He's read that the average person swallows at least eight spiders a year.
Sometimes Draco thinks about that, staring up at the elaborate carvings etched into his high ceiling. When he's reclining in bed, arms behind his head and white hair scattered around his face like a jagged halo, he thinks about spiders and swallowing and chewing tiny, fluttering legs between his teeth. The bed curtains are green and black velvet—when he curls his hand around the fabric, it bunches to his satisfaction and hides the shadowed corners of his room.
There aren't any cobwebs in those corners, of course. He's ordered the house elves to clean every inch of this room to the point where nothing lives in it except himself and the most microscopic of germs.
Sometimes he wakes up at night and feels something squirming in his mouth, but it's only his tongue struggling not to scream.
"There are things that no Malfoy should do in public," his father states flatly, his gray eyes boring down his son from the far end of the dinner table. To his left, his mother pauses and sets her spoon down with a clink upon the plate.
Draco stares intently at Lucius Malfoy. "And I don't intend to do any of them, Father."
"Intentions," the man murmurs softly, a smirk curving his lips, "are the things that drive men mad, Draco. It would do you well to remember that, as well."
He makes himself nod, forcing the obedient gesture out of himself with ease. He's had years of doing the same. When he picks up the clean white napkin at his side, dabbing lightly at his lips, he wonders if it will ever change. If there will be anything more than this long expanse of oak between his father and mother, the glimmering of silver at his side, and the empty breath of cold air hovering over everything.
Once, when Blaise Zabini visited, he had said it felt like eating in a morgue.
Draco thinks it's like sleeping in a room of spiders.
When he hits the ground, everything is knocked out of him.
His back impacts with enough force to shove his breath clear out of his lungs, startling him into a blank gasp. Eyes widened upwards cannot close, because the memory of working eyelids has been erased from the blast. His back breaks against the dirty soil of the Quidditch field, and gone is the desire to speak, hear, or search for the scent of his own blood and sweat.
He hits the ground. Remembers nothing of his parents—his father waiting proudly for him to embrace his destiny, his mother smoothing his hair with her chilled fingertips, and the deathly silence of a room. Gone is the knowledge of acidic potions and vengeance, the ugly green of envy, and the picture of laughing students walking ahead of him. It is a blank slate, a sudden shock of nothingness, leaving him barren and waiting to fill up again with whatever the world gives him.
He hits the ground, and everything is knocked out of him for only a moment.
The first thing he sees is the climbing arch of gold racing towards the sun, its tiny wings fleeing madly from the giants desperately trying to catch it.
"I hear the Dark Lord is gathering forces," Pansy is whispering. The entire western half of the library can probably hear her.
"It's almost time," one of the second years agrees, twisting his quill against his cheekbone. "Potter won't stand a chance when he finally rises again."
"He's been gathering Death Eaters," Zabini murmurs from the other side of the table. He smiled indulgently. "Of course, it could just be a rumor for now, but…"
"Draco? What do you think?"
Sitting with his potions book out in front of him, his quill half-dipped into the ink pot, Draco looks up to scowl at them. There are violent smears of purple bruises under his eyes, testament to the long nights he has spent studying for the final exams, and the grim set of his jaw line is severe.
"I think you should all shut up."
When they are all silent, he dips his quill again and makes a gentle curve to the 's' in 'Scouring Potion.'
Draco passes Harry Potter in the hallway every day now.
Their classes don't always coincide, but they still have the occasional merger of Slytherin and Gryffindor. But these are the days when they've learned the better part of discretion, and they end up sitting on opposite sides of the rooms in order to keep their lips clamped shut on the insults and nasty warfare. In time, they may even learn to ignore each other.
Except it's hard when he passes him every day in the hallway, and their eyes always meet for an instance.
Green on grey, but Draco can't tell which was the first to catch the last.
On Friday, Draco finds a Muggle shirt in the Prefects bathroom.
It is frayed and wrinkled, the short sleeves a little tattered at the edges, and all he can make out of the yellow on black lettering is Ra o Hea in blocky font. The tag had a name on it once upon a time, but the ink has long since washed away through care and time. It is large enough to hang disturbingly on his skinny, bony frame.
He makes sure the door is locked and stares at the mirror.
Hesitantly, his fingers work their way upwards into his hair, pulling it back into a small ponytail at the base of his head and knotting it there. Slips still fall into his face, but he doesn't bother attacking them. Instead, the boy glares intently at the silent reflection facing him—a scrawny little Mudblood with weary, suspicious eyes and a vicious scowl. There are scrapes still bleeding lightly on his elbows from practice earlier.
The mermaid hides her face in her hair when he begins to laugh.
He laughs and laughs, and it chokes and hurts, and he falls, crumbles, in on himself like a broken toy. The shirt tears under his nails when he clutches the hemline, but he doesn't hear the sound above his own hysterical giggles. When he's down on the wet tiles, soapy water seeping into his trousers, he can no longer see himself in the mirror's surface.
