Draco
He never quite understood the human body's automatic physiological reaction to a threat. Of course he knew that the perception of threat activates the sympathetic nervous system, therefore triggering an acute stress response that prepares the body to flee or fight.
If you really wanted to get into the chemistry of it, then he knew that technically, the sympathetic nervous system is initially activated by a release of hormones, which leads to the stimulation of the adrenal glands, and then triggers the release of catecholamines, including adrenaline and noradrenaline.
What he couldn't explain was the why. Why would the human body even have a function that reacts to threats. If there was a greater force out there, something he sincerely doubted, then why did they make the human population susceptible to menaces' in the first place?
That was exactly what he asked himself when Lyra spun around, decidedly choosing the fight response, pointing her wand inches away from his pupil. He clings the fabric of her collar firmly, his wand filling the gap between their bodies.
By taking advantage of her surprise, he pries her wand from her nimble fingers and leverages it above her head where she can not possibly reach it.
They are both quiet for a moment, glancing between each other's eyes, the silence fostering a density that enkindles shivers to roll down his spine.
He grapples with the silence, unable to decide whether to break it, punishing it for the unruly anticipation it springs, or welcome it for saving him from the insuperable anger that boils through the bloodstream of the girl trembling before him.
Had it not been for the silence, or more accurately the surprise it brought, he certainly would not be standing right now. In truth, he'd probably be blasted into the wall by one of her curses.
The minutes pass where he clutches her twisted robes in his hand, holding both of their wands captive above her head. She pants with adrenaline, making the hairs on his forehead tickle his eyelashes each time, holding onto his forearm to balance herself.
She gawks at him as if he is a vampire about to sink his teeth into her neck. Good, he thinks.
She should be scared.
Looking around, he pulls her along by her robes and drags her into the nearest broom closet.
She seems to resign herself to his hold as she goes along without a fuss, indulging him. She occasionally makes an effort to stop him from pushing her into the closet, but ultimately she pushes his hands away and enters herself.
He shuts the door behind them and pulls harshly down on the string that hangs from the ceiling, allowing for a dim sheen of light to pass over her slightly mollified features.
"Why did you pull me into this closet Malfoy? You gave me quite the fright," she starts to blubber, pacing back and forth in tight strides. "grabbing me out of nowhere," she continues. "You're lucky I didn't blast your brains out."
She stops pacing and takes a look at her surroundings, glancing around at the numerous dusted objects surrounding them with a disgusted look on her face.
"Where are we anyways?"
He looks at her and says, "No clue."
He hadn't anticipated the location of this confrontation, but it seemed to be adequate for the circumstances.
The closet, as small as it appeared, contains thousands of little trinkets and weapons. It is possible that it was used for some sort of weaponry in the past, seeing as the conventional munitions that line the walls and scatter the floors consist of katanas and battle axes, quite the anomaly in view of the fact that this is Hogwarts, a magical school, that does not partake in anything requiring antique muggle weapons.
Despite the oddity of it, the room is a place shown in a different light, a black and white film portrayed in color, the type that makes one reminisce on the past and hope for the future.
He waltzes over to a bundle of thick rope haphazardly discarded in the nearest corner of the room, and picks it up, twisting it into intricate knots that form into two tight loops. They resemble and, to his convenience, function similarly to manacles.
He can feel the anger on his face growing palpably hotter as he approaches her, but he smooths over his features so as to not get ahead of himself. What he cannot prevent is the shadow that sweeps across his face.
Each step serves as fuel to the churning ball of fury that begs to get out, trapped inside of him for as long as he could remember. "Don't act clueless you little twat, I know it was you." Any hint of amusement at her babbling vanishes from his face.
She looks up at him dubiously, giving the impression of honest confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, you know what I mean, and the next time you pull something like that on me, I will hurt you." Draco was now stepping closer to her, giving her no choice but to back up into the wall, tripping over the scattered knives, and coughing from the dust they polluted the air with.
Her frustration was apparent, the coughing fit she launched into ostensibly being her breaking point. She stops stumbling and marches over to Draco, pounding her fist into his chest.
He stares down at her, bewildered by her sudden aggression, but unbothered by her fist that has no affect on him.
"No Malfoy, I will be the one to kill you!" She growls it, punctuating the sentence with another pound of her fist to his chest.
