In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the Twistmas collection.

Prompt: Christmas visitors

Warnings: torture, murder, hints to non-con, heavy alcohol consumption, cussing. This is a violent and twisted fic.

JK Rowling owns Harry Potter and all that belongs to that fantastic world. A couple of the dialogues towards the end are from The Deathly Hallows. This story was inspired by A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens.
Thank you to The Slytherin Cabal for putting this twisted Christmas fest together.
My endless gratitude to my alpha/beta RooOJoy. All errors left are mine!
Happy Holidays to you all! Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think.

Draco's Twistmas Carol

22nd of December 1997, 2:45 AM

Draco came to, a throbbing headache and a taste of bile in his mouth.

Bollocks.

The dark room he woke up within smelled musty and somewhat foul as though he'd been shagging and drinking all night. Bracing his stomach, he found himself naked. The last details he could recall were a self-refilling bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, Theo, Pansy, and the Greengrass sisters.

A soft sigh from somewhere next to him hinted that he wasn't alone.

Fuck, please, Salazar, don't let it be Pansy.

"Draco," a hushed voice called for him. Thank Merlin, it wasn't Pansy's high pitched whine. She tended to be a little clingy if he paid her any kind of attention.

Rubbing his eyes, he focussed his sight and scanned the darkness around him. At first, it was in vain. Once his pupils adjusted to the lack of light, he could finally discern the familiar shapes of his bedroom at Malfoy Manor. Next to him lied a pale undressed body, barely covered by his green duvet. The witch's oval shaped face was framed in honey coloured locks.

"Greengrass, what the fuck are you doing still here?" he questioned rather rudely.

"You asked me to go to bed with you," Astoria quipped, pinching her thin eyebrows together.

Draco suddenly remembered her flirty eyes from the night before. The youngest of the Greengrasses had rubbed her body against his own all night, rendering him aroused and willing to bed anyone; she had been lucky enough to be the closest to him when he finally decided to retire in his chambers.

"Yes, and you already did exactly what I wanted from you. Now get the fuck out," he hissed while he was frantically looking for his wand.

He didn't listen to Astoria's protestations and insults towards him. He knew he deserved them all, but he couldn't give a Sickle about it. Witches bored him. At least when he was not shagging them.

Finally, his fingers grazed the familiar ten inches long Hawthorn wood. He summoned a pair of sweatpants and left the bed. He walked straight for the loo while his hands combed through his tousled hair. He didn't bother saying goodbye; he only hoped he would have found an empty bedroom upon his return.

He briefly looked at his face in the mirror, before standing over the toilet. He looked like dragon dung. His skin was as pale as the translucent sheer of the Slytherin House ghost. He had gotten thin and unhealthy, the dark circles around his eyes making him look like a hollow skull.

Draco Malfoy fucking hated what he had become. He couldn't remember the last time he had a proper meal. Since he had returned to the Manor for the holidays, Mother had been complaining every day about him not joining the family for supper.

Scoffing at the thought of family, he flushed the toilet and approached the sink. His family consisted in the shadow of his father, spineless and wandless as he was, in the fading beauty of his mother, stomped by the duress of the constant threat on her life, and in his fucking mad aunt Bellatrix, if he could call her a relative at all. He barely fucking knew the bint. He stared at his reflection for two heartbeats, then he averted his eyes. He could bear no more.

His gaze fell on the exposed skin of his left forearm. The sinister snake of his Mark was slithering out of one of the skull's empty sockets. The serpent hissed as his last spire flopped out of the hole that was supposed to host an eye. Draco's stomach flipped, and he was forced to hunch over the sink to empty it. A dark, burnt liquid splashed all over the immaculate porcelain. The smell was acrid and foul, it made his bulging eyes water and ache. His throat was sore and soon started stinging and burning.

He vomited until he had nothing else to purge. After spitting some bile, he cleaned up and dragged his feet back toward his four-poster bed. There were still noises in his bedroom, metallic scraping as though someone was playing with the fireplace tool set. He inhaled sharply, before letting his breath out, spitting all his annoyance, "Hadn't I made myself clear, Greengrass?"

