Disclaimer: Hogwarts etc belongs to JKR
AN: This is where the author cringes at her fifteen-year-old self and realises that she really just wrote up a thought process and tried to call it a story. Hmm. Again, Arctic Demon would like to remind you that this is NOT recent work.
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Chapter Three
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Black
You look across the planes of existence, the shadowed fields that lie empty in you head and you wonder in silence what it is that brings such a name about: Darkness. When did it become such a bad thing? Why should light take the name for what is good and pure? In the end it is light that is stronger. Light that triumphs and dark that is engulfed.
Darkness is where all things start, not on a fresh piece of white paper. In darkness things can be reborn. White, so easily tainted, so easily twisted and warped and coloured another kind of thing. Black is constant. Is that not what goodness should be? The goodness that endures, through the blood, the sweat and the pain. Stains that spread so easily through evil should never show on what is right. It should not matter. And in darkness it does not. In darkness there is room for growth but not for staining. Darkness is pure.
When a forest burns and all life is gone it is black that remains. From the ashes light and hope springs again and it is in the darkness, in the sweat and the blood, that we find hope and the will to go on. Where would we be without that? That offering of once last chance. White, once soiled is lost forever, but black never breaks down.
Goodness can be overpowered, it can be repressed, but it will always be there (or so they say), in the hearts of men there will still be hope, and when chance comes, when that light flickers and it's hold slips, the shadows can return. Light can never truly be cast away and you have to be a fool to believe there can be life without evil, without malcontent and dispute. But beneath it there is purity in the dark. Beneath it there is possibility which is not always seen. Hidden in a realm of false understanding. Where spirits twist and writhe and fall and fight. Where fatality exists within ourselves, but by the faults of others it is unleashed. When the people who never cared enough care too much and the sunlight falters in the heavens. That is when you will find your rightful place. Alone in the dark with the miseries and failings of the world loosely tied to your shoulders.
In the dark things make sense.
It warps your logic, it sheds 'light' because there is no light to distract or cast false shadows.
Never lose faith they told you. But they never told you why. It was just something that was there, you did not talk about the consequences, the repercussions and the effects, it was simply forbidden. Never lose faith and never forget. But it makes no sense to you now. Sitting in the dark and the pain. Never forget. There are memories that shatter your faith in life and death and the beauty of the world like nothing before. To never forget is to lose faith entirely and to keep faith, to cling and scramble and clutch to what is left is to forget. It is to forget why it was leaving you in the first place. It is to forget what it was that made you who you are, what you are….
Never forget and never lose faith.
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Blackness.
You would have thought it suffocating really, before, when you lived outside in the sun… But it isn't. There is almost a sort of calm to it. Makes sense really… You're supposed to put a blanket over an owl's cage to calm them down. No reason why it shouldn't be the same for humans.
Perhaps it's the way it's constant without monotony? A sort of comforting familiarity without being boring. You always used to like familiarity. Change wasn't good on the whole. It usually ended up with someone dying in protest.
"Where do you think we are?" You ask as it occurs to you.
"How the fuck am I supposed to know?"
He isn't in a good mood. Perhaps talking was a bad idea.
"I- That wasn't what I meant. I mean… What is this place… Well I know it's a cell, or a dungeon or something, but what else has it been used for? There isn't anyone else in here and I'd like to know… its history."
"Its history?" He sounded sceptical. This invitation enough, you continue.
"Yeah. You know, how old it is, if someone else was in this spot before me. If so, for how long? And why?"
"You want to know if we're gonna be the first to die here?"
"No… just… I… I'm not sure. But it would be nice to know what's out there in the dark. Whether there are any corpses lying around or something."
"You know, Granger. If there were corpses, I reckon we'd be able to smell them."
"Well skeletons or something."
"You want to know whether there's a skeleton sitting beside you?"
"No… I just- Well. It could have been used in the last War. Or against Grindewald. And I just thought it would be interesting to know what other prisoners were kept here. Anyone we'd have heard of…"
"Merlin, Granger... Facing a life of eternal torture and you're wanting a History lesson!"
"I was just wondering."
He laughed. It wasn't happy, more grateful. "No need to sound so put out. And there won't be any skeletons, I'm pretty certain of that. If there were they would have some light in here so we could see…"
"What?"
"That's what my father used to do. Keep the old skeletons in their manacles for the new prisoners to see."
"Old skeletons?! Like dug up from graves old skeletons?"
"As far as I know they were never buried…"
"You had fresh skeletons in your cellar?"
"Dungeon, and it was an old house, I'd hardly call them fresh."
"That's got to be a thousand different degrees of wrong Malfoy… Ever heard of 'respect for the dead'?"
"They were a bunch of bones! Gods, Granger. You asked a question and I answered it. I honestly didn't mean to spur you into 'Welfare for the Long-Since Decomposed' mode."
"Sorry. But still, that can hardly be hygienic, can it. I mean bodies rotting in your home! And when you were a child, did they never think of that? What it could do to someone growing up, to randomly stumble in on some maggot infested corpse! You'd have been scarred for life!"
"I'm touched by your concern… But trust me, I've stumbled in on worse. Besides, the dungeons are guarded with just about every ward known to wizard-kind, there wasn't much danger of anyone just wondering in."
"…Roughly how often was it used? You know, before the war?"
He snorted. "Not much. There was the odd occasion when father would come home drunk with–" He faltered. "Never mind. It was very rare. But after fifth year, in the build up, before it really began, he kept a few muggles or the occasional wizard the Dark Lord wanted kept quiet down there… That was when he started teaching me the Unforgivables. But later, well it was HQ for a bit, before they got the Riddle House up and running again. That was uncomfortable… Waking up in the morning, all set on getting a nice shower, to leave the room and find them dragging some clawing POW down the corridor… It's enough to put you right off your breakfast."
