'Speaking The Devil'
By She-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Psycho!



Prologue
The intoxication of Art is more apt than any other to veil the terrors of the eternal abyss.
- Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), Paris Spleen (1869)

Hearing his own cold steps in some almost deserted corridor he can tell his anger is over-powering him. The tapping is fast, constant, violent. It's already hurting - the cold stone hitting his frozen feet, the winter making itself present at his veins. Louder that those of the ones at his surroundings that appear to melt in the dark silence of the dungeons.

He can't tell the figures. Nor he can care.

He keeps making his way though the looks surrounding him - two mass of men trying to keep pace. Draco, sometimes, would feel like ripping them off him. Sometimes it would get so unnerving to be walking, always with this two slow blokes at his sides.

No. He was the slow. The one who didn't realize that the reason Crabbe and Goyle hanged out with him, why they treat him good, was because their fathers told them to. They have their many debts with his Father. Besides Father was paying them to be Draco's "friends".

Yeah, that's right. When he was giving Draco his pocket money he'd handle Crabbe and Goyle some as well, because of being his 'friends' and 'friends' should be - how had he said? - 'rewarded'...

'And I ate the stupid bullshit for years...'

Only, Draco Malfoy never valued 'friendship' that much.

'I hate my father. He fooled me. Make me look like a moron. Is it that he feels I cannot make friends on my own? I mean, I ... well, maybe I'm not such a good making-friends type - I mean - What does Potter know? Just 'cause he's a damned git it doesn't mean that I cannot make friends at all.'

All the same.

It tortures him. It means it. Potter's rejection of his friendship means - is the symbol - of his defeat. 'My defeat to my father.

'- I cannot believe it - That's it! As Potter's still hating me, until he just... exist, I'm cursed by this true...

'I cannot have a real friend.'

While the cold bites his skin, bit by bit, from his fingers to his ears; a hot licking in his insides burns with a heat it reached the corners of his eyes. A pleasant, yet torturing feeling.
And there occurres thoughts, with no end.

'It's just like Voldermort, I am. Until Harry Potter lives and breathes in this earth we suffer what he represents:

'Our defeat.'

Draco Malfoy feels a gost of a smile creep up his face. The steps are calmer, tired of hurting themselves.

'I hate to realize that Potter's of such importance in my life.'

"Boggarts take a shape, but it may not be the shape of the fear. Because fear itself may not be in a tangible object. Then, it would adopt a figure that subtitutes the intention or meaning of what we fear," Professor Looney Lupin explained.

'That means: It's not him of whom I'm afraid of but what he -his image- represents.'

Draco had to bully most slytherins into shuting up. He could not risk the publicity and it was humilliating enough as it was.

'Wasn't enough being the Golden Boy, the Boy-Who-Lived, The famous Harry Potter! You also had to be my, a Malfoy's, worst fear! You should be proud of that title.

'Amazing it is, the stupid creature cannot make the difference between hate and fear! -- the many differences!' He snorts the thought, 'My worst nightmare, he is.'

'I shouldn't even be bothering. Muggles and Charms homework are stupid.'

Draco Malfoy isn't on the mood for fairy-tales, let alone writing them. He had been trying to write something in class but had what many would understand as a writer block. He was uninterested.

Hence, he couldn't finish the assignment earlier in Charms and he got extra homework.

Now in his personal working space in the Slytherin Common Room, Draco puts the quill down the parchment yet another time, he couldn't concentrate.

'A fairy-tale... any fairy-tale...'

But he could only think of one fairy tale.

It was his favourite in his childhood. He would beg his mother to tell it again and again, the most frecuent night-time story.

He had been fascinated with the legend of The Boy-Who-Lived.

Draco Malfoy stares absent-minded to the blank parchement once again. The quill scratching featherly the texture. Biting his lips in self-reproach, screwing his face in concentration...

Ashamed he was. For, once, Draco, when he was a naïve, stupid child, admired the boy. Fan of Harry Potter, that boy, just like him, who had defeated the Dark Lord, the most powerful wizard... No, he didn't.

