Title: Monster
Summary: He wasn't porcelain like poor little Daphne, but fragile and invincible in the way one is when their toes are balanced on the edge of the Astronomy Tower. "I'm sorry." / All Draco has is metal and shadows. au.
Notes: This is an AU, showing the extremes the Ministry might have gone to if Draco tried to kill their Golden Boy after the war. To be honest, I just really wanted insane!Draco, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I hope you enjoy!
"He battered his tiny fists to feel something." - Meg and Dia, 'Monster'.
Draco breathed heavily.
"Harry, Harry, Harry," he murmured, fingers curling around the bars and trembling. He tugged - tugged - but they didn't pull free. His tongue was thick and heavy in his throat, and he so wanted to scream but the noise would echo and he would hear it for days. If anything, he preferred silence.
Footsteps were too loud, but nobody came there anymore.
In the shadows, his face was dark with bruises and blood and nightmares.
"Harry!" Draco called out again, and he battered his fists on the cold iron bars - bang, bang, bang - and he scraped his fingernails against the metal.
"Hush now, Draco," a woman's voice said softly, and he turned to glare at her. Her blonde hair was matted and plastered to her pale face; if it weren't for the twitch of her fingers and the twisted curl of her lips, he would think she was dead.
His own smile was bitter.
"What would you know, my dear?" He crawled towards her and she cowered. But she didn't blink.
"Please," she said loudly and this time, Draco pressed a hand to the bars separating their cells. He laughed when his fingers could fit through the small gap and stroke her cheek that felt like porcelain. She flinched away from him, and though her skin was porcelain, her eyes were steel.
"Tell me, then, how to get out of there." He smirked, pressing forward and tugging at her hair like it was pixie dust and it could pull him away.
(Monster, Monster, you don't escape from here.)
"I don't know."
"TELL ME!"
Draco lurched forward and pulled her as close as he could to the bars; she trembled and whimpered and he snorted. He put two hands on her cheeks and knew that he could snap her pretty little neck right there. All he would have to do is twist her throat and she would be dead on the floor of her cell and her blood would seep through like watercolours on a canvas and paint her red -
- one little snap -
"What's going on?"
Footsteps echoed like gunshots as they paced down the small, stone steps and into the darkness of the holding cell. Draco could picture the face of his captor before he had even opened his eyes. He knew those footsteps, and he knew that voice.
- bang, bang, bang -
"Look who it is. The Boy Wonder," he drawled, and he withdrew his hand from the bars, leaving the girl to cower in the shadows.
Harry knelt down in front of the cage beside Draco, threading his hands around the bars and crinkling his brow in sympathy, or empathy, or loathing, or whatever emotion people felt nowadays for those of them left behind metal.
"What happened, Daphne?" he cooed to the broken girl next to him.
Draco scoffed.
"N-Nothing. Draco was just getting a little... handsy." The glare she sent in his direction and the flare of her nostrils probably indicated hurt pride or something ridiculous, so he ignored it with a scoff.
(Monster, Monster, how should you feel?)
"I can have you moved," Harry offered kindly, and then he looked at Draco - actually at him, not at the shadows or the curve of his neck, but eye to eye. And Draco did not break the contact. He hadn't seen those green eyes in so long; they were no longer covered by glasses, and appeared bigger in the firelight.
Draco was mesmerized and he hated it.
"Harry," he murmured, and he crawled forward to look closer, to see every speck of midnight in the window to the great Harry Potter's soul. He was confined to a life of metal and shadows, but Harry was not. And never would be.
He didn't answer.
"Life imprisonment," Draco reminded him, elegantly stretching himself out as much as possible in the small space of his cell. "Or so they tell me. What counts as a life nowadays?"
Draco tapped his fingers on his chin in a mockery of thought. He didn't think much now. Thoughts were dangerous.
- bang, bang, bang -
"Shut up, Draco," Harry growled. He didn't call him Malfoy anymore; it would be too harsh, he confided once. Draco was the easier option. There was less attachment, less Lucius Malfoy tied to that name and everything it meant.
(Monster, Monster, inner demons are supposed to stay inside.)
"But being quiet is so boring, Harry. After all, being quiet is what got every known Slytherin to be thrown into jail cells. Daphne, here for instance-" He gestured at the pallid corpse in the corner, who looked away and hid behind her hair. "-she got ten years for wearing a green tie. Pansy was killed by a firing squad for not giving away my location. And you tortured Blaise for information he didn't know and couldn't know, but you didn't care, did you?
"So tell me to shut up, Harry, I dare you!" Draco roared, standing up now, hunched over and swaying on legs that have forgotten how to stand.
(He has to stand to fly.)
Harry shook and his footsteps echoed on the stone as the shadows lurched and tried to curl themselves around his fingertips. "That wasn't my decision."
"No?"
He trembled, fragile in the darkness and the damp and the defeated. He wasn't porcelain like poor little Daphne, but fragile and invincible in the way one is when their toes are balanced on the edge of the Astronomy Tower. "I'm sorry."
Draco tilted his head, puzzled. "I tried to kill you, you know," he said softly.
"I know," Harry replied, his throat thick. Oh, the things Draco would do to that throat. He would start off with kisses and caresses, of course, but they would bloom into bites and bruises. He would paint his pale neck pink and green and blue and black and purple, twisting like a tattoo onto his shoulders.
Finally, he would wrap his long fingers around the junction between his collarbone and his pulse point and squeeze like a hangman and his noose.
He would choke Harry, who would thrash and gargle and put up a fight and most likely be the most exciting kill Draco had ever had. He would bruise and break him, carve his thoughts into his veins and leave him to die.
(Monster, Monster, their nightmares are your dreams.)
"I'd do it again, too."
"I know."
"My Daddy beat me, you know. Used to lock me in dark rooms where I couldn't see the bruises. And Mummy didn't love me, not really. I was a mini-Lucius to be coddled and adored, and oh, isn't he sweet? I wasn't sweet, Harry. And I think I used to love you."
There was a long pause that could've been an infinity or just a staccato note in the melody of Draco's heartbeat.
"You don't have to tell me this, Draco," Harry said with a smile, messing up his hair and stepping further back from the bars. His fingers trembled.
"What I wouldn't give to bruise you," he hissed in reply.
Harry walked backwards slowly, footsteps echoing and echoing in Draco's head - bang, bang, bang - and he wished he had a Muggle gun, in that moment, just to aim it at his heart.
(His or Harry's, he couldn't say. It wouldn't matter anyway.)
In the shadows, Daphne sniffled and curled away from him and he battered his fists on the metal bars to feel something, anything. He wanted to bathe in kerosene and set himself on fire just to touch and feel something. Maybe this was his punishment, not metal, and not Harry.
- bang, bang, bang -
Every thought sounded like love me, love me, but they were too loud - he held his head and they pulsed like living creatures burrowing into his skull.
Harry wouldn't come back now, and his friends were dead, and the shadows crawled like snakes and coiled themselves around his ankles and his wrists to bind him to a life he could've had.
(Monster, Monster.)