
he hadn't started drinking until he was seventeen. what with his father throwing off stern lectures about alcohol and his mother demonstrating the negative behaviours of a continual drunk throughout his childhood, it hadn't seemed attractive at all. it hadn't seemed particularly attractive, even, when he'd first tried it--and gotten stumbling drunk, naturally, and gone out to the club, staggering across the dancefloor giddily.
he poured another glass of wine.
by that time, however, he'd opened his mind to the possibility of getting OUT of it, his mind, that is; and drugs were both hard to find consistently and potentially dangerous. he wasn't interested in getting himself hooked on anything, not in the slightest. nothing really addictive, nothing possibly fatal if adulterated. hallucinogens were perfect; lsd and mushrooms were more than nice, but hookups were never dependable. usually it was the same thing--'the area's dry, man.'
condensation dripped slowly down the side of the bottle. he took another long swallow.
so he took what he could get. went on a quest to find something that didn't taste so disgusting. it wasn't the taste he was looking for, after all. he just needed desperately to disassociate from reality.
some would ask why he of all people needed to disassociate. he was RICH. he could do most whatever he wanted, especially now that he had graduated. he was brilliant, lovely, wealthy, an aristocrat pureblood to his bones. all that was required of him was a few hours every day helping to manage some of his father's holdings in various enterprises--which came easily to him...he'd been raised to it, after all--and to look distinguished and elegant at all times, also easy.
so why the need to get out of his head?
he could start from the beginning. could show the filthy underbelly of his childhood as an excuse, from when a visiting death eater's adolescent son had raped him in the garden shed when he was four, the violent prologue to his mother's sexual abuse throughout his life. he could use that as a reason, if he wanted. he could point at the indifference of his father to all of it, to his father's own emotional and physical abuse, his father's tyranny making hogwarts the best escape he could have dreamed of. he could tell of his lack of friends, all his 'peers' anything but, either playing to his financial status and birth or despising him for the same, all his mental inferiors except for the very few who COULD match him and yet turned their backs on him. he could do all this. but that wasn't really it.
when he was very young he had spent hours each day lying on his bed wondering if he was just someone else's dream, all his life someone else's imagination, to pop like a soap bubble into nonexistence when they woke. this thought obsessed him until he was nearly six, and every once in a while after that it could still seize him.
he knew there was no god when he was five, even as his father kept him up all night so they would watch the sunrise together. his father said it was beautiful, and draco agreed, though he really saw nothing of beauty in it; it just WAS, that's all. his father kept on pointing out beauty and draco kept agreeing hollowly in this manner until he was almost nine. wanting to please the only god there was, the god that was his father.
every once in a while his mother would engage him in a vodka-fogged discussion about religion. he agreed with her outwardly because she was his mother and his parents knew everything. that's what childhood was, accepting absolute knowledge from your parents, wasn't it?
he also agreed with her because if he didn't she would shout, and then she would come to his bedroom at night. and he would do anything in the world to avoid that. mostly when she came she would slip into bed with him and say she was just going to sleep beside him, her sweet little boy, she wanted to sleep with him like when he was just an infant...but what she did no one should ever do to an infant...or a little boy... in the morning she'd say she'd been sleeping and had thought he was his father, crying, making him feel guilty. whenever he could he would slip off of the side of the bed in the night and sleep on the floor, just in case. the next morning she would shriek and slap him for being afraid of her.
he spent all his youth―right up until he learned how to lock his door so NO ONE could get through it―cowering before his father and hiding from his mother. in private, of course. the public must see only the best. only the most admirable family.
but none of this was really the reason.
he could do whatever he wanted. and that was just it.
he didn't want anything.
not anything in the world.
he couldn't want anything. he was immersed in a flat grey acid plain. there was pain, or there was nothing, which was almost as painful.
his life was unbearably meaningless. it was nothing.
