This is a big step away from my usual fluffy pieces, but I feel that this was really important for me to write in order to get inside of Draco's head. If I'm going to write a redeemed Draco, there has to be a past. I hope you enjoy my darker foray into our beloved characters. If you would like to leave a comment, I would love to hear what you think.
With love,
WithRhyme
If we don't end war, war will end us.
-H.G. Wells
He could feel the fire, feel it burning. Burning up everything around it as he ran, ran faster than he'd ever run.
To escape the heat, melting the skin off his calves and sweating the fight out of him.
More than once, as he staggered around the piles of furniture and books, desperate for an exit from the infinite magical dumping ground he found himself in, he thought about giving up.
About letting the fire consume him, have its way with him. Control him. He was used to being a puppet.
What was he running from?
What was he running towards?
Past and future were the same for him, existed as one. His life was tattooed onto his arm, a writhing serpent inky black that called for him, burned him like the fire did.
One night he woke to find that he had clawed at the brand in his sleep, tearing ribbons out of his arm, a bloody mess on his sheets that left the mark fixed starkly, mockingly, on the remaining flesh. The bandage that had covered the wound had been a relief; a sanitary white covering the sin beneath.
The screams of Crabbe and Goyle rang out, sickeningly, at his back, and he wasn't sure whether they were spurring him on or inviting him more towards the blazing warmth at his back. Towards a future that wasn't the destruction of everything that he had, in his short life, loved.
Goyle's shrieks fell silent.
Draco found himself thinking, numbly, that he had never stood much of a chance. The world as they lived it was not made for men like Gregory Goyle.
He felt himself slowing.
He couldn't sense his legs beneath him, but knew that they were burned. Could smell the scent of charred flesh in the smoke around him, tasted it heavy on his tongue. Breathed it in with every panting breath.
Though that could have been Goyle.
He closed his eyes, let his arms fall heavy at his sides.
He could feel the tears running down his cheeks, into his open mouth and dripping from his chin. He couldn't tell whether they were from relief or fear, but he thought that this, this feeling, was what death felt like.
Death was having every regret hit you at once, all the things you had done or should have done. It was a feeling, struggling deep and primal and primitive in your chest, pushing up and through you.
It sounded like a sob but tasted like despair.
It was cold.
At least, this was death for him. For a Death Eater. The youngest in history! Something to be proud of.
He laughed, hysterically, as he heard the name in his head. Death Eater. Death was not something that you consumed. Death was something that consumed you. And they were foolish, a group of boys playing lamb to a misguided shepherd, to think otherwise.
The fire was a deafening roar in his ears. He tipped his head back, opening his eyes to consider the heavens above him. The ceiling of this improbable room was an infinite blackness, swallowing the prayers falling from his lips without a sound, shadows dancing across his vision.
A breeze rushed by, and he turned his head to see a shadow morph into the form of Potter, battle-dirty and hero-symbol, shimmering above the haze of the fire.
He felt an irrational surge of anger as Potter picked him up by the collar, and he kicked his feet in an attempt to be free of the hands which were drawing him away from his redemption. As the flames nipped at his boots, he watched the place he had been standing disappear in the inferno he had hoped to be devoured in.
He had almost been free.
And now Potter was winging him through the air as they rose above the flames, throwing him back into the fight, back into the fire.
Back into this hopeless war, a war he had been forced to join the wrong side of.
"For Mother," a voice whispered in his ear. The voice of his father, as he stood in Draco's bedroom that fateful night, eyes wild and pleading. Desperate to use his son to fix his own mistake.
"Anything," Draco had replied, and he'd watched his father's face break into a grin.
The melting heat was working its way across his back now, and he wondered if he wouldn't be getting his redemption anyways. After Goyle had gone down the fire had exploded even more uncontrollably than before, a beast without a master, and the flames were climbing higher and faster than Potter could escape from them. A sudden burst of speed hit Potter and the door to the Room of Hidden Things flew open before them.
He cursed Hogwarts's semi-sentience as his face hit the blackened stone of the corridor with a dull crack that he registered only as blood running tangy into his mouth, matting his hair and obscuring his vision. He didn't hesitate, didn't stop, ignoring the black stars that swam in the air in front of him and the rolling urge to vomit as he climbed to his feet and took off down the dark corridor.
He could hear Potter yelling after him, but the sharp keening in his ears and the rough beat of his shoes beneath and his heart inside saved him from hearing the words.
He didn't need the Chosen One telling him that he should be grateful.
Grateful that he would live another day to torture, to see the Dark Lord strip the skin off of a young girl or hear Dolohov's demented cackle as he spilled someone's innards.
Grateful that he would be forced to hear the whispering pleas in his head as he cast Imperius, forced mothers to harm their children and families to give up their loved ones.
Grateful that he would forever be haunted by the screams of the victims he was forced to Crucio, the sobs piercing and jagged until throats were too raw to cry and minds too broken to process the pain. Draco had seen people seizing and twitching for minutes after they had died, nerves still firing and exposed.
Eventually he stopped running.
Slid against the wall as he fell to the floor, not caring that he was out in the open, exposed. The damp air clung to his skin and stuck his already sweat-soaked clothes to his body, stifling as he attempted to drag the air into his oxygen-deprived lungs.
His body was shuddering, his breaths gasping and hands shaking as the adrenaline faded and he was left with his own thudding heartbeat and humming thoughts.
Left with the screams of his friends dying and the rumble of his school crumbling.
He thought of the position he was in.
The position he had put others in. Graves.
Thought of a white face with no nose and thin lips, madness ruling.
And it built up in him, the anxiety and the desperation and the terror that gripped his heart every day, that never for a second left him, and he roared, a frustration that consumed him more than death almost had, because this would never end.
He screamed until his voice cracked and twisted into a sob, tears splashing wetly onto the Dark Mark.
Feeling gripped his chest and he was left gasping for breath, shuddering at his loss of control as he gave in to the urge to vomit, the sour smell invading his nostrils and burning in his throat, a slick film on his tongue.
He savored it, the acrid stench and the rapid beating of his heart and the fucking emotions ripping around inside his chest that let Draco know that he was, for now, human.
Human was sitting in a mess of your own vomit and tears and sweat-sticky skin.
Human was caring when you tortured people, when your friends died.
He'd once thought that being human meant fighting tooth and nail for survival. But he'd leaned in the past few months. Being human was giving up.
And so Draco did, slumped against a cold stone wall in a hallway where he had once lived his life so freely.
He turned his head to look out the window, at the battle raging.
And he saw his future. Burning.