Chapter Three: Draco's Prayer
A/N: If you recognize it, it's JKR's; if you don't, it's mine, or it's historical fact. The German was checked and fixed by a German beta! Thanks Irina! The rest is Sally, my British beta. Unfortunately, once the French shows up—and it will, ooh la la-- there is no French beta.
Draco sat for a long time, long after the last echoes of Ginny's footsteps had died away. His eyes ached from staring and from too little sleep. Night after night after night, rolled over onto his back and staring up into the dark green velvet hangings of his bed. Letting time, thought, sensation slip away from him, bit by bit by bit. It never quite worked, though, not completely. His mind always began racing in the same old circles. Just as it was doing now. Remembering that past summer, the last few tortured weeks he'd spent at home after the blessed months in Bavaria. His mother had stayed behind in Linz, refused to return to England. She'd begged him to stay with her. But he had not. Damn Ginny Weasley... goddamn her... she'd stripped some obscure mental armor away from him and left him dazed and vulnerable to those memories. They rushed through his head like a dark sea.
The long bleak corridors of Malfoy Manor, the winding wooden staircases, the always-closed door to his father's study. The strange fascination of that closed door. Knowing that behind it, Lucius Malfoy was slumped in a vast leather chair, clutching a snifter of brandy and muttering to himself. Every so often he would steal out, unshaven and wild-eyed, and always, always in the deepest part of the night. But that was when Draco sometimes roamed those halls, too. It was always when he had finally given up on the sleep that evaded him. And then father and son would meet, each knowing that they were driven by their own private obsessions. Each haunted in a different way; Lucius by what had been, and Draco by what now would never be. By the power that had twisted both their lives and then vanished, leaving nothing to replace it. The shade of Lord Voldemort.
Draco looked out into the darkness and wondered in a detached sort of way if Ginny Weasley had had the right idea, going over the balustrade like that.
He clenched his hands together over the rough stone at the edge. "All I want is an answer," he said. "Just some sort of answer, or clue, or sign, to tell me what the hell I should be doing--" Draco realized that he was speaking aloud. "Uh-- God?"
No answer. No wonder. How inappropriate.
"Satan?"
Still nothing.
Muggle mythology. Fails you every time.
"Wotan? Donar? Loki?" The names of the Teutonic gods of his mother's people came to his lips, and fell through the cold air as flatly as the rest. They were all dead as dust, crumbling stone images in long-abandoned churches. There was no-one to help him, no-one to offer him a word of advice or comfort, and no-one to stay his hand from his own destruction.
The night seemed to stand still, holding its breath. Waiting for what he would decide.
As he stood, he heard the beating of wings. A great eagle owl settled itself on the stone rail. "Aquila," he said. "Gods, when was the last time I saw you?" Draco couldn't remember if his father had sent him a single letter throughout the entire fall term. Not since... well, he wouldn't think of that. Wouldn't remember that last thing that had happened in the deepest dungeon of Malfoy Manor before he went back to Hogwarts for fall term. Narcissa had sent a few scrolls by the great von Drachen raven, Vogelfrei. But she was an indifferent writer, and her command of the written English language had never been good. He stroked the owl's feathered back, and it nipped at his finger gently. He unrolled the parchment tied to its leg.
It was his father's writing, the long, bold, black strokes. It was in his father's style, the terse, cold sentences, each one clipped and separated from all the rest. The words swam before Draco's eyes. He forced himself to read them.
Draco,
You will be pleased to learn that our efforts have borne fruit at last. There is a new hope. He whom we seek is close at hand. Time is of the essence. I will write no more now, but go to the high belfry of the Hogwarts clock tower as soon as you have received this letter. Aquila will lead the way.
The paper disintegrated in Draco's hands as he read the signature. Lucius M-- hovered in the air, and then crumbled into dust.