he'd breezed through his classes because they were easy for him, nothing more. they were all easy. easy enough that although after a while he rarely attended, never studied, missed most homework assignments, he could do all the makeup in the few minutes before class, walk in without having cracked a book, take the final, and get a better score than anyone else in the class. because he knew most of all this already. or he'd read the textbook in the first week of class. or just because it was intuitively there, that's all. not because he worked for it, not because he cared at all except to keep the peace at home and his reputation at school.
he held himself upright and fulfilled the malfoy persona because it was easy. because it was beaten into his skull and it made a lovely front for the bleeding despair he could show no one. because they could never understand, let alone help.
there was nothing. nothing behind his eyes. he wondered often why no one could see that he was dead inside. a rotted cavity where his heart should be. it seemed so blatant, so glaring. but they never did.
the walking soulless, that was what he was.
he felt only the flat craving to end it all, terror that there was nothing beyond, yearning for there to be nothing beyond, terror that there WAS something beyond. he held back time after time because he was too tired to move, because he hadn't written a note to the few people he'd like to say something really meaningful to, because he hadn't yet done something he'd always thought of.
when he wasn't afraid, or plotting his death, or doing something productive like carving geometric patterns into his thighs and arms, he felt driven to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING. whipped toward something he could never quite see. he sought distraction. he felt always like there had been something he was in the middle of that MATTERED to him, that he had been shortly before absorbed by something (just a moment before where did i put it? i swear it was *right there*) and could again immerse himself in if he could just FIND it, and so he strode frantically from this book to that project to another and another and ended up with a wide sunburst of open books and half-finished projects and whatnot around him, none satisfying, leaping from one to the next to the next and jumping up to snatch something else that would also fail to scratch the itch. it was like he'd lost the key to his soul, and if he could just find that thing he'd been doing (i SWEAR i was doing something and it felt good i SWEAR) it would snap in like a dislocated bone. but it didn't exist. so he could never find it. until the cloud thinned a little and allowed him to find interest in something new.
this happened especially when he finished something. a book, a project. so he endeavoured not to finish anything, and savoured every word and slowed every process with vast perfectionism until he lost interest and either moved on to something else or was dragged into the driven stage again.
he read incessantly. every moment stolen from his torment was bliss. every moment he could forget himself was golden.
usually, when he was reading, he would do two or more things at the same time. drawing something, carving gemstones, even embroidering. his parents approved of embroidery and the fine arts. they were properly aristocratic. his father was a well-known embroiderer and was pleased to see his son excel in the fiberarts. in the latter years of school he had taken to bringing embroidery or lacework to class with him; he'd found he was better able to listen to the lesson that way, it took the edge off, kept him from fidgeting madly and clawing at his scalp and writing bad poetry, and he hexed everyone who mocked him until no one but the weasel did. his grades remained exemplary, so his teachers ignored it.
one distraction was a boon. two or more shut up the cracks in the wall.
drugs offered a way beyond the wall. a way to not care. a way out.
he'd discovered very quickly that alcohol fogged everything. it got him away. and best of all, it was legal, so it was always available. even if it DID taste awful.
he didn't want anything. even without his advantages, even if he were ugly and poor, he wouldn't want anything. he didn't want, that was the problem. nothing felt good, so there was nothing TO want. he was lost in a void of anhedonia. even just trying to find something to really care about was just an expenditure of energy he didn't have. all he could do was try to forget himself.
so he did.
it was a tiny bit of an exaggeration, saying he truly wanted nothing. every great once in a while, he wanted. he found a situation, a person, a concept, an activity, that he became obsessed with. it burned on his numbed soul like lye in a deep wound. he would find something and pursue it madly until he wore himself into a fatigued sort of nausea, days or weeks or months later; he would repeat the situation, interact with the person, as often as possible, examining each incident or conversation over and over and over in his mind as a shield against the voracious demons trying to eat his soul until they faded threadbare and colourless like cloth in the sun and he was lost again.
