The Dark
By Kay
Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter. Grief, would I be rich if I did.
Author's Notes: Insane!Draco and angst make all the fangirls happy. SPOILERS for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
i.
Draco does not kill Albus Dumbledore. That is his first mistake.
No, maybe it goes back even further than that. Maybe his first mistake lies in the underbelly of the beast, smoldering hot in the cinders of the Malfoy Manor where he used to prod at the fireplace with a crooked poker. Footsteps rebounded against the stone walls there, echoing outward like ripples upon ripples, and he burnt fingers in a fire and cried for his father in such a way that it filled every room in their little, private castle.
Maybe his first mistake was reaching out when he should have stuck it out, been strong enough to shoulder the pain.
Either way, it doesn't matter anymore. Draco does not kill Albus Dumbledore. It is exactly the mistake that the Dark Lord is waiting for.
ii.
They lock him in the dark. Snape cannot save him, not anymore, and the wretched grimace that twists his professor's face is a sort of agony that could freeze heads into that of a gargoyle. There isn't life there anymore, just a sort of pitiful futility that gnaws at the hollows of his cheeks and shines in the black of his eyes when he looks at Draco, trying to say he can't save him, unable to find the words in front of their audience.
The Dark Lord laughs at him, but Draco cannot hear it. He has failed. He does not kill Albus Dumbledore.
"I tried to do it," he says.
The pain is quick. The worst is to come-- they drag him by his hair, fingers tangled in bloodied white, to the lowest floor. The floor tastes like mold and age and despair against his mouth, which continues to move soundlessly as if protesting beyond Draco's control. His shoulders ache from the ruthless pulling. It is worse than burning his fingers.
"I have a gift," the Lord says, and they throw him into the cell hard enough to knock one of his bottom teeth loose. He spits blood weakly, trying to ignore the ringing in his head.
The light from their wands glimmers against black granite and straw, and a tall shadow that swings gently from an unknown breeze in the center of the tiny cell. At first, Draco doesn't understand.
The door shuts. The key locks. The lights leave.
But not before Draco sees the stain of red spilling over Lucius' finest white shirt, and the milky white of his eyes. The pitch black hides everything, but he can still hear the rope creaking.
iii.
If he screams loud enough, he can't hear it.
There is nothing here. His fingers scramble for the door and flinch against iron weights, cracking against stone. They are rubbed raw by the end of the first night, and he feels like a dog scratching at a door. He doesn't leave the door. He might touch it if he leaves the door.
He doesn't remember who he screams for, whether it is his mother ("Oh God, not Mum, don't take Mum away, where's my mother, I w-want Mummy--") or salvation that's no longer his ("I didn't mean to do it, I didn't mean, I didn't mean, I didn't mean,") or a rising swell of anger and hatred that is the last defense mechanism of a true Slytherin ("You bastards, you bloody monsters, I'll kill you, just wait and you'll be sorry, you'll be sorry, I'm so sorry, sorry...").
When the last of his voice stutters away, there is still the Sound. It is so utterly subtle now, nearly still in the windless chamber, that is seems to dominate every one of Draco's senses. Creak, it says, and he sobs back answers about forgiveness and stagnation of nature.
The air is so tight that he feels like he's tasting it, death like molted feathers and baking sunburns, the rot lingering in the corner of his mouth.
iv.
He doesn't bother to keep track of the days because there is no sign of the sun. Only darkness that is so profound that it wraps around him, encompasses him, until he does not know how far the cell spreads-- if it is a universe beyond or a box so small that It is dangling in front of his face. For this reason, he doesn't move. Just crouches there, by the door, face mashed into the frame as if he can leech the outside air from it.
The creaking groans. It aches. It sighs.
Draco wonders if there's anyone on the other side of the door. If they'll leave him down here forever, to die, and won't even come back for the body. Will he be nothing but stringy muscle crumbling against bones? Will he die of starvation or fear? Is this just a test, a preview, a chance, where if he waits long enough the door will open again?
If worse comes to worse, Draco thinks, there is always the rope. Surely it can hold two necks.
v.
He spends a lot of time sleeping, trying to wear away the lasting pains from the Lord's curses. Sometimes he wakes up and reaches out for the curtain to his bed, sleepily wondering if he'd finished Potions homework the night before, only to grasp empty space. Other times, Draco doesn't wake completely at all and instead feels drugged, hollow, alight with an inner glow that shields his eyes from seeing the dark and smelling the rot.
