Fish
In Heaven, everything is fine. You got your good things and I got mine.
#
Draco Malfoy holds the parchment in his hands beneath the flickering light of the desk candle, just to make sure he'd read it right. He tilts it left, squares it right, and then flattens the crumpled edges out more, as if doing so might rearrange the message. However, against the lovely mahogany the shredded thing stands out like a sore thumb and Draco, perspiring, blinks the squiggly penmanship into comprehension. His letter informs him:
I am going to gut you like a fish.
And no matter how hard he tries to interpret it, the intention remains the same. He is going to be gutted- like a fish, for that matter, brutal, messy, and inhumane. When the image hits, he bends over, retrieves the waste bin, and sicks up in it before spelling the contents away and leaning back to work out the specifics.
If some madman were to come and gut him like a fish then he, Draco, would have to be more prepared. He'd have his father re-secure the wards at night and sleep faithfully with one eye open. He'd keep his wand under his pillow and his door boarded up with furniture; and when the morning came that he'd wake to find himself remaining together in one, appropriate piece, he'd start the day anew, in preparation to repeat the task again. Sure, it was not an ideal way of doing things, but Draco had learned to live un-ideally ever since the War had ended and everything went to utter shite anyway.
But then again, he's not not not telling his parents about any of it.
So Draco prepares to be gutted (like a fish) in the evening after his father nods 'goodnight', and his mother spends several minutes stroking his hair in desolate silence by the side of his bed. He doesn't tell her about the letter tucked underneath his mattress (or the many others that he's been receiving since the beginning of June), but he watches her movements slowly as if she might sense something 'off' about him; and a small part of him wonders if she'll sense it simply by the luck of being his mother.
She doesn't. But then again, exhaustion overcomes her now like the faded blonde to her hair or the worn-out gray of her eye sockets; and when she kisses him on the forehead and slides down the hall, she resembles something of a specter vanishing, vanishing, vanishing, until she's gone, finally, into the mist.
Then, at night, he dreams that he lives underwater and he's happy to be there beneath the surface. Carelessly, he floats to the broad expanse of his ocean until a large, shaded claw appears out of nowhere and scoops him up from the warmth to drop him down, hard, upon the cold, solid ground. His skin dries out and his throat does, too. Though unseen, the looming spectator just watches and waits; and Draco, gasping, opens his eyes just enough to find that he had never really lived in the ocean at all. Rather, before him sits a pond—a mossy, unimpressive, pond. And Draco mourns the loss of his comfort zone.
He wakes up at three in the morning with wet eyes still clenched shut and his face buried hard into the pillow. When he opens them up to his bedroom, Draco spots the folded up parchment flapping in the wind. It's another note; though, intertwined within the tree branches outside his window, it isn't really anything like a note at all. Instead it's a sloppy display of animal intestines bundled into crumpled-up paper. There's a lone salmon eyeball in it and it stares helplessly at Draco, flattened to the edges all silver and scaly and scared. Wide and round the way it is, Draco imagines that it might have screamed in it's own fishy way, before it couldn't even do a silly, non-fishy thing like that at all anymore. And still.
He folds the parchment up neatly, casts a concealing charm on it so that it won't smell, and properly tumbles like a doll to the rug of his own bedroom floor. He doesn't dream this time, but instead stays unconscious there until the sun rises up and peeks grandly from the trees like a spectator in a looming sense that makes his head hurt and his limbs numb. There's a large, messy pond of spit drooled into the fabric and Draco thinks quickly of drowning before changing into day clothes and hiding his shaking hands into the confines of his pockets.
His mother asks him how he'd slept. She speaks in mystic and tired tones, and its haunting how her voice travels as smoothly through the ghost-town Manor, caressing him sweetly below his ears. The patterns of her motherly breath whisper, "Darling," and something inside Draco feel comforted to know that he is, after everything, still someone's 'darling'. "How'd you sleep?"
Draco wonders if she means the first time he'd closed his eyes in his bed, or the second time he'd fainted on the carpet.
He refers to the first time, though, tweaking the truth by informing her that he'd dreamed of the ocean; and in a faint and far-off sort of voice, he says that he misses it. The beaches in France, the transparency of the water- spotting the colorful little fish swim around the dancing strands of seaweed. And yet, in a sort of unintended reaction, Narcissa goes quite stiff and stares holes into the porcelain. She smiles sadly at her son and continues eating without another word.
Draco thinks he should have never brought up the beaches of their past. He thinks he might never talk again if he cannot control his sentences.
There's a clinging of silverware before him and Draco glances up. He spots his father at the end of the table and his expression is stoney- mighty and important, as if his physical appearance might make him feel just as mighty and important, as well. There's a flashy black bracelet around his ankle, though, and Draco knows. Lucius hasn't been permitted to leave the Manor in nearly three months. House arrest makes him old like like the hanging portrait of his own father in the hallway. Half shaded beneath the enormity of the glistening chandelier, he sort of looks like him, too.
"Draco," his father says to him over the plate that he himself hasn't even touched, "eat your Halibut." And so he does. Shaking hands and shaking fingers find the silverware before him and, without another thought, Draco Malfoy punctures hard skin.
#
I'm going to gut you like a fish.
Draco Malfoy is a tadpole. A tiny, almost non-existent tadpole. He's a barely-there figure in all the chaos of the ocean, and if you weren't really looking you might even miss him. Sometimes, on off days, Draco sits at the bottom of the bathtub and holds his breath beneath the surface. He feels the smooth touch of his blond hair against his face and he thinks, "I should never have been born a man. I should have been only ever been as insignificant as a tadpole."
