Before Reading

Warning the first: This story is very, very dark.

Warning the second: Within, you will find a narrative with heavy mature content. Dark emotions, vivid descriptions of war, sex (both consensual and rape), discussions of death, disturbing and suicidal thoughts, Stockholm syndrome, betrayal, kidnapping, murder and grief. In other words: All the works. If you are uncomfortable with any of the listed or are not emotionally mature, I implore you to proceed with caution. While I would love for this story to reach as many readers as possible, your well-being is first and foremost in my heart of hearts.

Warning the third: Expect tears. Tissues advised.

Note:

This is a story that I wrote almost exactly two years ago, and posted on a different account, but ended up abandoning and deleting, because it became too depressing for me, at that time in my life. I have about twelve chapters written as of right now, and plan to continue writing this story at some point, but as some of you might know, I already have another current work in progress (Our Blackened Hearts - if you are interested in Remus Lupin, the Pureblood Aristocracy, and a darker view on the Hogwarts era, I would suggest you go and check it out). So, for now, I will just be steadily posting the chapters I already have.

Please, please be warned, one more time... this story is not sunshine and rainbows.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole, dear reader.

One: Threshold

November 1995 - The Malfoy Manor

neither in waking nor in sleeping am i. there is the floor. there is the ceiling. there are the walls. there are the creases between them. i know they are there from my hands, though i cannot see, here.

there is only a door when He chooses to enter.

time flees from Him. a body slicing the air, impervious. no light steals through the doorway in the wake of His robes. under the ground. leagues from the sun. if it still shines, that is. if it has not yet rusted into night as all else has.

His mercurial eyes are the sole stars in this room. an inexorable tug. in this room beneath the house in which i was born. in this room beneath the house in which my family sits and shouts and paces and cries.

i listen.

My Child, He says to me.

His lips burn my neck with their cold. if only He would let me use my hands. but i would never know what to do; to embrace Him, to strangle Him. still, safely, my hands are away and cut by the chains secured to the wall by dark magic. tying me to the room, to Him, to this snagged place of grey.

above my body, his wand glides. my ribs move up toward him, toward his darkness, from the chill of the stone at my back, grating away against my spine. two strings tied to me, tied to Him, tied to the puppeteer. the wand passes over me with a blessing of fertility. open the bud. fill the bud with true unending life. darkest wheels do your bidding. bless the child, spear the tarnished womb. life upon him to eternity. for her, at end, a tomb.

i am the chosen vessel to keep His soul alive. entrusted. to carry Him on through ages and ages of the dark until there is nothing more and there is only Him left. never does He see this. how could He; Him, the great one, the unfeeling; how could He imagine this isolation past the sharp curving of the mortal road. this isolation of a god. this entrapment. in stone. in the most permanent of deaths.

yet i shall not speak of such days.

today, or tonight for i can never be sure of the time, He is slower. it is a taunting way of touching, giving hope to withdraw it, the coldness of His hands, His thin lips, His burning tongue inside my mouth. i think about his eyes grazing my nakedness and wait without words. in the corner resides a thin oily mattress, springs screaming, heaven when placed at odds with the floor. the chains are too heavy for my brittle arms to lift. He drags them over the stone with an aching sound and i sigh against His skin when he carries me and places me down again. i am a bird. hollow-boned. i am light.

my bad heart knocks on my ribs, too fast, death's harbinger. darkness obscures my eyes, absent color tingling behind their hot violet lids, pulsing with the feel of Him, the knowledge of His blood, two skins away from my own. His hands tell there will be no needless speaking. i want to touch Him. i want to break my wrists and feel the hate i should feel. but the metal bests my bones and His tongue is rust in my weak mouth and i breathe all my air out into Him and moan.

He is a knife inside me, so painful, but still i arch into His darkness and lose track of breath for want of it. i am leaning over a chasm and can only keep leaning further. i watch myself, i watch a little girl, hair twisting toward the layered fire, face brushed by the hot white ashes, screaming, a train, toward her death. breath comes in waves from his mouth, cool, a shuddering breeze, and ancient, smelling of river stones, a street after rain, soap, charcoal...

outside. outside. i cry.

when He is inside me, pressed against my walls, i am His sheath. i am the protector of His power. i am His power. i know He is coming, coming to his knees, seeing the blackness, arriving. and there is a void, a dip, the absence of a tiny piece of His reality. a weakness. a chink in the silver breastplate. a missing scale in the glittering coat of a deadly, grinning dragon.

His sacred body thrashes into me like a wave, against the back of me, the innermost, the singularity, the rose, dashed and stained, saltwater. the hull of a weather-beaten boat made by hard paper hands. He tears its petals and relishes the blood. i want to wring my neck with his crown. after He arrives this time He does not stop and continues, nails scraping my sides, more blood, grinding, boiling, sweat, the scabs over my bones tearing and bleeding and i am an abandoned garden to which he has returned life and my weary neck rises from the mattress and from the earth and the blood rushes from my wrists and i scream in his arms. jarring, drowning in a searing, numbing ink.

from my body, He tugs his own, and i do not look back while He stares. the musk of the air enters my paper bag lungs and swirls there and returns to the room. His cold knuckles shudder across my cheek and i turn my face to brush them with my lips - a rebellious, dangerous act, i know - before He goes. black robes without motion, no wind, no outside, no garden, no light beyond the open door. all is closed again.

i lay on my back and feel my blood on the inside and my blood on the outside and his seed everywhere and tuck my bruised lips with the blistering taste of him safely into my mouth. i watch my hair to see if faeries will come and move it, braid it or steal it from my scalp to make houses. were He to bring me lead and parchment i would draw it. but i am not allowed. for fear of my using it to shred my veins.

the hair is oily. my hands are unpracticed. i would not use the lead. i would not use the parchment. i do not want them.

He must come again. He will come again. i will be let outside. soon, there will be a clean day.

the walls listen to the secrets inside my head. is it trapped. are they trapped. am i trapped. did i say them out loud or were they kept in all along or am i no longer awake. is there anyone awake...

life is standing in a bottle on the ocean painted black all alone with no-where at all to go because the world is sealed off in echoes apart from a single open wall leading down into a deep abyss with sirens coming from nowhere and the night is a polluted smog-infested black with an absence of stars and this is not a dream and everything inside down to each failing breath is slowly clenching and shrinking

freezing...

freezing...

freezing...

NOTE

Thank you so much for reading. I would love to hear any feedback or thoughts you have. Also, my deepest apologies for torturing you amazing grammar purists out there, but any errors or stylistic oddities are intentional. Thank you all ten thousand times for being you and I hope you will continue reading!

Thank you for not plagiarizing my writing!

Yours truly,

On_Errand_Bad

1,471 words

18 November, 2020