For Fledgling, undisputed sovereign queen of everything and jo' mama, because this was a truly incredible request. Lecherous snake plus anti-hero. Equals this, only better.
Emerald Serpent For Vanity
(Witchsnake.)
Draco tries to spit the words like venom, but no words will come.
(Witchsnake, dry serpent, creeper! I know you can hear me. Isn't this good enough?)
His lips are too thick and clumsy for her sinuous language. In fury, she pierces them with a fang, sews them shut with toxic threads, and leaves this to fester in the hot, black cavern of his mouth: the lesson – and, beneath that, the threat.
It must not speak, the words are poison.
Oily orange globes of light coalesce in his room, long after she has gone. He swats them aside with a muffled growl, because the shadows they cast flicker and curl like serpent tails, spilling out from beneath his canopied bed.
Nights spent counting muscles and scales. There are limbless bodies lounging insolently in the bewildering theatre of his dreams, and he is vulnerable while he sleeps, receptive. He swallows their suspirations and the long rivulets of snake oil and slander, a glittering course of tears to salt the rich flavour of laughter lost underground. And when he tries to call down a protective ward, there is – of course – only silence.
Elsewhere, on her master's arm, Nagini twists into the eternity knot and – unable to sing – only mutters the word: lullabylullabylullaby.
Sometimes Voldemort himself appears in the corridor, unfurling from runners of burnished wood and twilight with the fringe of his silver-dusk robes rising slowly, like smoke under glass. He breathes rusty golden light and arrogant runes. His hands rest like colourless moths in the darkness – a flutter for a heartbeat – and the darkness is everywhere. Under these, his waxen hands, the hallway is incomplete. Malfoy Manor lies in strange ruin; a broken maze of finery and boneless shadow, removed from the world.
(This is your fault.)
He stops at Draco's doorway, sways in a nimbus of weightless rotten scales. His scarlet eyes lose focus briefly and follow the framework of a haunted realm somewhere in the distance; then he seems to note the narrow slit of the open door, the pale hand crabbing out like a curious spider.
"Oh, Draco," he breathes, not unkindly.
And Draco steps out. Snide words froth corrosive against his teeth but the venomstitches sear and pinch, warning his voice away. Down either end of the hall, a heavy presence mumbles, a dark talon reaches for him.
"Have you," and there is a lilt to the words, a suggestion of slow, moonlit slitherings, "seen Nagini?"
He shakes his head, thinking, (yes, but you already know that). The long corridor distorts, canting wildly.
"Ah," Voldemort says softly. "Well. She dreams of dragons and loves only the dusk. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of her."
Even knowing what little he does about the two of them – only whispers and speculations, really, and then of course the sight of those pallid-petal fingers gentling the serpent's tapered jaw like a wilting orchid – Draco doubts the truth of this. It seems very likely to him that Nagini has her eyes on him even now. That Nagini is never so far away as she appears, certainly not when her master is so near.
(Witchsnake.)
Voldemort turns his reptilian head thoughtfully. Then he does something strange: he smiles.
"Pronunciation would be easier," he adds suddenly, "if you had a split-tongue. But you don't, and nothing is easy. Lock the door behind you."
Draco obeys. Thunder bursts against the worn oak and ebony before he can draw his hands away; the roar of a sleek, endless abyss chews his fingertips, the squalling of a long-dead monster rattles his bones.
Then silence, and the childishly conceited trappings of his room, full of shadows that twist and flail.
He sits on the bed with his feet drawn up. Tries, with unreasonable serenity, not to feel the fissure forming at the tip of his tongue.
Rats.
Rats in the walls, or else motes of magic scrabbling on the rim of all the wrong perceptions: smell, taste, touch, and for a moment he is certain that they must be on the inside, crittering warm and invasive against the smooth slip of flesh enfolding his skull.
Only for a moment, but he is beginning to understand it now: the lesson – and, most of all, the threat.
The serpent comes at midnight, a grin dangling from her unhinged jaw like putrid meat. She rides the shadows, liquid in darkness, pouring unimpeded through the stains of sickly, false sunlight burning feebly in the corners. She is the echo of the tempest, a fragment of ice on a silken slope, and when Draco tries to touch her, she melts between his fingers, soft and swift as a whiplet of blood –
It mustn't touch, either.
Tonight, her sides are a sleek, abysmal green, the colour of ancient forests and vices. Her admonishing eyes are a silver sky fallen to ash; the soft palate flexes pale pink and exhales long, thin horizons out from behind ivory tower teeth, clamouring and burning with poison in place of a sun.
Pretty; she's pretty, and he would say so, if only to see what flattery might accomplish. If only he could say so.
A dry rasp of leather across varnish: she pools on the blackcherry wood at his feet. And the acidic silver eyes fix and hold him, carving his consciousness out of the flesh, floating weightless in the perpetual dark, the twilight, her favourite; and her little tongue quests after his retreating hand like a second thought.
Never mind. Master says speak.
Liquid in his mouth. When he parts his lips, ropes of skin pull and swelter, melting back over his tongue and down his throat in a waxy, hot rush. But he doesn't choke. He sits down and stares at Nagini, scales tipped in antique flame, muscles moving like water over his splaybone skeleton, soothing away the unwieldy geometry, bending everything back, supple and serpentine.
Prettyprettypretty.
This is not his voice, nor his own doubled tongue flickering, but he hears himself say it:
Aren't you so –
Voldemort touches the smooth skin sloping between Nagini's lightsick eyes, having seen the boy's fear and smelled his resentment. Malfoy was a good name once, a very good name, but the blood has apparently gone thin. It wounds him bitterly to strike such an auspicious name from the court of his confidence, and Draco is salt in the open skin; such a faltering scrap of a Slytherin.
Nagini reads the name in his mind and susurrus softly, elastic tendons trembling. Even she knows what should be done. Especially she.
With a spider-jointed finger, Voldemort lifts her delicate chin. Meets her razored gaze and concentrates on the precise, white heat of it.
He gives us such furtive, ugly looks, my dear. My darling.
His doubled tongue flickers.
Perhaps you should have a word with him.