Two Sides of the Same Coin(DRARRY)

CHAPTER SEVEN

"There's nothing in this world so sweet as love. And next to love the sweetest thing is hate." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Draco was striding through dim, damp corridors at an agitated pace. He was moving as quickly as he could without actually breaking into a run, despite the nearly irresistible din of every inch of his body begging him to do so. His very cells tingled unpleasantly with the desperate need to get as far away as possible from the cold presence at his back. The cold presence that was following him in a silent, sinister pursuit. Yet to run from it would be to condemn himself, to admit to his fate. There could be no running.

Draco's breaths hitched in his throat and coalesced in frosty clouds when he exhaled. Every corner he swept around seemed to deposit him into a corridor identical to the last – just as deserted, just as bleak. He must be miles underground, he reasoned, could be walking the very tunnel to Hell itself, from which there was no escape. There was no way to fight, no way to flee this maze. There was only this endless labyrinth of the dungeon corridors, the bleak panic of the chase. He was just as surely trapped as if he were shackled to a cell wall, the illusion of freedom afforded by his frantic pacing but a cruel mockery compounding his entrapment.

You are a Slytherin, he told himself, a Malfoy. This is your element.

It tasted like a lie. He was no more at home here than he would be in the arms of the shadow that chased him. In truth, Draco was terrified, just barely hanging on to a semblance of composure. He had been left alone to his fate with this shadow-monster, had perhaps even been intentionally locked in with it. There was no one here to save him, no one even to witness his eventual and inevitable end. For Draco had no illusions as to how this would end. He was only managing to stay just out of the shadow's reach. He couldn't stay one step ahead forever.

The shadow was getting closer, gaining on him. Draco could feel its clammy breath raising the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. Panic rose in his throat like bile. His legs jerked unnaturally with each step in the effort to keep them from taking him off sprinting for all his worth away from the shadow, straight into the black arms of his fate. He must keep his cool. Showing weakness was not tolerated. Malfoys were never weak.

It was too late, or perhaps there had never been a chance at all, and he snapped. He was running then – running like he never had before, at a speed that was almost like flying. As his feet hit the floor in large, leaping strides, the stale draft of the dungeon corridors became the wavering, hissing heat of flames. The sort of heat that burnished one's skin and turned it shiny with scar tissue. The sort of heat that consumed a soul as soon as a body. Hellfire. It rose in angry columns on either side of him, and he was chased still – the flames racing and snapping behind him, beside him. Draco ran, but they were faster.

He hadn't thought death would be this fiery, this passionate. He'd thought it would be a sneaky, slippery thing. A quiet thing one was pulled into in the cover of darkness.

The fire was just feet behind him now; he could feel its foremost reaching fingers tugging at his hems. In moments, it would consume him. Of this, he was so certain that he almost stopped running and finally let himself be overtaken, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't relinquish the last thread of control that was the pounding of his feet against the floor and the pounding of his heartbeat against the thin crust of his chest. Now that he was running, there could be no stopping. He would survive, or he would die, and no one could say he hadn't tried.

There was a whoosh of air above his head, and then a skin-colored thing was thrust into his face. Draco tried to blink it into clarity through vision that burned red and blistered in the heat. It was a hand, he discerned. A hand that was dangling open-palmed before his eyes, beckoning agitatedly for him to take hold.