JoiBoy

Sanji feels a shadow over the covered half of his face. He hadn’t noticed Zoro move. He turns and digs the point of the knife into Zoro’s chest, over his healed scar.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing ?”

“You have blood in your hair.”

When he was nine, Sanji was bitten by a Black Widow while digging through a crate of provisions in the Baratie’s hull. They’d had to dock at the nearest port and beg for a doctor, at least that’s what Zeff told him afterwards. Sanji only recalls the blackening crater of skin on his hand, multicolored in the sunlight like fish scales, spreading and spreading. He must’ve been in excrutiating pain but all he remembers now was his determination not to cry in front of Patty and Carne, his death grip on the bite and passing out between Zeff’s arms. When he’d woken, paralysed still and delirious, Patty had joked that they’d had to cut his hand off, and that he’d have to get it replaced with a wooden peg, like Zeff’s leg. Sanji had burst into tears then. He’d never become a chef with a missing hand. Zeff would have no use for him anymore. The Baratie would leave without him. He’d remain on this island alone, and because he would not be able to work or cook or even steal with a peg for a hand, he’d starve to death. Sanji had cried so hard despite the crew’s bumbling reassurances that it was only a joke, that he’d lost consciousness again.

To this day he could not stand a spider. It did not matter that most of them were not venomous, that a black widow would no longer be fatal to him all grown up, that he was a thousand times stronger now than that little boy, the promise alone of a spider continued to spark a tremor in his hands as his forehead erupted in sweat. I was a strange thing, to be afraid still of something that could no longer hurt you.

Sanji tells himself it’s the spiders that put him on edge.

Sabaody is full of spiders. Spiders with abdomens the size of Sanji’s palm, the hull of which is round and transluscent like a soap bubble, so that through it, you can make out its spine-like red heart pumping, its pink and yellow guts curling and contracting, and its sack of hundreds, thousands, of little round eggs. They hang down from the mangrove tree on a single line of silk, thick as chewing gum, and split the sun into blue and purple colours when they hit the light.

Stepping back onto Sabaody feels like waking to a bad dream, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the mangrove spiders. Sanji has to keep on reminding himself that the anguish he’d lived here two years ago is over now, a thing of the past. But his heart is beating wildly, his collar is damp. He has to burn through three cigarettes, chewing them each down to their filter before beginning to walk.

A part of him is tempted to find wonder in the capriciously shiny bubbles that float up around him, in the larger than life Yarukiman trees, the way he had the first time he’d stepped onto the island two years ago, but he can’t find it in himself to relax. He hasn’t eaten since spotting the island’s turtle-shell head on the horizon this morning and the mindless commotion of tourist and inhabitant, all countercurrent to him, make him dizzy. The smell of the mangrove gives him goosebumps. He lights another cigarette to stave off the nausea and realises, he’s nervous.

It doesn’t take much however, to forget about the spider. He steps into Shakkie’s Rip-Off bar at the heart of grove 13 and finds in the span between two heartbeats the glint of sun-bleached finger bones, a tall metal nose, a winking emerald blue eye, a tuft of coarse brown fur, a very long nose, a swash of bright red hair, the hilt of a katana, a straw hat. His nerves melt away. There are no spiders here.

He finds his arms full of captain and reindeer before he can properly greet anyone. He bubbles over with love for Nami and Robin, truly they cannot know how much he’s missed them. He almost sheds a tear when Brook starts to sing. They’ve all changed so much, grown so much it’s almost hard to watch.

The swordsman watches him from the bar with a pint in his hand. He’s missing an eye. Sanji doesn’t know what to think of it yet. He’s taller, broader, tanner. His jaw is squarer. He’s missing an eye. He’s changed so much, it’s hard to watch. Sanji walks up to him, can’t help but feel something like fight inside of him, can’t help but smile.

“Marimo,” he says.

And Zoro doesn't answer right away. He kind of just looks at him, immutably, grown. And instead of responding with a quip of his own, a curly brow, a pervert cook, he simply says,

“Sanji.”

McGonagall looks at Draco periodically over the rim of her glasses. Then she looks down at the 1000 page tome in her lap, reads its title, The Comprehensive Lexicon of Dark and Eldritch Blood Runes. It had been on his home summer curriculum when he was twelve, but Draco, bored by the title alone, had used a synthesising spell he’d taught himself to perfectly recite the tome’s summary before his father. He hadn’t, of course, been able to keep up a subsequent conversation on the topic of the book, and had for his troubles been grounded from flying over the summer. Instead, he’d spent the entire month of June at his father’s desk pouring over the book, reading each chapter once aloud to him, twice in his head, and writing out a reflective essay on each section of the tome.

