Disclaimer: All the characters and settings in this work belong to JK Rowling and related franchise owners of Harry Potter.
No one would listen
No one but her
Heard as the outcast hears
Phantom of the Opera, film.
I
It was another one of those nights. The moon shone icy and unblinking from her solitary perch. The feeble cast of the stars sent the darkness below whispering. Night and demons swirled- waiting- through the field of treetops, with no sound but the rhythmic rush of a thousand leaves, as the Forbidden Forest breathed out in its dreadful slumber.
A cool breeze twined around Ginny's legs, fluttering the ends of her shirt and snaked up underneath to circle her waist. She shivered where she sat on Tower's ledge, but managed to remain still, afraid that she might tip and tumble soundlessly into the arms the forest. Closing her eyes against it, Ginny felt the air inflate the flannel material of her pajamas and flap the edges against her sides, playfully. Ginny felt its effort wasted as the icy caress traced flinching bumps, traveling up her rigid spine like long bony fingers and awoke, instead, the biting chill of unforgettable memories.
Tom.
Bundling the comforter that she had dragged out of the dormitory firmly, Ginny tried to make herself as small as possible inside the worn quilt. Curling her toes inside frayed slippers, Ginny shuddered out a long breath, closed her eyes again, and prayed that the peering eyes in the darkness below would not reach her up here.
-\|/-
Draco crushed the rich, crackling parchment into a ball in his fist, bursting through the empty common room, and out to the stony corridor. Almost instantly, the warmth of his bed, and the fire crackling in the dormitory fled from his skin and he was left with such a cramping cold that he wondered if he had not been turned into one of the stones.
Some things are worse than death.
Squeezing on the now hard ball of paper in his hand, the forming points stabbing into the soft flesh of his palm, Draco stalked through the hallways blindly, a helpless anger buzzing through his veins. His head hurt, and the unrelenting toll of too long without sleep beat incessantly against the backs of his eyeballs.
He was so tired.
He felt translucent; like the crumpling, expensive letter in his hands, he felt like a shell with no substance left. Well dressed and well fed, perhaps, but what was survival without the promise of tomorrow?
Without the promise of death.
It was that prospect of tomorrow that plagued Draco. Love, son, duty, pureblood, right, wrong; all of these took on a new meaning without the security of tomorrow.
Instead, Draco was leashed to Today, and the ugly immediacy of the present. With one mark, he had become reduced from boy to creature, from son to progeny. From pureblood wizard to disposable soldier.
And yet, the letters continued to arrive, filled with loving lies: Love, son, duty, pureblood, right, wrong. There was so much tucked into these words, so much darkness, anger and pride that Draco could not recognize them anymore. The letters, the well crafted words, the dreams; the waking, living nightmare; the dull, unrelenting ache in his forearm spoke to him, each in their own tenor. Requests and commands wound together, forming a vice around his limbs. Although similar in political cause, these commands were laced with silent requests—pleas—while the requests ran with the terrible current of threat. Family for honor, and cowardice for family.
Some things are worse than death.
Draco dreamed of silence.
The world around him had expanded and taken on monstrous dimensions while he had been lost in his childhood it seemed, and now he awoke to find no one he recognized. Those nights when he would sneak to the Quidditch pitch to graze the starry skies seemed far away and absurd now. The many memories of sneaking into Hogsmead for a drink, or climbing up dusty towers in the castle for a snog now felt alien. The pride that once resided on the clouds above them now rained like a river on him, each drop condemning him a little more.
Drops of hope, drops of fear, drops of whiskey, cathartic cruelty and blood. But no matter how many others he tried to beat down around him—to try and eek out the same relish that his father and his friends enjoyed— to feel it's empowering sweetness on his own tongue, Draco's anxiety remained. Instead of empowering him, the sweet tastes of his expended fury turned dry and bitter in his mouth.
With each reminding letter from his father in Azkaban, of what he must do, the layers of futility continued to roil and plunge him.
He dreamed of peace.
But if there was one thing that his father's new guests at home had taught Draco over the past couple of summers, it was that people endured: they lived on, kept walking and breathing, even after their very souls were lit aflame.
People endured. And they didn't seem to be able to help themselves. They went insane; they broke a little inside, every day—but they endured.
And the thought, deceptively, was not comforting at all. Indeed, there were worse things than death.
When he had first watched his father casting the Cruciatus curse on the mudblood collected from Diagon Alley, Draco had been rooted by the man's gasping, his twitching, his screams. Frothing at the mouth, the keening voice that had burst from his jowls had seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him- some small endless space where even the Cruciatus could not reach.
It had grated on Draco's ears, stinging through his eyes until watery rivulets of the man's agony ran down Draco's face.
He had expected the man to die at any moment, so he had continued watching, unblinking grey eyes fixed-
- as if that was something he could do- to witness the pain without flinching, and be there. To learn.
Draco had not thought a person so exhausted could go on for so long, but the man had not stopped. The noise echoed on, bouncing on the tall glass windows, breaking through the wooden hinges of rosewood doors, and collecting, ringing, in the hollowed domes of patrician ceilings all through the mansion.
He had kept screaming; shrieking and clawing and begging—"mercy!"— until Draco had wanted to scream with him- to tell him to shut the fuck up!, to give up, give in, stop twitching, stop enduring, stop it stop stop stopstopstopstop-
He had wanted to scream at his father to just kill him.
But he didn't. And neither did the man.
Draco had sat there for the whole thing. He had watched intently, his teeth clamped on the inside of his cheek until little dents of copper lined there. And everything- the piles of gold inside his Gringott's vault; the closets of fine robes; the lusty eyes of his peers and friends, all the vain, blinded pleasures of his world had come to mean nothing, all at once.
He had learned the insubstantial quality of privilege. When circumstances turned, they were all victims of the same fear. And he feared the Cruciatus Curse all the more when he heard the screams of the next one, and the one after that, and the next.
And it was like a cold, stabbing realization, a dawning, immovable fear of a world that has no end.
Wrestling with burdens too heavy for him, Draco stepped onto the moving staircase that landed before him without thinking.
On silent feet, he moved up towards the sky.
-\|/-
Nothing could get her here. Underneath the open, infinite sky, in the perpetual freedom of the limited, precious hours in the unbounded air, Ginny was safer than at any other time.
There were no nooks, no crannies up here for demons to lurk in. Here, at the top of the tower, there was no enclosure where they could corner her. Beneath the cool, inhuman touch of the watchful stars, there was no Tom, no evil.
Because, surely, with so much night, so much darkness, there could be no room for the excess of his darkness. Surely, here, in the cool peace of complete and perfect night; with its pinprick lights, and its chilling, endless breeze- she was secure.
Up here, she could not feel the dead clay weight that hung in her stomach every day. There was no morbid clench in her spirit, staining her inside out.
Here, where she could step over, dive to an end, nothing would chase her.
So instead, scaling the cramped castle walls, full of a hundred thousand memories, Ginny crouched every night at the top of the world and reveled at the blotting blackness that sheltered her from the onslaught of the world. Holding her breath, she imagined herself disappearing, hidden from not only the view, but the thoughts of everybody, until there was nothing left to mourn.
Just the shell of a fifteen year old girl, her lungs filled with ink.
When the moon was black, Ginny would think, surely this was the closest she could ever get to death before she died. She would close her eyes, and the wind would curl and sway around her, making her a part of the endless of sky, teasing her like a leaf caught in a breeze.
And, smiling, in its unstopping, constant breath, Ginny would hear it whispering to her that nothing could get her here.
She was safe.
Cold, vulnerable, and always on the verge of tipping over— but safe.
a/n: Please drop me a line in the "review" section.