Disclaimer: I really wish I owned Draco. Sadly I do not. D: Promise to tell me if he's up for sale?
Summary: A story of how Draco becomes less and less human.
A/N: This story came to me while frantically trying to study for my Literature task on Frankenstein. It occured to me that Draco is actually quite a lot like Frankenstein's monster, rejected by his father and by the world. I used this as a basis for why Draco started becoming less and less human until finally one day he became something else completely. Touches veryveryvery briefly of what it means to be human, and heavily on rejection and abandonment.
This has been sitting in my computer for quite a while, and I only recently finished writing. I blame the ending on the fact that I've only just read Jodi Picoult's i The Tenth Circle /i and all the stuff about Dante's hell is invading my mind!
Please, please, please, review and make my day!
How They Created A Daemon
My first memory of my life was when I was four, and it involves myself, my mother, and my father. It is so hard to remember, because of how much I want to forget.
We stood in the family's living room, merely one rectangle of space in the massive manor that I have come to call the place I live in. Not home, but the place I live in. This rectangle of space is eerily silent as we stand there, my mother's gaze fixed upon the floor, my gaze fixed upon my mother, and my father's gaze fixed upon me.
All is quiet.
Then my father speaks. "Draco," he begins, and I am frightened though his voice is neither harsh not angry. He sighs and takes a seat on one of the plush living room chairs. My mother does not move, and I do not move either. "Did you give our new house elf your coat?"
I swallow and glace at my mother. She tears her eyes from the carpet to glance at me, but the moment out gazes meet, she looks away as though burned. Not daring to meet my father's gaze, I nod my head ever so slightly the movement is almost indiscernible.
I have no knowledge of what I have done wrong, but I know that I have done something wrong, because my mother chokes back a sob and looks as if she wants to run to me, to protect me. I want her to take me into her arms, but I do not know how to let her know that.
My father gets to his feet, and I cower a little, expecting a scolding or a beating. Instead, my father turns and walks out the door, shutting it behind him silently. With a pleading look at me, though I know not what she is pleading for, my mother escapes through the same door, and I am alone in that rectangular room once more.
The cold silence that echoes around the room hurts more than any beating I will ever receive.
---
From that day on, all my memories are vivid and painfully clear. A series of scenes in which my father turns his back on me and my mother leaves me as well, fear etched onto her pale features. A series of scenes, each one leaving me standing alone in a room foreign to me, even though they are all part of the building I live in.
"Durmstrang," my father says. He is seated at the head of the dinner table. My mother is next to him, and I am seated at the other end. "You will go to Durmstrang when you turn eleven."
These words mean nothing to me, and I continue eating my dinner. My mother turns to my father – this is one of the few times I have seen her look him in the eye. "Durmstrang?" she repeats in a choked sort of voice. "But that's so far away!" A look of delirious anxiety overcomes her. "Hogwarts has sent a letter, Lucius," she says. "Why can't we just –"
My father stares at my mother, and she falls silent. For the first time in my life, I understand why my mother has never dared to embrace me. However, at that moment, I did not know why my father wished to send me away. Till this day, I do not know.
"Be prepared," he says, after an excruciatingly long minute of silence, "that I will not have time to spend with him, even during the summer holidays."
My mother nods frantically.
"And if I hear word of you spoiling him," my father trails off, and a look of understanding crosses my mother's face. "He is born to serve the Dark Lord," my father continues, glancing briefly at me and ignoring my mother, who has reached out a hand to grab his. "And you will not soften him anymore."
He pushes my mother's hands off him, and she pulls them back to herself, looking ashamed of her behaviour. My father looks at me scathingly, and though I wish to avert my eyes, I can only stare back at him in fear. Then he pushes back his chair and gets up to leave.
I am not surprised when my mother follows him out of the door, and I realise, in that split second, that my mother is afraid of being in the same room with me. The thought is more scarring that I could have ever imagined.
---
During the trip to Diagon Alley, I meet a dark-haired boy of my age. Having never made friends before, I am compelled to say something. I begin to wonder if he will look down on me if he realises that I have never had a proper conversation with either of my parents, and that my closest friend is probably the house elf I gave my coat to.
And I didn't even know that elf's name.
