Father Lucifer

Father Lucifer
By Tashasaphi
Ignores, as far as I’m aware, OotP onwards. Set in 7th year.
Father Lucifer by Tori Amos

The phrase ‘Girl Weasley’ is, I believe, stolen shamelessly from Maya. Sorry, dear. I only do it out of love and admiration ;)

Genre- Drama, Dark!fic?, Romance, Song!fic and probably a whole lot more...
Warnings- H/D Slash, Ship, Disturbing imagery, Musical terminology used in the stead of adjectives- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_terminology for any you want to look up.

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~~Father Lucifer
You never looked so sane~~


My father never looks less than perfect. He keeps his hair brushed back from his face, neatly styled. If he’s cut it short, then the style is fashionable and timeless, and it makes a perfect V at the nape of his neck. If his hair is uncut, longer, he lets it fall down his back, pushed efficiently away from his deep mercury eyes, or he ties it with a strip of black ribbon. No hair hangs loose. The top is completely smooth, no bumps or errors on the part of the comb. The tail hangs straight between his shoulder blades, never over his shoulder, and tapers evenly.

His clothes, though timeless robes, are always clean cut, beautiful, decadent yet highly functional. He likes the colour black. He says it lineates, makes everything clearer. However, he will accent it with silver from time to time, but never gold. Gold, he says, despite its economic value, is brassy, almost whorish in the extent to which it is over popularised. Platinum, after all, despite being far more valuable than simple silver, is a grey metal too.

He carries himself with an air of someone wise, someone powerful. Someone who’s seen a far deal more than his age lets on. I’m never quite sure if that’s so, but it always looks that way to me. My Father is very proud of this, and although I suppose in some ways his pride is a weakness, you wouldn’t know it on a day-to-day basis. He is respected- no, feared by most who he meets. He can be perfectly civil and still incite fear into grown men. It’s a talent I hope one day to have perfected. God knows, I’ve been practising.

Father’s study is a very large room. It’s full of books and scrolls and documents and letters from all over the world. However, they are all tucked away in bookcases. My Father never allows his desk to become cluttered. There are only ever the essentials on it- quills, ink well, parchment, whatever letter he’s answering or book he’s reading. He doesn’t leave things lying around for prying eyes. I’ve been allowed to sit in on his hours in there before, in a big embroidered chair which tells stories in beautiful pictures. When I was very small, mother would rock me to sleep whilst sitting in it, and I’d doze off, mind full of unicorns and lions which ran like the wind through cross-stitch forests. When I sat in on Father in it, it never occurred to me to look at the pictures. I was always watching Father. The way his quill moves in little jumps and loops across the page, the slight flick of his wrist when he finishes a line. Glissando. The soft tap as he punctuates, the brief pause as he ponders what to say. Marcato. How he slows up, realising he is at the end, before finishing primly. Ritardando. He never, ever differentiates from this method. Then, once the letter is complete, he clicks his fingers for one of his three owls, attaches the letter, and sends them off through the ever open window. If, now, a reference material is obsolete, he stands, straightens his robes, and takes it back to the bookshelves, where he files it alphabetically, or so he says. I think it’s a little more complicated than that, but it makes sense to him. So long as everything is constantly in a state of order; so long as you always know your place, he’s fine.

My Father is a very orderly man.


~~You always did prefer the drizzle to the rain~~


Today I am in his office once more. Again, full of nostalgia, I sit in my embroidered throne. A sweet toy for a little prince. The big, strong unicorn bows his head as I sit, before galloping across the arm rest to chase the blood red, snarling lion. My Father is wearing black. The lining of his robes is silver. He walks to the beat of the ticking of the grandfather clock in recently polished black boots, each heel clacking with the subtle tick after the drone of the whirr of the cogs. The fire crackles to the right. The rain patters on the open Owl window. A bird ruffles his feathers, head sinking into his chest, before hooting softly, repeatedly.

Already, we have a tune.


~~Tell me that you're still in love with that Milkmaid~~


‘How’s Mother?’ I ask. My Father sits in his chair on the other side of his desk.

‘She’s enjoying Paris immensely,’ he replies evenly within two ticks of the clock. The wind from the window sends cowlicks of blond into my vision. My Father, as is to be expected, is immune.

‘Did she get to the blessing in Orleans?’

‘Of course.’ My Father is eyeing me with darkened eyes. ‘She says it was a lovely service. Of course, it would have been lovelier if your brainless cousin hadn’t eloped in the first place and this was a proper wedding rather than some make up affair.’

YOUR brainless cousin. Not MY brainless nephew. My Father is not associated with less than perfect things. That is why he is still here, with me, in this office, instead of in France with mother.

‘Of course,’ I agree vehemently. My Father is always right about this sort of thing. My Father lowers his eyes.


~~How's the Lizzies
How's your Jesus christ been hanging~~


‘And how are you doing?’ He asks. I smile.

‘As well as can be expected.’ This response pleases him. He’s sees a little of himself in me.

‘Your grades are up. Well done.’ Sweet praise.

‘Thank you,’ I respond calmly. ‘It was just a matter of re-approaching the text. The notes I had made by my old method were insufficient.’

‘I see,’ my Father responds. ‘It’s good to see you applying yourself so well.’ His eyes glint with bittersweet pride. Pride in his son. ‘I hope you’ll apply yourself this way to your other tasks.’

In these words I lose composure. My Father forgives me it.

‘I… I am to be marked?’

‘After your birthday, yes.’ My Father’s tone is dry, unfeeling. ‘Our lord demands it’

‘I…’ There is nothing I can say. My Father has such power, over me, over everyone he meets, but he in turn is lorded over, and by a creature far less efficient. Far less organised. ‘I see.’ My Father stands and turns. He isn’t looking at me anymore. I am in his shadow.

‘I am sorry,’ he whispers. ‘I would have… I would have at least wanted you to be older.’

I am following in his footsteps.

‘His orders are absolute.’

I am his sacrifice for his sins. His mistakes. I will be lost, taking with me the weight of his errs against our lord.

As of this moment, I am nothing but a beast for the slaughter.


~~Nothings gonna stop me from floating
Nothings gonna stop me from floating~~


I could run. I know that. I could throw all my caution, all my breeding to the wind and find some corner, dark and dusty to curl up in and bide my time and live out this war as a crawling insect that survives only in the dark hidden dampnesses of the world.