"Yeah?" He deadpans with a straight face as he discards the rope.
She stops her fuming, her eyes gazing up to meet his with a strange glint, "Uh, yes"
"Do it."
That shuts her up.
"Alright, now that your prissy fit is complete, we can get back to the topic at hand. Stop messing with me and reverse the bloody spell."
Again, but with even more confusion clouding her features, she stares at him blankly. "I really don't get what you mean Malfoy." Her voice trills with the unmistakable pitch of conviction.
She was truly put out on getting on his nerves, wasn't she? Not to worry, two can play at that game. He drags his shirt up to reveal the skin on his abdomen, pointing at the outline of a lewd figure that covers his entire frontside.
His gaze turns away from hers, if only to save himself from the embarrassment that briefly passes over him, but before he can fully turn away, he catches her hand shooting up to cover her eyes.
Her cheeks grow hot when she finally peeks through her fingers, that hazel gaze of hers drifting to his stomach, but then her lips begin to twitch up into a grin. A moment passes in tangible silence until she is laughing so hard that his eardrums ring and her body convulses.
"It is not funny," he says as he pulls his shirt back down and grabs her by the shoulders, shaking her violently to try and stop her laughter. "Now reverse it already Wolf."
Tears begin to slide down her red cheeks and she stares up at him with glittering eyes. "Oh, Malfoy, I am sorry to admit that the clever trick was unfortunately not mine, however, do tell me who it was once you figure it out so that I can congratulate them accordingly."
She steals back her wand from his hand and trapezes out the door, grabbing one of the katanas that borders the wall, beaming at herself through the reflection of the blade as she inspects it, still chuckling in amusement.
Draco is left in the closet, staring at the spot where her body was a few seconds ago, astonished by the girl's brazenness.
He swears to himself and ponders her reaction. She seemed genuinely baffled by his accusation, but he was not dumb enough to believe the act. The ball of fury swelled at the thought.
A memory lurches through him at the pretense of lies, and he is in fourth year, nearly four years ago, the night well through, the air heavy with the scent of worn parchment and magic.
He wanders through the shadows of the underground corridors, below the Great Hall, searching for Crabbe and Goyle, who he'd sent to the kitchens to fetch him something to quell his hunger, but had naturally been unsuccessful. Those blithering idiots were truly useless.
As he approaches the corridor with the painting of the fruit bowl, he finds Wolf holding a piece of parchment under her wand light. She wears a grim expression on her illuminated face, murmuring to herself about impossibilities and outrages.
He's about to pass her and tickle the pear to gain entrance to the kitchens, when her wand makes a loud crackling sound just as Filch's cat turns the corner, summoning the supposed caretaker and getting them both caught.
While Filch ambles on about catching the two of them, and possibly asking Dumbledore permission to bring back the old torture methods, Draco turns to Lyra, and says, "Well," in a hushed voice, holding out his hand, not for her to take, but as if to say "Lead the way."
He was boastful then, thinking that at least she would be getting disciplined as well, but when she smirked at him in response to his gesture, he should've known he was wrong.
She lied straight to Dumbledore's face, coming up with a perfectly reasonable excuse while he, too baffled by her ability to lie so blatantly in order to come up with a valid excuse himself, had to spend two detentions in the Forbidden Forest with the big oaf who's name frequently escaped him.
So he knew now, that when she claimed to not be responsible for the tattoo on his abdomen, she was absolutely guilty.
Two could candidly play at that game.
Madam Pomfrey had sent him off the previous week after the encounter with Wolf in the weapons closet.
Since Lyra had refused to remove the spell that gave him an eccentric portrayal of—male genitalia displayed on his abdomen, he figured he would briefly relinquish his dignity, and ask the nurse to remove it.
Madam Pomfrey had inspected the tattoo, failed to hide a smirk, and sent him off claiming the
spell could only be removed by the caster, while mumbling to herself about congratulating them if he ever found out who it was.
He knew it was Wolf, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of his surrender.
Instead, the past week has been spent finalizing the plans for his new initiative. It seemed pointless to him, though his publicist claimed it would be the easiest, and most practical way of maintaining his family name and removing the supposed "stains on his reputation," as he so eloquently phrased it.
