lucius malfoy 🐍 (leucistic) wrote in raveled, @ 2017-08-25 03:17:00 |
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Everyone always says they look alike. That's only almost true. Grey eyes, like stones slick with morning frost in early winter. Pale. Pointed. The same silvery white-blonde hair that has been passed down over a thousand years from their Norman ancestors. But Draco wore his hair short and sleek, like his father had in school, while Lucius, always to his own father's dismay, proudly liked his long and flowing, with the odd flourish. Both flaunt the infamous Malfoy smirks and sneers, though Draco's was always touched by the Blacks' regal air of superiority. When he's angry, he looks just like his mother, cold fury hotter than Lucius' icy disdain and cooler than Bellatrix's fiery rage. It only takes a year for both of them change – different, yet more alike than ever. When Draco looks at his father now, it's like staring back into a mirror. Not the polished heirlooms that can be found around Malfoy Manor, smooth glass and clear reflections suspended in antique goblin-wrought frames. This mirror is like peering through a veil of fog, blurry and broken like the grimy, stained mirrors he would gaze into at school when he hid in the ghost's bathroom to sob, alone and afraid. Perhaps it's really tears clouding his vision again, but Malfoys (and Blacks) aren't supposed to cry. (He hears Bellatrix, mocking him for being soft and weak-willed like Regulus, that she wouldn't make the same mistakes this time, when she penetrates his mind again, again, and again.) His mother had to cut his father's long hair when he finally came home. No one made a sound, save for the snip of magic cutting through dead straw. He and Draco both wear their hair short now, without care for its former sleekness. They have the same shadowed eyes, like smudged charcoal bruises against tired, greyed skin, though Lucius' are dull as dusty ash and sunken in his hollow face after Azkaban. Draco, gaunt and pinched, looks as if he hasn't slept in a year. (Neither of them have. Sometimes, they don't think they ever will again in their lifetimes, unless the Dark Lord fulfills the year-long threats he hangs over their heads like a sword.) In the low light of the manor at dusk, they continue staring at each other in silence. When they can't stand to see the same pain and emptiness mirrored in the same face anymore, their identical grey eyes flicker down to the sleeves masking their left forearms. Draco stares at his own up-turned wrist. He doesn't know if he's just imagining the heat of the skull and serpent burned into his cold, clammy skin, stark as black ink on white paper, suffocating under heavy silk. (It had taken days until his father was able to speak again after a year of silence broken rarely not by words, but sobs and screams. He tries to forget the noise Lucius had made when he had shown him his own Dark Mark. It hadn't been the sound of pride he had, as a child, imagined would – or could – ever come from him.) He doesn't, however, need to look up again to know that his father's eyes, just as hot with tears as his, have drifted like a ghost over to him – and the final detail forever marring his son's arm that now makes him a perfect, if broken, reflection of himself at last. |