I don’t need Harry bloody Potter telling me the same. It may just be another of our ‘what about the future’ bickerings, but he has a habit of getting dangerously near the mark.

‘You have options,’ he says. ‘Stop telling yourself you’ve run out of options.’


~~He says he reckons I'm a watercolour stain~~


‘I have run out of options,’ I tell him. ‘I will not go against my Father and his wishes.’

‘Then you’ll become a slave to Voldemort? A Death Eater?’ His eyes are on mine. They’re dark. As we sit together on the big black bed with it’s thick velvet hangings, the drizzle runs in silent rivulets down the window pane, and the wind whistles in the fireplace.

‘I don’t want to,’ I admit. ‘You know that.’

‘I do.’

‘But-‘

‘Not but, Draco!’ He is angry. I can see the sponge mark of pink appearing on his cheeks. He punches the bed. His movements are reckless, without beat. He does what he likes, when he likes, with no planning, no order, no class. It’s spontaneous and rugged and alluring in its liberating pure notions.

‘Then what?’ I ask, dryly, mimicking the words of my Father. Harry’s eyes are so dark now. They are like the fir trees that poke up from deep inside the forest, or their shadows in the twilight.

‘I love you,’ he says softly, cupping my face in hand, caressing my skin with his rough thumb. ‘If you become a Death Eater, I can’t protect you. You’ll have to keep running. But you’re very good at that-‘

‘Don’t taunt me, Potter.’

‘Then stop running away from me!’ He pleads with me, voice and eyes and being, shaking me roughly. His world is erratic syncopation to my regular beat. It’s invigorating and exciting, but I just can’t want that. He is polyphony to my monophony, discord to my concord, an abandoned, tattered, unfinished manuscript to my forceful plagal cadence. He eyes me, begging, imploring, like a lone, whimsical violin.

‘Stop running, Draco. Stop running or you’ll never be able to stop.’


~~He says I run and then I run from him
And then I run~~


It is Easter. I am called from the throbbing haven of Hogwarts back to the manor. Mother is feeling unwell, and the house is quiet, save for the soft, rhythmic ticking of the clock in the dining hall, or the disgruntled shuffling of the dozing Gabriel Hound by the fire in the back lounge. His human mouth rolls open in his hairy face as I pass, and a lolloping clumsy tongue slaps along his nose and lips before he wriggles and huffs back into deeper sleep. There is a creak in the third step of the wooden staircase at the back of the house, near the sun lounge and the conservatory. It hasn’t been oiled since the last time I walked these steps. I doubt it will have been oiled the next time I do. I wonder when that will be. On June the fifth, three days before my first exam, I will leave the incubating madness of Hogwarts for good. People will assume I gave up due to the stress-related panic attacks I have been claiming since February, or at least that’s what they’ll say. I have little doubt that even the smallest Hufflepuff does not know where I am headed. I smile slightly, for a beat, just between two steps. Eighteen years I will have under my belt when I fall into the march; rough footsteps in dark rows, regiments stomping to harsh beats. Rhythm. Order. Things I’ve always based my life upon, but with a degree of improvisation. I didn’t sit down and plan hating Harry Potter. I didn’t scrawl it purposefully across the stave of my puberty. And once that had become a natural drone to my symphony, I didn’t pre-empt the sudden swelling violins and fluttering flute descants and the slamming of doors and the clatter of falling broomsticks or the pressured hum of mattress springs. It had never crossed my mind that all the pulling of my pigtails hadn’t just been reciprocation to the flat malice I’d shown him before. I hadn’t planned to care.

And though somewhere I’d harboured the notion that one day I’d stop living in my shrill solo world, buffered and battered by the polyphony of my schooling and my friends and now my lover, I’d never really believed my quiet, perhaps poignant, perhaps bold little voice might become some drowned out tenor in the fateful choir of my Father’s choosing. That I’d become just one of many pretty little instruments in the swelling bosom of the Dark Lord’s orchestra.

The house is so still today. It reminds me of the power of silence, something I have often neglected, especially since, dare I say it, my slow integration into a whirling cacophony that was my schooling. It was like an infection, flooding my bloodstream with brusque shouts and hisses and brawls in corridors and arguments at the dinner table and laughter in the common room and murmuring caresses in the bedroom. And now I am parted from it, I dare to miss it.

I reach the top of the stairs and go through a secret panel to the main corridor of the house. I pause, no, I stop. I stop at the door to my Father’s office. He is not there, no doubt caught up dealing with my mother. The owls are all out, delivering letters and urgent messages I suspect, and there is a book open on the desk. I do not care to pry, only note that it is there, open, as if my Father had been spirited away suddenly. He always picks up after himself, but he has much on his mind at the moment. My mother’s sickness, the Dark Lord and his demands. Me. My chair, my throne, is there, as it always is, and it casts a long, warm brown shadow across the rug and floorboards. The embroidery, silver and gold and russet brown glints, is highlighted by the glow from the window.

The unicorn isn’t running today. He stands alone, nervous, glancing to and fro, tail twitching and ears pricked.

The hunter is bearing down on him from behind, unseen, unheard. The predator has become too canny for the prey. There is desolation in the Unicorn’s silvery eyes.

Maybe he just wants it over. He knows his destiny, and now seeks a way to end it. He understands the pain of waiting.

I close the door sharply. The wall shakes, fading as I move away. A vase rattles, but does not smash. I almost wish it would.


~~He didn't see me watching
From the aeroplane~~


I walk, nostalgically, like an echo of an ancient, decrepit nursery rhyme, towards my bedchambers. Mother’s sick room is just two past mine- the old nursery. I can hear muttering voices in the corridor. Since my Father’s previous incarcerations, as thankfully brief as they were, the manor has been… tampered with by certain over zealous officials, and, for a minor start, all silencing and privacy charms removed. I find this offensive, like a rank odour in my nostrils, or a noxious slime upon my very skin as I walk, listening to the melodic lilt of my mother’s voice, before she hacks and wheezes and my Father begins to pace a beat again. I don’t want to listen to it. I’ve never had to before and I don’t like it. School is loud and open and irresponsible in its sheer lack of privacy, and, as a harmony to this, home is quiet and reserved and closed. I shut my bed chamber door a little too hard upon entering, and the room hums as it shakes, an old lyre striking a discord in protest as it rattles on the wall. I carelessly fling my coat across my bed, striking accelerando on the polished floorboards before throwing myself into the piano stool and slamming my fingers onto the keys brutally. After four bars of tripe I give it up. I just can’t do it here. Slowly, and suddenly brightly and in major key, a sweet repeating melody than swells to forte in the chorus. I’m tempted to sing along, but I’m not a boy soprano any more. My tenor would just sound ridiculous against this soft song, rubbing like sandpaper and creeping like my Father’s distraught voice in the walls.