When his head gets heavy beneath the surface, he clenches his fingers to the sides of the tub's sculpted edges and doesn't lift himself up. Nevertheless, at the arrival of the very moment in which he thinks might be death, two forceful hands plunge into the water and lift him out in a horrified frenzy. His mother presses his sopping wet body to her chest and she cradles him tightly, sobbing, "Oh, my poor boy. My poor, poor son," as if all along, the world were at fault for him ever having failed at being human.
Yet-
His pretty mother wraps him up in a towel and he lets her, looking shamefully at the walls and every other place that isn't near her eyes. She leads him slowly up the stairs and lies him naked beneath the covers; and she doesn't tell his father. When the morning comes and Draco stumbles downstairs to his proper place at the tabletop, she smiles at him sweetly instead, and in a voice of tender complexion, asks him what he would like to eat for breakfast.
#
"I think you've had enough."
"... What?" Blurred vision blinks out fuzzy figures. Bright lights bleed inky white through thick, droopy lashes. "I..."
"I said, you've had enough."
A cold voice denies Draco his fifth Bloody Marry and he staggers from the pub wondering whether or not the bartender had recognized him beneath all his Glamours. Humiliated, a deep blush creeps upon his face and he all but yanks the heavy hood forward, ignoring the tightness in his throat and the wobble in his step. He's drunk, and he doesn't feel elated or happy about it, either. Rather, the stark heaviness of nonchalance devours him and he finds that, really, he could care less whether or not he'd drank himself to death at all in the first place.
Right. Time to wallow in self pity. But, truth be told, the Malfoys have always been alcoholics.
If asked, Draco would tell you honestly that he had only ever been inebriated once in his life before, and he'd swear to it. With a little more persistence, though, he'd open up and tell you it'd actually been twice.
Still, the first time he'd been quite young. At fourteen, he'd nabbed the remaining bits of liquor from the celebrations at the Yule Ball simply because he was getting tired of watching Hermione Granger prance around looking unsettlingly un-Granger like. It wasn't natural and it made him feel sick, so he'd taken an armful of glistening bottles to the boy's dormitories and consumed enough alcohol that he eventually found Millicent Bullstrode attractive; and that took care of that.
The second time Draco Malfoy had ever been drunk, he was sixteen-years-old with a Headmaster to kill; and Pansy Parkinson had to haul him from the edge of the Astronomy Tower just to get him to stop crying and, "Tell me what's wrong, goddamnit!" because he must have looked like a bloody madman. But as the story goes, he hadn't. Instead, Pansy just supported him back to the dungeons on wobbly legs and Draco had gone out of his way to spot that Mudblood Granger and shout, "MUDBLOOD GRANGER!" before turning the corner and vanishing completely from sight. It's tonight, however, that he feels not even the slightest need to open his mouth whatsoever. The only good doing any of that had ever got him was a lifetime of misery and so he gapes at his losses to himself like a pathetic, goddamn fish. He's going to be gutted like one soon, you know.
"Oy!"
Draco spins around at the loud shout that echoes out from the very back of a darkened alley. It's a stupid thing to do, in hindsight, but he's intoxicated and, surely, it stands for something of an excuse. He doesn't think about not talking to strangers, though. He doesn't even think about being possibly recognized back at the bar and, peering through the haze of wonky vision, Draco spots a single figure beckoning him over. "Psst," it whispers. "Over here, Malfoy."
Draco's heart freezes in his chest. For a moment, he stands stilly in the middle of the street with his hands dumbly at his side; and its all he can do to refrain himself from taking off and sprinting down the block. The man just stands there. His large shoulders are drawn back just slightly; and when he calls Draco's name again, a strange sense of panic shoots up the crooked slope of his spine. "Malfoy! I know you can hear me!"
"You've got the wrong person," Draco tells him when he finds his voice. It sounds nothing like that of the confident being he'd once been, but then again, Draco hasn't sounded anything like that man for what feels like ages. He takes a step backwards and tries his hardest not to slur his words. Subconsciously, his shaking hand reaches up and tugs further on the edge of his droopy hood. This has never happened to him before- not with the Glamours.
The man slowly says, "No..."; and he sounds oddly familiar, but Draco can't place his finger on it. "No," repeats the voice, "I'm certain of it." When he walks, he does so with a jumble that's almost too husky and unnatural. His rounded arms swing slightly at his side and, for one reason or another, he resembles something of an undersized gorilla. "Come on," he says. In the far off distance, he looks like a Jack-O-Lantern and Draco plunges his hands into his robes for the safety of his wand. "Don't you recognize me?"
No, whimpers a small voice in the back of his head. The air smells like rotting sea and bile rushes up Draco's throat. He wonders when he ever became so pathetic.
"Stay away from me!" he warns, though he's not exactly sure why. There's no one else around and when he directs the tip of his wand to the target of the shadow's chest, he isn't even certain he has it aimed right. "I-I mean it..."
The man laughs at him in the distance. He doesn't appear threatened by Draco's wand, and twiddles his own between the sausage-like husks of his big, burley fingers. "God, Draco," he laughs, "you should see yourself right now. You look like a fish out of water, you know that? Just like a useless, fucking fish."
