Not Ice, Not Anything
Draco didn't know when he had started to feel so numb all the time. All he knew was that the tiredness had settled into his bones, and the heaviness in his movements felt like it had been there forever. It was different from emotion; it wasn't the same as the sharp flashes of anger, or the all-consuming flood of sadness that often followed. The numbness was the absence of the fire and the flood. It wasn't ice. It wasn't anything.
Idly, he wondered if the numbness was depression. He dismissed it. Even if it were, whom would he tell? His father, who he barely knew? Draco didn't think that he could over his resentment towards his father enough to discuss the weather, let alone his feelings. His mother, who had shrunken into herself recently, afraid and annoyed all at once? No. He didn't want to upset his mother, push her suffering any further. What about a friend? That was as far as he would go with the idea of telling someone. Friends were for laughter, and he was too proud.
And so Draco's pride kept him from letting any friend know what was going on. Once, he had told a girlfriend something. Pansy. This girl had confided in him. This girl had said that she was suicidal, that she knew what it felt like. But that was a lie. In his numbness, he knew that the girl had only wanted to draw attention to her existence, to find someone to complain to. Any special bond they had shared was shattered now, beyond repair.
And it sounded so cliché, like he was making so much out of nothing, conjuring his feelings out of thin air like the birds they created in Charms. But it wasn't nothing; it was the truth.
He didn't feel like eating. So he didn't. He didn't feel like seeing friends, or playing Quidditch. But he did anyway, telling himself that it was progress. He didn't feel like fighting, which he was glad of. Most days he worked on the Cabinet for a few hours, then did as little schoolwork as he possibly could, and then fell asleep for obscene amounts of time. But he didn't feel like doing anything really. And that made him scared.
So maybe that was how he felt. So scared all the time that the fear had settled in and turned numb.
And he told himself, he wasn't scared. Shouldn't be sad. Other people had so much more to complain about. He was being honored.
So he locked the feeling away. And it stayed, a heaviness in his chest, his knees, his shoulders, throat, and temples. He didn't know if it would grow. He wanted it to go away.