~~He wiped a tear
And then he threw away our apple seed~~


He’s shouting, violent bursts of white noise that rumble and fizz between my ears like lies. I break into allegretto and lift the piece, thicken it as best I can, screw my face up, don’t listen. The high, plaintive soprano of my mother’s protests mingle with that striking baritone that burns a hole inside my head. Images flash in my mind. Papers with potions ingredients scrawled across them. Blaise and Pansy and Vincent and Gregory. The Astronomy tower. Dumbledore. The Giant Squid. Professor Lupin. A tiny Dragon on a rough coffee table. Ravenclaws brandishing loveletters. Trophies. The Quidditch Pitch. Harry Potter’s ridiculous scar. Hermione Granger’s name above mine on that secret list of top students someone keeps. Harry Potter’s stupid face. Weasley and his copious relations. Harry Potter’s unforgettable face. Harry’s face.

My Father’s voice cracks two rooms away. The keys blur in my vision as I sink to pianissimo grave, and then just give up. I close the lid softly and lean on it, arms folded up and head buried so I can only hear the throbbing of my pulse and the hiccoughs in my breathing.

I don’t want to listen to my Father crying, so I listen to me crying, instead, and just forget all about it.


~~Nothings gonna stop me from floating
Nothings gonna stop me from floating~~


He cradles me as he takes me. He holds me like you would a child, a babe, an heir to some almighty throne. I feel as though I am something so incredibly precious that even a slightly rough touch will blemish it forever. It’s slow and deep and the gold light of may is streaming through the window, sparkling on the ebony of his eyelashes a hair’s breadth from mine, casting delicious whitenesses across the bronze of his skin, and igniting mine to white fire. I arch, whimpering. I hate it. I hate it all. I like it fast and painful, I like to be ravaged and thrown around and near abused. Then I like to pass out in sheer bliss and awaken to only Prince Charming’s fated blush warmed kiss. But he won’t give me that, not today.

I like to cry privately. In fact, since I went home, I’ve liked to cry a lot. It’s as if those fat round tears that bleach my face can fill the void that hangs like an albatross around my throat and chokes me. I’m sobbing now, deep throaty pained cries in some tongue I know he doesn’t understand, but I do, and I know he hates and loves it, but it makes me feel that little bit better as he worships me in dolce legato. There’s no other way to describe how he takes me, how he cups me to him, his face against mine, pressing soft kisses and caresses to the curl of my ear or the planes of my throat. We’re on fire in the light of the window, two idols, false gods made real by nature and the nurturing he’s giving me.

‘Don’t cry,’ he whispers crisply, and I feel suddenly cold and bite back a wail of loss. In a rushed panic he kisses me, bruises me, wraps us further in the thick blankets and pillows of the bed we use. I tremble and cling to him, and though it’s weak and fragile I never regret it, because his broad, calloused hands pull me closer yet, press flat against the taught skin of my back so I can feel all of him. My nails, half bitten, gnaw jagged clawing lines into his skin. I can feel sweat or blood on my fingertips. Slowly, carefully, he rocks me again, and I bite my lip. He offers himself to me, inch by inch, touch by touch, and greedily, selfishly I drink it in. I want to be hurt, abused, violated, yet he nourishes me with compassion and enriches me with love. He gives what he somehow knows I need, and I hate him all the more for it.

There is no rhythm today. I can’t hold a beat as I bleat lambishly and tremble too much to excite him. Any lover but he would think me virginal or cowardly or just not interested, yet he knows that for once, I can’t hide from him. How thin I’ve become. Why doesn’t he hate me? The light from the window casts a harsh light across our bodies- a chiaroscuro in bronze and alabaster, fire and ash. I’m laid bare, torn open before him, but he’s not looking at me, he’s just holding me close, letting me flounder for my dignity as he softly moves with me, in me, against me, and makes me miss him all the more even though he’s still there.

For just a few moments, I realise I can’t do it, and I remember my Father crying, and sob bitterly.

I’ve nearly broken the skin when Harry coaxes the side of my hand from my mouth, and I rock my head back so I don’t have to look at him.

‘Please don’t cry,’ he trembles, and I feel all the worse. I swallow hard, and feel his eyes trace the bobbing of my larynx. Tears trickle down the crease of my eyes and blot against the pillow and blur brassy in my hair.

‘Draco,’ he mumbles against the dip of my collar, ‘I can’t do this. You…’ He never finishes that sentence, only presses closer to me, deeper, and I suddenly remember we’re having sex, and can’t help but laugh. Twice. Increasingly bitterly. And then I give in, just a little.

Those rough hands brush tears from my face, and buoy me up.

‘Why doesn’t your face go blotchy?’ he asks bluntly, and I smile a little.

‘Oh, it will,’ I mumbled back, my voice a trembling shadow in my mouth. ‘Don’t you worry.’ He smiles against my skin and laughs a little, vibrating his broad chest against mine and mouths my jaw line. Accepting, I rock my head back, cat-like, and close my eyes, tears bleeding out.

I let him adore me. He likes to. He worships me with his kisses, reveres me with every caress, and I, a pool of noxious vanity let him, and allow him to carry me off and make me forget, even for a moment, that I don’t deserve it.


~~Everyday's my wedding day~~


‘Draco…’ Pansy asks at length.

‘Mmm,’ I grunt back shortly.

‘Potions maims me. Make it go away.’

‘You should be ashamed to be a Slytherin, Parkinson.’

‘Why couldn’t we have a charms teacher for a House Master?’ She groaned. ‘You know, I could have even coped with Binns. But Snape has expectations…’

‘Pansy-dear. Binns is dead.’