Draco stops breathing right before the spell even hits him. For his lack of air alone, however, he considers the irony of how much the comparison fits.
#
The first time Draco receives the letter, his mother isn't home and his father has locked himself in the study for what's been going on for three days. The War has been over for a week and Draco, likewise, hasn't lifted himself from his bed once. The fact alone makes him think of his father, and at night he curls up in a ball and sleeps so that he doesn't have to consider the similarities. Father paces, he intones. And here I am just waiting to rot.
Draco doesn't know how the letter gets there. When he wakes, its folded up on the top of his desk and the breeze from the open window makes it flutter gracefully beneath the paperweight. Retrieving it feels like a task, but the curiosity makes his head ache. Granted, his name is printed there on its surface; and the ink looks shiny in the moonlight.
For some reason, the gesture of contact makes knots in his throat. He hasn't spoken to anyone in days and the only voice in his dreams is the one of the Snake-Man in his ear, whispering. It makes him want to tear his head off with the sharpness of his fingers, makes him want to cut the damn thing away just so he can get some rest. He thinks- perhaps- the letter will bestow that sort of serenity upon him. It says, instead:
You look like a goddamn fish.
At first, he doesn't get it. When it dawns on him, however, his heart all but fumbles from his throat. The room shrinks in around him and he feels small, helpless; and Draco had known that the world was always going to loathe him, but the suddenness of the inevitable makes him numb, like a zombie. He sees the fish guts strewn across his chair- wound around the knob of his drawers, dripping slowly onto the carpet.
It smells like oily beaches beneath his nostrils; and he must look so stupid, standing in the middle of his bedroom like he is, gaping like a bloody fish.
Draco gets a nosebleed all over the front of his cotton pyjamas. Bright crimson runs down the curve of his collar bone and expands on the fabric, staining it. His head feels heavy on his shoulders, his legs feel too weak to support him. It's not the first time that he faints, but when he wakes up with his face shoved in what must have been the mutilated fish's intestines, he leaves the world again with his back to the safety of Heaven.
When he dreams, it is of memories he wishes he'd long forgotten. He remembers, though, nevertheless; for they use him as an example for those who stray from the Dark Lord's path. He's stolen from the covers at night and his half-conscious body hangs over the table after dinner. It's the first time he notices the worms in the corner of the Manor; and they writhe around on the carpets as if they've been living there forever.
Upside down, he thinks they look something like Nagini- not scaly, but pink and slimy. As if her babies had had babies and, quickly like rabbits, joined together to have babies again. Draco wonders if they'd crawled into his room at night, if they'd entered his mouth in his sleep, and now lie in wriggling clusters at the sickened pit of his stomach. Had he crushed them beneath his feet in the dark? Did he consume them in the food from the back of the kitchen cabinets? The thought of them makes him ill; and he wonders when the Manor became such a wasteland.
At the corner of the dining room, Gregory Goyle watches stonily from the shadows.
There's something funny about the way he's changed, but the thoughts in Draco's head are muddled and blurred. Rather, Goyle doesn't move a muscle, save to let his eyes linger past Draco's bobbing form; and, from the side of him, Fenrir Greyback steps into the light. Draco sees him pluck a small black bug from his scalp and consider it coyly with his great yellow eyes. His gaze whispers, "All the better to eat you with, my dear," and then he does. Eat it, that is.
He wishes they never allowed the Death Eaters in the house and that the dog would just stay outside.
#
"Wake up." Draco wakes up the very moment the voice tells him to. If he doesn't, he thinks he might never again.
A large hand slaps him. In the darkness of the nighttime, Draco sees stars like spotlights flashing greedily before him. He opens his mouth to catch air, but only tastes iron in the back of his throat. Images blur together. Crunching sounds like footsteps screech out madly in his eardrums. He wants the world to stop spinning, and he doubts that the chaos has anything to do with the liquor.
"Pathetic," spits the voice, that looming form of whomever. "You look fucking pathetic."
Malfoy shifts his shoulders to find that his hands have been roughly tied behind his back. His legs, too; the rope digs deep into his ankles and the fabric of his trousers feel wet and runny against his exposed flesh. Something wet and rising splashes up against his side. The dewy moistness of the ground beneath his body lets him know that he's not Hogsmeade anymore. But for that matter, he's not even anywhere close.
"Nnnuugh..." says Malfoy.
"Shut the fuck up," instructs the voice.
Draco sees two scuffed sneakers by the close proximity of his nose. When he strains to lift his eyes and locate the person above the mess of unsightly footwear, the limb in question reels back and delivers a hard kick into his cartilage. Pain shoots into Malfoy's face instantly. He feels the bridge of his nose shatter and a cocktail of deep crimson and snot pools out into the earth on impact. It's almost as if he can't breathe all over again; and then, in a complete loss of composure, Draco abandons the idea of compliance and sobs, anguished, into the grass.
The voice says, "My Lord, how far you have fallen."
Malfoy watches the sneakers disappear into the blackness. They vanish beyond the haziness of his vision and appear back in front of him, pacing. For a minute he supposes that his captor does not truly know what to do with him, but when the large figure squats down behind him and shoves a fist into Malfoy's blond hair, he decides instead that he has only been making him squirm.
Then a clammy palm wraps tightly around his mouth. When Malfoy feels the sausage-like fingers breach past the dry bulb of his lips, he takes the slip as an advantage and bites, hard, onto salty flesh.
