Icemen and Cupboard Corners

by AviTay

My arm ached with red and I considered my father beneath my frost. His words passed through my lips and I wondered for the first time where I had gone. It was my mouth that shouted and my arm that ached and his hands that pulled the strings.

Title: Icemen and Cupboard Corners
Disclaimer: Not my characters, definitely my interpretation.
Rating: PG13, but that could be stretching it. Some of the implications may be disturbing.
Summary: My arm ached with red and I thought of my father, really considered him, beneath my frost. His words passed through my lips and I wondered for the first time where I had gone. It was my mouth that shouted and my arm that ached and his hands that pulled the strings.
Brief Note: This is a rather strange little story. I would tell you why I spent three days working on it, but I don't really know. Also, this can be read as HPDM pre-slash, but it doesn't have to be.

Icemen and Cupboard Corners

Let me tell you what I have never been allowed to be.
~Dorothy Allison

I always liked the way the light came through the manor windows. It looked like a crystal kingdom. I could pretend those early mornings that every room was a colony filled with enchanted beings; they were in the tiles, the little icemen breaking free, and the curtains, brightly colored bird with the finest, softest feathers. Those mornings as I dashed about all of seven years old I could even believe my father gentle and my mother delicate, two more mysterious creatures inhabiting my wondrous land. Even the house elves seemed beautiful.

i I i I i I i

Red was never a color I liked, a preference my father was all too willing to enforce and my mother to ignore. I found it too often in unexpected places: on the floors, in the kitchen, my mother's clothes, my own mouth. It frightened me when I parted my too pale lips the shock of color between my teeth and on them and running down my chin. I was eight years old when I learned what red meant when it left the sky and touched the manor walls; when my mother's eyes leaked as she smiled and my father watched so carefully how everything was done. The house elves were less beautiful then and the kingdom less wondrous.

As I watched the light touch, slowly, the floors and creep across the rugs and up the walls in the early mornings, those early mornings with red clouds and orange glowing skies, my kingdom was re-revealed a horror. The icemen drowned in copper colored earth and those beautiful birds fell skyward with none of the grace of an albatross. They were fleeing, my beauties, and I was learning why.

i I i I i I i

The first time I showed my father my icemen, on parchment because he could not see them in the floor, his wrist twitched and the world caught fire, or I did. That day, when I was nine years old and shaking, my mother took me away from blues and golds and reds and introduced me to green. I had been in the gardens before but I had never seen the kingdom there, or, I had, but it was ever changing and so much harder to read. My quavering hands found comfort in the leaves, filled with tiny sticklike people, and their freedom to change from day to day; a freedom my icemen and my lovely birds had never had and I was losing day by day.

i I i I i I i

I learned to write my father's script in black surrounded by browns and books. I could see in it sharp points of mountains or blades or wands, each colder and less personal than the last. The cane sat beside the table as my quill moved slowly, carefully, and without flourish. I forgot, for a moment, the horses that lived in the library table as I scratched each letter, learning to mimic those freezing peaks and splintered valleys.

I was ten years old when I learned to forget, temporarily, the friends who had guided me since my smallest days when they were larger and more real to me than people. I learned to rage when they returned to my sight because I could not free them anymore than I could remember how to make their tiny upturned faces smile instead of scream.

i I i I i I i

I found eyes deeper and more mysterious than my icemen's eternal struggle in a world of black chocked sunlight. My mouth moved through the library patterns, with glacial script behind each clipped and tailored word, as my mind or my soul moved swift behind my eyes and ached with a feeling I had learned to ignore.

In the garden with my mother I examined green and found it wanting for the first time. She gave me a quill and I showed her a jungle filled equally with dark cupboard corners and glistening owl feathers all dressed in green. She smiled a smile that lacked understanding and I held her hand to feel the pulse beneath the skin of this slowly fading woman I called home.

I lost my jungle and its wild things and was trapped on a lonely mountain peak at bare eleven. My life had lost its growing things and I feared for my sight in that strange castle with too many things alive to see beneath and deep green forests hidden, cloaked in red.

i I i I i I i

My arm ached with red and I thought of my father, really considered him, beneath my frost. His words passed through my lips and I wondered for the first time where I had gone. It was my mouth that shouted and my arm that ached and his hands that pulled the strings and betrayed my lovely, long trapped birds gone free. My mind shook with the sight of red that fled my body, traitorous red, as my eyes fell deeper into a canopy of green I knew was full of tiny sticklike people I had forgotten to see.

