Notes:
Hi again.
Last week I was feeling terribly down, not happy at all with my work, even with all your fantastic help. But now I'm not so sad, and I wanted yo thank you, my few readers, for being there even in my bad times.
This chapter is kind of a prelude for the next one, where Harry and Draco will come back. Just a little further to wait.
SPIDERWEB
Chapter 19- Family matters
Not an hour had passed since the party, dull and opaque to his eyes, started, when a servant approached one of the three seats at the head of the long banquet table, to whisper in Lord Malfoy's ear a message come from the dungeons.
Someone was requesting his judgment in assigning destiny to a newly brought prisoner.
The boy had not been able to give him more information than that. But the fact that the person in charge had sought his presence, accepting the risk of bringing on himself the wrath of the Dark Lord's second, that annoying Lord Malfoy might attract, told much about the importance of the captive ... or the stupidity of his captors.
And yet it was not this that made the blonde aristocrat rise, but the relief of finally having an excuse to retire.
A few words later, the Dark Lord granted him permission to leave.
oOo
Under the mole of the black castle there was a tangle of corridors that spread like rotten roots through the subsoil of the city. And just like the vegetable appendages, these corridors also contained nutrients. Those necessary for the maintenance of the regime:
Inside, like roes attached to the walls of the tunnels, cells were cradled, where new slaves were educated into lifting the titanic works of the state, and attending to the vitiated elite of the system.
However, these were not the only dependences of the dungeons.
Marginally cleaner and better-built pantries, housed the magical creatures they rarely managed to capture. Their skins, bones, muscles, blood, and organs, thin and hollowed out, where they had been plucked to make potions, wands, and other valuable goods.
And there too, between cells and pantries, were the rooms ... whose insides stank of fear, urine, and plasma; Dead things in a state of putrefaction, bile and decomposition. Places with diverse uses full of tools according to them. Yet, if someone were to name them with a single label, the most suitable word would have been torture rooms.
The pungent stench that came from them filled the whole complex. It turned the air thick and difficult to breathe. Permeating everything that entered the grimy net, clinging to the nostrils like a foul-smelling slug.
Once inside the prison, it was almost impossible to ignore the stench. Those who worked there learned quickly that if one did not have a sturdy stomach, paying attention to it only sharpened the awareness of nausea, to end up overflowing in vomit.
Not many accepted the work of jailer, few of lasted long enough to get accustomed to the smell, and fewer were those who maintained a facade as composed as the one displayed by Lord Malfoy, those occasions when he was forced to go down there.
Like now.
With ease born of practice, Lucius allowed the emanation to pass through his lungs, largely ignored, all his attention centered, not on what had brought him here, but on the state of his wife.
The sooner he finished, the sooner he could return to her.
So it was no wonder he did not catch the other, much weaker, scent, hidden beneath the usual stench, until it became utterly impossible to ignore.
When he was already before the entrance of the cell to which he had been summoned, and next to the guard who kept ir.
At such a short distance, not even his own self inflicted ignorance of the nauseating smells of the place, nor the monstrosity of old wood, dry and hard, like sheets of tasajo, that made the door, could hope to hide it any longer.
The sudden uptake caused a violent shiver between the first layer of his skin and the second; The human dermis and the chitin. A biochemical impression of racial recognition, which scaled his temperature several degrees, in what could have been called an instantaneous fever, if he had been remotely human.
Lucius fell totally still.
That place buried in the depths of his mind, always present in his viscera since that night a decade ago, was hit by the scent and broke, opening like a shell. A sensation, almost forgotten after so long, of pain, was released from within and spilled through his muscles like too hot butter.
At the same time the smell that had flooded his nostrils crawled through Lucius's nerve endings to his neurons, igniting the acidity of betrayal and the frozen agony of abandonment. Awakening, with brutal efficiency, the memories he had tried so hard to bury.
His whole organism, suddenly, awake, when it had not been during what had seemed an eternity, capturing the world through a thin cloth of insensitivity, reacted with a catastrophic intensity, which the mask of frozen calm he always carried in public, could not sustain.
All the air left his lungs suddenly empty.
His right hand settled absently on the rough surface of the door, seeking a point of support that would prevent him from bending in half. The fine, aristocratic lips creased in an unpleasant grimace, and the fingers of his left hand curved into a fist, hiding a sharp desire to tear something.
