Draco Malfoy walked the halls of Hogwarts every night; his rank as prefect allowed him to do so without the need for an invisibility cloak and without the threat of having detention. His goal was to ensure that no other students were casing trouble, but his thoughts drifted elsewhere, back to that night in his second year…
Draco felt his head smack against the wall as Lucius Malfoy hurled him around effortlessly with his want. He felt his body slam into the floor, into the bookshelf, and finally, painfully into the crystal chandelier, smashing it into pieces and feeling the shards slice his skin.
"Father…please", he murmured almost unintelligibly. His body couldn't take any more abuse, and cried for the blackness that always mercifully invaded him. But as it was about to descend upon him, Lucius broke its bond with his ice-cold voice and the pain of being hurled once again against walls, floors, ceilings.
"Do you realize what your little blunder means!? Do you realize what your failure to stop the bond from being broken actually means!? That journal was so brutally important to the Dark Lord's revival; and YOU, his only representative at Hogwarts; YOU, my only son, my only heir; YOU, you pathetic inept excuse for a follower let that POTTER get away with destroying it! Did you know what that journal really was!? It WAS the Dark Lord! It was a part of his soul! You cannot even begin to understand that every time Ginerva Weasley penned a SINGLE LETTER in that journal, she gave the Dark Lord some of her strength, some of her life!"
"I'm sorry, father" Draco moaned. Anything, everything to stop this pain, just please don't let it be…
"Reparo" The chandelier mended itself, the room put itself back together. Lucius healed his son, but the relief was not welcome, for Draco know its purpose.
"Come. The dungeons"
"Please, father, no!" Draco begged. Anything but the dank, putrid depths that haunted his mind, where he had to mercilessly torture the pathetic beings that could barely be identified as human.
"You have to prove to me and to your lord that you are not a failure, that you have not lost your ability to do this will"
Draco hated what he had to do to keep himself alive. He hated the fear in the prisoners' eyes when they saw light appear for the first time in so long, when they saw him, dragged by his father. But he had to. Not only his life hinged on his father's assurance, it was his mother's as well. Narcissa Malfoy was by no means a kind, compassionate mother, but she was all Draco had, and it was Lucius' only leverage he had over someone who no longer valued his own life.
The two moved in silence to the dungeons, Lucius' hand tight around Draco's neck to keep him in order. When the door cracked open, they could hear a moan of terror from someone new; someone who had not yet learned that silence would lessen the severity of the punishment, because its administrator felt so sick when he heard the screams that he departed from his body and took his rage out on the poor body before him, not knowing that it was a person like him, tortured by the same cold individual who watched over them all…
Cold water splashed Draco into reality, and he looked up to see Peeves above his head with a large balloon full of water, and looked down to see his robes dripping. He shook the water out of his hair and ran, with peeves hooting and following after him;
"Someone wasn't watching where he was going! What, where you daydreaming, pretty-boy? Who's the lucky girl?"
"Bugger off, Peeves, I'm not to be trifled with tonight!" "OOOHHHH, he's 'Not to be trifled with tonight'!"
Another water balloon splashed at Draco's feet, and he ducked into an empty room, thankfully (for the first time in his life) running into Filch.
Peeve's water balloon hit Filch square in the face, and in the shouting match that followed, Draco ducked out to return to his dorm for another sleepless night, another concealment charm in the morning to hide the bags under his eyes, another energy potion to give the appearance that everything was alright, but that only took away more of his energy.