"Fuck!" The man, whomever he is, releases Draco's head and slams him back into the grass. Malfoy's chin hits the earth against the mud and rock, but the lack of pressure on his skull is heavenly and he relishes in it- momentarily- before the new tip of a wand presses harshly against the exposed part of his neck. "You're gonna regret that, you little shit," the voice grunts. He takes in a couple of heavy breaths. When he composes himself enough to position his wand back into the surface of Draco's skin, he hisses, "Crucio!"
The force of the spell hits Draco instantly. Burning, the fire in his bones takes over and he doubles over through the ropes against the grass. Though it has been several months since Draco has felt the effect of the Cruciatus Curse, it hurts all the same; and, either way, it still tears and rips at him from the inside out. Expectedly, as he had so often in the past, Malfoy feels the convulsions as they shake his weak, aching body. He wants to open his mouth to beg for him to stop, but the first attempt sends dirt into his throat so he chokes, panicked, on wet gravel.
When the voice commands, "Finite," it does so with a twinge of amusement that is all the more obvious above the shocked intakes of Draco's exhausted breaths. "My God," he says, "I've been waiting so bloody long to see you suffer."
The shoes stop moving. This time, instead of bending down and leering at Malfoy from behind, the body above lowers itself to Draco's level- and were it not for the shadows or the blurred likes of Malfoy's vision, he might have been able to identify him. "Please," Malfoy tells the large and bulging stomach that hangs over a pair of dark Muggle trousers. He doesn't bother cringing at the ghastly trickle of mud that leaves his mouth. A worm even wriggles its way through his teeth and he watches it bury itself back into the world, gone forever.
"Please what?" snaps the voice. Malfoy just shakes his head. The words, though so loud in the back of his head, seem almost too horrible to slide past his lips. He thinks of smelly fish and stringy guts. He thinks of waking up sick in a pile of intestines on the floor of his bedroom all those nights ago and has to hold down bile, just to keep composure. "Please what, Draco?" asks the man again, this time more gently. He lifts a meaty palm up to the blond's bent face and touches his cheek, gliding a thumb past the dirt smudged across it.
"Don't..." Malfoy manages to murmur, turning his face ever so slightly.
"Oh, but I can't turn back now, can I?" the voice tuts. It's strange, though, because despite Draco's sense of fading hearing, he recognizes it. The voice, that is. Behind the hostility of the speaker's words, the thickness is still there- that intense sound, boyish still from so many years ago.
And then so many things rush back to Draco at once. He thinks of the sloppy penmanship, scrawled across the parchment on his desk... of the large, burly hands... the protruding, heavyset stomach...
"Goyle?" croaks Malfoy, eyes flickering up as far as they can go to the spot of his exposed, flabby neck.
His captor doesn't even freeze. Rather, he tilts his head to the side and reaches down for Draco's chin, swooping it up between those large fingers and directing it, roughly, to the front of his sweaty, blubbery face. After all this time, Gregory Goyle still looks like a boy.
"About bloody time," he spits, and the salvia slashes out of his mouth to dry coolly on Draco's skin. "And I always thought you were supposed to be the brilliant one." With that, Goyle lets Malfoy's face plummet back to the ground. His chin meets the grass for the third time, barely missing the edges of Goyle's muddy shoes.
Malfoy's head spins. All these years of living in terror, all the nights he'd spent sick on the bathroom floor- it had all been because of Goyle. Gregory Goyle, his childhood friend, whom he'd seen the horrors of the war with. Who'd survived. Who had gone off like the rest of them, to hide from the world. Draco had always thought that the others were the ones that would be so cruel.
There's a sinking hole in his stomach and he wants to be sick, but the shock from the discovery has made it impossible to do anything but lie there, dumbfounded. He doesn't even try to wriggle free from the tight bonds holding back his limbs. It's as if a massive, invisible weight has just kept him there. It's as if moving, though perhaps lifesaving, might make him even more delirious than he even already is. He says, still dizzy, "I don't understand," and it's true, he doesn't.
"Well, Malfoy, would you like me to lay it out for you?"
A small whimper falls from Draco's mouth. It's mean to be a 'yes', but the ability to vocalize escapes him sadistically.
"You," says Goyle, harshly, "lost me everything. I lost my self respect. I lost my father. I lost my best friend. And it's all because of you." Goyle uses his palms to push himself back up to his feet. He walks back behind Malfoy and his eyes latch on to the twisted form of his torso, bent and bound between the thick layers of immovable rope.
"No!" says Draco in a desperate attempt to explain himself. He doesn't do it to save his life. Instead, Goyle's words send a numbness through his entire body and he knows- the effort is useless. Its as if Goyle has read his own thoughts. It's as if he had poked his head inside his dreams and seen him screaming over the lifeless, ashy body of a charcoaled Vincent Crabbe. Draco doesn't even hear himself when he rasps out, "I... I t-tried to, to..."
"To what?" Goyle hisses. "To save him? Well, excuse me, Malfoy, but, as you can very well imagine, your efforts didn't quite work out in the end, now did they?"
"Goyle-" begs Malfoy.
"Shut up."
Goyle bends down and latches his fingers around Draco's bound ankles. He presses his wand against Malfoy's throat and murmurs a curse he can't recognize. Pain spreads horribly throughout his neck, but Goyle starts off under the moon, towards the lake; and Malfoy just drags along behind him- face first in the dirt, nice dinner shirt rising up and snagging on stone. It's not at all surprising now how the rough grip had been the very same wound around the quill that had scrawled all those hostile letters. Draco can even feel the fury leaking out like ink from Goyle's pulsating veins against his skin; and it makes so much sense now, so much sense. Draco only wishes that he'd kept his focus. Perhaps then he'd have caught on to it sooner.