At thirteen my father's voice demanded death for my beautiful now free birds from my own lips as my eyes, ignoring his strings, followed the jungle I had lost to a mountain peak and pondered growing things, icemen, and cupboard corners. If my lips refused to speak my mind, at least I had learned it could still be freed.

i I i I i I i

I listened harder, those days, when my voice said spells I didn't know, my lips shaped sounds I had not heard, and my eyes wandered from their ordered path. It was easier, there, surrounded by cold and stone like home to see beneath the world to the one I still knew and understood. Deep in the corners of the stone hid tiny, desperate soldiers in gray war paint that showed like cracks against their fragile bodies. My eyes were drawn away to neat, flashing circles my mouth had made and my lips curled into something that was not a smile.

I was fourteen when I saw dragons for the first time outside of wood grain and found my mind entirely my own all too briefly. Black and red and blue in the sky against the faintest speck of green that held more life than any, even the most populous, stone floor. And then I was pushed beneath again and I felt as if I was drowning without the colors and the creatures of the world.

i I i I i I i

At fifteen I understood my place in the world, as my body would have it, for the very first time. I was to serve animals, or so my mind screamed and hissed at the woman with the large mouth my lips vowed service to. My legs followed him, a him with jungles in his eyes that were haunted no longer by cupboard corners. The forest was deeper, darker, with deathed winged horses and my future all too clearly revealed. And I was only fifteen.

i I i I i I i

A new guest frequented the manor and walked through my kingdom and stepped on my icemen. My lovely little birds had fled, but my tiny, screaming icemen still clawed at the surface of their stones, their former smiling faces twisted past all but my own recognition.

The guest, cloaked in green and black, was full of more red than I had ever seen. Red is an ending color and it tinted everything I saw as my world (only my world I now understand) burned. When I woke, shaking like so long before, my mother's hand clutched my wrist. It was my pulse I felt flutter beneath her fingers and my lips that moved with my mind for once, and she knew. She didn't explain because she didn't have to; my father had to remain behind my eyes despite my sudden freedom. There was a monster in our garden and it wanted things that as myself I could not deliver, but with my father's careful prodding would have come too easily.

It was not something I was good at, I realized, pretending to wear my father's strings. His absence was in my voice and showed through my skin and for once the jungle followed me. I did not hide as well as the cupboards in his eyes and I didn't want to. Even as I learned to breathe my own air, I was distracted by the people in the stones and I missed terribly the fresh green growing things I had been able to visit before I had to learn to act without a puppeteer.

One day he found me and a fire burned behind his eyes. My lips moved in the library ways despite that he had caught me briefly honest.

It was not like the fire when my chest turned red, but from one full of growing things it might have been worse. Hours later I traced thin lines across my bones and allowed myself to see the people I walked past instead of their reflections in the stone. Their faces twisted much like my icemen and I knew it was not pain; it was hatred. In a cupboard with strange, deep corners, I knew that would change and it would be mine, not my father's doing.

I was sixteen when the sky fell and the lights turned out. I was left alone cloaked in red and darkness. There was pain, but I touched my scars for grounding. I am not my father and I am bad at pretending. When everything is over there will be room for fresh green growing things to erase my world of red. But there may not be room for me.

i I i I i I i

If I hadn't heard so many whispers about it, I would have completely forgotten the color green that year. A woman I once knew drowned my precious, angry icemen in her copper colored blood because our guest, our Dark Lord, willed her to. I watched their tiny ice sharp hands clutch their fragile, see-through throats and thought of sunlight. How could something so innocent predict the colors of my living nightmares?

My birds were freed some years before and in their place were dank dark curtains that kept the rooms in a perpetual twilight. It seemed fitting to me; there are some things even sunlight should not witness.

I learned more words for blood and pain and learned more feelings for each in the two short months of summer than even on my darkest days I dreamed were real before. And I, just me alone inside my scrambling brain, was ordered to teach out visitors the same. What not even Voldemort pulled from my mind (not a protected thing, just scattered) was how many of those high pitched screams I tore from my own throat when left with them alone. I felt my body fade away each slowly passing day as my meals vanished inside the mouths of those who should have been my prey.

