Mitzvahs

Chapter Five

by Capella


A/N: This little piggy is back from nerd camp. There isn't really anything I can tell you about it except that it was the best experience of my (admittedly rather young) life. However, it was so busy that I didn't get the chance to write. I did, however, do some plotting, and now I have most of the story figured out 'cept the end. Sorry it took so long. I really should be working on Black Eyes...but, I'm not.
Well -- that's pretty much it. You guys know how much I love reading your reviews. Please leave some so I can blush and giggle like a little schoolgirl.
Oh, and in case you didn't see the memo, I reversed the whole "bowing out of slash" thing I had going on. So this is quickly going to become a raving boy-love fest. Well...no, not really, but if you don't like slash, there's gonna be some innuendos in this chapter and a little bit more in the last chapter or so. Sorry if that pisses you off. It was freaking hard to write this as gen. Gargh. I'll give you fair warning of when it's coming.
But anyway...here it is.
Also, I feel the oddest urge to write Phelps/Thorpe porn. Swimporn. This is something to consider.
"And the angel hovered near me,

And kissed me with the cold kiss of death.

This worthless body is my body!

Take it wherever you will,

For I am dead already."

-- an opera singer whose name I don't know (if you know, email me)


The hours passed so slowly in Azkaban that sometimes Draco wondered, in his more lucid moments, if they passed at all.

After his father had visited for the first time, giving him another scar on his cheek to match the first, Draco had went into what he considered a sort of coma. He ate and he drank what he was given, and he would have read the newspapers had the dementors given him anymore -- he supposed the first was just to torment him -- but he did it all with a sense of detachment.

Then his next visit came, a half a year later.

"All of Harry's friends fought for the chance to visit you."

Draco inhaled sharply as the heel of a boot drove into his stomach, the force of the kick driving him off of the floor. The crack of a rib breaking sounded loud in the stifled, close air of the prison. He crashed back down hard, the wind knocking out of him as he hit the floor, his lip splitting on the stone. Struggling to regain breath, he looked up into his tormentor's angry blue eyes with his own dulled gray ones.

"I guess I was the lucky one."

Another sharp kick to his side, and the soft hiss of pain escaped Draco's lips before he could stop it.

"I hate you," Weasley said, his voice trembling as if he were near tears, and he bent down and grabbed Draco by the back of his neck, dragging him up like a kitten. "You almost took my best friend away from me." Draco tried to stay on his feet, but his legs buckled and he fell to his knees, weaving unsteadily. Weasley sneered down at him, but it was tremulous through his angry grief. Draco looked up at him, and let a tiny bit of the contempt he felt show. Weasley's eyes widened; his fist connected with the side of Draco's face a second or two later.

"Bastard," Weasley hissed. "He just got let out of the hospital, you know. I don't know what the fuck was in that poison, but it almost killed him. Then you feed us some halfcocked shit about Harry asking you to stab him --"

"Do you want to know what was in the poison, Ron?" Draco's voice was low and smooth. "I could tell you, and you could make it, and come back in a half a year and give it to me. You could become just like me."

"Shut up," Weasley said through gritted teeth.

"Don't you want to avenge Harry? He could have died."

"Are you trying to goad me into beating the shit out of you, Malfoy?"

Draco smirked up at Weasley. "You never found out my motivation for becoming friends with him, did you? That must make you so angry, that he would let someone like me know the same sorts of secrets he told you. Maybe it was to get close to him so I could kill him -- like I'm sure you're thinking right now -- but maybe it was something else." He paused for dramatic effect, and in the silence he could hear Ron breathing heavily through his mouth. He's attractive, you know. Maybe I just wanted to find out what it would be like to fuck the savior of the wizarding world. Maybe --"

Draco fell to the floor when Weasley punched him again, in the same spot; he could already feel the bruise beginning to purple and swell.

"You shut up right now, Malfoy, or I swear to God --"

Draco pulled himself to his feet using Weasley's shirt, and got up close to his face. "Maybe I already have had him," Draco breathed, a grin contorting his face, and he watched Ron's eyes widen.

"If you have, Malfoy --" Ron couldn't seem to find the words. "I swear to God, if you have --"

"You'll what? Kill me?" Draco smirked, bent his head slightly to one side to bear his neck. "Do it then. The dementors won't care. The wizarding world won't care."

Ron was still staring at him, but he had a horrified look in his eyes. "This was a mistake," said Ron, and backed away from Draco slowly. "You're cracked. I'm not going to kill you, for God's sake."

Draco growled up at him. "Just do it, Weasley, or I'll attack you and make you do it anyway."

Ron was shaking his head. "No. No. I'm not going to kill you." Without taking his eyes off Draco, he reached around and knocked on the door quickly. "I want to leave."