Still, it's cruel to see the dissolving world wind off into the shadows behind him. Draco watches the shrinking tress, the shuffling brushes- the vastly erasing view of his final midnight, his last few moments outdoors. If his hands were not bound behind him, he'd reach out and hug the branches. If he could, he'd wrap his wiry arms all around them and hold for dear life onto the roots. He can't, so he watches instead helpless and miserable to the big practical joke that had turned out to be his life.
"Let's go for a swim," says Goyle.
Goyle drops Malfoy's legs once they reach the edge of the water. He swoops down, lifts the lingering end of rope from the grass, and points his wand steadily at the bulge of massive rock nearby. "Accio."
Several spaces ahead of him, the rock wobbles to life. Goyle directs it through the air and Draco whimpers, fully expecting it to crash down on his skull, when it instead slaps the ground behind him by his feet. He hears the echo of Goyle's scoff, and listens to the rustle of his fingers as they work their way to fastening the end of the rope around the circumference. Ironically, his movements are quite graceful.
Anyway, the action goes by quickly enough. It takes only a matter of moments to feel the added weight at his back- and he shivers, chilly on the grass, as Goyle plucks it up easily from the ground and releases it, finally, into the deep.
He doesn't plunge to the bottom right away. Instead, Goyle holds his upper body there, an awkward 'C' along the contrasting edge of two extremes. The rock barrels readily to the bottom of the lake and the pressure of the rope around Malfoy's ankles intensifies. Though Malfoy bites down on his bottom lip to keep from crying out, the pain makes him do so anyway; and a mixture of mud, sweat, and tears disgraces all those previously graceful features. Goyle merely leans over. He puts his palms on the raised slump of Draco's shoulders and Draco catches the gleam of perspiration above a furrowed brow. There's nothing there- only hatred- and he has to agree. Even now, he'd caused it.
Still, Goyle runs his hans through Malfoy's soiled, blond hair. His breath ghosts past the side of his cheek and then, without shyness, he grazes his lips along Draco's dripping temples. Very suddenly, he gives Draco's body one last shove. He says, "Rot in Hell," and this time, Malfoy goes under.
#
Cold. Underwater, its fucking cold.
When he opens his mouth to scream, a tide pool of water rushes in and it's his first mistake, he thinks. Consolation prize: at least he'll die faster.
Chilliness makes everything a blur. Its the fish, though- the multitudes of them- that scuttle by his feet, swim past his ankles, and bite loosely at his skin. Malfoy feels the slimy slip of their scales, the floundering rush of their flippers. It's as if they're simply waiting for him. Inviting him, he thinks. One of their own.
Some sick, anxious part has time to wonder: how long does it take for a body to decay underwater? How long until he's no longer an anchored corpse, bobbing at the bottom on display to these cretins? It's a miracle that he can even hold his breath for so long, though he knows its only been a few seconds. My God, if he could only take a breath...
Will anyone even come to his funeral? Will anyone even care? He can't feel his head- just so you know; and for the record, he can't really feel anything, so the panic sets in like fire. How ironic.
Oh well, he thinks hysterically. There is always Hell. Har har har.
Strangely enough, he thinks he may have always been there.
#
"Malfoy!" Malfoy lies on solid ground, and his eyes are closed, and around him everything is black. A voice, frantic and feminine, shouts, "Malfoy!" and presses down, hard, on the sore spot that might be his chest. It has to be his chest. He thinks, my God, do I still even have a chest? The voice just says again, "Malfoy!"
Malfoy is almost positive he can't feel himself breathing. There's a painful stinging at his side, and when he tries to move his arms they feel like led on the ground. Two hands grab his face; they pull his chin up and, without warning, wet lips meet his open mouth. For a second, Draco doesn't move. It's the most gentle contact he's had in a while, and he just melts into it. He feels something like loved again, something like 'cared for'; and Malfoy just wants to sink into the embrace. He wants to stay in this coma and remain like that, forever.
He ruins it midway, through. Revoltingly, Draco spits pond water down his chin, feels seaweed on his face. He breathes in the harsh, chilly air and when he opens his eyes, it's the Mudblood.
She blinks once, twice, and for some reason her eyes are wet. "Oh my God," she says.
Malfoy takes a long look around the sparkling clearing. His eyes are blurred but he sees him there nonetheless- Goyle, a big, fat lump against the dewy green. A boulder, unmoving, tied up. His back is to him and he doesn't even twitch. A more frantic part of Malfoy wonders quickly if he's been killed; but for some reason or another, he hopes that Goyle has been left alive.
Draco opens his mouth to ask, but a great glob of moss slips out from it and he gurgles ungracefully instead. Granger simply leans forward and tells him, "We have to go," and, as if Goyle doesn't even exist, she takes him up under his armpits and hoists him to the stale air at her level.
And it hurts.
Crying out, Malfoy sags in her grip and he wants to ask her what in God's name she is doing in this clearing of all clearings, but what comes out instead is, "Not Mungo's." Granger shouts over him, directing a spell to levitate the mound that is Goyle about a foot in the air. He just says, "Please... please..." and her shoulders smell like books and warmth, which is funny, he thinks, because he's so cold. "Not Mungo's."