He’s been sour at first, but by early July, Draco had forgotten all about flying and synthesising spells, and had began to look forward to the time in his father’s study. They would sit next to each other and Draco would be allowed to take notes using his father’s purple peacock quills, and at four o’clock, Snap would bring them tea and biscuits that he took care to eat without leaving crumbs, while she said things like, are the masters done with tea? and Draco would preen. His father would take Floocalls and write letters, and Draco would wordlessly mimic how he pronounced the words ‘Integrity’ and ‘Perseverance’ and he forced his fingers to loop the ’S’ in ‘Sovereignty’ like he’d seen done on his father’s spellegrams.

His father let Draco sit in during his meetings with the family solicitor and his financial partners at the prestigious and private St Magus Moritz club, where he befriended one Blaise Zabini. He showed Draco part of their accounts and had him imagine investment plans for his ancient wizarding societies coin collection. They sold the collection to Borgin and Burkes for 11 000 galleons and then he took Draco to Gringotts to deposit one half. The other half he invested, under his father’s counsel, into a share of Frostfang Imports, a specialised potion ingredients venture in Tromsø, Norway. The owner, Igor Vostokov was one of his father’s close financial partners and Draco remembers that first investment particularly well. Yes, because it was a first investment, but also because they Portkeyed out to Tromsø so that Draco could meet the Vostokovs in person. But, more notably, Draco met the Vostokov’s blue-eyed eldest, Dimitri.

The boy only shook Draco’s hand on that first day, and yet it was even more thrilling than the customary greeting kiss placed on his cheek by French boys brought along by his mother’s friends for tea. Dimitri Vostokov was a year and a half older than Draco, and because his english was particularly terrible, and Draco spoke no Norwegian of his own, they exchanged not one real word during the entire two days of their stay in Tromsø. Instead, Dimitri called him Lille Varg and Draco blushed even though he didn’t know what it meant. The way the boy smiled at him told him everything he needed to know.

On the second day, Dimitri flew Draco out to a lake in the Lyngen Alps that remained frozen in the middle of July, and where fellow Durmstrang boys, using dead gannets and whale flubber, were luring Ice Wraiths out of holes in the frost. They reined the beasts in, silver-backed and open-mouthed like dragons, with ropes of magic to mount and race their long bodies on the frozen ground. When Dimitri rode them his black hair stood on end as if a crown.

Draco stood so long immobile and in awe that his fingers froze twice over inside his London gloves. Dimitri pulled them off his hands afterwards, and brought Draco’s fist to his lips, then—he breathed fire. It soared, red but painless, out of Draco’s hand, warming his entire body, as though the fire had come from within him, and he’d transformed for a moment, inside his dragonhide coat, into a great Hebridean Black, Draco’s fist its powerful, hot mouth.

Then Dimitri pulled Draco in and gave him his first kiss. It tasted of smoke and melted the chapstick right off his lips. He thought how brave, how brave, and realised that if Dimitri had been at Hogwarts he would’ve been a Gryffindor. Draco gave his first kiss to a Gryffindor.

Before leaving the lake, the Vostokov’s youngest, Ingrid, pointed up one of the half-thawed hills to a patch of sky near a small stave church.

“This is where Aurora comes,” she told him, since she’d put in more work in the english department.

Draco knew this was the same Aurora his father spoke of.

“When does she come?” he asked.

“On the darkest nights.”

Dimitri spoke to his sister and held Draco’s gaze.

“Come back to see me,” she said for him.

By JoiBoy

There is a slit of light in Draco’s cell wall, wide like his wrist, tall like his arm, deep enough that only a handful of light ever makes it inside. Through it he can peek a patch of grey sky and sometimes, if the weather is mild, a patch of sea.

He spends hours on his toes, nose pressed against the cold wall, strong with moisture and brine, cataloguing the colours of the day: silver on a cold morning, bone grey if it rains, a hint of lavender when the sky is clear and evening closes in. He’s just tall enough to look through the gap, to let the wind chill his eyes, till they’re dry and painful, and finds it brilliant, as brilliant as thunderstorms when he pushes his arm through the opening to catch the rain. At first it did not fit well, and could not stretch far enough, but one day he found his arm had skinnied, and inch by inch, drag by squeeze by thrust, shoulder stretching up and out, Draco met the tail of the storm. He shivered with every stray droplet that touched his fingers, and dragged the cramped palm of his hand across the tiny pool of water that had formed in the sternum-like crevice of the stone, no larger than a wad of spit.

Today, something distorts the shape of the light coming through the gap, gives the long, straight shadow a bump at its feet, and Draco presses his nose to the wall to spy it, but owing to the backlight, doesn’t understand much of the figure obstructing the window until it moves, a ruffle, and makes a sound, plaintive and high-pitched. It’s a bird, and a nest. A bird Draco can place. Small, pigeon-shaped—his eyes adjust —a dark brown back and bright white stomach. The inside of its mouth when it calls and its duck-shaped feet, they’re bright red. It’s a Guillemot—marine, monogamous, migratory—and Draco knows this only because his idle brain, starved for months, will leap at any chance to think, to recognise, to remember. It’s nothing special, really, but Draco can’t look away.