The large clock down the hallway chimed three times. It was fucking loud, and Draco hated that thing. He cussed at himself for drinking his mind into oblivion and forgetting to cast a Quieting Charm on his bedroom.

Draco suddenly shuddered, a glacial shiver rattling him to the core. The temperature had dropped below zero; his breaths swirled before his eyes. He scanned his room, trying to find the source of the metal thrashing sounds, but he was alone.

An ethereal and cavernous whisper mauled his eardrum, sounding as though it originated right in the centre of his brain, "Not Astoria, dear."

A cloud of white smoke began seeping through the wooden boards of the floor. At first, the mist rose in the air and filled the room, expanding and spiralling upward. Then, it condensed in a dense and thick glob that shifted until it formed a human figure. The ghost floated around the room, producing all sort of screeching noises, and came to a halt in front of the luxurious fireplace.

Draco let out a horrified cry at the sight of his former Professor of Muggle Studies, Charity Burbage.

The witch had been killed by the Dark Lord in the Manor over the summer. Draco still had nightmares regarding that awful night when he was forced to witness the death of that poor pleading woman. He could still hear the clunk that her body produced when it hit the wooden table in what used to be his family's dining room. His sleep was constantly disturbed by the image of Nagini devouring the witch's stiff corpse. Looking at his former professor, Draco could clearly distinguish clumps of mangled flesh on her face and neck. He suspected there were more but they were mercifully covered by her pearlescent robe.

"It is a pleasure to meet you again, Mr Malfoy." Once more, her voice seemed to emanate from inside of him.

"Professor, I-I ..." Words couldn't form coherently in his mind. Burbage tilted her head, smiling at his struggle; her dead eyes were soft, almost affectionate.

"Don't be afraid, dear. I'm not here to haunt you." She floated over his bed and sat on it, the mattress remained unmoved. Piercing him with her gaze as though she could see right through him, she spoke, "You would deserve a scolding for the way you treated that poor girl though. I remember Ms Greengrass, she's a clever girl."

Not clever enough to stay away from me, Draco thought but didn't dare state it out loud. "Why are you here, Professor?" he asked instead. He was feeling really uncomfortable, her eyes were disturbing, they had scrutinized each and every movement he had dared executing, like biting his lip or fidgeting with his thumb ring. He felt as though he was stripped bare, right to his bones.

"I'm here to warn you to change your ways," she responded with a hollow smile.

He tilted an eyebrow up towards his hairline and shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

Professor Burbage giggled an eerie sound that went straight to the pit of his belly. "You need to come to your senses, dear. You are going to be put in front of a hard choice soon, and you need to know what to do. There can be no hesitation."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," Draco breathed out almost in a whisper.

"You'll be called upon to help the Chosen One," the spirit sibilated, floating towards him. Draco stepped back one pace after the other until he hit the cold, stone wall of his bedroom.

The ghost of his former professor stopped mere centimetres from his pointy nose, her eyes were smouldering pools of molten lead. "Don't you dare speak, boy. I can see every despicable thought in your mind!" Her voice was reverberating within the confines of his brain as though it were made of thunder and blasting curses.

Draco was panting, unwillingly breathing in the cold, dead air that was leaking from her lifeless lips. He was thinking that helping Potter could never be an option for him.

"You will change your convictions," her voice dulled into a more bearable lower tone. "You will receive the visit of three spirits in the coming nights. Two will come at three o'clock, the third will come at the last stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve." Then, the wraith passed through Draco's solid body and disappeared, leaving him hunched on the cold floor, greedily gasping for some clean oxygen now that the ghost was gone.

The young Malfoy heir stared at the dust particles dancing in front of the feeble candlelight on the claw-footed desk on the other side of the room until the sky reverberated its pale light into the manor. He remained lost in his mind, still scared and shaken to his core.