Memoirs of a Serpent's Son

Memoirs of a Serpent’s Son

--Age 17—part 3

August 5

I’ve started trying to keep track of the days as they pass. I can’t see outside and I have no clock so I can’t know for sure how much time passes, but judging by the regular increments at which I’m brought food, I can say that about five days have passed since I arrived here…wherever here is.

They still haven’t told me where I am, but I have gathered that this must be something of a headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix. I don’t know for sure, but I do hear voices outside of the door every so often. I’ve heard Lupin’s voice as well as some Ministry members that I’m sure I must have met at some point. I’ve never seen them but I know they have to be Ministry people…

They just SOUND official.

Don’t laugh. I’ve been well-trained in the art of divining people’s positions by the tone of their voice.

My father was my first lesson and I’ve never falsely estimated someone’s ranking since.

In any case, I’ve taken to listening as hard as I can through the door, the walls, even the floor if I’m bored enough. I’ve even less to do here than when I was with Snape –even though I’m treated very slightly better.

They give me three meals a day –full meals too, not just scraps of food or unidentifiable sludge that I’m expected to consume –and they allow me to bathe regularly, which is a wonderful relief; I finally managed to get a look at myself and…let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty.

No….that’s a lie. I’m always pretty. But it was not nearly as good as it could have been. My hair has grown just a little too long and hadn’t been properly groomed in weeks…and my skin was sallow because of the terrible nourishment and incredible stress, though it’s fading now what with the meals and more relaxed atmosphere. Clearly, I hardly ever saw the inside of a bathroom with Snape –something I greatly dislike having to admit to.

The problem with staying in Potter’s house (yes they were so quick and kind to inform me that while I’m under “Potter’s roof” I will have to obey his “rules”), is that he refuses to allow me my wand. I have absolutely NOTHING to do in this room without magic…and it’s not as though I would try to escape. I’ve got nowhere else to go…

……

I’m completely alone now…no safe place to have me…no one to welcome me…

This is all I have…why would I give that up?

But I haven’t made it easy for myself and I know that. I’m too quick with the snide remarks and the sneering comments for my own good.

They won’t let me out of my room at all except to bathe and even then I have a ‘guard’ stand at the door while I’m in the shower.

Honestly, is that really necessary? What the hell can I do in a bathroom without magic apart from possibly trying to drown myself in the toilet bowl (and BELIEVE ME that is NOT anywhere on my list of things to do, Malfoys do NOT shove their heads in TOILET WATER).

Still, they seemed to think it was imperative that I be watched at all times. And that’s when the snide comments came.

“At ALL times? Do you really think that’s necessary? Or is it just that you aren’t getting your kicks with the little She-Weasel anymore so you need to find alternate options?”

…….

WHAT? It’s not as though he hasn’t said things just as insulting to me in the past! I’m entitled to my venom!

Besides… it’s not as though I didn’t suffer a very swift blow to the stomach for that one… haven’t been able to catch my breath since.

……

I don’t know why I keep doing this… I really shouldn’t. I know that it would be so much easier and…well it would just serve us all if I could be civil… He wouldn’t give me those looks anymore if I stopped being such a royal git. He would stop treating me like a convicted mass-murderer if he could only see that I don’t mean to be this way…

He just… has that effect on me! It’s like a compulsion! When he’s close…and I can feel Weasel and the mudblood nearby, watching… I just can’t stop myself. It’s as though I’m still trying to punish him for rejecting me…all those years ago…and every time he’s seen me since.

God, I wish I could just stop this altogether. I want so desperately to tell him everything and beg him to love me…not even to love me… just to look at me like he looks at his friends… like he looks at ANYONE else…to treat me like I’m Human and feeling and not just the empty shell of a being that he thinks I am.

I just want to feel whole again… like my old self…before all this happened, even before Harry Potter came into my life and made me into this…

Though…maybe I should finally stop blaming him…

Maybe I should just wake up and realize that it’s my fault…

This is all MY fault…

******

August 10

Potter and his friends usually alternate bringing me my meals. Lupin brought me food once as well…and once there was this woman with bright purple hair and happy eyes that brought it. She didn’t say anything to me but she didn’t treat me like the others do. She looked at me as though she understood and…as though she knew my pain all-too well.

I think they called her Tonks…though what kind of name that is for a woman, I’ve no idea.

Lately, mind you, Potter has been the only one bringing me my trays of food. I don’t know why he did this, maybe to keep a closer watch on me… as though the rest of the people in this house are incompetent or something.

And he doesn’t talk to me when he brings me my meals. He won’t even look at me. It’s like he’s purposely torturing himself.

I know what he thinks he’ll see if he looks at me now… It’s the same thing I see when I look in the mirror.

He’s afraid he’ll see the whole scene from the lightning-struck tower replay out before him. He’s afraid he’ll see the poor boy that Dumbledore died trying to help and he’s afraid that he won’t be able to handle it.