The pretty auk calls again and it’s music to his ears. She preens and plucks at her coat of feathers. She moves and Draco is hypnotised. The inside of her beak is so red, so loud, so alive. He barely keeps himself from pushing his arm into the gap—heart soaring. He could not reach her anyway. And if he scared her and she fled, to another window, to make another nest, Draco couldn’t bear himself for it. He has enough regrets as it is, needs instead more reasons to live, and adds her to his mental list: the light, the wind, the rain, the bird. It’s barely anything, but it’s everything.

There’s a pop and a rattle behind Draco and he turns around to find a black potion vial sitting in the middle of the room. He swallows it down, finds the mouthful tastes of liquid lead and feels in his body like a drop of milk in a glass of water, scattering until he’s left cloudy and sick.

It’s poison.

It’s breakfast.

It kills his entire magical nervous system in seconds. They call it a squibbing potion.

Draco holds his arms around himself. It’s recommended to take the potion quickly lest an Auror come and do the job himself. Two more potions arrive. These two keep him alive after the last one strips him of magic, keeps him breathing through the motions of having an entire nervous system shut down. And these, too, they’ll see to it that you take.

His breakfast finally appears. Today he is graced with a plate of biscuits and hard cheese, a bowl of prunes, and some watery tea. Draco takes one of the biscuits and quickly brings it to the slit window, but the bird is already gone.

  ***

In the yard, which is not a yard as much as a concrete cube with a charmed high ceiling projecting grey skies, similar slits of light arm the walls. The prisoners there are mixed and matched from different wards every day, and so it’s with some amount of trepidation that Draco walks around the field, from window to window, hoping not to meet any eyes he may know. He believes Azkaban tries to keep the inmates with relations well separate, but on one account he’d witnessed the grave and aging figure of Mulciber drooping down the prison wall with the Carrow sister at his side. Draco had then neatly spiralled into paranoia because, dear Salazar, what if Greyback was here too? He’d held out until he couldn’t, when reciting prison facts memorised hours before incarceration was no longer enough—the prison is made of sand not stone, because sediment makes the walls grainy and uneven, so that not even the simplest of runes, the rune for self, can be carved into it, and the prison uniforms are enchanted to keep body temperature below average and prisoners lethargic, and even if Draco did meet someone he knew they could not speak to him, for the air warps and swallows all sound, makes speaking as tongues swimming through a blanket.

The Aurors had not allowed Draco to leave the yard early that day, despite his pleading. They’d in fact threatened him instead, with a tour of the temporal confinement chamber. Draco had not known what that meant, he had not read of it in the history text books, nor seen mention of it in his great-uncle Cassius’ journals, written after his own two year stay in Azkaban, arrested for the smuggling of dark artefacts in the effort to raise funds for Death Eater activities, and released under dubious circumstances. It had been in the early months of Draco’s imprisonment—he had not known better yet than to disregard a warning.

How long he spent in the temporal chamber he does not know, but that was the point. The chamber was powerfully warded against time itself, and so for infinity, Draco lived inside a black box his height in length and his shoulders in width. He did not sleep and he did not eat because his body did not tire and did not hunger. None of his cells grew or died. He could not tell the passing of time, just as he could not see nor hear nor taste. The walls were slate. A perfect cube of black void.

Draco could not live there, in that black void, and remain human. So he closed his eyes and in a spot of mind untouched, he began to build a house. He papered the void around it with the French provincial sky, rolling with vineyards and blue lavender fields. The house he built was small, the silhouette of a 1910’s Bastide, inspired by holidays spent with his mother in the southern, French village called Mondragon, made of Cotswold limestone, the cobalt blue of a blue-tongued skink, with roofs of charmed slate tiles, of which the colour capriciously depended on the weather, lost in the middle of scrubland, a pine forest, and with at its feet a garden with a grotto and a spring, sheltered from the Mistral wind. It was however, unlike a traditional Bastide, single-storey and short, because tall rooms reminded Draco of the manor, or worse, of Hogwarts, and he wished to be reminded of neither. However, he did not want to be so terribly close to the ground, to the wolves and the snakes.

So he lifted the Bastide off the ground.

Below it, Draco replicated his mother’s garden down to the wrought-iron fence trellised in black roses, he added his favourite starlight tulips and, because he’d only read of them in fairy tales, his own approximation of the fantasy-esque silver bubo pods, which were said to contain flowers inside flowers, inside flowers, infinitely. Naturally, he wished to see the garden from inside the house itself, so he charmed the floors in the sitting room to glass and watched as Diricrawls and Sun-jellies appeared from between rose bushes and swam in them like fish.

Then, stepping further inside, he built large, white, wooden frames for his arched windows and picked diamond-shaped panes in glazed glass to fill them. He carved the fireplace from a single block of moonstone and equipped it with a green-tinged ceramic fireback, a perfect replica of the one in the pictures of his mother’s childhood home, and set a vase of her flowers on the mantelpiece. Draco was hesitant then, about the Hogsmeade-style, dark, oak floorboards for his bedroom, and about the dragonhide armchairs, picked from the vague memory of a Fortescue’s Fancies magazine. These elements were dark, Draco knew, but ultimately they were not the black of the manor’s Noir de Mazy floor, or the granite fin-ish of its glossy kitchen countertops. He was careful to have no black drapes and no black stone and no graphite finishes, the same way he was careful to ensure that it remained only ever daytime in his little world.

