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Ten years later, Draco would come upon a forgotten journal, shoved halfway in the moving boxes that contained half a life. His husband was whistling in the kitchen. His cat was pawing at the dust bunnies. Grimmauld Place was a broken old wreck from Sirius, but it was Draco’s blood right, after eschewing the Manor and the Malfoy estate.
On the first page: Thoughts Constructed Before a Broken Cabinet.
Draco reeled and remembered again. The first poem, written after Harry had courted him all throughout the turmoil of sixth year, proper and pureblood and with all the passion and romance he had dreamt of, only to then give him the ultimatum: stop work on his task, the Vanishing Cabinet. Betray his family. Betray their trust, likely get them killed. Because…because this wasn’t fair to him? Since when had fairness, in any way, ever applied to Draco’s life?
Draco had been unable to work on the Cabinet that day. Instead, he’d sat before it, head in his hands, and he had written the dark things that he had scrounged from the pit of his tumultuous soul.
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Aspirations of a coward
Notes to a treacherous lover, for trying to convince me of his devotion, for forcing me to see the choice.
How dare you aspire to convince me of devotion. You are those who have never known love. You endeavor to convince yourself of insulation from the wrath of those you’ve scorned. My wrath is Charbidys. She is made of the rage you gave to me when you called it love. Say you love me, liar. I love you more.
I banish you, to the Underworld I send you. Perhaps, away from me, Orpheus shall become you. You who have never known love, you would not look back upon Eurydice’s face.
Your callous self-absorption, the cruelty of your embrace imprisons both of us. Were you to brave the River Styx, nothing would bind you to life. We are no heroes. Less than a wraith, you only exist if others perceive you.
I am nothing but the prescient Pandora, unleashing the contents of my ravaged heart and soul upon those who have wronged me. Cower and weep, these are the only emotions you have left for yourself, you unimpugnable saint. May four horsemen set upon you. War famine and death have always become you. May conquest overtake you. You live a half life, one of decay, tainted by the poison of my wrath. Your dripping fingers are no match for my demons, whose teeth have been sharpened as they bit into the soft flesh of mine, transmuted it not as sweet heady liquor for your consumption, but as skin to steel.
I reject your perception, wraith. I set alight your house of mirrors even as you are lost in them. May you languish in the fields of Asphodel and know that even the gods you claim to love, a love you do not know, was not powerful enough to spare you from the conviction of your own unearned complacency.
May your soul be forgotten, as you have aspired for it to be.
It is the only great aspiration of your wasted life.
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The harsh words made him uncomfortable to read over again, even though he knew they had once felt so real and raw. He hadn’t wanted to be confronted with the idea that he could be an active participant in his own servitude to a madman. He had never wanted to be confronted by the reality that his parents were people, grown adults who had made their own choices to live with a demon and then asked their only son to suffer the consequences and martyr himself for them.
He let the sounds of Harry humming in the kitchen ground him, took a deep breath, and kept reading.
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Only the living bleed
Beloved Father, musings on the childhood you gave to me
Fool that you are to ignore the dying cry of a canary in this pit you have plunged us. Born of bitterness you were, but I was crafted in darkness.
This pit of noxious gas where I have made my home finds me a gracious host. The canary cried before you killed it, feathers yellowed and crumpled upon a gleaming pristine floor. Canaries do not die above ground.
We were in the pit, you and I, and no force from your weak will can spin a sweet illusion strong enough to convince me otherwise.
Come the cave in, come this crowded death, I have already died a hundred small times before the canary thought to sicken.
Already buried, alone in this mine shaft, and now you make overtures to send the rope? Plummet and shatter, I have survived here fossilized under pressure. Yet I’m too intelligent now, you say? It is unseemly when I parrot your insipid proclamations with such dearth of emotion? This canary has been dead for decades, you putrid fool.