He paused.
"He never used silencing charms for torture sessions either… It's one of those things where the imagination can do far worse things than can be inflicted with a wand. Some people he'd just leave down there between two interrogation rooms and let them hear the screams…. They were always hit the hardest. The people you couldn't harm because they were being ransomed, or they had information that couldn't be taken by force… They would listen to the screams and think up so many things that could be happening that they went mad, constantly waiting and dreading for when it would be their turn. Those sort of people would talk in their sleep… Far more effective than physical pain. Psychological torture. There's a knack to it."
"It's times like these I wonder why you're in here with me, rather than outside with them."
"You and me both, little girl."
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It's like he doesn't care. What you'd give to experience a day in the life of Draco Malfoy. What could possibly make you so immune to such treatment? It's him against the world and that's all that matters. Prejudice is gone and yet he's still that bit better than you… Not morally, not academically, but in life, real life, that is not what counts… You're not sure what does count, but whatever it is, Draco Malfoy has it.
"Do you know where we are?"
"No. It's dark."
"Thank you. Without your guiding words I never would have established that."
"No need to bitch. You're just jealous my patch of wall is better than yours."
"And you worked that out how?"
"Well, I'm obviously in a better mood than you, so I must be more comfortable, therefore my space is much better."
"Or you could just be slightly more accustomed to swinging in dungeons with frequent overdoses of pain."
"You've got room to swing? No fair."
"How can you sound so unaffected!? We're stuck here forever! They're not ever going to let us die!"
"I thought you were supposed to be the optimist, little-miss-sunshine. You're the type that sits at the end of the world and looks for the bright side of the blackened sun. At least make the effort, you just went and warped my entire perception of you and that's not very friendly."
"Jesus, Malfoy, you sound drunk."
"I could sound worse."
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"He's destroying an entire race out there… An entire species… The good guys are all dead. It's like Hitler won the war and all I can do is sit here and know, but never see, that the world is ending. My world is ending." You are crying now, but that doesn't matter. The tears are like the blood. It just doesn't make any difference, there's still so much left to fall.
He doesn't speak. What could he say anyway? You don't think like him and you never did. He never fought for morality or the greater good. He was like one of those kings in the old Myths, money, power, drinks and women… but then he tried to outsmart his god, he tried to make a war between Good and Evil his own…. and now he takes his punishment.
What did he really think? Back then when he killed so many of your kind, your friends?
Did he believe he was doing the world a favour and ridding it of the filthy vermin his father was so certain you were? But then you remember who this is. It's Draco Malfoy: the Dragon of Bad Faith. You can't see him doing anything for the good of the world.
His exasperation cuts through your thoughts. "What do you want me to do, Granger? Comfort you?"
Your eyes are wet, cheeks blotchy. The damn unfeeling bastard. "Well you could give it a try!"
"But I don't get what you're so cut up about!"
"You don't get– Argh! Have you lost all sense of humanity? All I can feel is pain. Over and over again. It reaches a new level of agony every time they step back into this room and I know that it is never going to end. This is the ultimate worst it is possible to feel… How can you not understand?"
"Well… that is one way of looking at it. But at least it lets us know we're living, right?"
You were silent. He had clearly lost his mind. Served him right anyway.
"Think about it. We could sit here for eternity and never know whether we had died and just not noticed. We can't move, can't see. Without those momentary lapses of pain we can't even feel. What is there in an existence like that? You have nothing to prove to anyone living like that."
You stared incredulous into the dark. "What is there in that? What is there in this existence? We have nothing real! All I have is you, and for all I know even that could be some mindfuck of my own psych. A little voice to keep me going in the dark. Survival mentality and all that. For all I know you could be entirely a creation of my desperation, so I don't feel alone. Hell, you could be me. What if I developed schizophrenia and never noticed? What if I can never tell? I could die not knowing! What if the one thing that stops me losing my mind is in fact a product of my insanity?"
"As ironic as that is my dear, I do believe you just proved my point. Take away the pain and the only other focus here is the little voice that speaks without a face. Pain you cannot question, me you can. Therefore pain is good. Ha. I win."
How was it that when she had no idea what his face looked like now, she could still see his smirk twisted into his words?
"You do not. All that proves is you're some sadomasochist and I'm the only speck of reasoned thought in this… this… black piece of unnamed space."
"And now you're referring to yourself as a thought? How reasoned is that?"
"Don't twist my words."
"I didn't need to."
"Hmph."
For a small while, or perhaps longer, you were silent.
"I have a question."
"Don't you always?"
Frowning you continued. "What is it exactly you think we have to prove in being tortured?"
He was clearly losing patience. "Look, if you don't want to understand it isn't my fault! The way I see it, if we are forced into living, there can either be something to fight against or we can be left in the dark with nothing but the possibilities of your mind giving you someone to talk to. I always thought you were the one who liked facts and truths? You said it yourself that nothing else here is real."
"Facts and truths, not crucio after crucio while they're off inventing more painful ways to treat us."
"The more you endure the stronger you become. Extensive pain can destroy weakness."
"Spoken like a true Malfoy." Your voice was scathing.
"There is some truth in it! Look it up in a book if you must! Okay, sorry that was low, but you do build up magical resistance."
"To what end?! It's not like we'll ever get to leave here! How is that any form of comfort? Oh, if I sit here and soak up a lifetime of mind numbing agony I will die a strong little prisoner, strapped in manacles but without fear. You really know how to make a person feel good."
"I wasn't trying to flatter you."
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AN: Dude, this sucks.
If you've read it please review it!