AN: I know I promised no updates, but this one won't leave me alone. I had to go write it down. Off to study again - just remember, your opinions make me happy and motivated!
Disclaimer: I do not own anything.
Demons
"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." – Stephen King
He lived with the darkness his whole life. He knew it was there ever since the moment he was aware of himself as a person.
He fought it, oh yes; he fought it for so long. The temptations tortured him every day, for how do you fight the one thing everyone around you approves of? How do you stay pure, when everyone around you is obscenely immoral?
You do not.
There wasn't just darkness inside him – there were demons, too. He built up a wall to divide his consciousness and prevent the inevitable – his slow decay into insanity. He used to be able to control them, but as the time passed and the darkness loomed around, slowly suffocating him, the demons grew stronger and he grew weaker.
They screamed and trashed and tore at his defenses. They shrieked at him, begging, urging, demanding to be let out. They writhed in agony and thousand burning blades pierced his mind as he fought to keep his reign over them. He fought; the demons were relentless.
Fighting the war brought him little solace – the nature of war was such, that all the good perished and all that remained was the filth and decay of humanity. He had to fight them actively, every second of every Merlin-forsaken day he counted as another one he survived.
The monsters he had hidden so deeply fed on chaos and despair; he was the perfect candidate. He had known misery his whole life – it was a bothersome constant in the mayhem of his existence. With every passing breath, he was losing the battle. The wicked whispers he heard in the night, tossing and turning in his bed as he stood on the line between reality and imagination, were sickeningly sweet.
Let us out.
Let us out to play.
Let us out.
He had managed to keep the darkness under control for so long. For years, he had denied that part of himself, draining his mental powers in order not to implode and destroy all that which surrounded him.
And then he found her, tortured and beaten on the floor in a cell in his house. Her breathing was shallow and sickening to listen to, her clothes were torn and dirty, and her usually frizzy hair slick with blood.
Her blood.
Thick, dark red, muddy blood.
And as he walked into the dining room, hearing his Aunt laughing about the torture she inflicted upon Hermione Granger that afternoon, he closed his eyes and willed all the walls to come tumbling down. The silence inside his head was something he was not used to, and for a moment, all was still. Then, the darkness came tumbling in, and the victorious screams of all the monsters he was keeping away for so long deafened him.
Draco Malfoy slowly raised his wand, and the screams that he heard afterwards were not in his head anymore.