‘So? That makes him easier to deal with. He can’t do all the much about it if you flunk his classes. And given that he teaches History, it’s a GIVEN that most of the year are just going to give up half way through. I swear he only marks the first half of the papers. Draco?’ She looks up at me. I’m thumbing a corner of my notes. It’ll tear soon.

‘Draco?’ She asks again, before shaking my arm comfortingly. ‘Are you Ok, hun?’ I smile down blindly at my notes.

‘Potions is our first exam, isn’t it?’ I ask numbly. My voice is flat, untuned, lazy.

‘Yeah,’ she replies, tapping her pen presto, before slowing a little and flipping her diary page. ‘On the eighth. How are you feeling about it?’ I feign a shiver.

‘Nervous,’ I lie. I know I’m not going to take Snape’s precocious little exam paper. ‘How long is that away?’ Pansy eyes me cautiously. Precious, sheltered Pansy, who will never see a black cloak and mask until she’s twenty one. Her step-mother is American and stuck in her ways.

‘Nine days,’ she replies eventually, eyeing the bottle of pills I’ve been prescribed for those panic attacks. I don’t feign the tremble this time.

‘You’re on your own,’ I announce forte in the middle of the library, and mortally offend a clan of Ravenclaws. ‘I finished my revision for potions yesterday.’ I swan out of the room to Pansy’s fading cries of indignation, before throwing myself in the nearest empty lockable space, casting a silencing charm and screaming until I’m hoarse.

Harry thinks it’s sexy and alluring when I rasp at him later. I think Harry’s an idiot, and that I’m even worse.


~~Though baby's still in his comatose state
I'll dye my own Easter eggs~~


On the first of June, Harry comes out to his dorm mates. And he drags me and my sacred stash of Firewhiskey liqueur along too.

If I wasn’t so hopelessly condemned to be my Father’s scapegoat, I’d probably murder him for this heinous waste of my alcohol and passively inject myself into the Dark Lord’s inner circle by default. It’s not as if I’ll be drinking liqueur where I’m going. If I’m lucky I’ll be chugging the rawest stuff I can get (the only stuff I’ll be able to get), throwing it down my neck until it burns out the screams from the inside.

I have been to the Gryffindor dormitories on sparse occasions before today, but, for once, its daylight, and there are other people there. Namely Weasley, Finnegan, Longbottom and Thomas. Granger and Girl Weasley have managed to secret themselves in too, but I’m rather glad of that, since they have spared the unjust guzzling of my alcohol by bringing some of their own.

My respect for Granger has increased tenfold. Which, considering her breeding, attitude problems, irritating intelligence and near constant Slytherin-focused PMS, is really saying something.

The conversation seems to happen around me, rather than with me. I feel awkward, to tell the truth, and Weasley keeps looking at me as if he’s confusedly trying not to snarl and at the same time desperate to smile. It looks painful, if nothing else, and I simper back, just to irritate him.

Just because Harry has decided he’s now the Boy-who-lived-to-fellate, doesn’t mean I have to play nice.

Besides, Friday is the 5th, and we’re over then anyway.

Oh God.

‘M..D-draco, are you alright?’ Granger asks, swirling Irish cream around the ice cubes in her glass. I don’t hear her, as the white noise snarls leopard-like between my ears, and my temples drum a timpani war dance.

Granger and Thomas. Muggleborns.

‘Draco?’ Harry asks, and he seems so far away, lost in burning autumn reds. The pennants of the Dark Lord are flying against a blood red sky, and the ground is black with spilt gore.

‘Draco? Draco?!’ He repeats, a shout in the distance. Grey eyes are in the swirling sky, bearing down on me, ever watching, and now they burn to red, narrow, slit open by ebony pupils. A snake hisses at my feet, a fizzing percussion. My pulse accelerates with the distorted symphony. I feel, numbly, my eyes widening.

‘Do you think he had too much to drink?’ Weasley whispers, and Finnegan swats him over the head.

Weasleys and Longbottom. Blood Traitors.

I feel Longbottom shift on the mattress a little, and suddenly that crackling and spitting, like fat in a fire, is whirring up to immediate fortissimo. With a cry I clutch my head and feel myself trembling. People are moving. A panic. Snare drums. Cymbals. Bursting trumpets that blast arcs and spats of blood that flicker on my face. My forearm burns.

Finnegan and Potter. Half-breed scum.

I am being shaken. The world moves beneath me. The clock chimes six. One hundred and eight hours until I leave. Six thousand four hundred and eighty minutes. I can feel my mind burning, swelling, agonising. There’s not enough time. Accelerando in the drum line. The cymbals and bells clash next to my ear and I shy away, blindly. I can’t see the room, the Gryffindors, bloodtraitors and mudbloods and scum ridden half breeds the lot of them. I kick over my untouched glass, I know that much, but only from the tinkle of the ice that suddenly grows to spell clashes and explosive popping of well used Sectumsempra. My airway closes against the smoke from burning flesh, hissing remnants of child-shot unforgivables that just didn’t work quite right.

Bodies arc like fireworks in the air, before sredding into sparks of entrails against the dying sun.

‘Draco!’

I scream. It’s short, sharp, sudden. I claw at what’s caught me, cold as inferi, ripping skin and cloth with my torn nails, before falling suddenly still as I can’t breathe.

‘Get it off of me!’ I rasp, choking, and there’s movement all around and with a sudden gasp I bolt, smacking into something fleshy. A corpse hung from a tree, green tinged and flaccid, bursting with decay. I shove it away and hear its slap and rupture against the wood of the tree trunk. Still that horrible noise rumbles and ricochets in a constant line between my ears, like a parasitical demon tearing at my mind, killing me from the inside.

My Father is crying, and the image vanishes with a sudden smack as I find myself coiled as tightly as I can under the sink in the Gryffindor bathroom, trembling, dazed from the sharp knock to the temple my crash into the tiles has given me. Blood boils in my skull, and trickles towards my eye.

Everything is quiet.

Until the door scratches open, and I scudder with my feet, pushing myself further into the corner, lest it’s him. Him.

They push the door a little further, and Harry enters, quickly, smoothly. I can almost see the golden glissando slip from him as he moves. My lips move in words I cannot say, and no sound comes forth.

