STRAY
Prologue: Delirium
'It's not working.'
He didn't like to think about it.
'Make it work. It doesn't matter how.'
'If it breaks him?'
'Then break him.'
His initiation had been wrong from the first. Fragmented memories rose for the dark muddle of his mind: being held down screaming while the wand came closer and closer, the light on the tip a lurid red. And ripping away, the mark somehow incomplete. Then a painful rearranging, not of features or flesh, but of mind. This shifting too ended abruptly, leaving his nerves singing, leaving him dancing barefoot on the razor edge of sensory overload. The lines between madness and reality blurred and flexed, becoming smudged beyond recognition.
'He is flawed.'
Voice going hoarse, cracking, dying away to nothing but eerie seemingly inhuman noises.
'He is flawed.'
He reached out to nothing, slick fingertips sliding through air as if it were expected to be solid. Cracked lips repeating words whispered from air and flawed remembrances. 'Don't scream. Hush, child, don't speak.'
This was how he came to be here.
'He is flawed.'
He had found his way back in small steps. Memory weighed on him heavily, but gave him dimension as well, and helped him to break the surface of the catatonia that had surrounded him, like insulation or perhaps more like a burial shroud.
The dingy cell was in shades of grey. He'd thought at first that the torture that had come after his failure had damaged his sight, but then caught sight of the runes painted across his skin in woad and the bright crimson of his own blood. It had taken him only a minute to recognize the pattern, understand their significance.
So he was to be a sacrifice to the Beast.
A pretty present for Voldemort tied up and handed over like mere chattel. After all, the poisonous whisper in his ear had hissed, this is what you were created from, created for. Horror, betrayal, lies, hatred. Darkness, power, ...and greatness.
Just not his own.
'He is flawed.'
The only thing he had was desperation and a secret. And he would use them. As soon as the eyes he could feel on him were gone. Smiling grimly, he traced a finger across the wet, sticky mess on his skin. Blood and paint mixed together as he dragged the pale digit down the wall, creating letters in an obscene purple.
Vindicta.
Vengeance. He smiled. Soon they'd have to send him to Hogwarts; after all, this particular spell took time to prepare for and if he didn't come, they'd send someone to look... and they'd find the grisly mess Voldemort had left as an example to his faithful. Easier for him to vanish later in the year, apparently to join the Death Eaters, and enjoy a shallow, unmarked grave for the rest of time.
Fools, all of them, to think him cowed and broken. He was Draco Malfoy, and Malfoys did not surrender.
Prologue: Delirium
'It's not working.'
He didn't like to think about it.
'Make it work. It doesn't matter how.'
'If it breaks him?'
'Then break him.'
His initiation had been wrong from the first. Fragmented memories rose for the dark muddle of his mind: being held down screaming while the wand came closer and closer, the light on the tip a lurid red. And ripping away, the mark somehow incomplete. Then a painful rearranging, not of features or flesh, but of mind. This shifting too ended abruptly, leaving his nerves singing, leaving him dancing barefoot on the razor edge of sensory overload. The lines between madness and reality blurred and flexed, becoming smudged beyond recognition.
'He is flawed.'
Voice going hoarse, cracking, dying away to nothing but eerie seemingly inhuman noises.
'He is flawed.'
He reached out to nothing, slick fingertips sliding through air as if it were expected to be solid. Cracked lips repeating words whispered from air and flawed remembrances. 'Don't scream. Hush, child, don't speak.'
This was how he came to be here.
'He is flawed.'
He had found his way back in small steps. Memory weighed on him heavily, but gave him dimension as well, and helped him to break the surface of the catatonia that had surrounded him, like insulation or perhaps more like a burial shroud.
The dingy cell was in shades of grey. He'd thought at first that the torture that had come after his failure had damaged his sight, but then caught sight of the runes painted across his skin in woad and the bright crimson of his own blood. It had taken him only a minute to recognize the pattern, understand their significance.
So he was to be a sacrifice to the Beast.
A pretty present for Voldemort tied up and handed over like mere chattel. After all, the poisonous whisper in his ear had hissed, this is what you were created from, created for. Horror, betrayal, lies, hatred. Darkness, power, ...and greatness.
Just not his own.
'He is flawed.'
The only thing he had was desperation and a secret. And he would use them. As soon as the eyes he could feel on him were gone. Smiling grimly, he traced a finger across the wet, sticky mess on his skin. Blood and paint mixed together as he dragged the pale digit down the wall, creating letters in an obscene purple.
Vindicta.
Vengeance. He smiled. Soon they'd have to send him to Hogwarts; after all, this particular spell took time to prepare for and if he didn't come, they'd send someone to look... and they'd find the grisly mess Voldemort had left as an example to his faithful. Easier for him to vanish later in the year, apparently to join the Death Eaters, and enjoy a shallow, unmarked grave for the rest of time.
Fools, all of them, to think him cowed and broken. He was Draco Malfoy, and Malfoys did not surrender.