Quite honestly, the publicist was a dumbarse that could go fuck himself, although he was doing a good job so far in "rubbing away those stains."
Hence, the dozens of stories in the Daily Profit and Witch Weekly that rambled on about his love affairs, or lack thereof, declaring him "single and ready to mingle," whatever that implied.
He was even awarded with Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile, and named the wizarding world's most eligible bachelor. It was silly, to say the least.
Tonight, Draco was lounging in the Slytherin common room, his award winning smile out of sight, the heat of the fire brightening the characteristically gloomy nature of the Dungeons.
His proposal for the initiative was coming along slowly. It wasn't the lack of motivation, he was entirely motivated to finish the initiative and end the torture of dealing with his publicist, but it was more the lack of concept.
The idea of creating the initiative had sprouted a mere week following the Battle. His mother had been quick to make the arrangements, not giving him a say in the matter, maintaining that after all the people he killed, he needed a way to start clean.
"Begin with a clean slate, darling," she coaxed.
He couldn't refuse. His mother needed a drive, something to distract herself and feed her obsession with fixing his life. So he let her.
It seemed the initiative helped Narcissa significantly in distracting herself from the onslaught of paparazzi and reporters looking for gossip on her recent divorce with Lucius. Draco felt obligated to at least help her in doing so.
The last meeting with McGonagall had gone rather smoothly as she had to make arrangements for the upcoming ball. They spoke briefly about their aim to eliminate the stereotype on Slytherins over the summer, so the ball had sprung up as an opportunity to fortify the movement.
In essence, the masquerade aspect would allow for the students to interact with others, discarding the stereotypes that accompanied the inevitable lack of association between the houses. It was brilliant, but not something he was passionate about. He wasn't particularly set on changing the global perspective. Slytherins were to be Slytherins whether the other houses liked it or not.
Abandoning the piles of parchment that were beginning to form an oddly organized disarray on his lap, Draco sat up from the lounge chair, cuffing the sleeves of the white shirt he wore, the buttons slipping from their usual fastened state from hours of shuffling before the fickle flames, leaving a sliver of the skin on his chest open to the chill of the dungeons.
It was late. The warm shades of the sunset had dispersed into the darkness long ago when some students still lingered in the common room. It was empty now, the room quiet, having no one to break the silence.
He thinks back to that saying he read once in a muggle philosophy textbook. "If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?" He's applied the thought-inducing question to various situations but always comes to the same conclusion. Of course, it makes a sound.
Then he falls back into the spiral of "what ifs," and "maybes" and all progress is lost again.
What if the world disappears the second a gaze is not there to see it?
What if a sound does not echo if there are no ears to receive the waves?
Maybe the world is a figment of the imagination, and he is really just asleep in a lab somewhere undergoing stimulation for a clinical study.
In that case, this is one of the worst feasible stimulations he could imagine.
The possibilities are endless, yet there is no certain answer.
Perhaps the saying he should truly be investing in is the one about curiosity killing the cat. After all, the only thing curiosity ever got him was trouble.
The heat of the fire had settled over the common room like a sheet, shaking him out of his thoughts, though Draco is anything but bothered by the temperature. If one were to touch him, they would find that he is quite actually polar to the touch.
He stands suddenly, deciding to go out under the guise of Head Boy duties.
As he leaves through the common room entrance, the night goes still, save for the faint sound of magic humming, and his footsteps echoing throughout the corridors.
His feet take him towards the library, where he hopes to find a book that will tell him how to remove the bloody tattoo, but he doubts he will, seeing as he's been to the library every day this week to no apparent avail.
The walls of Hogwarts seem tighter than usual, whether it be from his recent height boost or from something less juvenile than a growth spurt. It is the first time, he thinks, that he's been alone since the Battle.
His mother had been glued to him both for her own selfish reasons and his need for company after the Battle. Ever since, he had not allowed himself to be entirely alone, always near a stranger, surrounded by work, too frightened by his own mind to leave it to wander.
Walking in these too tight halls, constricted to only thoughts of himself, is the first time he's wondered without being goaded, demanded, coerced. He feels free. Something taken from him from the day his father told him he would be meeting Voldemort, the day his father was first put in Azkaban, the day he was assigned the task. The hours of mental and physical torture he endured from his own Aunt and Voldemort himself.