I tell him that my father loves me, only I decide not to be so blatant about it. I tell him that my parents spoil me, and I tell him that my father is getting me a broomstick. I brag to him about my pure-blood line, and I rattle on about Slytherin.
The event following are slightly fuzzy, but I remember the boy turning away from me. I do not understand what I have said wrong, and I do not understand why he is offended. I do not even understand why he is not happy to see my smirk, which I have seen on my father's face so often. I know for a fact that my father would love to see me smirk like he does.
It turns out that I do not understand anything except for the fact that I am being rejected again.
---
The first of September arrives, and I do not know if I am happy or sad.
My parents have come to send me off, and I suppose I should be grateful. But I sneak a glance at the other kids at the station, who are all embracing their parents so tightly I wonder how they breathe, before exchanging heartfelt goodbyes, and I know that my family is not normal. Perhaps that, in turn, makes me not normal.
The train pulls out of the station, and I plaster myself up against the window. My mother is standing at the platform, but she is not waving. She looks like she wants to wave, but she simply stands there, staring at me blankly through her glassy eyes – eyes that are glassy from fear, not emotion.
My father is next to her, and I wonder if he is going to miss me. As he turns away from the departing train coldly, I realise that he most definitely will not.
---
My father may not love me, but I still aspire to be like him. I seek acceptance, and I believe the only way to get that is to become like him. To become a son that he will be proud of.
I am not stupid, and I know very well what kind of son my father wants. One cannot live through eleven years of rejection without realising that something is extremely wrong with them. I now know that my father finds me too soft – he said so to my mother. I will become a hard-hearted, emotionless son to my father, because he will want a son who is exactly like him.
Resisting the urge to smile is not easy, and I catch myself smiling a couple of times before I twist my face into an awkward but no doubt believable smirk. Then I meet two large and gormless boys, and the feat of not smiling is suddenly easy, because of the horrible mood they've put me into.
---
It turns out that if you pretend to be someone else for a long enough time, you start believing the lie yourself. For me, the process takes years. I have stopped smiling, because there never is any reason left for me to smile. I can't tell if I have been accepted into my house even though I act as though I am king of Slytherin. I can't tell if my friends are my friends or merely people like me, too scared to accept because they've never been accepted.
The whole process begins with the hardening of your face. I think I've forgotten how it is like to cry, or to smile. It was hard at first, but every time I felt like expressing emotion, I tried so hard to concentrate on my father's face that sometimes I'd see my vision blur up. Then one day, my friends told me a joke, and I realised that I could not laugh. The day I had been waiting for had finally arrived.
I was devastated.
Perhaps I was even more broken when I found out that I was no longer able to show what I felt. Then I went home to my father with a face hard and stone and eyes cold as the lake that Lucifer is destined to spend eternity in.
My father nodded approvingly at me. And I thought I had finally become his son.
But good things don't last forever. They don't last at all.
The ever familiar scene of the train pulling out of the station is brought to mind, and once again I see my father turn his back to me, a pane of glass that blocks me out of his world. My mother looks between us, again, and she chooses to stand on the side my father is on instead of the lonely side that I am on.
Again.
And the ball was set in motion; I was determined never again to feel. The hope I had experienced was not worth the devastation I would suffer every time my hopes were shattered to bits that were so small, they were invisible. Each time I was destroyed, and each time I dissolved into nothingness. No one saw me lying broken on the ground, and no one would be willing to piece me back together.
I numbed myself to the world around me, and even though that only made the hurt even more acute, as time passed, I stopped feeling anything. Hurting others became even easier than before, because I could not feel guilt, but only disgusting elation at the fact that I was sharing my suffering. And when they tried to retaliate, I could no longer be hurt. It was beautiful, and it was amazing to feel so safe even when my world came crashing down around me.
The only problem was that I could feel the beauty of what I had become. I could not feel anything.
It's easy to try and change into someone else, someone you think is better than who you are. But that rarely is, and after you spend you life and all your effort into changing, you find that you want to change back. And that's impossible.
Once you lose yourself, it's lost forever.
---
Nothing in my life is of any interest after my graduation, not until the war arrives that wreaks havoc amongst everyone in the wizarding world. By then I am completely hardened, and I am no longer human anymore. While the people shed tears over deaths and loss, and the Death Eaters rejoice for all the suffering they have inflicted, I am emotionless. Neither happy nor sad, I hang in the void between. And perhaps that makes me so much scarier.