He turned on his heel and went down the stairs, forcing himself to move slowly. It had come. It had come at last. The letter. The one he'd so often dreamed of, waking with a cry, whether of gladness or horror he was never quite sure. But he wanted it, of course. Wanted it more than anything else in the world. A vast dark excitement bloomed inside his head. Draco forced himself to keep it in check; he still didn't know, not really. But he did know. He had never truly believed that this moment would come, never, and oh, how he winced at that now, how he hoped that they wouldn't hold it against him. Not now, when against all odds the longed-for dream might at last be within his grasp. "Let him trust me... oh, please," he murmured, knowing that his words were a prayer to whatever gods might be. "Let me become what I was meant to be, born to be..."
A few minutes later, the bushes at the back of the balcony rustled. Colin Creevey stepped out. His knuckles had gone white from clutching his Hasselblad to his chest. The counter in the little window of his camera read thirty-six, a fully exposed roll of film. "That's odd," he muttered, shakily picking his way down the staircase. "I know I didn't take that many."
As Draco hurried across the lawns towards the clock tower, he caught a glimpse of red hair out of the corner of his eye. Ginny Weasley. The memory of his madness with her flashed across his mind. She was standing next to her brother and Granger at the edge of the gardens, arguing with them, seemingly, shaking a finger in their faces. The front of her bodice was still torn; he would have thought that she would have used a Sutura charm on it by now. But maybe she hadn't noticed it yet. Even in a quick glance he could see the red marks on her neck and chest. He smirked. How would she explain those to that damn overprotective brother of hers? Those marks that he'd made... and, touching his cheek, Draco remembered the mark that she'd left on him.
More than one girl turned to look at the slim, graceful figure of Draco Malfoy walking away from the castle with the eagle owl perched on his wrist. But those who saw the cruel smile on his handsome face flinched back, their eyes wide. Some of them woke screaming from the dreams that racked their sleep that night. For Draco smiled as he thought of the future, and of the past. And, of course, of what he'd do to his enemies, once they were entirely powerless and defeated. Particularly Ginny Weasley.
The sort of insult she'd dealt him could not be allowed to go unpunished.
Perhaps, at the end of all things, he'd ask that she be spared.
So that he could deal with her himself.
The door of the clock tower was locked. Draco had expected that, and he slipped his wand from its holster to point at the elaborately carved keyhole, saying "Alohamora" in a low voice. He rattled the knob. Still locked. He moved the wand in a figure eight, and faint sparks followed its motion in the air. "Apertus." Nothing. Patefacio, Patens... all nothing. The door remained locked.
Draco rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Then he traced the tip of his wand directly over the keyhole itself, murmuring the words of a Revealing charm, and the metal glowed an opaque blue. The door could only be opened by a key, not by a spell. Was something as simple as this really going to stop him? He peered through a crack in the door, not sure what he was looking for, hoping for some clue. Moonlight spilling through a high window lit the interior of the tower. It was empty and abandoned. Rusting machinery was piled on the dirt floor, and Draco could see what looked like the fallen ruin of a wooden staircase. But what he saw was impossible, because the tower clock did work, did strike the hour as it was supposed to do. How could this be?
Even as the thought crossed his mind, he felt a cold presence at his back, something draining energy from the very air. A tall, gaunt figure covered in silvery stains, lantern-jawed, silent. It was the Bloody Baron. Draco couldn't help jumping a little; even Peeves the Poltergeist was afraid of this ghost, who seemed to suck happiness from the very air as effectively as any dementor. Then the Baron did something that was, as far as Draco had ever heard, unprecedented.
He opened his mouth and spoke.
"Hast du das Juwel?"
"I didn't know you could talk," Draco said stupidly.
The Baron was silent.
"Don't you speak English? That's it, isn't it? That's why you never say anything." Then Draco realized that if the Baron didn't speak English, then he probably hadn't understood a word of what he himself had said.
"Hast du das Juwel?" the ghost repeated, a glum, hopeless look upon his face.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said. The ghost began to move away, and with it Draco saw his one, slim, faint hope of getting into the tower vanish. There was a ring of keys at the Baron's belt. "No! Wait! I think I understood what you said-- you asked if I had a jewel-- but I don't know what you mean, er... Ich möchte in den Aufsatz gehen, bitte, bitte! " Damn. For once, he devoutly wished that Hogwarts taught Muggle languages. He was fairly certain that he'd just begged to be let in the tower, but he might also have been asking to borrow the pen of his aunt.