It's one of those feelings you don't appreciate until they are gone. The freeness of being unconstrained.
He yearned to bottle the feeling, keeping it as an award he could place on his shelf and admire when the feeling was lost, gone.
So as he finally gives in to that incredible feeling, walking at a pace that makes his blood rush just fast enough to remind him that he is alive, a smile flickers across his face for the first time in years.
All highs come to an end however. The seconds tick by quickly before the creeping smile turns into a reserved frown, the glint in his eyes retreats into the shadows, and the swift pace turns into an unconventional amble.
Letting down the walls of his prolonged occlumency comes with consequences. It starts with a rush, the sense of frigid water being splashed across his face, cold water on coals, waking him up from a languor state, transforming into the overwhelming ache of remembering.
It's like reliving everything that happened for the past years. Torture. Pain. Stings. Slashes. Murders. Blood. Worry. Again.
He stumbles a bit as his senses dimmed, but he is practiced, he knows how to build up those walls again.
Place a brick. Mix the mortar. Spread the mortar. Place a brick.
The syllables fall from his tongue as he repeats the steps out loud. Slowly, but surely, he feels the air rushing back into his lungs, his expression smoothing over, his eyebrows loosening, his hands unclasping. Before he knows it, he's reverted into the cold. No longer feeling, no longer needing to.
Each time he renews his walls, the days go by and he doesn't even notice. He blinks and he's somewhere new, doing something different. Eventually the initial coldness warms and he can think again, feel again, unburdened by the memories he keeps hushed, locked in their cage, stuffed into the back of his mind. It's the only thing that works.
It's different this time— the aloofness only lasts a few seconds rather than a few days. Perhaps it's the fact that Voldemort is dead, and he is not stifled by the incessant and crucial need to keep those walls impossibly dense.
He learned to keep them permeable when in Voldemort's proximity, only letting silly memories seep from behind the walls to give just enough to keep suspicions aside, but never letting out the truly invaluable information. The type that would get him and his mother killed.
He's rounding a corner now, somehow on the sixth floor, the habit of coming up here to find the caged birds he needed to test the cabinet back in sixth year engraved into his routine. He almost chuckles humorously, but he doesn't.
He comes to a stop at the corner, leaning his weight against the rough corridors to look out through the arched castle windows. The stars glisten from their spots in the sky, mocking him, reminding him that he is an insignificant organism— an ant in acres of field.
Oftentimes, when he regrets his past choices and wonders what his life could have been, it's comforting to know that what he's done is hardly notable through the eyes of the night. Only a few times does he ever think it saddening that no matter how hard he tries he never will be notable.
"Never say never," a small voice whispers in the back of his mind.
And it is as if fate is answering him, putting him up for trial, declaring its final ruling. A shadow passes along the opposing corridor, approaching the very spot where Draco is perched under the aegis of obscurity.
Fate has proclaimed him guilty.
Lyra Wolf strolls to the window, her hand gripping stone as she leans forward into the wind past the window, her other hand holding a piece of parchment, same as those years ago. Her hair flows from her back in waves, her eyes shutting and a smile skimming her lips. The pleated skirt she wears rides up on her thighs revealing the dagger strapped tightly against her skin, her calves flexing the farther she leans.
He can see a bit of that lacy red underwear he caught her wearing that one morning. If only everyone else knew how much of a nagging tease their precious Lyra Wolf could be.
However much he despises her, the stars don't mock her, they applaud her very being. It invigorates him how much he wishes they did the same with him. Jealousy is a cliche he would never subject himself to.
"Enjoying your night?" The question begged to be asked, though it startles even himself to know that he's allowed the words to escape.
She jolts away from the window, as if caught committing a crime, or discovered under the covers with a man who was not hers. Under closer inspection, he notices the reserved way her arms curl into her body and her legs fold over each other provided that something is in need of shielding.
Perhaps she is just as guilty as he.
"Malfoy," she breathes out, quick to rearrange her limbs into a less timid position.
"Malfoy," she says again, this time with a curious tug on the syllables, hand going down to the dagger at her hip. She knows how to wield it, knows too that he can overpower her in a minute, and if she draws the blade, it would take him little effort to steal it from her grasp.
Deciding better, her hand twitches away from the strap and goes up to pull the skirt back down, a smirk flickering across her face, like firelight.
