Night falls and Draco Malfoy breaks apart.
It is hard to differentiate night and day in the Slytherin common room. The rise and fall of sun and moon passes as theory down here. It is an underworld where light glows from a hundred green gems, each lit from within by some spectral fire as if Draco and his housemates see by the flickers of an ancient haunting. For more than five years this place has been his home, and now he can only understand it by its name on the Hogwarts school maps: Dungeon.
Like father, like son. Somewhere a thousand kilometers away Lucius Malfoy too rots in a dungeon cobbled together by wizarding hands. Does he yearn to be free from Azkaban, to fly from behind the Ministry's stone walls and iron bars to see his son and wife again?
Draco doubts it. His father is the only free Malfoy today, for behind bars he is free from the all-seeing eyes and steel fist of the man they call a lord.
Seams split deep within Draco. Joints fray and snap like the cables of some great bridge blown apart by a hurricane, the storm wall sending rubble flying off to every corner of the winds and leaving ruins in its wake. Pressure tugs at the corners of Draco's eyes, and he seesaws between cursing his father's name and crying for him to come to his rescue. He has sworn upon his soul and life his own damnatio memoriae.
It's futile, fruitless. He is thankful it's past midnight and he is alone amidst the ghostly green lights. Already he hears the rumors: Draco is losing it. I don't know what's gotten into him. He too wishes he knew.
He remembers twelve years old; he remembers his father leering over creased pages of the Daily Prophet like some vulture perusing carcasses just to pull free the most appetizing of rotting flesh. Ministry Hails Decline in Pure-Blood Wizards as "Welcome Integration with the Muggle World" earned a sneer and a scoff. "The problem with these ilk," Lucius told him, his voice envenomed with disgust or hatred or fear or something otherwise sinister Draco could not tell, "is that they're like addicts. One they start with their so-called good deeds, they never stop. They only raise the bar higher and higher until they can see nothing but their crusade, no matter how misguided it is. No one will ever be able to tell them they are barreling towards a slaughterhouse."
Perhaps, Draco thinks now, they are too far down their road to veer off course even if others intervened.
He cups his face in his hands and bends over his knees, bile lurching up his throat. He is not supposed to be some boy with thoughts like these, not like Crabbe and Goyle playing at the dark arts like toddlers waving butcher knives. Not like Potter and Weasley and the Mudblood, or anyone else at Hogwarts, for that matter. He is a Death Eater, the youngest Death Eater. He is trusted by the dark lord. Isn't he?
Like the ilk his father spoke of, Draco has marched too far as legion to turn back. He is here not to study and make friends and find love and relish the last years of childhood before the anvil clouds of adult life settle overhead. He is not here to be a kid. He is not here to live the years he will look back on at seventy as he regales his grandchildren of a golden life.
He is here to kill a man. To kill Dumbledore.
He's meant to do it. It's his destiny. He will delight the dark lord, fulfill his mission, and then…
And then Voldemort will not kill his family.
The dam breaks. Rocks tumble, rain pours, Rome falls, and Draco cannot help but cry.
A devil looms in his forebrain in his father's body. Blame me, it shrieks. You could swear yourself to the dark lord free of your own volition and ambition had I not failed him so. Blame me, son. I was not enough for our lord.
Draco hurls the false prophet aside. He gave himself to Voldemort for that very yearning. He looks at Potter and wishes he too could see his name in lore. He looks at Weasley and wants brothers and a sister who love him for who he is, no matter how much a failure. He looks at Granger and wants half as much talent as that Muggle-born has.
He thinks of Dumbledore and imagines killing a man he wishes looks after him the way he looks after Potter.
He has done these things. He has damned himself. He has walked on his own two legs down the path towards a tunnel with no light at its end, a pathway to Tartarus that he has imagined lined with gold. His immortal longings have won him not a robe and crown but a pauper's guise. Synapses fire, muscles contract, sinews pull, and Draco takes another step towards the slaughterhouse. He has signed his soul to the devil and received only threats and promises of punishment should he fail in his tasks. Even Faust got a better deal.
What has he done? He weeps and can not stop. He is sixteen and already his life is over. Across the world millions of sixteen-year-olds wake up, go to sleep, tromp off to schools and fields and storefronts, work, live, love, laugh, and all Draco Malfoy can do is stare down at the sword he has thrown himself upon.
Perhaps that would be easier. Here in the night he cannot see, the life he cannot imagine living a moment longer, all Draco can think of is that the next world must be better than this.
He does realize his company until he hears his name. She stands at the mouth of the staircase to the girls' dormitories, skinny, bony, and fourteen. If Astoria Greengrass were a Muggle, she'd see a nutritionist and have anxious teachers showing her parents charts of height and weight measurements by age and sex. Underdeveloped this girl, so much that Draco thinks she could float away in the breeze if the wind blew too hard.
Tonight she is a ghost, a bird. Her face is pale, her eyes deep-set and dark, her purple nightgown a cloak swallowing her whole.
"Leave me alone, Stori," Draco mumbles through tear-drenched hands. Draco is losing it. There's another one to recite the rhyme.
She does not. Astoria walks ethereal across the common room, a sprite in the darkness, a spark at midnight. Draco knows her sister Daphne well enough to sense the taunting and accusatory whispers that a Greengrass tongue can spill, but from Astoria he feels only a hushed warmth. She sits beside him beneath the will-o'-the-wisps that bob from the ceiling, all acceptance and nothing more as he tries in vain to stem floods and summon stoicism.
Finally she speaks again, her words so alien to the accusations of Lucius Malfoy and Lord Voldemort that coalesce like a plaque in Draco's mind. "You don't have to say anything," she says, her voice summer rain and prairie sunrise, a moonbeam piercing the inky tunnel Draco hobbles about, "but you can tell me if you want to."
He cannot speak. He cannot imagine telling her of the demons he has named brothers. For once – and when and for whom otherwise has it been so? – he wants to keep her from the nightmares. He wants her to run away, to hide away in her dormitory and flee the black beast crawling forth from his chest to be born.
She only sits and waits. The silence between them is of foreign worlds and home, alienating and the only thing Draco truly wants in his heart of hearts. At last she leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder as her eyelids droop, her cheekbone digging into his skin.
For a moment Draco comes together again. He is beyond this dungeon, beyond thralldom to Lord Voldemort, beyond wondering whether is father and family will die and whether he will have to kill a man he knows he cannot. He is naught but sixteen again, a boy with a girl falling asleep on his shoulder late at night when stars glisten and owls hoot. He is a wizard, learning, studying, living, more than a tool of some corrupted man hell-bent on twisting the world into unknowable shapes. For a moment something red and warm and restless shudders deep in his chest and pushes back the black beast infesting his spirit, fighting, grappling, carving out a space of its own and declaring that Draco Malfoy is not a Death Eater. He is not a dark wizard, he is not a bad man. He is not anything but sixteen and lonely and human.
Then the moment passes. He is still fractured, still twisted and broken with tears drying on his cheeks. But Astoria still rests on his shoulder, and the memory of something greater, the picture of what could be, lives in his mind's eye.
Perhaps something can be done. Perhaps, in the briefest of flames burning bright in the dark, he sees a flash of hope.