"Malfoy..." says Granger, who begins to also say something else, though it sounds like nothing more than a blur of verbal nonsense. "... Almost drowned... have to make sure you're-"
What? He wonders, what? Have to make sure he's what? As if they even gave a damn. "Not Mungo's."
Granger lifts him up in the air and it feels a bit like he's weightless, as if Goyle had stripped him of his own human innards and made him hollow. Emptied him out. It's strange though, because all high up there the way he is, Draco can only see the top of Granger's bushy head and the every-so-often form of Goyle's equally bobbing figure. Malfoy wants to reach out and grab Granger by her shoulders. He wants to make sure that she's not taking him to St. Mungo's, but this time when he tries to tell her, only a pitiful cry leaks out. It takes him a second to realize that he'd made it.
"Shh," says Granger gently. He feels his feet dragging along the grass and he wonders why he'd thought he'd been airborne. Against the curved nape of Granger's neck, Malfoy breathes in and for the first time he doesn't smell rancid, mossy pond water.
"I don't want to go to Mungos," he says, but allows her to steer him anyway. "I don't want to... g-go t-to M-Mungo's." He's dripping wet. His hair is a mess. There's snot and water pouring out of his nose and he's getting it all over Granger, who doesn't seem to notice either way.
She just says, "Shh, come on. There you go, just a little bit further," and Malfoy loses his balance. The clearing spins around wildly and Granger's hands tighten on his shoulders. For a second he thinks he might be dying, but the look in the eyes that watch him root him there, almost anchoring him to the earth; and strangely enough his body just doesn't seem to want to go.
"Malfoy," says the mouth below those eyes. That round, pillowy mouth- that very same one that had been pressed softly against his. "Malfoy," the lips say, "stay with me."
He doesn't, but for some strange reason, he wants to.
#
Draco Malfoy has always been cold blooded, just like his father and just like a fish- which is ironic on a multitude of levels, unfortunately enough.
In that case, it is quite peculiar how Draco Malfoy is not cold at all when he wakes up an eternity later in a place that is, in fact, not St. Mungo's. His inner subconscious tells him to move, but the most his body does is open his eyes; and that is actually pretty painful enough.
"Stay still," a gentle voice says, and he knows. My God, he knows.
He hadn't imagined her; he hadn't imagined The Mudblood.
Hermione Granger is sitting inches above him looking pitifully angelic, even as windswept and dewy as she is. She's holding a wet hand towel in one fist and her wand in the other; and there's something offishly appealing about the comfortable way she appears in the Muggle sweatshirt and jeans she's changed herself into. Its enough to make Malfoy feel uncannily out of place in his soaking wet pub clothes. And then he realizes he's no longer wearing his soaking wet pub clothes.
He opens his mouth to say something about the indecency of it all, but decides he doesn't really know what to say to the woman who had just saved his life. Rather, Malfoy feels the warm air of the living room around the exposed part of his collar bone. He takes in the burning fire in the mantle place just behind her and the decency of the curtains that have been drawn shut. He takes it all in with a hazy sense of indignity and, perhaps because his best friend of fifteen years had tried to kill him, he then starts to bawl uncontrollably.
It's as if someone else has taken over his whole body, as if Draco is merely a puppet to the cruel hands pulling on his heart strings. His eyes itch, his throat burns. He wants the couch to swallow him whole just so he never has to face the rest of the world again; and it doesn't help that Granger is just sitting there, that her wide-eyed shock only makes him more embarrassed of himself. Now, Malfoy wishes he actually had been lucky enough to drown- whether it be in the bottom of the pond or within all of that goddamn liquor.
Granger draws herself back. She looks as if she doesn't want to touch him; and when Malfoy curls into himself on his side to wrap his wiry arms around his middle, she pushes herself up from the stool and says, "I'll let you rest," in a sorry, sympathetic sort of tone that makes his whole body hurt.
It's not even fair how Malfoy doesn't rest. In fact, the most unfair part about it is how he can't stop himself from crying; so he cries himself to sleep and that is how it ends.
#
"Gross, what's it doing?"
"Dying, obviously. Look at it."
"Ugh. How disgusting."
There's a fish out of water on the earth by their feet. It's eyes are wide and panicked; and for some reason, a ten year old Draco thinks that they look easily detachable. He nudges the flopping cretin with the bottom of his shoe. Greg scatters away from it and a mischievous smile spreads across Vincent's face.
They find it in the clearing on a Sunday after breakfast- and their mothers would probably warn them not to touch it. Nobody knows, however, so Malfoy squats down and tilts his small, blond head for a better look. "How absolutely vile," says Goyle, who holds his nose with the stubby ends of his fingers. "It reeks."
"Well it's certainly not supposed to smell like daisies," says Crabbe, who is holding his nose, too.
The fish is only a couple feet from the end of the pond water. From Draco's angle, it looks as if it is watching the shoreline desperately, as if one more flop might bring it closer to the salvation of liquid. The buttony eyes don't blink. Instead they beg silently for assistance that will not come. It makes no sense, though- Draco had watched it. The silly creature had simply leapt from the water on its own.
Crabbe says, 'I've never heard of a suicidal trout before."
And Greg suggests, "It must be pants living underwater all the time."