"Please," Draco whispered. Ron's eyes took on a faintly pitying look.

"No," he said again, and the door slid open and he was gone.


Draco's third visit, six months after Ron and a year after his father's, surprisingly, was from Blaise. He had half-expected Granger to show up with a tackhammer. He supposed she hadn't the nerve.

He had also expected by this time, a full year after his imprisonment, to have begun hearing voices and answering them, or to start collecting flies, or to make up an imaginary friend. But he had -- at least to himself -- managed to stay relatively sane.

Although when Blaise walked in and Draco imagined himself stabbing Blaise through the eye with his own wand, he supposed he wasn't really completely uncracked, at that.

"Draco," Blaise said, clearly expecting Draco to say something in return. There was a long silence. Obviously wanting to fill the uneasy silence, Blaise said, "How are you doi -- that is, um, I'm training to become an Auror, now."

Draco supposed, silently and a bit bitterly, that rooming with the insane attempted killer of Harry Potter for near seven years would look impressive to the correct people. No doubt testifying against him at his trial certainly helped. Well, being fair, Blaise hadn't exactly testified against him, really, just presented certain information in answer to certain questions that looked a little incriminating. Draco still wanted to stab him through the eye with a wand. He wondered again at his alleged sanity, and dismissed the thought.

"Draco," said Blaise, a little nervously, and stopped, staring down at Draco guiltily. Draco hadn't ever seen Blaise look guilty in their seven years of rooming together. It wasn't really a good look on him. Draco stared up at Blaise impassively, unblinking. "Draco, you know I didn't want you to end up in here."

That was very reassuring. He could die in peace.

"Draco?"

Draco said nothing. He could see Blaise grow visibly agitated, and for a moment he felt a twinge of pity, wondering how long this had been weighing on Blaise's mind. Then he remembered how much he really hated Blaise, and the pity was gone.

"You were always my best friend, you know. We had a good time, didn't we?" He sounded desperate. "Tripping Hufflepuffs, playing Quidditch, annoying Pott --

"Don't say his name!"

Draco's voice felt like broken glass in his own throat, raspy and disused after six months where the only time he'd had to use it was to scream late at night when he slept.

"Okay," Blaise said, running a hand through his hair. He'd grown it out, and it hung almost to his shoulders. Draco wanted to tell him to stop copying his own style, but since his was lanky and unwashed and Blaise's wasn't, he stayed silent. "But I tried to get you out of here, Draco. I swear I did. Went to Dumbledore, Snape, Fudge, for God's sake. None of them believed me. Well -- Snape did, Dumbledore might have. But Fudge wouldn't move. Said that what I told him was worthless without Potter's testimony." He saw Draco tense and stopped. "Pot -- I mean, he won't say anything besides that he doesn't remember an -- an agreement, between the two of you. He says the night it happened is fuzzy to him. He refuses to testify for you."

Draco wondered absently why he didn't feel anything. After a long silence in which Draco refused to speak, Blaise seemed to give up. At the door, however, he turned around and gave Draco a long, sad look.

"There aren't always people who can save you, you know," he said, and left.

Draco saw no one else for another six months besides the dementors. By then, his mind had forgotten anything else but revenge, and his throat had forgotten how to do anything but scream.


Draco kept track of the time by putting notches in the bed for every visitor he had.

After every visit, he'd notch a scratch into the soft wood of the bed using a fingernail. Then, for another six months, he would sit on his bed and stare at the notches, counting and going over every visit in his head, tracing the marks lightly.

Father, Ron, Blaise, Lupin, Hermione, Mandy, Seamus, Snape, McNair.

One, two, three four five sixseveneightnine.

A day, six months, a year, a year and a half, two years, two and a half, three, three and a half, four.

Lupin had not acted angry, really, but Draco could tell he had wanted to; he supposed it was against Lupin's nature to be particularly violent, from what Harry had told him. Hermione had obviously been told of what had happened during Ron's visit, and had carefully avoided any talk of death. Draco supposed she only wanted to understand -- all her questions where things like why? and what happened? and were you ever really friends? She left after only a little while, when Draco refused to answer. He didn't know if he remembered how. Mandy -- she was a vengeful little bitch. Harry and she had cut it off shortly after he'd recovered, she considered it to be through some fault of his, as if stabbing Harry had given him some sort of revelation. Draco thought it would be humorous if it had. Draco felt a bit of something like sorrow at Seamus' visit, one Gryffindor besides Harry for whom he had felt a sort of grudging regard; Seamus, evidently, no longer felt anywhere near the same.

Draco found that the memories of Snape's visit were gone a week or two later and was a little saddened.