When his laughter becomes crying, he doesn't notice.
"You've been acting really funny lately, Draco," Crabbe tells him. It's a surprisingly astute observation.
Draco purses his lips. He turns to look out the window and replies, "It's a nice day. I didn't even notice until now."
"What?"
But Draco is already walking away. He's had practice with that.
Sometimes Snape tells him that he'd make a great potions master. One of the best, in fact. After all, he'd been teaching him everything he knows.
It used to bloat Draco's head, but he no longer brightens when he hears the words. If anything, the sullen glower to his eyes shifts even deeper—he hunches his shoulders inwards and gives a fake, listless smile to his professor. Snape never questions it; he understands more than enough. There is no regret or pity in the dark caverns of his eyes, but sometimes he touches the lip of Draco's cauldron as gently as though it were made of living flesh.
But he feels it, and Draco understands more than enough, as well.
"You dropped this."
Draco looks up and blinks. Potter's head is turned away, the profile revealing the sharp downturn of a mouth. His nose is sharper than it was the year beforehand, the blonde muses idly.
He takes the book offered to him. Tucks it under his arm.
"I always knew you'd pick up after me one day, Potter."
The green eyes flare only once in his direction, but the relief coursing through him is a hundred times more important. It's been too long without saying the words—he'd almost forgotten them. Almost erased them.
"You're welcome, Malfoy," is what Potter says back finally, and he turns to leave. Draco is surprised at first, but rationalizes that he's forgotten, as well. It's only after the familiar back disappears behind the doorway to a classroom that he realizes it's been grey on green all along.
"Our time approaches, Draco. I'm sure you've heard the rumors."
"I have, Father," he says, politely placing his silverware down on the plate with a clink. His mother smiles dotingly at him for a moment. From the other side of the table, Lucius dabs his mouth with a white napkin.
"When the time comes, I expect you will join us." There is no question within the statement.
"Of course," Draco says. He slaps the table hard enough to rock the entire contraption on its legs. His father and mother jump up, startled, to avoid the fallen splashes of wine across the wood.
"Draco!"
His ears are ringing. "There was a spider," he says.
To be honest, he doesn't want to do anything, really. He doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps anymore. He doesn't want to endure the cloying perfume of his mother when she embraces him. He doesn't want to walk along a set design made for him before he was born. Maybe it was okay once, but he's spent too much time passing green eyes in hallways, idly hearing the softened volume of a Muggle radio in the Great Hall, and spending time with the sharp sizzle of potion ingredients.
He wants power and success. He's ambitious. He won't settle for anything less than the best.
"It's just," he tells the ceiling helplessly, "that my best isn't the best for me, is it?"
He doesn't know what he wants anymore, but this isn't it. He'll eat all the spiders that come crawling to his mouth in the night, so long as he doesn't have to live like this anymore.
"I don't believe you," Potter says slowly. "I think you're lying."
"I could be," he agrees calmly, standing in the hallway with his hands hanging defenseless at his sides. "I could always be lying, Potter."
"What makes you think I—"
"I made this," Draco murmurs. He lifts up a small glass vial from the folds of his robes, glowing a coarse black over his pale, tapering fingers. "It's a Scouring Potion. It can painfully rub away the flesh from a person's bones. Remove their entire face. Burn holes through their necks."
Potter takes a wary step back, but he isn't afraid.
Slowly, bitterly, Draco raises it to his own face and tilts it over to pour.
And again
And again
The stones are hard on his back, but it doesn't matter anymore.
"What were you thinking?" Potter is murmuring against the smooth line of his collarbone, his dark hair tickling Draco's chin. "Are you insane?"
It's difficult to speak; he swallows. To his left, he can hear hissing as the acid eats away at the floor in a morbid puddle. "… maybe."
"Idiot. Fool."
"Stupid Gryffindor," Draco whispers, his hands reaching up to twine in the black mess of ebony. He feels that body pressing him back to the wall, securely, safely, and there's something amazing about the fear he can still smell in Harry Potter's breathing. It makes him press a kiss to the corner of his eyelids.
He blinks.
And when he kisses him for real this time—tilting Draco's chin up and swallowing every sound he could possibly make, grabbing impatiently at the knobs of his hips and languishing in the motion—the blonde finally closes his eyes and lets himself fall. Lets go to the blackness, the possibility of never eating in a morgue again, and revels in this feeling, whether it be real or false.
He might die for this. It's a possibility he's always acknowledged, because he could die for anything in the end. It is inevitable. Predictable. Death will become Draco when all becomes apparent and judged.
Harry whispers something against him. The name isn't his own. He doesn't care.
He doesn't know the future. But he knows tonight, his mouth won't be open long enough to devour any spiders.