words and things (ex_recursive906) wrote in bandinnabox, @ 2007-08-25 16:41:00 |
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Current mood: | aggravated |
Fragment toward a story I
I figure the least I can give you is suspense, based on how many years you've been sustaining my interest in Snape and Draco and Harry and everyone around them. I think we have till tomorrow - a week from the opening of the comm - to post, and I'm going to try and piece together a fragment each hour until the story's done.
This doesn't really have a title yet, and it certainly hasn't been beta-ed, but it does have
Warnings: Spoilers for DH, angst
Pairings: none as yet
Rating: R-ish for implied torture and war
One of the peacocks cried in the night and, as always, the other cried back a minute or so later. It had always been that way, for as long as Draco could remember. He hadn’t even thought how strange the sound was until he’d had other boys staying over in the holidays and realized they thought it horrible. For Draco it had never been a shriek or a scream or a ghostly cry – that would have been Nott, of course, Nott and his ridiculous novels – but the sound of things as they should be; the manor and the grounds and life at home, where the peacock called and the other called back.
But he had been wrong. The peacocks still cried in the night, dragging their ghostly trains about the dark quiet grounds but now nothing was as it should be.
And that was where the distraction evaporated into horror again, and Draco looked up.
Her face was turned away, which was better. He hated her eyes more than anything. Her familiar face, even though after hour upon hour he couldn’t remember her name. Her eyes mocked him, even though they saw nothing now. That was for the best too. Better that she just hang there like a dead thing than that she should ever look at him again.
Of course, she was as good as dead. She was a dead witch as surely as he’d been placed here right beneath her so that the Dark Lord might better enjoy his horror and his terrified inability to stop himself looking at her.
Would he bring her to consciousness again before he killed her?
Of course he would.
Would Draco have to… of course he would. He glanced up again – one pudgy hand spun limply past. Dirty nails.
He tried so hard to repress the shudder that ran through him then. And perhaps he even succeeded a little because his mother barely glanced his way. The drawn out silence around them went on, as horrible a perversion of the bright warm drawing room as any other. There was no mark on the Persian carpet where she had writhed in pain but there may as well have been. All the warm bright happy memories of Christmas and dinner parties and his parents dancing and birthday presents stacked on the table. All gone. The chairs and the ottomans and the pedestal tables were all shoved against the wall around the invisible space where people writhed and people died, erasing everything Draco’s home had ever been.
Don’t look. Don’t flinch. Don’t tremble. Don’t look up and don’t look… The skewed shape moved slowly across the highly polished oak. That was the triangle of her cloak, twisted off one shoulder, trailing the fat curl of her dirty hand.
Horror prickled across his arms and up to his neck. Merlin, don’t…
He glanced up. Her vacant hazel eyes swung by.
Draco dropped his eyes to his lap as another shudder trembled through him, willing his hands and feet not to move. Hot dampness rose up through his skin at the effort.
But if anyone noticed then, for once, mercifully, no one gave him away. Which meant perhaps he was hiding it after all, because what was the chance of someone being merciful here?
The question set up a nasty echo in Draco’s memory before he could stop it.