He can smell it now. Holes in flesh, worms poking through bloody scars and feasting on meat. He wonders if Lucius is still looking at him.
Draco eventually works up the dredges of bravery that haven't been crumpled like a paper napkin, and feels his way around the outer rim of the cell. He works his way around like a clock, carefully clinging to the walls and avoiding the middle area, prodding at the floor and wall stones with still-pulpy fingertips. There is a drain for waste in the corner (and oh, how he dreads it) and a fountain head that no longer works in the other. He licks the faucet and comes up with crusting rust; it hasn't been used in years at the very least.
He'd give anything for a bath. And food. Crumpets with jam and butter, the fluffy kind that the Manor always had for breakfast. He'd give all the wealth and family honor for a bread crumb, actually, and maybe more if he had anything else to really give.
His wand, now broken beyond repair, is a missing thorn in his side that won't stop bleeding with 'What if, what if, what if.'
vi.
At first, Draco amuses himself by walking around in circles around his prison, spread to the wall and tucked against finely carved rock. But it exhausts him, saps him of energy, and soon he gets too dizzy to turn around so many times and often forgets where the door is, or believes the room is somehow growing bigger or smaller by the second.
He turns to the left and finds the door. He turns to the right and finds the door. Draco gives up that day and sits down on the floor, crying his eyes out, as if it will save him.
There's something growing inside, now. Like a bug, a winged insect that's scratching and fluttering its legs in the cavity of his chest, eating away at his heart and lungs and liver. Breath is short, warmth too long to come, and he imagines the beady black eyes staring out of the tube of his throat like a periscope, scampering upwards, climbing and climbing and climbing.
He wonders what it's like to paint. If he were outside, Draco decides, he would be painting.
vii.
He dreams about his mother almost always now.
It's not that she especially loved him. Narcissa did, of course, and she used to press her carefully manicured fingers to his hair like he was a child, all lavender powder and cherry gloss lips. 'You're my favorite son,' she used to tell him, smiling like it was a secret.
He never told her that he was her only son. At least, not when he was little and she was higher to reach than trees in the garden, whose gentle canopies often reminded Draco of her finely-boned fingers leafing outward on his head. Draco didn't want to stop being her favorite, after all.
She liked lemon powdered cookies and a good game of Wizarding Chess in the fall, he remembers. He can't recall the taste of those deserts, however, nor the chill of sitting in the ivory chairs at the garden, pretending to lose so that the lady could win.
If she is alive, Draco wishes he could tell her that he loves her. And that she is his favorite, favorite mother.
viii.
It's the strange things that Draco misses about being alive. As in, alive and out in the real world, he reminds himself. Things like the scent of feverfew in the Potions classroom, which lingered over his robes like a perfume soaked into the linens so long that it became a part of them. Quidditch. Oh, how he longs for Quidditch. A broom set between his legs and the wind swiping across his cheekbones, cutting and cruel, tracing its name over the tiny slope of his nose like it owns him.
He blows on his fingers, but it's just not the same.
"If I could do it over," Draco mumbles, rasping. "If I could do it over, I would win this time. I would win every time. I would keep flying and never come back, and that's how I would have ended it."
ix.
Creak.
"It's not like I don't like them."
Creak.
"It's just like... cobwebs, you know, little ones tracing over my forearms and... you know about the cobwebs, don't you?"
Creak.
"Trapped, coated in waste cleverly disguised so thinly that you can't see it. Waste. Always waste. Is that how we lived, Father?"
Creak.
x.
The insect is still devouring his belly. It feels raw and red now, a mess of terrible want and need, cravings that put white circles into Draco's head and twist them around. Iron brand, searing and scarring into the gray of his brain matter. Time out. Can't think. Just want, want, want.
He finds himself clutching the leather soles of his father's boots. They're still crisp, unworn, new shoes he probably bought and used only once. That's like Lucius. Draco considers stealing them before the sick, nauseous feeling hits, and instead scrambles back to heave dryly into the corner.
The walls branch out now, like waves flattening out into an open sky. If he looks hard enough, Draco can even see stars. He was named after one of them, if he remembers correctly, but can never find it.