"Mr Malfoy? Are you alright?" The sentinel, too young for jail work, too inexperienced to know how to act, came forward to offer his help, entering his freckled presence in the personal space of the predator.
The proximity of a wizard, a human, in his state, resounded as a discordant annotation throughout Lucius's organism. The instinct to protect and attack, curving in his stomach like an acid snake.
But the blonde had not lived so long with secrecy, making mistakes as stupid as changing in a place where he could be discovered.
Stopping the instinct to pounce left a dull ache in his gums, and a burning sensation in his muscles, which aggravated the agitation that was already running over his nerves.
"Get back to your post." The voice that came from the pale throat had the iridescent quality of broken, hard, inflexible, sharp glass.
"Yes ... yes, sir."
The boy pulled away, returning to his place, nervous and restless, like one of those little dogs who don't know exactly what they are afraid of, and that carry the survival instinct of a worm.
Lucius took air deliberately, forcing himself to find calm that felt more like an imposition, than like nothing he really wanted. Curving his fingers above the door, so he could feel the rough and dry hardness of the surface ... as a distraction from to the painful intensity of what he just wanted to forget.
When suddenly another smell, much more tenuous, made its way through his neurons and through the impact of the first recognition, to sink deep into his gut; The acrid, almost metallic aroma of blood.
The blood of a member of his nest.
Protective instinct burst forth unexpectedly, like lava from a volcano. Burning and destructive. He shivered from his bones to his dermis, in a convulsion that was not visible to the guard, only because Lord Malfoy had such iron control.
The only external sign of the tsunami, was his breathing, which got stuck in a harsh gasp for a few seconds.
Then, his hand left the wood with slow deliberation.
And all weakness died out of his countenance, as the widow clothed himself in the most basic instinct of his kind; the protection of his family.
The smell on the other side of the door, and inside his lungs, pounding inside his ribs like a second heart, had begun to pour through his veins a continuous litany of: help him, help him, help him... yet, instinct had not removed the unhealed pain of abandonment. Only relegating the ache to the background of his mind ... for now.
So, when a second later, he gradually placed his fingertips on the handle, it was a more instinctive, rather than voluntary, movement, that served to precipitate him forward like the first stone of an avalanche.
With one word, the great mass of wood and iron spun on its hinges, allowing Lord Malfoy's entrance to the cell.
"Make sure we're not disturbed." He ordered the guard without turning.
"Yes sir!"
Lucius came inside.
The door closed behind him.
oOo
The room was little more than frozen stone, covered by a crust of infected dirt, under the agonizing presence of a few torches almost consumed. A place without windows, where iron rings anchored to the walls, and chains secured to the floor, were the only decoration.
"Lord Malfoy." A fat man came forward obsequiously to greet him, from where he had been looking at something lying on the floor, next to another Death Eater who seemed to be his companion.
The two men were different, yet very similar, like copies from two artists of the same work. Where one was curvy and short-limbed, the other was angles and spiked limbs, but their faces had the same raw cruelty, and the same gesture of stupid superiority, which often concealed a bestial behavior.
Easy to predict, easy to dispatch.
Lucius accepted the greeting gracefully, avoiding looking at the prisoner thrown on the ground, knowing the risk such a vision offered. As watching a member of his nest wounded, might raise a reaction he had not yet decided what form was going to take.
"I suppose you caught the creature?" He inquired calmly.
The fat man nodded, immensely satisfied.
"Of course we did. A, both of us are glad your highness has been able to come personally, as we had to insist much for the chamberlain to take our notice. But it was worth it. You are here after all." He smiled, showing two rows of square yellowish teeth. "Would not want this discovery to reach anyone else's ears before yours."
Obviously because such low-level Death Eaters could not hope to be heard by the Dark Lord.
Lucius felt momentary thankful for his luck, a caress of gratitude to destiny, for being the first to be informed.
The man continued talking, terribly proud and insistent, unaware that the blonde was no longer listening to him.
"Did you say you did it alone?" The aristocrat interrupted the tirade, trapping the little man with his icy gaze.
The Death Eater swallowed nervously, vermin under the eyes of a predator, recovering with a feigned cough that confirmed the suspicion of the aristocrat.
"Yes, yes, us. There were more people involved, of course, but they did not survive." The man looked at the bloody lump lying on the ground. "It's a very vicious animal"
These two were alive to be proud, just because they had been cowardly enough to wait for the creature to be on the ground, and incapacitated, before getting ahead to win the prize. Lucius could see it in the sweat of their greasy skin, and the neurotic tick of their fingers. It would not be surprising to find that those wizards, already exhausted, who had been actively involved in the capture had been killed by them.
