the girl with all of the choices

o n e h u n d r e d t h i r t e e n

5391 words

march ninth- moonlight sonata

~ Draco ~

We thought Hogwarts was dangerous, what with all of the maimings and kidnappings and indoctrination. But Merlin, did we all underestimate the true lethality of the war. The real world was so much worse off than we were inside the castle.

I wished I could have been back there.

I loved my mother dearly, and I guessed that my father wasn't being as big of an arse as he usually was, but there were constantly people in the Manor. Bellatrix, who I no longer regarded as my aunt after watching her flay open a muggle woman yesterday on the floor of one of the drawing rooms, was always out with Greyback. 

I had discovered that there were two sets of dungeons underneath the Manor. One was for the nobodies, the people who were only being kept alive as meat for random psychopaths to torture at their will. The other was the one located off of the main drawing-room. It was special and held more important prisoners, people who the Dark Lord wanted information from. Mum had insisted that Father was not to let me down in either of the two, but yesterday, the Dark Lord had insisted that I be let down there to see if I could get them to talk, without a wand. 

My lucky day.

He wasn't here when he gave the instructions. Mum was right in regards to what she told me upon my arrival at the beginning of the month. He was barely here. As it was, his instructions for me to interrogate the prisoners came via owl.

The lack of his presence was the only thing that was holding me together at that point. I was essentially alone. At least when I was back at school, while I might not have had my witch, I had friends. Slytherins and Hufflepuffs were nice distractions, especially when firewhiskey was involved. Here, I had myself and my mother, except I couldn't bother her like I could bother Theo. She had other things to worry about.

She and Father were much different than they had been during the summer before I left for school. During that time, they were happier, full of hope, even. It was a direct contrast to how I had been then, but I genuinely believed it was only because they were back together again since Father had spent the entirety of the year prior in Azkaban. They really loved each other, and then, it was palpable.

Ever since I returned home, though, I had noticed a shift in their relationship, or at least what I saw of it. They shared fewer smiles and stolen glances. As far as I knew, the elves weren't bringing Mum breakfast in bed, a treat Father had arranged for her every Friday and Saturday since he returned from Azkaban. Their hope had been diminished, reignited only when the two of them would talk to me. But even then, it wouldn't last very long. The more we talked, the larger the pool of guilt in her eyes grew. I would never make eye contact with my father, so I genuinely couldn't have said if his eyes grew guilty too. I wanted to know if they did, though.

But they had returned, for the most part, to the strangely despairing state that they found themselves in when I returned home during the Easter holiday of fifth year. The only different thing was the way that they desperately held onto each other, whether that be physically, such as when I saw them sitting on the sofa as I stepped out of the Floo, or emotionally. They would try not to stray very far from one another whenever they left their wing of the Manor, and I knew they were searching for each other every second that they weren't together, their thoughts blaring through the rooms like a loudspeaker. I swore a few times that Mum actually said things out loud, but nobody else ever seemed to notice besides Father.

I could understand it completely. If my witch and I were ever reconnected, I would do the same, never letting her go or straying far when we physically couldn't be connected.