One day, how many passed I didn't know and couldn't care, my jungle came and knelt atop my icemen. Everything and everyone went quiet as I stared. I had forgotten, somehow, even as I fought my small constant battles, how green meant fresh green growing things. Potential. It all lay before me there and not the garden or my trapped icemen could dream of the things that grew all too clearly behind those eyes. How could I, an insignificant creature doomed to rot in darkness, take away those dreams behind those eyes? What I was would have no future in a world without that green. It may not have, even with it. I didn't know who rest behind those eyes (how could I? Everything it seemed was knew to me) but I knew he understood my icemen and if anyone could, he could set those tiny, long held bodies free.

There was a girl who bled within my former shining kingdom, who screamed higher than even I had managed. I wished I could show her the tiny living things that ran through the rooms before, when the manor was full of light, but all save my icemen had long since vanished. It was not long before I lost my power and my usefulness. Life became much darker for a time.

I met fire and the creatures that lived within it when I was seventeen years old. I was saved by fresh green growing things and for the first time since I learned to think again I thought that maybe, this new world could have a place for one such as me.

i I i I i I i

Even with the windows open the magic did not return to my now lost shining kingdom. Mother told me that the world would get bright again but I don't think she knew what was missing from our home. It had been alive before, full of tiny living creatures that she had never seen. Even with the monsters gone, it did not return to the way that I remembered. Only my tiny icemen, breathing calmer than they had before, remained, still trapped in stones together.

Mother took me to a place full of people and told them things I didn't listen to. In this world, the new land, there was no green or growing things. Monsters, it seemed, were not the only ones that dwelt in red and black.

A man came and I said "yes," he stared a while then shook his head and left. When the man spoke before the court I saw women cry. When the jungle came and demanded that I be allowed to go free (free from what?) there was no argument. Mother and I returned home and I was not sad when I did not see my father again. I was eighteen years old.

i I i I i I i

It was weeks after the trial that I saw Malfoy again. Well, I guess that was when he saw me, really. He touched my shoulder in the middle of Diagon Alley and had Ron, Hermione, and me spinning on him with wands raised.

"Before you put it back where it belongs," his voice barely raised above a whisper and his eyes were locked on something behind us that Hermione was kind enough to tell me later could not have possibly existed, "let me use that wand for something."

"What? Which-? Why!"

"Come to the manor tomorrow. All of you. You'll see." He turned and left as if these vague conversations were something that he had everyday. And maybe they were. It was hard for all of us to remember that the Malfoy we had known had never been real. Who he was now… Hermione said even the mind healers were worried. There was no precedent for a case like his.

When we arrived at the manor, a house elf took us to the room where Hermione was tortured. Ron was ready to make a scene but he couldn't find his voice when we saw what Malfoy (Draco?) had done to the room. All of the floor except a large square in the middle was covered with wool, and around that square were a series of strings that might have been made of rubber. Malfoy was sitting next to the square and rubbing the surface as we came in. That was the first time I saw him smile, when he saw that we actually came.

"Here." He held out his hand and not even Ron was angry when I handed over the elder wand without asking any questions. There were no words after that. Malfoy stood in a room full of wool and sunlight and waved the wand while staring at that square of rock. Before our very eyes tiny people formed and pulled away from one another and climbed out of the floor using those tiny ropes he'd left for them around the square. The there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, that pulled themselves from the stone, were made of stone, and not more than a half inch tall.

When they were all out and the floor was left without it's clear square in the center, they, all of them, walked in a group out a door I hadn't noticed was open and into the garden.

"Thank you." Malfoy was closer to me than I had expected, grinning, and handing back the elder wand. He followed those tiny, crystal people into the garden and I knew one day soon, I would be coming back.

"Are they alive?" Hermione asked at the Leaky Cauldron that night, the first thing any of us had said about the strange incident that morning, "or animated?"

I snorted. "I suspect it doesn't matter. Not when he used the elder wand."

It was two months before I returned to the manor. I found Draco in the garden and his mother watching him with a smile. She let me go outside alone. I sat next to him. He smiled and gestured beneath the bushes and I saw was he was watching.

There were the tiny crystal people in tiny houses made of leaves. They hugged tiny, clinking hugs and held tiny, crystal hands. They played tiny, crystal games and fed tiny, shining babies. That day hadn't been a dream.