Next, were the fish in the glass ceiling of his bedroom. Crystal koi and brightly coloured glowfins that pulsed light with each one of Draco’s heartbeats. It was a risky choice, for it reminded him a little of the Slytherin common rooms sitting beneath the great lake, but found he could not pass up the opportunity for nostalgia in his bedroom. Just like the darker floorboards, they reminded him of a simpler time, if nothing else. Adhering to the theme of youth, Draco made his bed with sheets patterned in tiny purple dragons. He’d slept in these bedsheets before, Draco suspected, as a baby, but it was the kind of memory so translucent it might have been made up. He liked the bedsheets nonetheless, even if he’d never let anyone catch him dead in them. He set the 2003 Galileo’s Gaze astral telescope to the bay window of the room and on the nightstand: a music box.

It was special, this one, because it was Muggle. He’d not known this at first, of course, gifted to him by a now estranged French cousin from Beauxbatons, Eloise, on one of their joint holidays when he was six. From a movie, she’d said—Draco had not known what that was either—that was called Le Roi et L’oiseau. The king and the bird. Draco had never seen the film but had fallen for the melody at once. When he’d understood that it was a Muggle artefact many years later, it had felt like heartbreak, like betrayal, and he’d parted with it guiltily, stuffing the clandestine music box into the manor’s attic with all manner of other illicit contraband, not ready to part with it for good.

Draco allowed the music box to play then and there, in the confines of his own mind, distorted only a little by hazy memory, as he set down a dream-weave carpet and charmed the grand room’s ceiling into a star-mapped canvas. He made tea and served it in a tea set cut from stars, and leaned out of the biggest window, with the longest curtains, to see that Mooncalves had appeared and begun grazing on the fields of lavender. When he looked down at his hand, the teacup had gone, and Draco was holding instead a chess piece, marble-weighed but silver-toned. It was shaped like a stag. A tiny, silver stag.

He placed it on the elmwood credenza, the Malfoy signet carved into its polished handles—the only snakes he allowed —and watched, transfixed, as the figurine began to glow.

***

Draco looks through each of the yard’s narrow, slit windows, searching for birds or nests. He avoids any gaps occupied by other inmates, even if he hasn’t seen any other Death Eaters since Mulciber and the Carrow girl. He also avoids any of the gaps near the backs of the Auror warders. Dementors may be gone but these Aurors dress in black, and although Draco would like to find it funny that someone thought about colour-coordinating guards to the prison’s aesthetic, the black folds of their robes when the wind blows make him feel sick.

He finds no other birds, however, and comforts himself with thinking about something Rubeus Hagrid—of all people—in a Care of Magical Creatures class—of all classes —had once said: The beasts an’ birds, they’ve got a knack for findin’ the good-hearted, like a niffler to shiny things.

Draco tells himself that maybe only his window is good enough for the Guillemots, then he tells himself that he surely has too much pride for what little dignity he’s got left to be thinking such a thing. Yet, it’s how he gets by.

The three morning potions make it all bearable, if not intentionally, for blocking the magical nervous system is blocking a 6th sense, it’s binding Draco’s eyes with a tight ribbon, so that not only does he cease to see, but the flow of blood to his brain slows, till there is not enough oxygen left there to form a coherent thought, much less thoughts of panic or despair, and so, once he gets past the initial nausea of losing his bearings, Draco sinks into a fog thick like lake water. The underside of these potions however, past the obvious squibbing, is that they mess with his appetite, make of food an alien thing in his mouth, of chewing a foreign act during which Draco finds himself hyper-aware of the glossy, white bones rubbing together inside his mouth. Nevertheless, he makes of it what he can, loses weight like shedding coats, and makes of hunger pains an anchor to his physical body. He wakes the pink and mangled scars on his chest with chipped fingernails and lets his hair grow out long until it’s falling past his chin, until it clumps at the ends with sweat from his neck, abuses the strands between his fingers, and makes of that sensation what keeps him abreast in the morning, in the ensuing disorientation, when the touch of his own body has become unrecognisable and its anatomy so distorted that there is little to hang onto anymore. He knows prisoners can request a haircut—or, not a haircut so much as a shearing—but Draco has always liked his hair, and if he could ask for one thing in his cell it might be a mirror, if only to find out whether the longer hair makes him look more like his mother or more like his father, and to, by the reflection of his own face, pretend he is in the company of either one.

In lieu of mirror-watching, Draco spends his time stroking the floor of his cell with full palms and fingertips, until they’ve gone red and raw, and digging his arm into the window slit till it’s bruised black and blue. Then, he spreads his colourful and aching limbs on the floor, finally feeling alive, and listens, through the vibrations in his bones alone, to the crashing of the northern sea against Azkaban’s walls.

