Disclaimer: I'm truly sorry, but you must be a sheer idiot if you think I came up with the characters. Thank the lady who lives in Britain who actually WROTE the books for these great characters (you know, J.K. Rowling). But I, thank you very much, owe the plot to me.

Chapter 1: Whispers in the Shadows

"I love you, Draco," The shadow whispered. This was not something Draco expected to hear as he woke up in the middle of the night. It sounded like someone he knew, some girl from Hogwarts, he was sure. But he was home. How could he hear the voice if he was home at the Malfoy estate? He looked where he thought he heard the voice. Nothing was there. It must have been his imagination. Had to have been.

When he properly woke up the next morning, to the little voice of a house- elf beside his bed, he thought he heard the voice again. But it was only Gertrude, the new house-elf that Father had arranged for Draco to be tended by only two weeks earlier. Draco had somehow formed a soft spot for her and called her Trudy. Trudy was nothing special but she had the biggest blue eyes that he'd ever seen, and somehow he thought of an old governess that he once had as a child when he saw her.

Trudy was scrubbing something on the pale carpet that Mother had decorated for him. "Draco, sir, you must stop hurting yourself so much, sir." She looked up at him. "Draco, sir, you're going to go too far one of these days, sir." She went back to scrubbing. He looked at what she was scrubbing. It was dark and almost a blackish red. His eyes widened as he realised that she was scrubbing his blood off the carpet. His blood.

She knew what he was doing. Every night after Mother or Father had yelled and screamed at him to be a Death Eater or to marry some Death Eater's deathly-pale daughter once he was out of Hogwarts. After he screamed at them he didn't care so much as they did about either situation. Sure, Father had great stories about Lord Voldemort and his doings, all of which Draco had seemed to find interesting, but his enthuse for what his father did was not as great as Father hoped. After all this, Draco would barge into his room and slam the door. By this point it would always be so close to midnight that the moon would be high in the sky. A candle, always lit by Trudy after dinner, would be lightly aflame. He would open that drawer he always kept locked to retrieve his weapon of destruction: a knife. He would sit on his bed and swipe the knife across various points on his arm for close to half-an-hour and various other parts of his body. The blood would land on his carpet, but he would be too tired to notice and would fall back asleep onto his bed. Of course, Trudy, looking out for her master, would blow the candle out and fix him properly in bed, never seeing the blood until the dawn of the next morning as she came to wake him up.

Draco looked into those monstrous eyes of Trudy's and looked at his arm; it was cut up, raw, and scabbed. He felt his bare chest, where he felt the sting of cuts against his hands. He looked at the drawer beside his huge king-sized bed. Suddenly, since he had forgotten her presence, Trudy spoke, "Draco, sir, its safely locked up, sir. Sir, I made sure I locked it, Draco, sir." He looked to her eyes and saw they were staring at what Draco had just a second before. When she spoke to him, she never referred to her self as Trudy, or possibly Gertrude, like she would have had Master Malfoy been in the room. She thought that an old practice and often scorned other house-elves for still preserving this horrid custom. But she had to play dumb when Master Malfoy was around. She still had to treat her masters with respect. That's why she began and ended all her phrases with 'Sir' or 'Madam.' She had to keep watch on Draco. She wasn't about to get the boot because she was being fresh to Master or Mistress Malfoy. She wasn't about to let some other blabber-mouth house-elf take her place. She loved Draco. No, not in some lovey-dovey way. She loved him like he was her child. She picked up his messes, and swept them neatly under the metaphorical carpet. If any other house-elf took her place, he or she might tell Master Malfoy about Draco's self-destructive habits, and to Trudy, this would just feed the fire of Draco's apparent unhappiness.

Draco blinked. Trudy had referred to herself as 'I,' which was something he was used to by now, but yet it was still so alien. Never before had he felt this way about a simple house-elf. He let it slip and almost instantly forgot about it as she spoke again. "Draco, sir, its getting close to breakfast, sir. Sir, you should be getting dressed, Draco, sir." He nodded absently and got up from bed. He was not a small fellow; he was getting close to being six foot at age sixteen, not exceptionally tall, but it suited him. He was slim and unnoticeably muscular. Not like he had biceps the size of Trudy, but he wasn't a frail thing in the least. He was satisfied with his body and never complained about how it was flawed in some manner. To him, there was no use fighting it if it didn't harm him.

It was sometime in July. Draco would be alone all day until Father came home, with the exception to the house-elves. Mother never stayed past breakfast, since she was usually off to some tea that some Death Eater's wife was having. There seemed to be one every day, as far as he was concerned. But it didn't bother him. He was just fine with his mother not around. She was just like his father, only with breasts it seemed. And the eyes. His mother looked almost exactly like his father, but her eyes were milky blue, some unnatural colour, unlike the steel that was his father's eyes. Draco had a nice mixture of the two. A silvery blue, though you had to get real close in order to actually see the blue streaks that lined his eyes. Not many people were ever that close; maybe his mother on those rare occasions she wasn't an unbearable witch and she would kiss his cheek before bed, she might've noticed. But that probably wasn't on her agenda to notice her handsome son's eyes.

That was another thing. Draco was no ugly kid. His parents seemed to be the epitome of beauty. His mother must have won pageants when she was a child for her breath-taking beauty; it was another unnatural feature of hers. His father obviously had lots of young women chasing him when he attended Hogwarts. But they must have also done more than just 'chasing,' Draco assumed. But he wasn't sure; he hadn't ever really asked his father about his sexual escapades as a teenager, that would have been too awkward.

Draco had decided to go to bed shirtless, since it was very hot in the year- round-heated mansion. Yes, the heat had been turned down, but it was still bloody unbearable in his room. Sleeping shirtless solved the problem enough to satisfy him. But when he got up from his bed, it seemed the temperature must have dropped several degrees to him. He grabbed his arms and rubbed them for warmth. He walked and grabbed the black-with-white- pinstripe suit shirt from the chair at his desk. He grabbed some dark khakis and slipped them on. This was just what he was going to wear to breakfast while his mother was around. He had to look presentable at breakfast. It was just a rule. Afterwards, he might change into a T-shirt and jeans.

As he walked down the hall to the massive staircase that lead to the entrance of the mansion, he heard only his breathing and the whispers from the various pictures and paintings that adorned the walls. All of them shot glances at him and then would continue to whisper to another person in another picture. Only one of the pictures did not.

It was a black and white picture of a young girl with thick, white blonde hair who was frowning, not at him, but for being frozen in this time.

It was his mother, of course.