I know that that’s what I see and every time it makes me sick. The first time I got to see myself since that night was here…the first time I’ve seen myself in two months.

I vomited.

I didn’t write about that before…I couldn’t relive it again but the way Potter is looking at me now…He was the one standing outside the door as my ‘guard’ when that happened.

I hate it. I hate having to see that in myself and I hate knowing that that’s what he sees too… and I hate more than anything that what I want is just to burst into tears and scream and cry my heart out so that he comes to me and tells me everything that he did in my daydream…

I hate that I want to let myself be vulnerable with him and that I know that he would never understand…that he would condemn me and hate me more…

So every time he comes in I try to get him to talk…as though breaking the awkwardness of the unspoken conversations between our clashing emotions.

I ask him every day if he’s heard anything new…about everything that’s going on. I ask him if he knows what is happening at Hogwarts or if there have been attacks or if anyone we know (as though he and I could ever be labeled under the heading ‘we’) has been hurt or killed…I ask to know about things and every time I get the same answer.

“I can’t trust you, why should I tell you any of this?” he snaps every time, with that same hard look in his eyes as he carefully avoids looking into mine. I noticed that every time I ask him, though, his voice becomes just slightly less harsh and his eyes get slowly closer to catching my gaze.

“Clearly if I’m asking you to tell me about any new attacks, I’m not looking to follow it up with a “fantastic!” if you tell me there were,” I spat at him one day, annoyed by his refusal to allow me any kind of information at all. He came very close to looking me in the face at that point.

“That’s not necessarily true,” he retorted angrily, dropping the tray on a small table they’d given me. “How am I to know you’re not siphoning off messages to your little Death-Eater friends about your whereabouts and the goings-on here?”

“Oh yes, Potter,” I drawled with a sarcastic smile and nod. “I’m sending secret messages to the people who want to kill me about the location that I’m unaware of with the wand that I don’t have. Good job, Potter, I can see now why they call you the “Chosen One”.”

“Oh sod off, Malfoy,” he answered as though that would wash everything away. “That isn’t going to win my trust, so maybe you should just kiss your wand goodbye for good.”

And then he would leave me. He would leave me there to stew in my own pool of frustration. He left me feeling like I knew even less than I did before we spoke, every time…as though I gave up pieces of myself every time I talked to him like that.

I stopped eventually. Saying things like that.

Well… not always. I still mess up but I’ve stopped talking much at all. I always look dark now… There’s a somber expression on my face and I won’t look at the people that bring me my food…not anymore...not after the last time they came.

I asked them (because Potter brought Weasel and the mudblood this time) if they would at least tell me if they had news of my mother or father.

And they said nothing.

They just looked at each other for a moment as though they were considering what the proper wording for that kind of news would be before they shook their heads and simply left.

The worst part about that is that I don’t know how to feel…I wanted to cry…because what else can I take from that reaction but that they are dead or vanished?

I did want to cry… but I couldn’t. I still can’t.

How do you feel when you find out that your parents, the people who raised you, tortured you, permanently mutilated your body and soul, sold you out and never really loved you, have been killed?

Or supposedly killed.

I just don’t know what to feel apart from loneliness.

******

August 13

They’ve left me. All of them have left me.

Potter came in this morning with my breakfast, fully done up in Dress robes to tell me that he and everyone else in the house were leaving to go to the Weasel’s burrow because Bill (apparently the eldest Weasel offspring) was getting married…and to Fleur Delacour from the Triwizard Tournament no less.

Well that was a wonderfully bright bit of news until he told me that he’d set up a magical doorway between my bedroom and the bathroom so that I didn’t have to go all day without bathing or anything…

As though he was thinking of me when he thought of this.

He left me three meals on the table so that I wouldn’t starve and bid me goodbye before leaving and magically sealing the doorway.

I seethed at him through the doorway and I damn well hope he felt it.

He and his posse of do-gooders just up and decide to leave the house for a wedding and don’t bother to mention this ahead of time to me? Or even invite me??

OR AT LEAST LEAVE MY DAMN DOOR OPEN SO THAT I CAN GET SOME AIR.

I feel like a dog that has been caged in the house while the owners go on vacation.

How sick is THAT? I feel like a DOG!

And I didn’t even get to say a word of reply to him, so I’ve been stewing with all these fantastically sarcastic and spiteful replies ALL DAY with NO ONE to vent them on!

ARGH.

You cannot possibly understand how frustrating it is to be left entirely on your own all day long…to have absolutely no one but yourself to talk to…to be locked away inside your own world for long enough that it seems as though it’s becoming real and when the real world comes to knock on your door and shatter your false reality, you come crashing down.