I speak to you with intelligence now because your crippled heart cannot comprehend the wealth of feelings within my own. You only want me to feel when I feel guilt for responding to your vile hatred in a way you find unbecoming, spare no glances for yourself. No glances for me, no glancing blows, when I speak to you with feeling I hope it hits you with mortal force. One blow, and your bloated skin will peel from your flesh the overripe fruit that is your reviled body to reveal the maggots writhing within you.
Putrid fool, you thought you had blood, purer than those others around you. But blood is only ever spilt from living flesh.
You killed the canary, and long before that you killed me. Even longer prior, you killed yourself. You caused your own demise.
We have both been dead for centuries, and yet you fear your death to such a degree that you insist upon perpetuating a facsimile of the living around you, pathetic mimicry that it is. The power in death is rebirth but only if one allows oneself to die. Pretend to live, and rot all the while. Pretend to choke on the snake in the mineshaft around us, while I stride unhindered into the flames.
I burrow into the center of the earth for I have always lived underground.
You put me here.
You, who bore the lack of sunlight unwillingly. Who tried to convince the undead that our maggots were blood. You scratch at the cave-in with impotent nails. You pretend to choke on the fumes though you have never needed to breathe as the living do.
Accursed kidnapper, you thoughtless, vile undertaker, you deny you are already undead. Scratch at the rocks forever, and see that they never release you.
Feel the brittle bones of the canaries break beneath your feet, but don’t worry!
Only the living bleed.
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He had spent hours and hours in the Room of Requirement that night, writing his feelings out. Harry had issued him an ultimatum of sorts–Draco had collapsed that evening, from exhaustion and stress. He had not slept a full night since the beginning of term. The bags beneath his eyes had become permanent bruises. Harry had told him that evening that he needed to choose who he wanted to be, not for him, but for himself. Clearly this task was devouring him from the inside. Would he want to be with people who had let themselves be so contained by a madman? Who celebrated his return? Who, even if they did not truly believe in him as his mother did not, still stood by and let him rise?
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Sheep
A note for myself
What am I if not my father’s son?
This hurts, It hurts, it physically hurts me. How can I go against what I was raised to be? Not a lamb to the slaughter but a sheep in wolf’s clothing? I’ve never been anything but spineless, these are the people who raised me, who dragged me from the wet earth and quiet peace of non-becoming and forced me into the light. Don’t I owe them gratitude?
Ingrate that you are, Father would spit. Can’t you see everything your mother and I have done for you? Everything we’ve sacrificed for you?
Sacrifice what, nothing but the peacefulness of your sepulchral Manor house, alone in your lofty airs and above everyone in their ideals. Pull me from the earthy bloom and cover me in blood, skin a wolf of its pelt and dress the baby in it, he would always be a quivering lamb still.
Gratitude? Ingrate that I am, suppose I am ungrateful for your meager sacrifices. The ritual they cast to cleave me from the earth shall not spare them my umbrage when the toll calls. Perfect son, your perfect heir, no worse a condemnation than a cell in Azkaban. Theives who stripped me of my childhood, of my very self and soul, so as not to burden them with my inappropriate overtures for attention and affection. I’m so terribly sorry, Mummy, Papa, at the ripe age of five I should have known better, should have understood to coddle myself only behind closed doors and alone, how very garish of me. A ghastly fool to think you could ever care for me. And now you deliver me a choice? And you say it is for glory, for honor, for family and its protection, but these strangers in the sitting room have never been my family, I have always been an orphan if not in name than in spirit, more than sanctimonious Saint Potter himself for at least Harry had Sirius and I had only those who shamed and flagellated themselves for their misdeeds at worst, who shrank away from their wrongdoing and gilded it in gold and steel. How dare you foist this choice upon me, mother, grown woman, autonomous individual, I am not born to save you, I am caught here a hostage when you had the power to leave and you were the one who chose.
I have a choice, yes, and yet could choose neither. Not your life or death but only myself. Betrayal it must seem to you, who has never known to do anything but choose oneself.
What am I if not my father’s son?
Perhaps I am nobody’s son. Perhaps I am my own father. Perhaps I was undeserving of either of your personhood inflicted upon me, and have risen above you both to see the fear and indignation you languish in only thinly conceals the rot and cowardice of your own cores.