Draco’s not gone mad yet, and he prides himself on it, but nights make a challenging adversary that wavers his confidence, predominantly when the window slit of light he treasures so becomes a stripe of bottomless void. It transforms from an opening to a breach. The transgression through which anything could enter. Yes, Nagini could slither right through. No, it’s too thin. Nagini is a gross beast, her head alone would not fit. Ah, but, He would make her fit. He would wave his wand and the slit would stretch and gape ’til Nagini was birthing herself right into Draco’s cell. Then, his own hand would appear, bony and blue, sharp nails clicking against the oily, black stone, reaching for Draco’s feet. Draco does not cry anymore, simply lies stiff and heaving, knowing it is not so but swearing that he can see it, breeching the gap in the wall, the shadow tip of Voldemort’s wand. All he can do not to lose his mind then is imagine Potter.

Harry Potter, at the foot of his bed, back to Draco, because he would never look at Draco again, but protecting him nonetheless. A barrier between him and the hole in his wall, from which Nagini and Voldemort threaten to spill. Draco had felt terribly embarrassed at first, in the light of morning, looking at the foot of his bed, to dare imagine Harry Potter in such a place. Lately he’d rather be embarrassed than insane.

That night, on the day of the Guillemot, Draco doesn’t imagine Potter, but he does imagine stealing some of that Gryffindor courage, because he wants to see if the bird has returned to the nest, and to do so he must make his way to the darkened window. He approaches slowly, fingers trembling where they sit at the edge of the gap, thick spit lodged in his throat, and decides that it was a worthy endeavour when he finds that the bird has indeed reappeared. Better yet, it has brought company. The male Guillemot nestles in next to its counterpart in their finished nest, and Draco’s heart quickens, the threat of a smile on his lips.

He notices then, that the night sky is clear and bright with moonlight, and finds his eyes drawn to a particularly bright trail of stars, curved on one bottom end like the curl of a scorpion’s tail. Draco recognises it of course, because he would know any constellation under any sky. Scorpius. A summer constellation. He preens, feels something akin to joy fill him, because the days have gotten long, Guillemots are breeding, the sky is clear and Scorpius is at his window. It is early June, then, surely. Which must mean that it has already been a year.

Draco had waited months for his trial, the dates had been constantly dragged out by the Wizengamot, until he’d turned 18, and then suddenly a trial date had most magically been allotted, and even more suddenly, his sentence had been Azkaban. It had been summer then, it was summer now and, most likely, Draco’s birthday.

***

With all these little gifts in hand, Draco doesn’t expect it. He should have, in retrospect. The birds, the nest, the summer constellation, his own courage to face the darkened window, a premonition written in verse—beaded, bangled, and barmy Professor Trelawney might’ve said in no uncertain terms something about the symbol of the bird, calling them the harbingers of change, the messengers that build their nest at the window of those who rest between the realms of the liv-ing and the dead, or perhaps she would have picked the scorpion as arbiter of her doomsaying, the celestial marker of rack and ruin in Babylonian lore, the beast that brings forth the judgement of the rulers, and what rulers they are, those that own your freedom, my boy, she would’ve said, waylaying the point with dramatics about betrayal and rebirth indefinitely until, perhaps, in an act of uncharacteristic hope-bringing,— like the light of that fateful morning, butter biscuit yellow, a first Draco catalogued in his mind—the ailing, ethereal woman might have laid a hand on Draco’s shoulder to murmur about prophecy, because your courage to face the window, my dear, is a prophecy fulfilled, as in Roman augury, the heavens grant clarity to those about to suffer great loss.

As such, as may or may not have been foretold by a dubious school teacher, and before Draco can stand to properly catch that brand new light of morning, an Auror is at his door. The metal of it creaks and laments and fills Draco with dread, just as the guard, clad in sickening black, is filled with grimness, for he knows his role is bearer of bad news and bringer of worse times.

The Auror does not waylay on his part, does not dole out greetings nor notice, and says that they’re telling him purely out of propriety. It is not their job, after all, it is a favour.

Lucius Malfoy was kissed.

It was two days ago, the Auror says. It was his reviewed sentence, to factor in line with the other Death Eaters. Briefly, Draco thinks of the Carrow sister, of Mulciber, of why he hasn’t come across any other Death Eaters since his first few months in Azkaban. He doesn’t think about what that means for him, because now the Auror is gone and the door is closed and the morning light is mocking him.

Draco has a second of controlled thought, where he begs himself to ponder the idea that maybe he’s reformed enough, maybe he’s regretted enough, reflected on his actions enough, that he can be at peace with this. That he can say, compos mentis and unburdened, that his father deserved it.

Alas, that second of stillness passed, the notion is forgotten, and Draco’s nails cut into his palms as blood fills his mouth where he’s bitten down on his tongue. He has a brief vision of his father, tall and indignant, looking above Draco’s head, somewhere out at the world they must face, telling Draco he must not cry, for it is shameful and unseemly, and that is all the encouragement Draco needs to weep.