I’ve started making a life for myself inside my head… I’ve become so bored and empty that I spend my time making up scenarios with Potter in my mind and then every time, just as soon as I start feeling like a whole person again, he opens the door to tell me he’s going to leave me locked in my room for a whole day while everyone else is partying, just to dash my dreams.

I suppose it’s all just Life’s fantastically cruel sense of ironic humour that the only person who can hurt you badly enough to make you hate yourself is always the person you love the most…the person that doesn’t know any better and couldn’t see it if it were a massive red stain in a perfectly white room.

Why does he have to do this to me???

Haven’t I suffered enough so far?!

If he only knew…if he only knew all the things I’ve been through this past year alone (not counting all the repressed memories from my childhood)…he would not act this way…

But he won’t even bother to ask. It’s as though he thinks I deserve my pain! As though ANYONE deserves to suffer in the infernal solitude that I’ve been marred in.

I just…

I keep thinking about the wedding… I’ve never been to a wedding before but… I keep seeing this bright grassy clearing surrounded by trees near a lake at sunset… and I’m standing there in my best robes, staring into Potter’s eyes and it doesn’t matter if there is anyone else there or not… it doesn’t matter where we are, what day it is, or what is going on in the world around us because we are there together…

We have each other… and he…

He smiles at me…he smiles at me the way I’ve wanted him to smile at me for so long…

And then I wake up and remember that I’m here, in this place where no one can find me and no one would hear it if I screamed out, alone while Potter is dancing with the Weasel-whore to the bride’s music…

……

I don’t know why but right then I felt the weight of the locket my mother had given me as a life-line around my neck. I pulled it out from under the collar of my shirt and stared at it…wishing that it actually had the kind of power my crazed mother thought it did… then I could stop Voldemort my self and….then maybe he would …

I HAVE TO STOP DREAMING!

I tore the damn thing from my neck and whipped it across the room. It clattered hard against the wall before falling to the ground and the echoes reverberated throughout the entire house as I fisted my own hair and pulled my head down to my knees.

Why do I keep doing this to myself?? Why can’t I just give up and accept that things are always going to be different for me now! They will never be the same and they most certainly will never be the way I want them to be!

No matter what happens from here on out I will always be the boy that got Albus Dumbledore killed…I will always be the “son of a well-known Death-Eater”. I will always be the coward that failed everyone…the traitor to all of wizarding kind… good and bad alike.

I DON’T BELONG ANYWHERE ANYMORE!

I don’t belong with the Death-Eaters. I don’t belong with Voldemort and I most CERTAINLY and QUITE CLEARLY DO NOT belong here with Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I just don’t belong…

This is never what I was supposed to be…this is never the way my life was supposed to turn… I was supposed to be a Slytherin Prince… like royalty in my house… I was supposed to command the respect and admiration of all other students, be the top of my class and always succeed…

And now I’m nothing… NOTHING.

I could have been so much…but now I’m tainted and flawed… now I’m just the captive…I’m everyone’s captive… Potter doesn’t have to lock the door or magically seal the area… I’m already a prisoner of my own mind and I always will be.

I’m a prisoner of my own choices and decisions… of my actions and my upbringing… I’m what I was made to be and nothing more… just a creation, not a person.

Just a dragon…meant to be used to achieve an end… never worthy of love.

Never kept, just tethered and whipped.

I guess Granger was right.

*******

Sometime in the night

I slept the rest of the day…after I’d written that entry and put the locket back around my neck…I needed to get out of my consciousness for a while and so I did. It’s not like I missed anything…

But then, I heard some rustling faintly downstairs and then the door opened to my room. Through half-lidded eyes I could see Potter, faintly illuminated by the light in the hall, placing something carefully on the table by the door before turning away and closing the door again.

I lit one of the lamps and walked over to the table to see what he’d left there.

In a little transparent plastic box on the table was a small piece of what looked like a very elegant wedding cake.

------IIIII-------

A/N: Wow that was an…interesting… chapter O_O Now, I would just like you to remember that because of his situation Draco doesn’t have anywhere near all of the information regarding their current situation, so things will be explained in better detail later, when he becomes privy to more sensitive info, lol. As for now, I’m trying to keep Harry and Draco’s relationship a gradual one… so I don’t rush it and all though, in my humble opinion, six years is quite long enough to wait for poor Draco lol… but Harry needs his time because he’s damn blind T_T Anyway, hope you liked it! I’ll hopefully be able to write again tomorrow but I don’t know for sure because I’m going to see Damien Rice tomorrow night…. So if not tomorrow, then Saturday!

I love you ALL for the fantastic reviews and everything! Seriously, I adore you :)

*throws cookies and confetti to stick with the wedding theme*

(P.S.: The wedding I just kind of placed in there… I figured it was more logical for it to be after Harry’s birthday because he isn’t supposed to leave Privet Drive before he’s 17, and the date… well 13 is just a fun number ehehhhh X_X)