"Anyone else, apart from you, know what you have captured?"
The other Death Eater, thin and silent as a corpse until that moment, who had not moved from his place next to the creature, spoke at last, to answer the dubious look sent by his companion.
"No, Lord Malfoy, no one. We brought him wrapped in that blanket, so he wouldn't be seen before now." And pointed to the bloody and cracked with dirt thing Lucius had not noticed before, abandoned as it was in the shadows at the far corner of the cell.
"What an excellent idea." Sarcasm bubbled in his words, like some toxic effervescence on a sooty potion.
They had taken a lot of trouble so no one would steal their prize. And if it had been any other creature the one brought, of any other equally rare specie, Lucius would have ignored his own reluctance, to notify his master of the find, with the knowledge that the Dark Lord would be immensely satisfied. Enough so, as to bathe in wealth the two men who had brought him, and enjoy a good mood for at least a few days.
But in this case, the two Death Eaters had made a mistake by looking for him as a messenger, and another much more serious one, by being so greedy as to hide the news. Slides that finished crystallizing the decision, which he had already known, would eventually take.
Lucius calmly extracted the wand from his pocket. Slowly and deliberately.
"You did a good job."
The chubby Death Eater displayed himself proudly even more if possible, ignoring the tone that should have been his first and only warning.
He never saw the curse come.
"JOHN!" Shouted the other, fumbling for his own wand. Slow, terribly slow.
A second green flash lit the cell, and the squalid body collapsed on the floor like a bag of dried bones, just a few feet from the first.
"I was wondering how long would you to take to kill them." The voice that came from the bundle lying on the floor was broken and exhausted, yet filled with sharp sarcasm. Strong in spite of everything. And familiar ... as familiar ... as oxygen, or the earth beneath his feet.
Lucius would have recognized it even if centuries had passed. A decade was nothing, it could not dent the memory of his brother's venomous intonation.
The sound awakened in him a longing and a grudge, almost painful. And when he spoke his name, it was in a resonance more torn from his throat, than toned by his own will.
"Severus." A murmur more than a word, doubly charged with resentment.
He did not turn to look at him yet. Torn by the knowledge that Severus was the one who had decided to leave his nest, broken his family, and destroyed his home. But also with the certainty that he had not done so because he had stopped loving them.
Lucius could not lend him his help, now that the immediate threat no longer existed, nor abandon him.
And the effort of not having a clear decision, was shattering his self-control.
He could feel his own epidermis turn white second by second.
"Draco is alive. "A phrase ... and it's perfectly built façade collapsed.
The feelings Lucius had buried at the back of his skull when he learned that his son was a traitor, came back to the foreground, seeking a place in the human self from which he had originally ripped them off; The pain of betrayal, the immense concern of knowing what awaited his son if he was caught, the affection, the resentment, and finally, the agonizing certainty that he could not have survived the entrance to the dark forest. The total weight of grief.
Lucius turned slowly to look at Severus. A thousand words in his throat, and nothing sure to say. The desire to believe a luminous spark in his clear eyes.
Half human, half-spider, the black slytherin was a mishmash of both, with long arms scrawny like insect legs, and elongated hands ending in slender claws like sword blades.
That was all Lucius would have called vaguely healthy, or recognizable.
There was red and yellow green blood, half-clotted and sticky. Pieces peeled and cracked lines, all over the black chitin that covered his naked body shot down on the floor. The broken muscle and chipped bone could be guessed at irregular intervals between the wreckage of the outer layer, coming out id the meat in small bony mother-of-pearl protrusions, and red flesh,where the solid metal of the chains did not anchor him to the ground.
His hair fell into filthy, untidy locks around an emaciated face, dominated by arachnid fangs covered in green liquid, seemingly painfully void of venom. Black eyes were like wells looking through the tangle of his hair, impossible to read ... for those who had not shared with him, the intricate encounter of the spiders.
The pain and the almost silent sizzle of yearning inside the indigo black, were for the blonde as easy to see as painful to assimilate. Like a physical blow to the solar plexus, they left him breathless, yet gave him words he wanted to utter.
"Where is him?" Love and hope became syllables, as they bleed from his lips against all the instincts of his human self.
"Release me and I'll take you with him."
To be continued