He becomes a ball on the floor, leaky with tears and snot, skipping inhales like the scratched disk of a turntable. He cries remembering his father’s face, his father’s hand on his shoulder, the prideful stories of his youth told at the dinner table, the brooms and brooches and books he bought him, teaching him how to tie his tie the proper way, telling him to straighten his back, to enunciate his words. How had his father said his name ? In negotiations, listen more than you speak, Draco. Remember to offer your guests wine. A firm handshake, Draco, always. Hastiness is the folly of the weak. Good speakers make good wizards. Do not wallow, Draco. Bid your mother goodnight. Sit by my side, Draco, tonight, at dinner.

When the heartbreak turns to heartrage turns to screams, Draco thinks he hears an Auror’s warning, but over the sound of his own splintering breath he can’t be sure. He’s scratched the skin off his face for lack of anything else giving enough to scratch and torn the sleeves off his shirt in despair, in a futile attempt to lift the lid off the pot that is boiling over between his two lungs. He keeps thinking sit by my side, sit by my side, sit by my side. He doesn’t remember the last face his father made, he doesn’t remember the last words he spoke, he did not think to. He doesn’t hear the door to his cell open this time.

It’s another Auror. No, perhaps it’s a dementor. Maybe it’s Voldemort. All Draco sees are black robes billowing in the draft. Maybe it’s a bloody lethifold, come to gobble him up. Then there’s a hand pulling him to his feet by the front of his shirt, and there is a shout, he thinks, but can’t be sure, for sound, the way he knows it, melodic and comprehensible, turns flat, white, vibrating, when the Auror cracks a hand across Draco’s face so violently that perhaps his neck snaps too. His ears continue to ring. Something about his face feels wrong. He’s dropped to the ground. He thinks, sit by my side, Draco.

***

Draco wakes up and learns two things: the rumours of Azkaban abstaining from using magic to heal its prisoners are true, and Muggle medicine is the scariest and most painful thing he’s ever lived through, bar Voldemort.

Azkaban’s medical ward is a single room with slate walls and slightly softer bedding than the cells. Draco lies in it, bound from wrist to ankle by chains, and from inner elbows to the palms of his hands by translucent silicone tubes, finding that the inside of his mouth tastes of plastic. When he goes to tongue at his teeth, pain ripples through his jaw like purple Wildfire Whiz-Bangs have set off inside his mouth, self-propagating and inextinguishable, spinning spectacularly in the shapes of Catherine wheels. He finds also, in the midst of that firework and the need to scream, that he can’t open his mouth.

His stifled whimpering eventually alerts a healer, although the robes she wears are not the typical mint shade, but more so the type of green that’s been dipped into an iron bath, so as to cast shadow onto her complexion, maybe so her sallow might match the walls of sandstone. She steps into the ward looking grave, tall and lean, not unlike a poplar tree, the edges of her expression a powdery white, as though it were a lobed leaf attempting to thaw winter from its stiff blade, to show the green of empathy, of reassurance. Surely, she’s here to tell Draco that he’s next on the kissing list, and they’ve bound his mouth so he cannot protest.

“You’ve suffered a fracture in your mandible,” she says, and then, perhaps because Draco cannot respond, reiterates for perfect clarity, “You’ve broken your jaw. We’ve immobilised it shut with a wire binding so that it can heal, but it will take a few weeks.”

Draco wants to say that he didn’t break his jaw, that the Auror did, wants to make a fuss, to come alive with the indignity and pettiness he was so imbued with in childhood, but the flame dies as quickly as it flickers, in the time it takes him to remember his father is as good as dead. There is no point to outrage after all, if there is no father to call for, no father whose pride he must protect, no father who will come to his defence when he cries, who will admonish his emotional whims but bear them nonetheless. Just as suddenly as he came into awareness of these facts, the wired jaw and the Auror that broke it, he forgets about them. Tears spill from his eyes for other, deeper wounds that have been made, and he swears to himself it will be the last time.

The healer, likely used to wrathful and death-dealing inmates, is taken aback by his tearful face, and her youth shines through, past her surprise, to tilt the boat of her confidence, of her professionalism. “I’m sorry, I—we’re not allowed to use magic to heal inmates on squibbing potions. It would put you at risk.”

This, oddly—or perhaps because of the anaesthesia still coursing through Draco’s veins—reminds him of a debate that had been had, in what might have been a History of Magic class in 4th year, on the subject of Azkaban’s rumoured Muggle healing techniques. The general consensus between law-loving Gryffindors and science-loving Ravenclaws was that it was surely done because the starved and squibbed wizard’s body, confronted with plentiful healing spells, would attempt to store some of the magic cast upon itself and use it to restore its magical core, thus annulling the squibbing and allowing dangerous prisoners to try for a wandless or wordless cast. More kindly, Hufflepuffs liked to add that it was probably just as dangerous for the squibbed wizard to endure too much strong magic, and that natural approaches would be safer on a weakened body. Slytherins disagreed, and now, jaw bracketed shut with metal splints and wire, Draco doubles down on the argument he’d defended at the time: Azkaban didn’t use healing magic on its prisoners because healing the Muggle way took twice as long and hurt many times more.

