Dystopia

Part 1

My name is Draco Lucius Abraxus Malfoy. I am twenty-nine, divorced, and up until four months ago, I was a Divisional Director at Gringotts. I am my mother's weakness and my father's regret. I am a Galleon-managing machine, surrounded by other people's wealth and a history that isolates me.

Gold is cold. The goblins at Gringotts know this well. They have a word for the climate in the vaults—dorranbrek. Loosely, it means 'cold comfort'. That's what gold is. You can horde it zealously, but in troubled times you can't eat it, you can't drink it, can't use it to fuel a fire. Hold it close to your skin for a moment and it will hold the heat of your body, but it cannot keep you warm. Gold is nothing but a pile of pretty metal unless there is someone to admire it, wear it, to make a gift out of it, to assign it value and meaning.

Gold is going to save me, apparently.

The ridiculous ransom they are asking for is ten times my weight in gold. I suspect some serious miscalculation as to the current state of the Malfoy fortunes is responsible for this. It's also quite funny really, because if my weight is their chosen unit of measure, then you'd think they'd be feeding me very well in here.

But they're not. I'm starving, and I don't mean that figuratively. I am malnourished to the point where the simple act of walking around the confines of my small cell leaves me breathless and dizzy. Ten times my rapidly depleting mass is not going to be very much, when all is said and done.

They've taken me out of this room a few times now to throw a bucket of water over me. The first time I was ill and did not recall much except that I was freezing. My teeth were chattering so badly I ended up painfully biting my bottom lip, while every joint in my body felt as if it was being pried apart by hot pokers. They thought I was going to die from fever. For a time, so did I. Perhaps the water did the trick.

The last time I was given an impromptu dousing was last week and I was as lucid as I am now. Lucid enough that they didn't see me snatch up a roll of parchment and a quill-pen from a table and hide it under my damp shirt as they brought me back to my cell. I didn't know what I was going to do with these items until I found a loose stone under my cell's small, iron-barred window.

Here was a place to hide my scroll.

And then the idea came to me.

I would write. What, I didn't know. But when I put nib to parchment, the words tumbled over each other, jostling to be scribbled into permanence. I am a good enough conversationalist and a passable orator when the need arises, but I am not the type to keep a journal. I'm reticent to discuss my feelings at the best of times, even with Hermione and especially not with myself.

But with nothing to lose and the expectation that with each passing day of zero ransom paid, I will soon be killed, I lose myself in this recording. It is disjointed, but that's fine because I know what I mean.

I write of recent events only, because I am not so morbid as to reminisce about my highly eventful schooling days at Hogwarts. Let's not rehash quite that far back, thank you.

It's about ten in the evening now, I think. There's a clock upstairs that chimes the time. It's got to the stage that I actually get a little excited when the hour changes. I try and count the chiming, but sometimes I miss a ding or a dong and then I am fucking inconsolable because I have to wait another sixty hellish minutes to get it right the next time. Hermione once told me she suspected I have a minor case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, as the Muggles call it. Not the kind that interferes with my life too much, thankfully. Highly functioning. She used to say it was 'cute'. My disorder was apparently endearing to her. I would only believe this from someone who is friends with Ronald Weasley, whom I've always felt is a disorder all on his own.

There's not much to look forward to in this place. When I am not writing, I count everything; the dripping water when the blocked gutters fill up with rain, the seconds after lightning and before thunder. I count footsteps. I count the collection of cuts on my body. I count the length of time I can hold my breath before dark, fuzzy shapes bloom behind my eyelids. Counting comforts me, affords me the most basic sense of control over a state of affairs that is chaos.

It's dark. The only light I have is the lantern glow that spills under the bottom of my door and whatever light the moon offers when she's in the mood. The door is unlocking. Metal slides out of oiled bolts. This is familiar and terrifying. I scramble to my feet and hurry to hide the parchment and quill behind the loose stone.

I curse the fact that I had no time to prepare properly for their return; no time to steel myself against the pain they inflict. I am unable to collect what's left of my wits. Actually, this isn't true. I've had nothing but time locked away on my own all these months in this little room. But time is funny like that. Happy thoughts take less time to think them. Fearful thoughts make time slow down to a standstill.

The largest of the three kidnappers enters the room. I know he's called Fitz, even though the three of them studiously avoid referring to each other by their given names. I've been here long enough and they've slipped up once or twice. Fitz likes knives, even though his fists are the size of tea kettles and he could drip my brain out through my ears after a quick punch to the head. Thankfully for me, he has not brought his collection of blades to practice on me today.