The ghost nodded and gave a long sigh. He bent to the keyhole, his translucent shoes just brushing the grass. He took out a curiously carved key and rattled it in the lock, first to the left, then to the right, then back again in a kind of dance. The door swung open. Now, Draco could see a long, winding staircase leading up into shadowed half-darkness. Aquila hooted on his arm, and he moved forward, then stopped. A strange reluctance had overtaken him, and he did not know its source.
The Baron regarded him somberly, as if bearing the weight of the world on his spectral shoulders. "Geh, jugend Draco.Geh zum Schicksal für dich ernannt."
"Go to the place-- no, to the doom appointed for me?" Draco echoed, unconsciously translating the ghost's words. "But what's that? Can't you tell me?"
"Weil das Wild das du jägst, das ist der Tod," the Baron said.
"For the quarry that I seek is death-- What the hell does that mean?"
The Baron was silent.
"Why'd you tell me anything, if it was just going to be a load of rubbish that doesn't make any sense?" Draco demanded. He remembered that the Baron didn't understand what he said. His own meager command of spoken German seemed to have lapsed almost entirely. There was no room left for anything in his head except the desperate need to get to the top of the tower. "Thanks for unlocking the door. I mean, ah, vielen dank," he said awkwardly, and Draco started running up the winding tower stair. Maybe it was in the nature of ghosts to say only cryptic things. Behind him, the Baron shook his head sadly and vanished into the grass.
Draco paused at the very top of the tower, in the belfry. The grounds of Hogwarts were spread out below him when he looked west, and the clock's mainspring whirred before him. To the east was the vast Forbidden Forest, blacker than the night. "Lumos," he whispered, and his wand cast eerie shadows on the moving clockwork wheels mounted on the interior face of the clock itself. "Now what?"
He had a sudden, hideous stab of fear that the letter had only been another piece of Lucius Malfoy's deepening madness. Might as well just say the word, Draco thought. That's what it is. God knows I saw enough of it. He waited, the sound of his own breathing oddly magnified in the tiny tower room. He was standing on a wooden plank floor. Some of the clockworks were in the middle of it on a platform, and long poles attached them to the rest of the wheels and springs on the clockface. The floor itself was actually a platform, he saw. All round it, there was only darkness, and he guessed that the drop went all the way down to ground level. The minutes ticked by. After a time that seemed interminable, the carillon chimed, and the works gave that faint rustling sound that meant the clock was about to strike the hour. Aquila leaped from his wrist. Draco jumped back, badly startled. But then he saw where the bird was going.
Without hesitation, the eagle owl flew directly into the inside face of the clock. The air where it had been wavered. The Roman numerals, seen from the wrong way, twisted and then righted themselves. Aquila was gone. Draco blinked.
Aquila will lead the way.
But surely that couldn't mean that he was supposed to do the same thing? He couldn't have actually just seen an owl fly through a clock. Aquila had probably pulled up at the last minute and flown up to roost in the rafters. If Draco tried that trick, he'd crash into the clockface and fall to his death. Maybe that's what the Bloody Baron meant.
Ah, but wasn't that what you were considering an hour ago anyway?
No... Draco shook his head vehemently... no. That sort of thing was for weak fools. And if he could truly trust what he'd read in that letter, he had so much to live for now. So very much.
But then you must trust what it says. And do what it told you to do. Would you disobey the very first order given to you? Refuse the very first action asked of you? He who would command, must first obey...
As he stood, irresolute, the great bell began to toll. The sound was unbearably loud. It must be one o'clock, so there would be only the one. It was now, or never.
Taking a deep breath, Draco half-walked, half-ran forward, launching himself at the glowing clockface in a leap. He only had time to see the wooden planks of the floor fall away beneath his feet into darkness. Then he knew no more.
A/N: Ahaha. An evil cliffie. ;) Review!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And remember to leave your email address if you want to be on the mailing list.
A/N: Review! Review! Please say in your review if you want to be on the superspecial mailing list!