The healer must have been a Hufflepuff, then, and as soon as he thinks it, Draco recognises her. Leanne. Yes, she’d been a Hufflepuff two years his senior, and a friend of Katie Bell, the girl Draco had imperiused in sixth year. All at once, his tears dry.

This. This is why Draco is here. This is why his father is dead. This is why his jaw is shut.

Use of Unforgivable Curses, Attempted murder, Assault, Complicity in the Use of Torture, Aiding and Abetting Criminals, Possession and Use of Dangerous Magical Artifacts, Kidnapping and False Imprisonment.

Draco hears it like an anthem. It allows him a short sobering reprieve from the potions, the anaesthesia and the grief.

“We can make you sleep,” the healer girl says, perhaps kindly.

She doesn’t seem angry although she must know who he is. She looks, simply, like she doesn’t want to be here, like she would rather be anywhere than with Draco, and maybe she reckons that this is punishment enough, and needs not channel any more mean-spiritedness. Draco nods and Leanne takes the tube out of his arm but, leaving the needle inside, pushes forward another liquid into his body. It’s warm all the way into his chest, the only warm thing he’s felt all year other than the inside of his own mouth, a short reprieve from the special type of cold Azkaban deals in. Closing his eyes, Draco lets his spirit fall limply into his dragon-patterned sheets, and stares up at the glowfins that swim in the ceiling of his mind-room. He counts each of their pulsing strobes of light until his heartbeat matches, count for count.

He’s sent back to his cell after a night, and learns the next morning the humiliating feeling of food spelled directly into his stomach. It’s a terrifying curse that leaves him defiled. The sudden lump of food breaching its way into his body is alien and heavy. It wakes a trembling in Draco’s thighs and a heaviness in his chest. He cups his abdomen for a long time, fighting away images of werewolves and their transgressions. It’s a pure fight of will to keep himself from throwing up, because if he does so while his mouth is wired shut, where will it all go?

Draco can’t bear to look at the birds, either. He sits under the gap, pinching at his scars and tracing with dirty fingers the melded brackets on his teeth, tonguing at the blisters that form on the inside of his mouth, and when he hears the Guil-lemot’s joyful animal sounds, he wills himself not to think of his father dying and of his mother grieving, for more tears will make his jaw shake, and that would be lighting a match in a room full of gas.

There are Aurors at his door a couple of days later. They cuff his wrists and tell him, “You have a visitor.”

It’s as exciting a statement as it is dreadful. Azkaban doesn’t do visitors. The vetting process is long and tedious and extremely exclusive. He dares to hope, foolishly, that maybe his mother still has enough friends in high enough places to spare her this favour. However, when he’s taken to a slightly larger cell and cuffed, throat to the wall, he desperately hopes it’s anyone but her. What would she say, seeing him like this? Wired, cuffed and starved? When Harry Potter walks into the room, Draco takes it back. Anyone but him.

Draco’s precariously strung inner world capsizes, the beat of his heart makes the sound of a bird striking the ground mid-flight, landing dead. He wants to call the guard back and tell him that they can’t do this. They can’t leave him cornered, leashed and bound, unable to scream, with Harry bloody Potter. But all that escapes him is a terrible, strangled cry. He’s both sweating profusely and frozen with panic. There is a reason why Draco never imagines Potter’s face, only his back. Because the only face Harry Potter has ever made when looking at him is this one. He looks furious.

He’s walked into the room and stopped. His eyes sweep over Draco and the darkness in his face grows. He turns around, marches out of the room and swivels right back inside. He looks angry, distressed, turns around again, back to Draco. Draco wishes he would stay like that, uses the opportunity to crowd his cuffed arms closer to his body. Potter takes an audible breath and turns back around, expression slightly more controlled. Barely.

“Your mother asked me to come,” he starts.

Draco doesn’t answer.

“It was your birthday.”

He lets that sit, like it’s important that he’s informing Draco of this. Draco nods slightly. Potter nods too.

“She wants me to—er, she wants me to give you his last words. Your dad. They told me you’d been informed.”

Draco swallows, barely nods, then Harry Potter loses his temper again.

“Merlin, Malfoy, bloody say something.” He raises his arm and Draco flinches. “I’m not just a fucking messenger.”

Quickly, Draco bares his teeth. Shows off the shiny metals that loop and zigzag along them. Potter’s eyes grow wide. Then his jaw and body tighten like the strapping of a belt and, red in the face, he takes a step forward, outstretching his hand towards Draco. Like it’s normal, like he’s not thinking—of course he’s not thinking, he’s never bloody thinking—and Draco rears his head back so spectacularly into the wall it’s a miracle it doesn’t split in half. The noise echoes off the room. Draco gurgles out a cry past sealed teeth and his vision swims. Between the black spots that form before him, Potter looks spooked.