There's nothing special with Harry Potter.

All Draco could appreciate nowdays was silence.

But not Potter's.

Draco's mind blank; the quill scratches the parchement in lines without form. He takes a view at his surroundings. Pansy's already finished. The heroine in her story is no other than herself; it was difficult not to snort.

In the last resent encounter with Potter both only ignored and passed the other without a word. And Draco's mind had been elsewhere since then.

"And then she fights a manticore -"

'Because I should be the one ignoring him.'

"- images move to escort the plot. Mine is a pretty girl in warrior custom -"

'Like Father ordered.'

Draco turns his hearing off. One would consider obvious and visible the ostility and faintness with which he heard every word Pansy spoke.

He would appreciate her to go quiet.
'Obviously Potter knows- or gives a shit about wizard history.'

That's what Draco thought as he stares Harry Potter's reaction. None. One Hufflepuff, Aboot if he was not too much mistaken, had run out of the History of Magic class crying. That was quite a show.

Potter should have felt something, pity her - The muggle lover.

'He may be too absorbed in his own recent tragedy to acknowledge about his own ancestors, far relatives, been murdered by the hands of those same "innocent" muggles he tries to protect.

'What about the victims of the Inquisition- or so many others- more modern ones- fanatic cults of mage-haters?'

Draco's own mother had presence the very same sick ceremony when her grandmother was been burned alive, when she was a mere little child. That was not so far way in the past.

The muggle-lovers should be considered traitors among the wizards.

Harry Potter was a traitor. The worst of them.

' "A sodding git like his father" would be Professor Snape's words.'

Draco has heard over and over again his professor's speeches. He doesn't actually hear that much when professor Snape starts rambling now -though Draco Malfoy still admires his Head of House in many ways.

Snape kept repeating one little phrase over all, like a mantra: "Just because they are Slytherins doesn't mean that something has to be wrong with them."

Draco Malfoy curses under his breath. He cannot concentrate on the stupid homework. He should give it a rest.

It was an old story that he heard some time in the long way past.

A children book, scratched and drew all over lay forgotten about. Skipping dinner Draco went to his room to start scribbing what he remembered of it in a piece of parchment. He wants it over with, end it as soon as possible. Now he is about to give it up.

An animated hologram should pop out of his work once it's finished. Yet, when it comes to find images in his head to show what the story describes he is blank again. The only image in his mind is a mirror showing bodies without head.

He stares at the celling without being able to concile sleep, with his eyes sealed in that celling. On his bed, waiting hopelessly for the sleep to overtake him, he shuts his eyes once more. Almost axphiciating with a pillow, Draco tries to muffle the many things he had been thinking, things which now ring in his head like a harrassing whisper.

It was still so cold at the surrounding and the thin silk didn't make much improvement. His naked feets hovering over the floor, hanging lifelessly, were aching still.

Draco found himself re-reading his essay.

The title read:

'The Sadness and The Anger'

He remembers his mother telling him the story.

He never liked that story much.

It is said that, once upon a time, the sadness and the anger decided to share a bath in the same lake. The anger huskily and without further thinking washed himself and took off carrying his clothes. The sadness took his time, and when he was finished he realise something: the anger had blunder and had taken the sadness' clothes instead of his own. It was not strange though, 'cause the anger has always been blind. The sadness was not one to like going around naked so he took the anger's clothers. Since then they always wears that gear, and are often mistaken for each other.

And it's said that, if you look closely to the anger, you may found there the hidden sadness.

But he was not sad. He was not. He had no reasons to be sad... no reasons at all...

And the tears started streaming down his face. And once they were there they wouldn't go away. And no, not even with the whipping all over his face. Over and over again. There was no end. It was unbearable, unnerving. It made him despair. It made him cry harder.

It would take a while to stop now.



By She-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Psycho!
(Nadia I. Rey)

NOTES: HP-not-mine-do-not-sue. First chapter out of, well, some... This is the prologue so nothing really happens but expect some more plot in next. 'Till then Be Kind to Your Headmaster's Sock!



April-November 2003