Halfbreed scum.

He squats about a metre from me, watching me with eyes that have learnt to be patient, considering me passively as I inhale a rattling breath and water splatters rusty on my cheeks from the poor plumbing and dilutes the sputterings of blood.

‘I found these,’ Granger says softly, standing behind him. Her voice is quiet, placated. It matches his eyes because I know his voice cannot manage it. He cocks his head towards her, but keeps his eyes on me as the Gryffindors hug the doorframe like children.

The children that they, and I truly are.

‘Sedatives,’ Granger explains, and drops into Harry’s hands that pot of pills I have been carrying around for months. Harry’s eyes drop to the bottle, and I see apart of his cool façade falter, and I laugh, or try to, and wheeze instead. A flash of red and a white hiss in my mind stops me, and I jolt again, knocking my head once more on the tiles. Harry moves closer fluidly, and I rear back from him, feet bracing on the tiles. His face moves to mine, and his whispers against my cheek, stroking my throat encouragingly. It soothes the throbbing in my skull, and I feel my eyelids droop. I cannot look at him, and my chest spasms in a choking sob, until he parts my lips with his fingers and begins to push my mouth open. I whimper then, eyes on his, and feel the adrenaline fuelled animal within reawaken. Fight or Flight it asks in a repetitive drone, a drumming beat that hurts my head like scalding water.

‘It’s alright,’ Harry says softly, eyeing me with mixed emotions, but his voice, though low, shakes a little, and it seems he knows as well as I that it really, really isn’t.

He pushes something inside my mouth, things I later realise to be pills, but at the time I struggle, annoyed and frightened of this sudden invasion. He clamps my mouth shut as you would as animal as I shriek and writhe, my shoes squeaking horribly on the tiles floor, before pulling me roughly to him and holding me forcefully until I settle a little. I pinch my eyes shut as the pills begin to melt, bitter, on my tongue. I let him tilt my head up and again brush his hands down my throat. Reflexively, I swallow, and then they’re gone, and he releases my mouth and pulls me tighter to him. Over his shoulder, Granger reappears as I gaze at her blearily, mouth pressed into Harry’s shoulder as I shake, mute. She brandishes a cup of water.

‘Drink,’ she says, and she reminds me of my mother when I was small, and the images plow back into my retinas with the force of cannonballs. I cry out into Harry’s shoulder, pinching my eyes shut, trembling, writhing in his grip, but he holds me ever tighter, not saying anything himself. We sit like this for what could be hours, Hermione feeding me sips of water and Harry clinging to me until I stop shaking. None of us really say much. I suspect that’s because there’s not really a lot to say.


~~Don't go yet, just don't go~~


When night comes, Longbottom demands I take his bed, and charms up a pile of blankets on the floor. Numbly I am surprised by his adeptness, but only numbly, as Harry has to half carry me to the bed. I have never taken sedatives before, but I am already impressed by the potency of what I have been falsely prescribed. It’s as though my spine has been removed, not in the sense of immediate death or paralysis, but I feel as though rubber or some unsafe gel has replaced it, and I am soft and supple like well worked leather. My mind has been dulled to barest thought, and the drums that threaten are in the distance, muted by safe fogs and soft embraces. Harry sits on the bed and draws the heavy curtains around us, watching me quietly as the other gossip outside. I consider carefully, but my mind has built a drug-fuelled wall around my doubts and my fears, a thick barrier of silence and murky humming that soothes me and lets me be at guilty peace.

‘Do you want to talk about today?’ he asks honestly. He sounds a little cross, and I don’t care to blame him.

‘You can talk about it if you like,’ I mumble, the covers drawn up over my mouth. Harry frowns at me, and I can’t help but smile back. I’m not sure if this placates him at all, but he doesn’t sound quite so sincerely annoyed anymore.

‘How long have you had those pills, Draco?’ He asks. I tell him the truth.

‘And when did you start taking them?’ he asks bitterly, not looking at me. Again, I answer honestly. His shoulders tighten.

‘I don’t like medicines,’ he says. ‘I think if you can get by without, you’ll be better for it.’ His eyes are on mine, triste teneramente. ‘But you really scared me today.’ He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘You concussed Ron when you knocked him into the cabinet.’

‘Sorry,’ I mumble serenely, piangendo. He smiles again, and it rises a little higher in the grey of his evening lit face. With a deep breath and low rustling of sheets and mattress he crawls over me and lies down beside me, resting an arm over me gently, guiding me to him. Whimpering listlessly, I manage to roll myself over to face him, and realise with a jolt just how close he’s gotten. I open my mouth to speak, but close it primly and mutely again when Harry presses a stupid kiss to the end of my nose.

‘Feeling better at all?’ he asks huskily, and I nod, tucked now up to the ears in Longbottom’s duvet. I’m so unguarded I can feel myself blushing, and Harry gazing at me, bedazzled. With a deep breath in the heavy silence, he moves over me and bites down ferociously on my neck. I gasp silently, my top lip breaching my safe duvet haven.

‘We’re in Longbottom’s bed,’ I protest. ‘And I… Harry…’

‘Shh,’ Harry demands, blasting air into my ear and making me quiver. He hooks his fingers just behind my other ear and begins to tame me with soft tickles and caresses. Were I myself, I would have booted him out of the bed, rolled over with a huff and gone to sleep obstinately. Submission is something that has to be earned. I am not his pet.

However, I long to be near him, next to him, to hold him inside me and have him rock me to sleep. Selfishly I mumble that Longbottom can sod off, and I arch my acquiesce.

Tomorrow is my last Arithmancy lesson.