His hands tear through his hair. “I can’t fucking do this.”

He storms out of the room and Draco is left inhaling air savagely, trying not to choke on it. He’s barely managed two breaths when Potter walks back inside.

“Okay,” he says to himself, eyes closed and breathing deeply.

Draco notices that he’s wearing black only because he’d expected him to be wearing red. He’d expected him to be wearing Auror robes. Potter looks haggard and cross and slightly bulkier than Draco remembers.

“Can you Legilimens?” Potter asks.

Draco shakes his head.

“Occlumency?”

Draco would like to shout that he can’t do a bloody thing because he’s been dosed up like a mule, left no better than a sodding rat. Potter only nods and lifts his hand.

No.

No, no, no, no, no. Draco frantically shakes his head, causes his jaw to rattle and pain to bloom like the thick head of a red rose through too small a wire fence, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t do this. He can’t. He will.

“It’s fine,” Potter says. “I’m pants at this anyway, I won’t poke around.”

Draco shakes his head harder. If he could beg, he would. But Potter doesn’t heed.

Instead, he says, “Project your thoughts.” Then, “Legilimens!”

Draco does project. He projects and pulls from the earliest parts of himself, so young they remain entangled with ancestors and forefathers, through which flow millennia of born and bred hate, the vilest of thoughts, and tells Potter with all his being to Get out.

Or I’ll burn every grave in Godric’s Hollow until there’s nothing left of them for you to visit.

“Malfoy, stop. I won’t—”

Whatever he has to say, Draco does not care. The filth he is made of flows out of him, as naturally as it ever has, as blood does through veins.

I’ll find your Weasel family and make them wish their clock hands never pointed to ‘home.’

“I just want to talk.” Potter’s magic is warm and red and familiar and Draco hates it.

I’ll ensure your Godson grows up an orphan twice over, and the next scar you carry will be carved into Granger’s face.

“Malfoy!”

I’ll see to it that you survive them all, and when you kill me I’ll haunt your every waking moment to remind you of how you failed them.

It’s exactly like the food spell, just like Greyback, infringing, debasing—Draco doubles down and Harry Potter is screaming now too.

Get out.

“Fine!” Potter’s magic retreats with a draft of wind that cools the sweat on Draco’s upper lip, yet leaves him disorientated, mind trashed and derilict.

Potter is utterly livid. He turns on himself, but stops at the door’s skirt. There’s a beat of silence and Draco doesn’t look, clamps his eyes shut, holds his breath. Potter says it on an exhale, so that it rings true and honest and crystal clear to Draco’s ears.

“You’re not worth it, anyway.”

It’s another blow to the head, a contravention with Draco’s name on it, a new poison to be served at breakfast. Draco doesn’t think he could shrink into himself any further if he tried. Potter walks away and he must be halfway gone already when Draco hears him say, low and resentful, in a manner that reminds him of his own father.

“Your father said: forgive me.”

***

Draco knows, and hates that he knows, that it hurts this much because it’s Harry Potter saying it.

You’re not worth it.

He’d spend his entire life trying desperately to be worth something. Worth his father’s praise, worth his mother’s love, worth—if not Potter’s friendship—then, at least, his attention.

Back in his cell, Draco goes straight towards the gap in the wall, does it without thinking, and sees that the day is setting and the light outside is blue and the birds are not there. Instead, there is an egg. A single, green-mottled egg—the size of a locket, pointed like a teardrop—and it awakens a familiar feeling inside of Draco, something that soars, something with wings, something that feels a lot like magic. His heartbeat quickens.

The squibbing potions last 24 hours and it’s been approximately 12 of those. He shouldn’t be able to feel any of this, but it’s as though the fog has lifted. Draco doesn’t hesitate this time. He jams his arm into the window slit as far as it will go and wills what’s left of Potter’s magic inside of him to work.

Accio. He thinks.

Because he needs this. He needs something, anything. It grows hot in his chest, his head throbs with it.

Accio.

The feeling approaches, warm and red and familiar.

“Accio!”

A burst of magic, straight from Draco’s fingertips, wild and not his own, sears his skin alive.

He pulls back, and finds that the egg is not in his hand. He opens his eyes, nose pressed to the black oily wall of his cell, but the nest is gone.

It’s a long crawl to consciousness, to the realisation that the egg has fallen. That he’s pushed it from the tower.

You’re not worth it.

Draco cries. It makes his jaw shake. It’s the lighting of a match inside the room full of gas.

He opens the door to the house that floats above his mother’s rose garden, to the credenza where the silver, stag chess-piece has fallen over and takes it in his hand, wants desperately to vanish it, knows he should—but it’s just like with the music box. He opens the top drawer and drops the chess-piece inside instead. Then he looks at the snakes on the handles of the furniture and, for one last time, Draco considers obeying his father.