"Merlin, I hate you," she whispers as her eyes dance over him.
His expression sours when he answers her, "Me more."
Lyra's eyebrows raise in mock astonishment, "That's impossible," her voice drawls like a cat purring at the success of capturing a mouse between its claws.
"I doubt that." The banter is familiar, so it is not a surprise they've fallen into its rhythm so quickly.
She's closing in on him now, her scent filling the air between them. He breathes it in until it aches inside his chest. Masochistic, perhaps, but certainly enslaving, obsessive, addictive.
With occlumency, he's been a metaphor of a block, difficult to break, unfeeling, but whenever she is near, the anger that perforates his walls is prodigious, never dissipating until she leaves.
"Care to remove the oh so lovely image you've procured on my stomach?"
"Under one condition," she states, her hazel gaze weighted with merriment, the kind that fore came duplicity.
"And what would that be?" He asks her the question with a raise of his eyebrow.
Her eyes unmoving from his, she responds, "You must beg."
It was payback, revenge, whatever you chose to call it, the words had the same intention. She was searching for retribution, something she wholly knew he wouldn't give her.
"No," he negated.
"Very well, have fun with that." Her fingers pointed down at his stomach as she said it.
She started in the opposite direction, but before she could go any further, he had grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back to him, anger clear on his face.
"Don't think that you have all the power, because trust me, you don't. I will get you to remove the tattoo one way or another."
Her eyes widened in mock fright. "How disconcerting Malfoy, perhaps this is a bit banal of me but for the sake of the argument, try me."
He chuckles. "Salazar, you're odd Wolf."
Lyra's features contort into a skeptical smirk, "Thank you."
He watches her walk off in the wrong direction, shaking his head in disbelief.
He'd been trying to come up with a way to get Wolf to get the stupid tattoo off of him, but he couldn't think of anything that would actually work.
At one point he considered hexing her in the dungeons until she relented or died, but the option was ruled out when he remembered the novel charms placed on Hogwarts after the war that prevented torture from being performed on its grounds. How that was possible, he did not know.
"Hey man, what's with the constipated expression you're wearing?" The voice had snapped him out of his reverie.
"You're hilarious Theodore Nott, utterly hysterical." Draco's countenance remained indifferent even with the sarcastic response he gave.
"Thanks, you know I've considered becoming one of those muggle comedians, but the pay is absolutely abhorrent," he answers, choosing to disregard Draco's sarcasm.
Blaise ambles towards them, leaning against the back of the loveseat in the common room. "You two up for a Quidditch scrimmage?"
Draco looked up from his book, giving Blaise an incredulous look. "Either of us haven't played Quidditch in ages."
"Perhaps, but wouldn't it be nice to get back into it?"
"No," both Draco and Theo respond in unison.
"Way to rain on my parade guys," Blaise says with a frown pulling the corners of his lips down.
"What does that even mean?" Theo asks the question with his eyebrows screwed up.
Blaise looks at him and with a shrug of his shoulders, answers, "No clue, I think I heard it somewhere in muggle London."
Turning back to glance at Draco, he wonders out loud, "If not Quidditch, then what should we do?"
"I'm not sure, go finish your homework or something."
"Really Draco, go finish your homework? What happened to you?"
Draco, clearly irritated, rubs his temples and opens his eyes to glare at the two slytherins in front of him. "You know, things change, if I don't want to play bloody Quidditch, then I don't want to play bloody Quidditch. Bugger off."
Blaise sighs and shakes his head, "Whatever you say." He pushes off his heels and makes his way towards some seventh year girls giggling by the fire.
Draco, running his hand over the cover, looks back down to continue reading, but the agitation gets the best of him, making it difficult to concentrate on the words.
Both Blaise and Theo had been friends of his before the war, but now they'd gotten a lot closer. Maybe it's the whole, my parents were Death Eaters and I hate them thing that they bond over, or maybe it's the way they all fought for the Order in the end. Either way, they had gotten significantly closer in the past few months, but today, Draco was not up for their company.
He was angry, not unusual, nonetheless this was a brewing anger. The type that has been proliferating all day until the moment it starts to boil and spew over. He's about reached that point.
He shoots up, but Theo, who he hadn't noticed was still across from him, grabs his shoulder and shoves him back into his seat, where he looks up at him indignantly.