Draco doesn't say anything, but instead drags a skinny hand along the fish's scaly flesh. He jumps when the thing jolts beneath his fingers, but regains his composure to reassume the strokes, watching the sunlight hit the silver edges in an ironically pretty way for such an unfortunate occurrence. The skin stretches widely with every wild breath. It's little flippers flap around and the tail slaps the ground in ghastly desperation.
"Look at it dance," laughs Crabbe. Goyle laughs, too, but Draco doesn't. He just pets the fish and for some reason, he thinks he hears it breathing. The breaths are dry, though, and they sound something like an old man's. "How long's it gonna sit there and flop around like that?"
It takes longer than expected. In fact, a whole hour seems to pass by and the fish still just flops there, barely clinging on to the last few moments of its life. They anticipation for it to die makes Draco anxious. He feels his own palms get sweaty and the fabric of his shirt starts to cling to his hunched back. Goyle and Crabbe are imitating dancing fish somewhere around him, but Draco can only hear those exhausted breaths. More than anything, he wants to lean forward and grab the putrid beast by its nonexistent neck. He wants to shake it about and scream at it to, "Just die go on and already!"
He doesn't, so he does the only other thing he can think of. Leaning over, Draco picks up a large, round rock, practically boulder-like by his feet. He weighs the heavy thing in his fingers and then, very quickly, brings it down hard upon the pathetic creature.
The fish's innards fly everywhere. Red slime and crimson blood leap up from the ground and splatter all over Draco's nice Sunday clothes. The chuckling above him stops. Crabbe and Goyle freeze, and Draco just sits there, horrified and covered in intestines.
"Gross!" cries Crabbe, who has been untouched by the insides. The rock just lies there and everything beneath it looks like chewed-up mush.
"You killed it!"
Draco's throat gets tight and he feels hot, despite being outside. He thinks he might be shaking, but the tremors in his limbs only confirm it. He thinks, 'I killed it, oh my God, I killed it'; and for some reason or another, he vomits all over the disgusting remains of its corpse.
In the distance, Draco hears Crabbe's mother calling out their names. Her voice carries past the wind and sound out over the retching sounds, and Crabbe pauses in his disgust to look past the scene and around the brush. "That's mum," he says, as if the dead fish and Draco were a little less important. "We'd better hurry, it's probably time for supper."
Draco walks back to the Crabbe place behind both boys and takes his seat at their dinner table in a daze. His mother puts a long arm around his shoulder and kisses his forehead before urging him to try the beef. Draco does, but for the life of him he avoids the fish.
#
The Mudblood is doing his best to avoid him in the times that Draco wakes up. He can tell by the way she watches him from the hallways and speaks in whispers to whomever from the fire of the Floo. He wonders in horror what she may have done with Greg. He won't speak to her, of course, but in the back of his mind he figures she's killed him. Or turned him in.
She probably hears him crying at night, too, and that part's brutal.
#
"Malfoy."
Draco hasn't moved from the sofa in three days and he thinks he it might be pathetic, but his body won't move and he only seems to cry all the time.
"Malfoy."
When Draco opens his eyes, Granger is sitting above him in her robe. Outside it's dark, but she looks like she hasn't slept in days. Malfoy wonders how long it will take her to kick him out of her house. He doesn't even know why she's let him stay for so long, for his ghostly presence in her living room seems to wear her out more than anything.
Nevertheless, Granger freezes when his steely eye meet hers. She looks, for a moment, embarrassed; and she straightens her posture ever so slightly to grab ahold of the upper part of her robe, prudishly shielding her pyjama-clad chest. "You were having a nightmare," she tells him, as if he'd accused her of something, "You were screaming."
There is almost no light in the living room. She looks something like a banshee above him, half hidden by the shaded halls of the empty house. Malfoy feels the drenched fabric on his skin, sticky and unwashed with sweat. He looks up at The Mudblood and takes in the shiny gleam of skin. Her hair, though rustled, slides along the sloped curve of her neck and creates perfect curls at on shoulders. Perhaps its because he had been recused by her only days beforehand, but Draco feels more inferior than he has ever felt with anyone in his entire life.
And he wishes it might have been different, between her and him.
"I'll go." Granger places her hands on the side of the couch to lift herself to her feet. The skin on her knuckles brush gently against the point of his chin and it's the gentle moment of contact that makes him forget how much he had tormented her back in school. Still, Granger pulls away from him and her figure vanishes in the darkness. He hears her footsteps retreat around the corner like the pitter-patter of rain, and he stares down the hall until the impression finally fades from the underside of his eyelids.
He has nothing left to lose, so he follows unsteadily after her.
She's leaning against the kitchen counter and she doesn't notice him in the corridor. Her hands are long against the countertop. Her fingers are splayed against the marble like spider legs. Draco makes his way across the floor like a person possessed. He sees the frizziness of her unkempt hair in the window light and slips his sweaty palms onto her shoulders. She only gives a short, shocking gasp; then his mouth is on hers and for some reason, she's kissing him too.
The two lower themselves to the floor and Draco slides his hands into the forest on her head. His fingers explore her oily skull there, trickle down to her ears, and then cup her softly beneath her chin. Granger doesn't look at him. Instead, Draco moans once into her mouth. He knocks his hipbone against the cupboards and follows her body when she rises against the tabletop, pulling him with her.
They're in the hallway in seconds. Draco's hip throbs painfully, but he pressed his body into hers and, perhaps because he hadn't done it sooner, Granger takes his hands and pushes them into her robe. Her breasts are round and perfect beneath his fingers and his knees go weak; Malfoy drops his head on her shoulder. He keeps his eyes shut and tries to ignore the tightness in the back of his desert throat.