Rot without me, sink into the curse you tried to pass onto me. I will dose myself with your poison no longer.
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He had never expressed these feelings to either of his parents. Ever the perfect son, ever the perfect pureblood. Writing his thoughts and feelings down felt like stripping himself of his own skin. It was raw, and painful, but so, so necessary.
Draco glanced up around the dust motes floating in the sunlight, streaming from the windows, and thought of the prison where the two of them still sat, ten years after he had penned his condemnations.
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Blood Money
A missive for my father
Condemn me as you damn yourself. I remain never more than an ingrate to your gluttonous, self-serving kindness. Beady-eyed, gaze upon the pig raised for slaughter. Even as you hung me from the ceiling rafters, upside down and dripping from my slitted throat, you never realized that you were the swine.
Peddle my blood for iron pyrite, fool that you are, and gild your un-mucked stall. A pig in shit, roll in my blood that puddles before you. You have always disguised your violence as love.
Ingrate that I am to refuse your fool’s gold, I am sick to death of your iron pyrite. You sold my blood for a paltry sum, ignorant that ichor flowed freely through my unmapped veins.
I have only ever aspired to gold.
I am no longer a fool, but you shall always be the swine who dragged me from restful oblivion and raised me for the slaughter. You raise your hand to me, dripping in my blood. Ingrate that I am, I can barely bring myself to gaze upon it.
You have always taken too much of me. You have auctioned my stolen parts to bidders beneath my stature. You have never been worthy even of my disdain.
Hang me from the rafters and let my blood drip into your eyes. You will never look upon me with an unclouded gaze.
Surround yourself with iron pyrite and call it gold. I refuse to live in the stall you would know a castle any longer.
I would rather a throat-slitted ingrate hang than roll as a pig in shit. You have taken my blood and sold it for fool’s gold.
Father, I am ichor.
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The worst of it was realizing his mother’s compliance in it all. She had been the one to choose Lucius over all else. Even if she was not as vile, as hateful as him in her heart, she stood by him, she coddled and enabled him. She told Draco that it was better not to speak up, that his Father was a very smart man with strong opinions and it was best to just let him have on, would stroke Draco’s hair when he smiled and send him cutting remarks about propriety every time he frowned. Ever the perfect pureblood, she had trained him to be, just like her own cowardly, dwindling self.
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Mother of mine
A note for my mother, traitor to a traitor
You come to me filled with sorrow for the pain your war has caused me and bear the tender flesh of your corroded insides, as though I may lay my hands upon them in healing. Condemn me to suffering for my naivete, but now I would rather burn on a witch pyre of my own design.
I am no selfless healer, and I am sick of the stink of burnt flesh in my nostrils from setting myself alight. Burn me as a witch, not a martyr, I am no Jeanne d’Arc. The only voices I hear in my head are the cries of a child abandoned to fight demons those before him were too fallible to face.
I clench my fistful of grave dirt, collected from our ancestors under a moon full and heavy with the burdens of those before me, and I scatter it like ashes among my own funeral pyre.
Mother of mine, I was never your son. Your bloodless love would never be enough to keep my ever-beating heart alive. Hear it echo through your floorboards, and despair as you feel the lively heat emulate from it.
You cold-blooded animal.
You were never suited to me. Only the shadows from whence you shall never emerge.
Your visage is a mask, mother of mine, behind which a hundred spiders’ legs weave. Calculating and unconscious, you ensnare your target without realizing you are mummified already in a tomb you so desperately gild.
Tie me to the stake and burn me as a witch. The screams from my mouth will still be truer than any words you have ever spoken to me.
Mother of mine, I have died for your crimes so I can live to be burnt on my own stake.
I may live and die a thousand times more. You exist but naught in an eternal lifeless death, so cold no cleansing flames can lick your crystalline heart. Begone to the shadows, hateful vampire that you are, and know you have never deserved to look upon my phoenix light.