"Brought you a present, Malfoy," he chuckles darkly.

Food. Is it food? Please be food.

He throws a long, cloak-bundled thing at my feet. The bundle groans.

Ok, not food.

"Enjoy," Fitz grunts. He is foul, lewd and worryingly happy. "While you can."

I peel back the cloak to see what they have brought me, even though I already know, and my heart has exploded, re-formed, withered from grief and pulsed back to life again in my chest. I know that cloak; I know that hair, I know, well enough, the feel of that unfailingly soft skin of her cheek as I push back the hood.

Since being here, I have tried not to think about Hermione. Thinking of her is like thinking of a big, juicy steak. It hurts. The hunger in my belly is like a big clawing vacuum, making me writhe on the ground in agony on some days. The hurt in my chest has nothing to do with this, but it's a type of hunger. Your eyes can actually starve for the sight of your loved ones.

"Hello," Hermione eventually says, sitting up. She rubs at her forehead where I can see a bruise forming. Her expression tells me that a lengthy explanation as to why she is here in my cell is imminent, but for now, she is soaking me up with her eyes.

I can't even mutter the most inane question. I am stunned. Maybe Fitz did end up hitting me on the head because I must be brain-damaged to actually believe I am looking at her.

"Hello," I tentatively croak back, my parched throat unaccustomed to speaking. I'm worried that the slightest sound or movement from me is going to burst this bubble. I count the seconds, thinking she's going to disappear before I reach ten.

Six, seven...

"I've got a loaf of bread and some cured ham down my pants. They let me keep it."

This is not something you hear every day, but I am too far gone to care about logic or reality. I just nod.

She stands, a little shakily because they've obviously knocked her about a bit, reaches down her baggy trousers and pulls out a small, tightly wrapped bundle. It's roughly the size of a fist. She places it in her palm, concentrates and then gently blows over it. The cloth bundle unfurls and expands such that she is now using two hands to hold the previously tiny parcel. I behold a loaf of fresh bread and a hunk of pork wrapped in clear plastic. The food smells like heaven dipped in chocolate, deep fried in beer batter.

But as hungry as I am, all I can do is stare at her.

She wraps the food back up in the cloth. What follows is a moist blur.

"I'm sorry I took so long," she says.

I am weak, but I manage to remain standing when she hurls herself into my arms. She plants kisses all over my face, touches every part of me she can reach and then grabs me by the shoulders to shake me. All the while, my arms remain woodenly by my side.

"For Merlin's sake, why won't you hold me?"

I blink. She did make me promise month ago, after all. "I can touch you again?" I croak.

She's crying and laughing. "Yes, sweetheart, you can touch me again."

I lead us both to the pile of dirty blankets in the corner of the room. We hold each other as she sobs into my neck. The last time I cried was at the Battle of Hogwarts. I swore to myself that I would never do it again.

Not like it's the first vow I've broken. I hold her to me so hard I know it's hurting her, as I squeeze out tears into her hair.


Hermione decided that she had cried enough. Indeed, she'd soaked the front of Draco's ragged shirt. She came here for a very specific reason and blubbering all over him was not it.

He slept.

She took her time gently cataloguing his injuries, and in doing so had to suppress another wave of tears. He was filthy, gaunt, bruised and beaten. She watched the rise and fall of his chest for a few minutes, letting the sight of him calm her. When he awakened later, she determined she would try and get some of food into him. Hopefully without most of it coming back up.

Her training took over. She began to inspect every inch of the cell, even though she knew Draco would have escaped weeks ago had he found the breach or the weakness she was currently looking for. A quick press of her ear to the door told her that the guards were a long way away. It was late and they'd had an eventful day, by all accounts.

Her inspection of the cell led her to the window, with its taunting view of a picturesque night-drenched outdoors that Draco had no hope of accessing. A sliver of white against the dark grey stone wall directly below the window caught her eye. She got down to her knees and inspected the spot, surprised to see that the whiteness was from the tip of a quill-pen that had been stashed behind a loose slab of rock. Hermione reached inside and found a grubby roll of parchment.

She unfurled it and frowned at what she saw.

Draco's handwriting had never been this frantic, or uneven. It was testament to his deteriorating physical and mental state that he wrote like he was trying to flee from each sentence that came before. What she was looking at was a collection of memories and disjointed observations from their recent past.

She wouldn't be able to sleep for a while yet, anyway. Hermione angled the parchment towards the window to catch the maximum amount of moonlight and feeling only slightly guilty, began to read.