~~And Beenie lost the sunset but that's OK
Does Joe bring flowers to Marilyn's grave?~~


Blaise gives me my birthday present on Tuesday and eyes me meaningfully. His grey brown hair flops a little over his eyes, as though he hasn’t slept properly, and he presses the wrapped boxes into my palms hard, his nails biting into my fingers. I eye him curiously, and see bitter realisation in his eyes. Blaise and I have been play mates since birth, and friends since I caught him a rat when Mother’s ermine ate one of his during one of our play dates. The two he keeps at the moment are three years old, and their names are Mal and Bini. When he told us, Pansy laughed because she didn’t understand, but I just smiled, and remembered the big wooden fort we built just inside the forest, near the meadow, with the monuments near our tiny chapel just poking up like stretching corn above the long grass, dotted with white beasts, and the charmed arrows we fired at them which cast flashes of colour across their coats, Silver and Blue, Malfoy and Zabini, until mother complained that her Pegasi looked like artistic accidents. I remember painting the flag on a lazy afternoon, burnished in August sunlight, while Blaise played Ode to Joy on his violin and kept watch for enemies through a monocle he’d been lent for the project by his grandfather, which made one of his grey-hazel eyes bug horribly out behind the glass. On rainy days, we re-constructed the fort in the second floor drawing room, harvesting pillows and cushions and draft excluders from all over the house. Mother charmed the flag inside for us, and laughed as we hoisted it. Mrs Zabini, a surprisingly cheerful and enthusiastic woman, at the time, was ever so impressed, and bubbled excitedly over our creativity, and was so wonderfully cheered when mother had me sit at the piano, and Blaise picked up his violin. I remember those days very well, with the rats sitting in a special ship-like crows nest we put on the flagpole. Those two were called Snitch and Amadeus, the latter after the ancestral portrait I snagged him under. He died two weeks into second year, and Snitch hung on until Christmas. Mrs Zabini had sent him so many care packages for months afterwards, and after the holidays and Christmas he returned with his sleek dark Owl, Icarus and four incredibly tiny gerbils. He’d protested that they were in dire need of some T.L.C, and he let me help for some weeks.

People didn’t seem to cotton on to how deeply we were friends until sometime in fifth year. I’m sure Harry still doesn’t get it, which is almost amusing. Crabbe and Goyle I didn’t meet until I was ten. They are easily bossed, and copy their fathers’ behaviour and therefore grovel to the name Malfoy. They have a free rein now, and they seem to have found some personality. Blaise, just like his wonderful mother, is irrepressible and knowledgeable, and now, as he looks deep inside the whorled smoke of my eyes, he reads me like a book, and sees me mentally tear a page from my short-lived calendar. My smile falters, and when I espy his sleek black rats, who perch, green eyed, on his shoulder, long grasping metal fingers and a feral rodent’s grin flash across my eyes and I gasp.

‘Exactly,’ he says in his dry aloof manner, and I tremble.

‘You know,’ I breathe pointlessly. He turns away from me then, the rats rocking and squeaking in protest.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says gently. ‘No one else has guessed. I’ve been watching out for the signs, and no one’s cottoned on. Not even Potter.’ I frown, and he turns, sensing it.

‘He’ll be heartbroken when you go,’ he says formally. ‘But, at the same time, he expects it. He just doesn’t know it’s going to be this soon. Somewhere, he still hopes you’ll give it all up and stay with him instead.’

‘Mm,’ I manage to reply, before scooping one of the rats off Blaise’s shoulder, petting it’s silk coat as it coils into my hands. This one must be Bini. Mal despises me entirely. I don’t blame her. A pretty poor namesake she’s been lumbered with, poor thing.

When I open Blaise’s gifts, not until the Thursday mind you, I find not trinkets and baubles such as I would expect from my friends, nor the saucy or outrageous things I’ve always dreaded. In one of the tiny boxes is a what appears to be a simple roll of rubber and wood, but when I lift it, it melts into obscurity, semi visible, and shoots inside my mouth, between my molars.

‘Something to bite on’, reads the note, ‘when the time comes’. Ever practical Zabini.

The second box opens at a tug of the golden ribbon, and reveals a coil and threads, blue and silver, bound intricately with tiny knots and glinting beads. There is no magic in this product, only the spark of something painstakingly crafted by hand, researched and perfected over a series of secret finger crippling sessions.

I tie the pathetic bangle around my wrist and roll my eyes at Blaise’s melodramatic tendencies. The boy deserves a box to ears, or canonisation, and while I’m still not sure which, I’ll smile my thanks meekly and get on with what time I’ve got left.


~~And girls that eat pizza and never gain weight~~


On Thursday night the Great Hall is filled with an aroma of warmth and stodge and Italian food. We’ve never had anything like this before, and the muggleborns are all squealing with excitement over Pizza, and everyone is in high spirits. Harry tries to accost me at the doorway, where I’ve paused in bemused disbelief, but I deny him that, informing him, with a whisper that makes him shiver that I’ll see him later. Tonight, despite the odd festivity, I need to be with my friends. Yes. They are friends of mine, no matter what others might think. We laugh, we joke, we play cards and chess and drink and eat and reminisce and ponder. Our fathers go out killing of an evening, and one day we might be side by side in robes, and then we'll head down the nearest dark-friendly pub to drown out the white noise in all our ears. For now, Pansy is toasting Dumbledore and the gods of the Cheese, Blaise is slipping scraps to the rats and Crabbe is watching Goyle chase a meatball round his plate whilst Theodore rummages for something Vegan, as he does at every meal, and fails.

Preconceptions be damned, I love them. I love them all so much.

Pansy and her severe haircut and thinned eyebrows and vicious tongue and slovenliness and ability to bitch about and for you all at the same time. Theodore’s conscientiousness, when he’s not tidying up after you or whining about some idealist notion he’s gotten stuck in his head. Blaise’s delight in the simple things of life, which he hides behind his guarded eyes and only I can see it ‘cause we know each other so deceptively well. Crabbe and Goyle. They’re not smart, but they are kind, and loyal, and I know they’ll make good Death Eaters one day, but better fathers.

‘Eat something, anorexia boy,’ Pansy threatens, shoving a slice a pizza in my face. I smirk and bite the end off coyly, before serving myself what turns out to be an excellent winey Bolognaise.

Eating is a rowdy affair. It always is. But today, it is like this sudden feast has heightened spirits. Pansy claims it as my ‘Birthday Feast’. Eighteen isn’t all that important a birthday, but still. A Birthday is a birthday after all. I wonder if she’ll cry when Blaise tells her I’m not coming to the party she’s no doubt planned for tomorrow night.

