Warning: Watch out for violence and explicit mention of wounds/injuries.

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones –

It is difficult to find the original colour of your skin beneath the ugly patchwork of bruises that mark your skin from wrist to arm, knee to toe. He prowls into the dungeons without fail every day and every night and you shiver behind the bars of a prison your family helped build as his rank breath stings your nostrils. He unlocks your cell with the lazy flick of a wand and you aren't given even a second before he pounces on you, thrashing your arms with the stout stick he refuses to part with. He pins you to the ground between his immense palms and screams into your face with the saliva from his canines dripping into your face and you forget who you are, who you were and who you thought you'd ever be.

But you let him twist your palms behind your back and kick you in the stomach, barely registering the blood that rises to your mouth mixed with bile. You're black and blue and green all over and you watch with ugly fascination as another little patch of fair skin cracks under the whip of his wand and bleeds red.

All he and your family and the freaking Dark Lord want from you are answers, but they are memories you will take with you till your grave because you'd rather feel sticks and stones bite into your flesh every single day for the rest of your miserable experience than betray Hermione. You've seen the life almost drain out of her at the hands of your demented aunt and swore from then on to be the sacrificial goat in this meaningless ceremony if only it meant sparing her body.

But Words Will Never Hurt You.

"You're a shame on the Malfoy name and your entire pureblood ancestry!"

"You are not the son I raised you to be."

"Death is a far better fate for you than being the puppet of the Dark Lord, my boy."

It hurts just a little bit more every day, the menacing hisses and disappointed statements and nasty threats as they call you a liar and a thief and a traitor and you are reminded over and over again about the great failure you've turned out to be. You've only done everything that you have to hurt and taunt and even harm all the half bloods and muggleborns at Hogwarts because you have wanted to fit in and be the perfect example of a cunning Slytherin, the perfect golden-haired Malfoy heir but your attempts ended up futile. There was a time when each cruel word has you bleeding from within and crying out in agony, doing and redoing everything with a maniacal degree of perfection if only to be accepted as one of them.

You can hardly care anymore, though, and just shrug your emaciated shoulders when the same voices taunt you and jeer you promise to deliver your head on a silver platter to the Dark Lord himself.

What does it matter to you anymore? Maybe mother and grandmother were correct, after all.

For sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.

Or can they?

Entered in:

The Twelve Days of Christmas Style Challenge, house: Slytherin