We're all so lost, he thinks, and plays connect-the-dots with the hiss of his tongue. It's heavy to move, but at least it doesn't shake as badly as his hands. They are riddled with rattlesnakes and trembling turtles, smelling of sea and sand and the dark.
xi.
"I'm so hungry." It does not echo, simply sits flat on the staleness of the air around him. It sounds small. Draco wonders if he could have possible said it, or if there is something else, a tiny person-- perhaps living in his ear like the gremlins he read about in tales-- giggling and lying in wait.
He could use a friend. Of course, he could have always used one.
"I am particularly good at using friends," Draco announces to the gremlin, and makes a curt, high-pitched sort of sound that could have been laughter. The gremlin was laughing, anyway. At least they understood each other.
He can count his ribs if he lifts the shirt. They're like a stairway, Draco thinks in wonderment, fingers walking up the ridges. But where do they lead? The plain of his chest is flat, the collarbone too high in the heavens, and they are so brittle that people walking them would surely fall through the floor and into hell.
He amuses himself for a while by plunging his fingers into the softness of his throat, but it doesn't work. Maybe it's not as frail as he thought, Draco considers, raking gouges down the path so no one would enter for fear of their safety.
xii.
When he was six, there was a music box. Draco doesn't remember what it played or who it belonged to-- it certainly wasn't his own, Draco had far more superior toys, like red broomsticks that flew higher than sofas and tops that spun for hours on their own-- but he recalls the subtle, smooth frame of it. Polished mahogany wood. Colors. He misses colors.
There is only one line he can remember from the song. It sounds like, 'Keep your feet in the boat, the river will surely take them away on a journey...' Draco keeps trying to hum it, but the melody eludes him. He tries to capture it with a snatch of his hands, but instead grasps the boots of his father, and the clapping sound scares the tune far out of reach.
He pushes his father for a while. Just swings him, back and forth, creak and creak, laying beneath him so he can feel the movement sweep across his face. It feels a little like flying.
Draco eventually stops. He sleeps under there, however, after softly warning Lucius to keep the bad ones at bay. For once his father listens to him, he thinks hopefully, for once it is okay.
xiii.
The insect has made its way through his throat-- Draco finds it itchy and hard to use, croaking instead of speaking, whispering through cracks of dried saliva that have crusted over his lips. He expects its birth at any time.
Like a phoenix, Draco thinks. Burning, melting, scorching everything in its path with gossamer wings and...
He scuffles his feet a bit, trying to figure out if his eyes are open or closed. It only takes a touch to answer, of course, but Draco thinks the game is much more interesting without that.
xiv.
One day, completely out of the blue, Draco thinks about Harry Potter.
He's too empty to feel hatred now. No desperation touches him, nothing but hunger and a sort of absurd fear that one day the door will open and he'll be exposed again. Maybe the Dark Lord will be happy to see his monsters. The demons crawling, wriggling eagerly between his toes and fingers, spreading out through the pink gums and sharp tips of his teeth. Draco is an infestation, a common cold to be dreaded, a plague on stick ankles and locking knees.
Draco wonders if he'd still be here had the Boy Who Lived taken his hand that day, back when he was eleven and the world was a pinprick of blood on a finger too large to navigate. Or would it be Harry Potter in the dark, living off of mold and shavings from the door, tugging at the pants of a swinging man and asking for stories?
'I could have hated you,' Draco wants to tell him. 'I could have done so much more. I wish I had. It's so cold sometimes. I wish I had.'
He can't remember the color of his eyes. He can't, no matter how hard he strains. The anger swells like music he's forgotten in his diaphragm, screeching upwards into an inhumane howl of crackling frustration, and Draco heaves himself for the first time in forever at the door and bangs with his fists until the blood comes and drains him dry.
xv.
Draco realizes he's going to die.
He can feel the buzzing now, caught between his tonsils and the open hole of his esophagus. It hums against the roof of his mouth, thirsty, pleading, trying to claw its way out. It feels more like a scream than a bug now, though.
Draco swallows it over and over simply for spite. He's not so ready to die and let another thing live. He's not so ready to live and let another thing live, either.
xvi.
'I was a terrible son,' he tells the thing that was Lucius.
It never answers back, even now. Gremlins and stars and dragonflies do, and plenty more across the arch of his shoulders, all teasing and low, but Lucius never says a word. Just sighs or groans, ropes stretching at the limit, lighter than ever with the erosion that may or may not be happening.