I thought I’d be more scared. I probably am. I’ve been taking those sedatives, a half dose, all week, and I feel not numb, but at peace. I accept what is going to happen, but I don’t like it. I don’t want it to happen, but I know it will, and though my brain feels like a odd lens is distorting it, making it compress and expand against my skull, a muddle of thoughts and feelings and fears, I’m ok. I eat my dinner, I chat quietly, I laugh; I can’t help myself when Theodore gets annoyed and slaps Blaise in the face with a piece of Garlic bread. I glance over and find Harry looking at me. He gives a shy smile. What do I have to lose? With no second thoughts, I wink at him, and beam, and watch him glow from within with pride and joy.

‘Love you,’ he mouths. I smile again.

‘Me too,’ I reply, snapping my fingers, and in a burst of wandless magic I blow a kissed origami no tsuru to him, and he catches it as everyone looks on.

Well, he did want to come out. Now everyone can envy how beautiful we are, and how happy, and how cool my wandless origami is, and he can be the centre of attention for all the right reasons.

And if anyone gets homophobe on us, I’ll origami them into a world of paper cutty pain. It’s not as if I’ll be here to suffer the detentions I’d get. Besides, love is love is love, right?

And this is love. I feel like it's valentines again, a whole week of hugs and cuddles from friends and loved ones and decadence and chocolate and private rendezvous just for me and him. I gnaw on a piece of pizza dreamily, smiling a little to myself, as Pansy berates me from one side and the Hufflepuffs hiss and whisper and the Ravenclaws ponder down their bespectacled noses and the Gryffindors gawk and Blaise smiles and know I did the right thing.

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, they say. At least I’ll have something nice to look back on when I’m wading through my sea of blood. He can be my silver lining on my storm cloud, and though I’ll never reach for him again, not like I do now, I will at least have him there, pristine and sparkling and brilliant in my tormented memory.


~~Never gain weight
Never gain weight~~


I pinwheel in the sky, pushing my beloved broom to the limit. The Nimbus Two Thousand and One. It’s no Firebolt, but I’d rather ride a fast horse that listens to me that a rabid bronco hell-bent on getting loose. It’s testament to Harry’s talent that he’s not dead yet. It’s testament to mine that I still ride my Nimbus against him, and still challenge him every time. I’ve beaten him before, but never in front of a crowd. Once he would have told me to give it up, that I couldn’t beat him. Now he’s terrified I’ll be upset when he does, or worse he’ll let his feelings get in the way and it’ll be an easy Slytherin victory. However, the real monkey screaming on his back is the fact that I can beat him, with a seemingly inferior broom. I’ve gotten to the snitch before him before. I’ve felt those wings brush against my palm… before I’ve been barged by a clumsy Slytherin beater or ganged up on by quick thinking Gryffindors and pelted with bludgers, with no support from my own side. So Harry has his victory, but I have that glint in his eye which tells me I’m just as good as he is, but that the Slytherin team sucks.

I see Harry circling slowly below, the faint glint of his glasses telling me that he’s watching as I play. He must have followed me out. Good. I’m not a naturally patient creature, having been brought up to demand things around my silver spoon. I feint towards the ground in a dizzying swirling crescendo rush, before swinging out straight past him, daring him to follow. To chase me. To catch me. To win me for his own, his prize always.

Tonight he has to win. I don’t know how I’d feel if he didn’t. That sappy side of me that demands he win easily, aches for him to catch me off my broom and pull me to him with those sinfully and surreptitiously built arms, yet that furtive Slytherin in me, the coy homme fatale requires that he win me, earn his favour through sweat and toil. I may submit to him, and to be honest, it’s what I prefer, but he has to earn it.

And if our brooms are present, he’s simply going to have to out fly me.

As predicted, he pinwheels, dangerously low, and presses himself flat to his broom, accelerating after me with wild abandon. He swipes for me too soon, attacca, as I swerve violently to the side and then up with a spin, shooting off over the trees before he can pick up that untamed beast of his. However, he is back in my hindsight in seconds, crashing through some alarmed upper canopy before hissing after me con bravura. I dip through a narrow shaft between two high pines into the magic of the forest. The moonlight filters through the thick canopy and creates a flickering shadow play on the mosses below. Fairies and fireflies swirl and swarm like eerie cappriccioso glimmering spectres, before shattering in picturesque supernovas as I pass, slower now, leisurely whizzing between the trees, imprinting my mind with the sights and smells and sounds of the forest, the enigma on the horizon of my soon to be past home. I look, con duolo, at the passing trees, the furtive glimpses of the castle on the horizon when the trees dip dangerously. Lost, Harry shoots overhead with a whoosh of passing air, and I dip just a little lower. The boy is going to have to work, prove himself to me. Silvery creatures suddenly break from cover like immaculate stags and thunder away without a trace, gleaming from inside with sheer perfection, and I’m enticed to follow them. I’ve always wanted to get close to a real unicorn, the creature that dogged my childhood, darting temptingly across the fabric of my story chair. However, there is not time. I check my watch. It’s already getting late, and I shan’t sleep well tonight anyway. Come on, Harry.

I dip low, spying heavy hoof prints of centaurs as I skim the ground, before angling up and pressing to my broom. With a crash I burst from the trees and straight up into the sky. Harry is on my trail in seconds, and I helix past him jaggedly and onwards, streamlining myself and much as I can and racing for the lake. He’s laughing, enjoying himself. For me, it’s bittersweet, doloroso but good and pure and right, and I can’t help by smile a little, my eyes blurring as I dive to the lake surface, skimming across it and drawing patterns in the water. Harry winds behind me; I hear the splashings of his feet as his broom dips him too close to the surface. He curses and pulls up, and I laugh heartily, turning my head to follow him. A rush explodes before me, and I bend smartly, getting off with naught but a snag on my sleeve. Harry’s eyes flash as he passes, his mouth pressed white with desperate need, his glance molten. Tremoloso I escape, rushing away across the lake, torn between giving in and ending this game, and my desire to prolong it, to extend it, to force him to be clever and quick and best me. He decides for me, snatching onto a tuft of my tail twigs, growling over the rush of the wind. I wrench away, and note bitterly the pops in the water’s surface as the sticks break off and tumble. I swerve sideways, even faster now, to avoid his sudden lunge, but too late. He grabs my arm and yanks me to him forcefully, his fingers biting through my robes. I try to hang on, but to no avail; I tumble from my broom as he pulls me into his lap. The Nimbus spins for a moment, it’s humming becoming a desperate wail, before nose diving cleanly into the lake.