wanting something/someone was more exhausting than the usual dragging despair of the flat grey plain. the highs were HIGH―but maniacally high, and with a potentially fatally steep crash at the end...and the end always came too soon.
so now he drank.
and drank.
when he was very little, younger than four, his father had shared his evening wine glass with him every night before draco's bedtime. he'd loved it, his father reading and therefore calm, safe to be with. he'd snuggled into his father's side and read bits of lucius' book (even then he could read) and every few pages lucius would hand him his glass of expensive white grenache. lucius kept the blushes for evenings; reds and whites were for the daytime. he'd loved the taste then, after the first few which he'd just taken because his father (GOD) had offered and therefore it MUST be wonderful; had loved all of it, sitting with his father's arm around him, knowing he was loved, the world quiet and safe. the wine had seemed synonymous with those perfect, crystalline evenings. he had taken his sips greedily and asked for more, and been given it, though never a glass of his own. even then, even before he knew it was wrong he had liked it. and his father had let him.
he knew it now, and hated himself. what he was born to.
draco was an alcoholic. and he knew it.
it wasn't so much that he liked the drinking. he'd grown accustomed to the taste of beer, although he couldn't stomach hard liquor, and wine, though lovely, gave him a nasty, nasty hangover. beer never did. but he couldn't really say he LIKED it.
he NEEDED it.
without alcohol, each day dragged interminably, became so many hours of torment before he could go to sleep and forget he existed for a few hours. or rather, he could try to sleep. sleep was his best-loved thing in the world, but had always been a very fickle lover--he wandered between insomnia and constant somnolence.
without alcohol, he watched the clock tick with an eternity between seconds, watched it, and was defenceless against being fruitlessly driven. defenceless against the need, the dislocation.
alcohol took off the edge. it let him enjoy social gatherings, instead of being driven to leave nearly as soon as he'd gotten there. it let him relax. it let him read most anything, not paw through hundreds of books before something caught him past the first few pages. it let him relax.
he hated marijuana, hated how it dried out his eyes and mouth and reduced him to a silent vegetable that could only track on one thing at a time, but sometimes, sometimes, he thought, even that would be preferable to the alcohol. but he could never make himself cultivate the right people to be able to get it consistently. so he went without.
but he had to have something.
so he drank.
he poured another glass and drained it.
it was in his genes, he'd always known it, had always been reminded by his father. his father's mother had been a drinker, had finally offed herself with a fatal mixture of fine scotch and a surfeit of sleeping pills. his mother's entire family consisted of rich sots. his mother was enough of an example herself, alternately violent (even his father had bruises sometimes) and self-pitying, trying to force guilt-trips on him or smack him around. he could never tell which was coming until he saw her.
most of the aristocracy was continually drunk, it seemed. any genteel gathering provided alcohol, alcohol with tea, before dinner, during dinner, after dinner, nightcaps, eyeopeners. it was socially acceptable to be a drunk. the civilised way to die, it seemed, was by way of the bottle.
but he hated himself for it.
his father had been god to him until he'd reached twenty. his father controlled the world, and his father was the only thing worth fearing. his father encompassed everything. yet lucius may have been abusive, controlling and terrifying, but had never abused alcohol that draco had seen. certainly his father shared a drink with visitors and savoured the occasional glass of wine in the evening, but draco had never seen his father drunk. draco couldn't remember seeing his mother sober.
and now he was just another liquor-soaked sponge like her.
he hated himself. more now than ever before. because now he was too fucking weak to end his meaningless existence.
he was weak. and worthless. and he knew it better than anyone could ever dream.
the sun was rising. it was the dawn of another day to get through. another day of putting on a show for the world, playing to the image they had of him. another day of wearing a mask and pretending what he really was didn't exist. until that evening, when he would open another bottle and continue the cycle.
draco drained a final glass and smoothed his face into that so-familiar calm superiority, alien on his bones like plaster. he rose, steady, voice unslurred, veins afire but hands not trembling at all, and began another day of playing the game, rotting inside where no one could see.