Draco thinks he's crazy, but feels awfully sane.
'I was a terrible son,' he repeats, and then, 'And you were a terrible father. Does that make it okay, Father? Can I go home yet?'
He's done enough, hasn't he? Draco thinks so. He feels stretched out on rope even thinner than Lucius, like he can meet the floor and the ceiling at the same time, a string of nothing but arteries and regret.
xvii.
His body is a map of the world.
'To the edge,' Draco sighs, cautiously rippling fingers across the bare curve of his throat. It quivers anxiously in response. 'And then down... to the caverns and the beasts, where mad dogs lay in wait to tear at our minds and throw them as sodden heaps into darkness.'
He touches upon the shoulder blade, the ditches of his ribs, the holes knocked into his hips. 'To the depths, the niches and trenches. Warfare and the cold clearness of laughter.'
Dead thighs and knobby knees, a far cry from whatever he had been before-- now Draco is only a direction, a compass, a flare in the confusion. His ankles are sunken in the quicksand where none can enter, fastened to the floor and unable to fly again. He is the gutted Hermes, the coarse fur of Hercules' mantle, the blunt blade of Jason.
He spreads his fingers, flaying them outwards like his mother's, across the bones of his feet. 'To Hades, to purgatory, to dust,' Draco breathes, and realizes he needs soles (souls) to keep from slipping further into the charred pit awakened beneath him.
xviii.
Draco is warm.
He doesn't know how it happened. His feet are encased in boots that are thick and somehow swollen, bloated around his heel, but ever so comfortable. His sore hands are wrapped in silk, the grime-coated slips of hair that once brushed against his face pulled away into an awkward shape at the base of his neck. He feels sticky, and tingly, and cannot understand what is wrong.
But he is warm. And the door has a heartbeat that calms his own, pressed so close against it that it becomes a living thing, a lover, a partner and friend. It is a mockery of embrace, Draco thinks sleepily, and closes his eyes to find no change in the inky blackness, just a relief that tastes of an ending.
The creaking is gone.
"Night," he says, and slips away.
xvix.
There is nothing. The insect is gone. Lucius is gone. The gremlins are gone. The silence seems oddly comforting to Draco, who realizes he's been staring at nothing for a long time without any thoughts. The emptiness, that strange barren sensation, brings a slump to his body. He can't really move anymore. It's not like there's anywhere to go.
Draco wishes there was a Chocolate Frog around here somewhere. Or maybe a secret. He likes secrets.
He chews on his fingers. They are nothing like chocolate, but taste of hardness and bitter, thoughtful reckonings. Painting frames left in an attic to wither in on themselves. If he put them together, Draco believes, he could make a picture worth more than a thousand words.
'Are you listening?' he whispers against the door. There isn't an answer. Draco smiles anyway.
xx.
Once he's counted enough stairs, he can climb all the way out of here and reach another door. It may have little slits of light glimmering through it, like a screen slathered in black that still has thread openings for hope. Draco would sure like to see sunlight again.
He timidly runs aching, slivers of fingers across himself. The stairs are steep-- too much climbing, Draco thinks in disappointment.
But if he can-- and why couldn't he, after all?-- then maybe it would be okay again. Maybe he would be his mother's favorite and the Dark Lord's worst, and there would be a place for him in the morning, somewhere like a dream he's forgotten, lost in shadows like a thief without feet to carry him home.
His first mistake, Draco decides, was forgetting to hug his mother goodbye before leaving for school. It seems he's left parts of himself with her now, and they are far away from reach, pieces of a puzzle that's falling around him and taking all the strength away bit by bit until there's nothing left at all except Draco and the darkness.
He tries to hug Lucius, but they don't return. And his father feels the same, cold and stiff and unyielding in silence.
xxi.
Everything is quiet.
Draco feels like he should be crying, but can't quite remember why.
'If I could be outside,' and he flickers in and out, like a firefly or wayward wand, 'I would lay in the sun. For hours.'
He sleeps for a while. Wakes up with a start, eyes rolling open and spasming, reaching for the blankets that have fallen off the bed. Can't find them. Sleeps again.
'If I could be outside... I would lay in the sun. For hours. And just lay there. In the sun.'
He dreams of the pounding of a door, through which light slips through like the brush of laughter and words he could never say.
The End