I don't know. I can't tell.
I'm not like Voldemort, who is doing this for power. All I want is everything to just end. Once I am finished with destroying the world that has destroyed me, everything can stop. The world will stop turning, the sun will stop shining, the tides will stop cycling, and I will stop being. The world has no space for me, and I will make sure that the world has no space for anyone else.
The war causes the rise of two factions, the good and the bad. If only life was that simple. If only I could belong to either side, then maybe I'd have a reason from living. A reason for living, aside from dying, of course. I live to die. How ironic does it get?
Before I die, I kill. I am an assassin, but I work for no one. Both sides are severely harmed by me, and soon I have eliminated so many of those in the higher ranks of the two sides that there is no one of worth left to kill. No one else left, aside from the two people who are heading this war, this battle, this cruel but strangely exhilarating fight for survival. I wish that I could be part of it, and I wish I was passionate enough for my cause to give my all to ensure its survival. As it is, I have nothing left that even resembles passion. And if I can't be a part of it, no one can.
---
I hear the people rejoice on the streets the day after I kill Voldemort. How I did so is of no importance, because I no longer have any space in my memory for something as unimportant as that. All I remember is the loud, painful cheers outside when the news spreads that the Death Eaters have all fled, now that they have no leader. The happiness of the people invades my space from every corner of the earth, pressing down on my and trying to make me break. Trying to make me happy.
Never.
If they're happy and I'm not, then they're no longer allowed to be happy.
I feel triumph only in the knowledge that the people who have rejected me will be getting their just desserts. For how they have hurt me, I will hurt them back. For the way they have pushed me into a world of desolation outside of their warm and happy dome, I will get back at them. I will make them join me in the everlasting fear and loneliness of having no hope and no future, and then I will leave them there forever. Eternity seems too short a punishment.
My wand is pushed into my back pocket, and I am on my way.
---
The Golden Trio stares at me incredulously as I describe to them how I have come to defeat Voldemort. Pure luck, I tell them, but I know it is more than that. Voldemort can only be destroyed by someone who holds in his heart even less emotion. Potter would never have been able to do it, but I could. I could because Voldemort, to me, was a weakling. He was a pathetic bastard who thought that power was the ultimate, when I knew that the ultimate was death.
A blast of light later, and the Golden Trio is no more.
---
Everyone is sad, and that is even harder to bear. I do not know what it means to be sad, or to feel loss. I have lost so many things in this lifetime that I am no longer able to feel anything as people and things slip away from me. I can no longer feel myself slipping away, bit by bit, so unnoticeable and invisible, until one day I am no more.
Today I have disappeared.
I sit on the edge of my bed, and the sun shines glaringly on my face, but I cannot see it. My vision is acutely sensitive to the shadows on the street and in my room. Everything in my world exists in terms of what is not there. I have been blinded to the truth of things, but I have developed a sense for the non-existent. I see shadows of things and people, and I see the shadow of myself. I cannot see myself as I am. I am no longer there.
The light becomes so bright and all the shadows are swallowed, and suddenly I am blind. Nothing exists anymore. Not even myself.
My wand hand falls from my throat, and the wand in my hand clatters to the floor. I know that it happens. I do no feel it. I do not feel anything.
And then, as suddenly as it all ended, everything started again. I could feel the emotions had been lost for my entire lifetime, and that was the kind of pain that made you stop breathing, that made you want to reach in and pull your heart out if only that would stop the pain. I had no heart to pull out, so I was forced to endure this pain.
I could feel the weight of what I had done, and I could see myself. But it was all too late and I was thrown into the depths of pain and punishment for which even eternity would not be long enough. I could see myself, and I both hated and loved what I saw. The beauty that exists in the ultimate ugliness is breathtaking and heart-wrenching, and the torture of the soul caused by the torture of others is ethereal. No longer belonging to this world, I had found where I belonged, alone and alone forever, to feel what I had done and what I had become.
The world I existed in was completely void of anything but me and my pain, but I relished in that. I had single-handedly landed myself in my prison and my sanctuary at the same time. I was the one thing that caused fear, rage and awe.
I was a daemon.
This is my first time experimenting with something so dark(: Tell me what you think?