"I'm not letting you do this Draco."
"Do what?" He bites back, playing dumb.
"You know what, but if you want me to spell it out for you, I will," Theo huffs as he collapses into the seat he pulled to be directly in front of Draco.
"You push us away and then you go break something. It's as simple as that, but I can't let you do it again. Shit is tough, you just have to deal with it in a healthy way, you can't just go blasting things, it gets you nowhere."
Draco leans forwards to get face to face with Theo. "You don't think I fucking know that. You don't think I've tried. Nothing works other than blasting the shit out of everything I see. I know things are tough because I've lived tough every single bloody day of my life."
He snaps the book shut, his fists turning white and his veins pulsing with adrenaline. All Theo accomplished was delaying his inevitable breaking point.
Before he could walk out, Theo grabs his shoulder again with a surprising amount of force.
Draco spins and starts, "What the fu— ,"
"Listen to me Draco, I just want to help."
Their eyes meet, Theo's filled with a sincerity Draco hadn't known he could possess, but in a second, Draco is speeding for the exit. He was the one to turn away.
He's running now, his breaths coming out in harsh pants. The hand that was holding the book squeezes so tight, a few of the pages begin to fall out, leaving a trail as evidence of his pique.
The other hand had reached for his wand, now ready at his side. His feet take him to the second floor, where they turn on the left corridor. Before long, he's come to a stop opposite the tapestry depicting the attempt of Barnabas the Barmy to teach trolls ballet.
The grand doors to the Room of Requirement stand, waiting for the tentative push of his hands. He stares at the doors in awe considering the fact that the Room of Requirement was certainly
destroyed when the Battle of Hogwarts had set it ablaze.
His anger briefly forgotten, his hands find their way to the hard feeling of the doors, confirming that this is not a hallucination, so he pushes them open.
Before him is a grand ballroom, though it is definitely not for the festivities that most ballrooms entertained. The marble floor is scattered with millions, if not trillions of petite teacups that remind him of snowflakes, not one of them similar to the other.
A thin path is set in the middle of the chaos, and when Draco starts to walk through it, the doors close behind him with a loud thud.
He pivots at the sound, only to see that at the top of the closed doors, reads a sentence in ornate pictorial calligraphy.
The Chamber Of Thurisaz
Beside the calligraphy is a small symbol. Thurisaz— the rune.
From his studies he knows that the rune indicates "Mallet/Giant," but what would that have in relation with a room full of teacups?
The rune represents Thor's hammer. As such, it suggests a robust direction of energy or force, for either destruction or defense, and can also be seen in the sense of cathartic conflict.
Then it hits him, he'd been thinking about destruction when he stormed towards the Room of Requirement, and needless to say, the room had given way to his wishes. A place where he could blast and break, effectively stifling his vexation.
Laughing to himself, he brings his wand up offensively and procures a wordless confringo that shoots into the nearest teacup.
The cup gives a satisfying cracking noise, and then it shatters into hundreds of pieces.
His grin stretches its way up into a full beam, and Draco begins spewing both wordless and dictated spells into the teacups, efficaciously resulting in a disarray of splintered glass.
By the time a fourth of the teacups lay shattered on the floor, Draco is sweating from the exertion, but possessing an insatiable hunger for more.
It was a ludicrous notion, to think that the only way to quell his anger would be to ruin hundreds of innocent petite things, such as teacups, but it is precisely the innocence of it that makes it so awarding.
The teacups— adorned with elaborate paintings, delicate colors, embellishments, touches of gold, meticulous details— have been savored in the centuries where women adored tea parties. When, the British enjoyed tea, eventually having it grow into a staple.
It was all too gratifying to watch as the history of it was destroyed with a careless flick of his wand or the curl of his lips to whisper a spell.
He collapses onto the floor, his arms spread wide on his sides, and his gaze lifting to the ceiling. The only noise that fills the room now are his shallow breaths and the occasional clatter of broken porcelain.
Remembering himself, he gets up, dusting off the bits of powder from his clothes, and makes his way through to the door. He takes one last glance at the artistic madness in his wake, his head shaking at the irony of leaving behind chaos.
And then a sense of purpose seizes him, and he's heading towards the Headmistress' quarters with a renewed breath of justification awaiting action.