It makes it better, however, that neither of them say a word. Rather, Granger takes Draco's hand and guides him to the couch in silence. She presses his sweaty back on the sweaty cushions of the couch he'd just left and drags her own hands through his own hair. The blond locks just fall pitifully through her fingers. They slant unremarkably across his face. Malfoy remembers the drowning intensity of being underwater and he succumbs to the ocean of her body over his. She washes over him and he feels clean, untainted. He dives into her sea and he resurfaces, born again- a whole new Malfoy.
He doesn't even realize he's started to cry. At first the tears fall down his cheeks in a manner that Granger perhaps thinks to be sweet. With her thumbs, she brushes them away and says nothing. Nonetheless, her eyes watch his face intently and her lips sit half parted on her face, as if only semi-certain about speaking out loud at all. It takes Malfoy not even a second. He thinks about his life from the time he was eleven to the very moment that he's at now; and he doesn't mean to, but the next thing he does is start bawling.
"Shh," says Granger. She shakes her head and when she does so, Malfoy's arm breaks out in goosebumps. "Malfoy-"
Draco feels like a child on the couch beneath The Mudblood. He wants to curl into her and have her hold him forever, but the sobs keep coming; and at this point, he is numb to the humiliation. Nonetheless, Malfoy swallows the thick lump in his throat and squeezes his eyes shut, forcing a river to push through.
He tastes salt in his mouth and it tastes just like pond water. "Why?"
"Shh."
"You were there in the clearing," Draco says. He feels the moonlight sting his eyes and the warm wash of the fire on his face. "Why were you in the clearing?"
"Shh, Malfoy. You shouldn't be-"
Despite Granger, Malfoy doesn't really care what he should or shouldn't be doing. Rather, the hysterical edge in his voice makes his heart beat faster and he feels sick, as if he might vomit. Above him, The Mudblood presses her palms into his cheeks. She soothes him relentlessly and either way, Malfoy just keeps crying.
"G-Goy..." he starts, but the name feels pathetic in his mouth. "He was... he brought me... w-woke up and... and..." Suddenly, a sharp pain presses in to Malfoy neck. It starts just below his temple and travels to his shoulders like an extra pulse. In the middle of his fragmented sentence, Malfoy cries out into the warm air. It takes him a long moment to regain himself; spotlights of flashing little stars spark off and cover the vision of the woman above him. He doesn't say a word, but when he opens his eyes again, Granger's crying too.
Draco looks down at the parts of his torso that he can see. He notices the wetness on his shoulders and finds red smeared across his collarbone, his forearms, and even in the locks of blond hair by his face. Newfound panic rises instantly in his very chest. He'd thought it was sweat before... He was certain all that water had just been sweat...
"What's happening to me?"
Granger doesn't tell him to hush, but instead bites her lip and chokes down a sob of her own. "Malfoy," she says, "I'm so sorry."
There's blood on the blanket behind him. There's blood on the cushions and the carpet and even down the hallway that they had just stumbled through. Draco sees in blurs. His vision fades away and when it comes back, Granger's still crying.
She says, "The curse... I didn't know, had n-never even heard of it before and... I tried to help, b-but it was already too late so I took you both h-here, but G-Goyle..."
There's a fat lump in the corner of the room with a single blanket pulled over it. A lonely hand pokes out from the sheet and the fingers are uncurled, but there is no movement. There is nothing but a white slab of cloth and a disconnected, bluish palm. Draco remembers the way Goyle had murmured the curse in the clearing and instantly, he feels dizzy.
"Is he dead?" he asks her in a voice that doesn't even sound like his own.
Granger just nods and its funny because she looks sad about it, too.
"Am I dead?"
"Oh, Malfoy."
Draco's heart threatens to break through his ribs and tear through the thin cover of flesh. He thinks he might sick it up on Granger's lap. "How m-much longer?"
Granger covers her mouth and when she speaks behind her fingers, her muffled voice tells him, "I don't know."
Her light body lifts up from the top of his stomach. She leans forward to cover him back up with the blankets, but Malfoy grabs her thin wrist and stops her before she can leave him to die there alone.
Granted, Draco doesn't even give the girl much time to protest. Rather, he takes advantage of her face being only inches from his and leans forward into her again- mouth on hers, hands wound back into her hair. Her knees hit the carpet by the edge of the couch softly. Between the every so often pecks on his cheek, she tells him, "Shh," and Malfoy does it, just for her.
#
It is the first time in a long time that Draco wakes up feeling well.
He feels the heat from the fire on his unclothed body mixed with the heat from Granger- Hermione Granger- wound around him and he even forgets he's to die. In fact, for a moment, it feels as if he may never die- as if he were supposed to live. As if he, Draco Lucius Malfoy, had a whole long life ahead of him and Granger on his right was just the beginning. Only the beginning.
The moonlight from the window hits him slanted across the living room floor. Granger is still asleep, and Draco puts his head on her chest, feeling for the first time unembarrassed about the Dark Mark, still prominent on his left arm. He has nothing to hide now, not anymore, and the fading sense of his existence trickles slowly out of every pore of his entire being.
He wants to wake her, but doing so would be cruel, so he doesn't. Instead, Draco shuts his eyes to the blackness of the room and lets himself float in this pond, drifting drifting drifting...