‘Ow!’ I snap, trying to get my arm back, but Harry holds on, guiding the broom back to shore at speed, and pulling up violently. I crumple to the ground (it’s very difficult to keep one’s composure and balance when you are being manhandled like an abducted milkmaid) with a gruff ‘oof’ before scrambling to my feet. Harry knocks me flat again, but this time he comes with me, pinning me down and drenching me rough dolcissimo kisses.

‘Filthy rotten tease,’ he growls, before savagely biting at my neck. I cry out, trying to lever him off, to regain some control, but to no avail. He’s won me, he’s claiming me, and I will submit, submit and savour it. I will brand these fragile things, these memories, these seconds into my memory until they become so deep a part of me that He won’t find them.

We don’t waste time on too much preparations and it’s raw and lusty and frenzied and perhaps a little too quick for such a climatic coupling. He comes hard and shouting, pulling me to him with a sudden powerful tenderness, before working out a second, trembling orgasm from me with his hand. We lie together. Stillness eats into us from the heavy night air, warm and sweet with june-summer. The ground is still cooling from a sunbaked day, and the grass under the clothes we use as bedsheets is crisp, green, full to burst with staining sap and solar richness. The last of the evening birds sing pianissimo from the trees that dot the grounds in two and fours and thousands, and the water on the shore laps gently like the ominous inevitable drum. My heart pounds against his cheek as he rests on my chest; it’s desperate to get out and tell him, scream to the heavens how hard how sweet how deep I feel for him. I can’t. It’s too much for a coward like me who drowns himself in skin and inward screaming to say ‘Hey Harry, I’m only here to be yours.’

He walks me back to the common room as if we’ve been on a secret dinner date. The Nimbus is forgotten, lost in the mirk of the lake.

‘We can look for it tomorrow,’ Harry says. ‘I’ll get up a bit early and have a look along the shore, just in case.’ He smiles; I bask and return it gently. My stomach seems to have forgotten where my guts are meant to be and has gone for a stroll around my tonsils.

‘You alright?’ Harry asks.

‘Fine,’ I answer, forcing a shaky smile and pulling him into an impassioned embrace. My arms bite against his back as I crush him to my chest, inhale deeply, and let go.

‘Goodnight,’ I blurt and rush inside the portrait. I close it behind me with a snap, and listen, heart a rampaging bull in my veins, until I hear the soft pads of his feet as he walks away. My head falls back against the wooden panel of the portrait back and I slide down, choking myself so that my wailing shriek of anguish is nothing more that a hiss of air through my wide open mouth. It is a long time before my body lets me rise from the wretching silent sobs, face purple from the strain.


This, all of this, is a burning, smouldering, painful memory as the sun rises. Footsteps in ancient hallways, fierce passions, dinners and lunches and blankets and sheets, skin and clothes, books and artefacts and my Father’s beautiful full and orderly study. The bow at the nape of his pale, straight neck. The sleek fit of his robes. The perfection of his long, powerful fingers and their clean, filed nails.

Everything I was meant to be.

I hunch over the piano keys in the Manor’s back lounge. The sun screams through the French windows. Six am. The first light of my eighteenth year, and it stabs at me with vicious angry claws that tear at my sleepy, blurry eyes as my chewed, abused fingers skim disperato over the keys. They build extra timbre, flesh out chords, and I hoarsely breathe the words of a dreamland not my own, hopeless.

The door creaks, and my fingers still. The air rings with the dying notes, and footsteps snap across the floor like tiny syncopated explosions.

Father.

~~Father Lucifer, you never looked so sane~~

My Father’s eyes have always held a deep cold that I have never quite been able to imitate. This morning is no different, and the ice of his gaze on my drawn, dreary face is even and biting. As always, his hair is neat, brushed back and tied with a velveteen black ribbon. His robes are fresh on, eye-poppingly black, lined in silver silk. He never looks less than perfect. Today is no different. I turn to him, still seated on the stool, and attempt to find it in myself to mirror his even, cool expression.

‘It is time,’ he says softly, and I fight the wince. My fingers flex, Blaise’s bangle shifts against my wrist. There is a soft pressure on my shoulder, and I am shocked to find my Father’s hand there, the heat bleeding through my school shirt, burning into my shoulder. I open my mouth, but my throat is dry. A furrow deepens on his brow, and the clock ticks a heavy metronomic beat in the silence of the morning.


~~You always did prefer the drizzle to the rain~~


Mother is standing in the doorway. Her pale face is taught with bitter resolution, though her eyes, cool and blue, are filled with wild, deep adoration as they look into mine. Father’s hand taps against my shoulder and he steps back, inviting me up. I rise, and he turns, gesturing towards the door.


~~Tell me that you're still in love with that milkmaid~~


There is a numbness in me as I follow him to the doorway. I can almost feel that roll of wood and rubber, that should go between my teeth, blocking my mind from my body as I, broken, stumble after my Father into the corridor. My mother catches my eye, and still her expression is stern, yet loving.

There are men in the hallway.

‘Is everything in order?’ asks my Father with a hint of disgust. And is that fear? My eyes snap from him and perfect lines of his robes to the men closer to the doorway. Men in dark uniforms, wands drawn, faces nasty. And Dumbledore.

‘I believe so,’ Dumbledore says gently, his tone warm but bleak. He looks to me, smiles, nods encouragingly, and looks back at my Father. ‘Are you ready to go?’

My Father looks over his shoulder at my mother, and then down at me. My heart is running double time, aching and sore from months of misuse as I gaze up at him, my drawn face a picture of confusion.

‘Yes,’ he says softly, affording me a tiny twitch of his lips which I read as a smile. He turns to the men, draws his wand, and drops it.

It is at that moment that I begin to know what is going to happen now. I do not believe it, or understand it, even as the men in black robes, which bear the crest of the Ministry, charm restraint on my Father’s manicured hands, and pocket his wand. Dumbledore walks towards, stands beside me, tells me that everything is alright. My mother moves close behind me, an arm around my shoulders as I watch them take my Father into the green flames of the floo system. His figure cuts a gleaming shadow into the fire. He doesn’t look round to me again.

~~How's the Lizzies
How's your Jesus Chirst been hanging~~