AN: This is written for The Golden Snitch, It's a bit Riddikulus-Face Your Fears Challenge. The prompt is: Pediophobia: Write a horror-based story. Bonus prompts are: Word-Fake, Word-Designer, Character- Marcus Belby. I'm in Hogwarts, Slytherin.

WARNINGS: This is not a happy ending, sorry. I'm trying to keep this one under a T rating, so please understand that I won't be descriptive of the gore in the death/torture scenes.


My life has gone to hell and back in the span of 8 years. I got sucked into the life I didn't want, and I should have gripped hard and hoped they could pull me and mother out when they offered a safe haven. But, I was a silly sixteen-year-old boy then, too stubborn for my own good. I could have been safe, with her. My mother would probably still be alive, but she's not.

They used to force me into their bidding, holding my mother over my head, but when I didn't try hard enough, Bellatrix held the Cruciatus on her a bit too long. She was insane, wandering around the manor, seeing things that would never be there. Torturing me in the process, she let slip my love for Hermione, of our relationship before the war, she saw us around her, our children playing in the halls, in the corners.

Oh, how I wish that could be true. I haven't seen her in three years, I haven't been allowed to leave my own home. My mother died in her bed two years back, claimed it was her own doing. But who would be able to slash their chest that many times, and that deep? No, I knew her "natural" death was faked*, that she was slaughtered in her bed like an animal.

No, I knew the truth, but I was still unable to escape. I could never escape. Not while she's out there, still fighting. I wish I had even an ounce of her courage, of her bravery. But it's too late now.

I was called out of my thoughts with a burning pain in my left forearm, moving sluggishly down to the parlor where she was many years ago, I waited for the reason I was called.

Terror clenched in my gut when Greyback pulled a woman by her dark brown and honey curled hairs, dragging on her knees. She was still, like a rag-doll, with her shoulder's slumped. When he arrived a mere few feet ahead of me, her scent invaded my nostrils. She got caught. She gave up, or hopefully, maybe she was lulling them into a false sense of security. A fellow classmate, Marcus Belby*, was stalking behind them, a huge shit-eating grin plastered on his face.

Holding back sobs, I stood stock still, waiting for her to gaze up. She never did, why did she have to lose her fierceness now?

It was made worse when he entered the room, clad in his sweeping black rooms, his pale, slimy feet bare upon my ancestry designer* home floors. How he wrangled the pull of the Pureblood elite, I'll never know, he acts like he was raised in a muggle barn, surviving on cow slop.

"Release her," Tom slithered out of his foul mouth, "I called you Draco, to finally witness the demise of this foul creature you wished the sully yourself with."

I watched as she fell forward, her cheek landing on the cool floor, her hair swept out behind her by a push of Voldemort's foot. There were three long gashes going down the length of her face, on the right side. They've been there for a while, he could tell, as they were scarred over long ago. Her eyes were dim, like she lost all hope, no hope, not even recognition that I was here. I wanted to inch my way toward her, pull her up, hold her close, and whisper promises of safety in her ear.

But, I knew if I did that, we would both die painful deaths. My fingers involuntarily reached toward her, wanting to caress her face, anywhere that I could reach. That's when she flinched. That's when I felt my heart shatter in tiny pieces, what have they done to her?

"Ah yes, I so hate to inform you, but that's the work of years of captivity, isn't it? Greyback here had a little too much fun with her a while back, so she's permanently disfigured. How does it feel? How does it feel that she's been in your dungeons, receiving harm, and you never knew? That you could have helped her, saved her even.

But now, you get to watch Greyback his last little bit of fun with her, and you can do nothing to help," Tom snickered.


I held her there as she bled out, he finally released me when she was taking her dying breathes. I swallowed her faint touch to my cheek like a dying man finding water, finding salvation. "I love you," she whispered. Her last words to me, to the world. She took one last stuttering breath, and then she was gone. I laid her down gingerly, not wanting to jar her horribly disfigured body any more than it already was.

That's when I snapped. I turned my wand towards Greyback, sending one of the most foul, darkest curses I knew to him. I didn't get to see it land, though, because Voldemort himself turned his wand towards me.

That's when everything went black as my limp body fell to the ground. I was finally free.