Hey there everyone! It's been almost two years since I started this story, and to be honest, I'd completely forgotten about it. Between Covid and life in general, I haven't had time to even think about writing. But I thought about it recently, and I remembered this story. I loved this story, so I'm picking it back up. For now, I'm posting an edited version of the prologue - nothing major changed, just cleaned up the grammar and added a few sentences here and there. I'll touch up the first chapter and then start posting new chapters.

Disclaimer for the whole story: I'm not pretending to be JKR. Anything characters/canon is hers. If you see anything you don't recognize from her work - hey, I had an original thought! ;)

WIthout further ado, I give you Insanium Convertunt

Late January, 1998

Almost half of the books in Malfoy Manor were either cursed, written in another language, venomous, or too dark to be appealing. The other half all had worn covers, creased pages, and stained patches where tea had been spilt and dried. Some of the wear was due to age - after all, many of the books were centuries old and showed age no matter how well they had been cared for. The majority of it though, he knew came from him.

Before his fourth year, he was never much inclined to read anything, let alone something that wasn't a requirement. His school readings more than satisfied any appetite he might have had for the printed word. But then Snake Eyes had made his home in the Manor, and everything had changed. He had quickly discovered that it was rare for anyone to come into the library at all, and when they did they never stayed for more than a few minutes. As soon as he had realized that fact, the library had become his refuge. His escape from the sickening things that now lived in his house.

It took less than a week of spending every spare minute in there for him to grow desperately bored. And while solitude and boredom were infinitely preferable to Voldemort and Bellatrix, they were still irksome. There wasn't much to do in a library other than read, he found. So he read. The first book he picked up was a clearly well-read copy of E. Nesbit's Fairy Tales. Who had read it enough to leave finger marks on the leather bindings, he would never know, but within months he had added his own. After his first time through Fairy Tales, he moved through the rest of the shelves with no real aim, only pulling down and hiding within every book that looked even mildly interesting and appeared non-hazardous. Three years later, he must have read them all at least twice, and some upwards of a dozen times. He learned to love the smell of ink on paper and the feel of worn leather. He learned how to escape into the volumes.

Today, he barely even bothered to inhale the soothing smell of the room as he made a beeline for the shelf where he knew his favorite sat. Over the years he had read Muggle fiction (what those books were doing in the Manor's library he had no idea), advanced textbooks, books on Dark Arts, taught himself Occlumency, and practically memorized the history of Quidditch, yet still, he gravitated to the first book he had read when he took refuge in this place. The stories didn't have morals, or truths, or even happy endings half the time. They were just tales that sucked him in whole, allowing him to slip away.

Today he slumped down into a dark leather wing-backed chair. A wave of his wand had a fire crackling in the grate, and he allowed the pages of Fairy Tales to fall open wherever they pleased. He had read the book so many times that he didn't need to start at the beginning of a story to follow its plot. He didn't care if he started in the middle of one today, he just needed that pull, that pleasant unawareness of the world that this particular book always brought with it. They were interrogating the girl again today. Maybe his avoidance proved everyone right - maybe he was a coward, but he didn't care. He didn't care if his inability to listen to her voice made him a spineless, soft-hearted infant. He didn't want to hear it when they finally broke her.

In the month since she and Thomas had been deposited in the cellar, the LeStranges had been trying to get information out of her almost daily. It made no sense, as she clearly didn't know anything useful - she was in a cellar, how would she know where Potter was? Yet he knew better than to voice the thought out loud. The LeStranges cared far less for Potter than they did for causing pain, and the girl was a challenge. She had become a game to the three of them - Who Can Get The Mad Girl To Scream First? They would emerge from the cellar after each attempt, livid, yet slightly amazed. No matter their methods, she was yet to say a word to them, and yet to scream.

If only the girl would bloody scream, as anyone else would, he wouldn't be hiding from her. Thomas screamed, and they left him alone more often than not. He was boring, predictable. They pulled the strings and he danced just how they liked. But the girl…the girl didn't, and so day after day they went back, and day after day he hid from her. From her voice. Despite her imprisonment below their feet, her voice echoed through the entire house. Always the same song. He didn't have any desire to know what they were doing to her, but the LeStranges liked to boast of their methods to anyone who would listen, so he had a fair idea. And through all of that, enduring what must be agony, she sang. It was the only sign he received that she was even alive. Why wouldn't the girl bloody scream?

He was weak, and he knew it. As the first notes of her song reached his ears he launched himself into the story in front of him. He could easily have cast a silencing spell on the library, but Bellatrix would have known. As if she could smell it, she always knew about anything he did that could possibly be construed as weakness. She derived some sick pleasure from tormenting him, from telling the Dark Lord of 'little Draco's love of traitors', or some rot like that. As if Voldemort needed more reason to distrust the Malfoys. So he poured himself into his book as if he was trying to crawl inside it and erase the eerily peaceful sound coming from the cellar.

This time was different though. The story failed to work its magic because after only a few minutes the sound changed. It morphed, growing into something that was anything but peaceful. It was the same haunting, eerie melody she always sang, but it was growing shrill. It quickly became something painful, devastating to listen to, as for the first time her tempo faltered. He squeezed his eyes shut as he dropped the book to the floor with a thump. His hands came up, desperately rubbing his burning eyes, as if that would somehow help. His head was throbbing, and he couldn't block it out. The sound only grew louder, and she had to stop. She had to stop.

She was still singing - through it all, she never stopped. But it came in bursts now, raw and shrill, and he could almost hear the jagged breaths she drew in between sounds. The Lestranges would be horribly smug at supper, because for the first time in a month, she was screaming. He had known her by sight at school, just well enough to know her reputation - Loony, the others called her. She apparently had an odd way about everything, so he supposed it made sense that she would have an odd way of coping with torture. And she did. Because even as they broke her, finally reaching a level of pain that drug screams out of a throat that had remained calm for almost a month, she fought.

Because even screaming, she sang.