One day, five months after Snape came, he realized it was his twenty-first birthday, and he stared at the wall opposite him and tried to remember his sixteenth.

He tried hard to forget about McNair's visit, McNair's touch, and failed.

Six months after that, his father came.

His father didn't hit him, this time, or even touch him at all. He simply walked in the room and smiled down at Draco, sitting on his cot, with a silkily-sweet sort of smile.

"Did you like my birthday present? A few months late, I suppose, but McNair was eager." His father's eyes had a nasty look in them. "He told me what he planned to do to you. I thought it was fitting. He always had a sadistic streak in him."

"You won't break me this way," Draco said in a voice so hoarse that he could barely recognize it as his own.

"I know," said Lucius, walking foward with that smile, cupping Draco's cheeks and placing a kiss on his forehead in a manner that, apart from everything else, would have been almost kind. "But you must understand that I broke you from the moment I first gave you this." He traced the silvery, faded scar that his cane had made with his thumb. "The rest of this is for my own pleasure only."

Lucius straightened and left. Draco put another notch in the bed.

Ten. Four and a half.


One day, six years later, when Draco was sitting on his bed, eating and staring blankly at the wall opposite him, he felt something strange. An odd feeling as if a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders. His back straightened almost automatically. The dementors were -- gone.

Draco stared harder at the wall and tried to figure out exactly what had happened. Strangely enough, an article from the Daily Prophet kept flashing through his mind, all the way back from fifth year.

MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN

MINISTRY FEARS BLACK IS "RALLYING POINT" FOR OLD DEATH EATERS

The Ministry of Magic announced late last night that there has been a mass breakout from Azkaban.

And then, suddenly, the door slid open, and this had to be some sort of weird dream, didn't it, because there was a young, quite healthy-looking Voldemort standing in the doorway, staring at him with slitted red eyes, looking not at all surprised to find him there. Behind him, Draco could see shadowy figures of escaping prisoners, Death Eaters. Voldemort's black lips curved in a little smirk.

"Young Master Malfoy," said Voldemort, and Draco slid off the bed to his hands and knees, bowing his head and feeling a little shiver of distaste going up his spine.

"My Lord," he murmured, ignoring the sparks of pain in his throat as he talked for the first time in years.

"Oh, get up, boy." Voldemort sounded annoyed. "I know you have never followed me. There is no need for a charade." As Draco climbed slowly to his feet, brushing his long, greasy hair away from his face, Voldemort gave him a calculating glance. "But -- there is something you could do for me." He held out his hand. "Murdoch. Give me a wand."

One of the shadowy figures came up and placed a wand into Voldemort's hand. Voldemort smiled. "I came prepared, Master Malfoy," he said, in answer to Draco's unspoken question. "My faithful here have had their wands taken away, broken. They are no use to me without them. I managed to procure a good amount -- and, if you are willing to do a small task, I would, in turn, be willing to give you one and get you off this island."

"Anything," Draco said immediately, and Voldemort laughed.

"Eager, Master Malfoy? I would imagine so. But do not worry; I imagine my designs fit quite nicely with yours." He studied Draco a little harder. "One of my Death Eaters has been getting -- ambitious, shall we say. He fancies himself to be the next Dark Lord, and while he has only a few followers, none of which I imagine to be very faithful, he is getting to be quite a nuisance. I want him disposed of. You would do nicely."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "There is something you aren't telling me," he said. Voldemort raised an eyebrow.

"Are you not afraid of me, to speak so impertinently?" he said instead of answering, but Draco could tell he was not angry, merely wondering. Draco shrugged and chose not to speak. "Yes. There is something I am not telling you. This Death Eater is someone I imagine you hold quite a grudge against."

"My father." Draco's reply was instant. Voldemort gave him another little smirk and nodded.

"Yes. Your father. I want him killed. I imagine that you do as well. I also wonder if you want other wizards dead as well -- and I would have no objection to that, either."

Harry Potter. Voldemort did not need to say it.

"I will give you this wand and provide you with a portkey. However, I do not want you to be killed -- at least, before you can do what you need to. The portkey will take you to a deserted cave a ways outside of Surrey. I expect you to stay there, and practice -- learn what you have missed and forgotten in the eleven years spent here. Do whatever you need to to survive." He pressed the wand into Draco's palm and laid a small gold ring on the floor. "I do not expect you to fail."

Without another word, Voldemort turned and whisked out of the room, his Death Eaters following him. Draco stared down at his dirty hand, holding the wand, and then glanced to the gold ring on the floor. A small smile curved his lips as he bent down to take the portkey.


Revenge is a dish best served cold.

-- old Klingon proverb
A/N: Done! Hooray! Feedback!