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He had cried while writing his last poem, he remembered. Because it was then that he knew that Harry was right. That he was condemning himself for his family’s crimes instead of his own, and that someone was finally, finally , offering him a way out. And he had been so hurt, so angry and so scornful because of it, that he had lashed out at Harry, called him a liar and a thoughtless fool who didn’t know what he was talking about.
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Thrice Cursed
To a condemned family, from a turncoat
The gods above are not so capable as a wrathful son on Earth. You had the confidence of purposeful ignorance to wrench me from oblivion and foist your own pestilent choices upon me.
You demand that I reverse crimes that I did not commit and affixed me in the crucible of your suffering. You shamed me for my torment and circled to dive upon my ever-healing liver until all that remained was scar tissue.
These words are dragged from the pit of my soul that has been blackened and stained by the ruination you caused. Feel the poison that drips from the blades of these words and know when you cry Brutus that I was the first betrayed.
Forgiveness is a lie of which you will never be worthy.
I did not endure your plague of locusts to buckle under your crocodile kindness. I hope the crocodile tears you are would convince yourself to be real flood your mouth and choke your flowery untruths before they bloom past your hateful lips, in that hateful voice that has caused me such misery.
Thrice I curse you, once for the son you had, once for the guardian you made of me, and once for the man you have never before cared to know. You have never been worthy of my groveling. May you kneel on stones and keel your grief to an impassive sky, which once contained an eagle bent on the destruction of your only heir.
The only birds I sent to you are my crows and ravens, beloved of mine, who have already witnessed my thousand small deaths, and wait now for the death of the lie that was always you. You could rake yourselves across hot coals and I would not forgive you. You can never return what you have stolen from me.
Slaughter your pride, ravage your ego, and obliterate your excuses. You are pathetic. You were never my caretakers. The only care you took with me was before you shoved me naked through the gauntlet to be beaten bloody and reviled while carrying your burdens. You liken yourselves to phoenixes resurrected with this brand on our arms but you murdered the boy I once was and the only spirit in his place is a vengeful one.
I could bray for your torment like a wolf to the moon and not one drop in this ocean of rage you have brought upon me would lessen. I dig my nails into my bloody flesh and I would scream to understand why, fruitless as it would be, because you may not answer me. You may not speak: I will not let you. There are no answers I could ever want from you any longer.
The only thing I want from you is your erasure from my past, present, and future lives. Thrice I curse you for your lack is a blessing I must bestow myself. I cannot drag your oily fingers from around the fluttering pulse of my throat, but I will cleanse your greasy dredges from my mind and you will never, you shall never, have the gift of knowing me.
It has felt as though these rivers have run red with my blood for eons. A pound of flesh from each of you would be a paltry sum.
Despair as I want you to. Despair as you make me do. And in the darkness, know you put me there as I now have you. Know that you deserve it.
May you never see sunlight, and may you feel no relief.
You have forced your violence upon me and trained me as an acolyte to flagellate myself before your altar in worship. But I am stronger than your violence, and it is this very unforgiving weapon I use to tear down the false idols you hide behind. I have seen your souls as you shall never see mine and I condemn you.
Your weakness has rotted your faithless hearts. Your fetid hearts and broken idols I will use to fertilize my gardens and I will grow stronger and more whole than you are capable of conceiving.
You dive for my liver and I shoot you down, I am Prometheus bringing fire to the cave you left me in, where you thought you were King but I am my only ruler and he is beloved by a vengeful devotee.
Thrice I curse you, past, present, future, son, father, mother. Thrice I curse you, thrice I curse you.
Thrice I curse you.
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Draco had finished his sentence, put the book down, and stared at the cabinet.
Then, he’d taken his hawthorn wand, and he’d burnt it down.
Harry had been waiting for him under the cloak in the seventh floor corridor.
Harry was waiting for him now, in the kitchen, from where the smells of sweet onion, garlic, and curry wafted. He was singing to himself softly.
Draco had not seen his parents in ten years.
But he had found a family nonetheless.