Soul Ties and Ministry Lies

04: The room down the hall

The function of normality was to reach an equilibrium in the destruction. The need for normality was to hold sanity away from the mania of living.

The acceptance that normality was to look like being summoned by Granger was a feat that Draco had not easily come to terms with, but he had, and when she had not called for his presence for a week, it only furthered his belief that he was merely a puppet attached to fraying strings.

He had told himself in repeated words, and through a thick pace of the cold corridor, that it was necessary to accept that he was to do what Granger wanted; a piece of paper and a signature had decided that. Once more, he was justifying his lack of control and decision, but he was used to reminding himself of that, that it was okay, because it was all that he could do.

Draco entrusted his mind again with those very same explanations as the shadowed table before him and the chair beneath him held himself from buckling to the floor before the Dark Lord in his manor, his home.

His silence was the tense bite of his lip, his eyes stolen by the sight of the shaded green drapes that hung from Voldemort's skeletal bones. He couldn't take his sight from the figure that couldn't quite be described as a man, couldn't flex his stiff fingers away from the edges of that ornate table that had taken hours away from what truly mattered to him.

Malfoy could see his twisted and curved signature beneath his nails that scratched into the surface of the wood, the signature that was seeping like a wet cloth against fabric into his spoken signature, the one that he had paired with the questioned allegiance to the Dark Lord. He could feel the power of the Ministry beneath that of the Death Eaters. He could only just endure how it stroked the length of his arms and forced his limbs to tense.

Draco lacked choice; he could not deny the Ministry nor how it allowed him to cling to a white kind of light, but he too could not look at these people who sat within his home and believe that he could kill them, not when their hands too formed the legs of the table.

The Dark Lord's thin fingers peeled over the edge of the wood as he closely surveyed those that sat before him. Draco wondered if he saw their seats as a bow, each buckling to their knees before him to kneel for the power that he wanted them to worship. Draco knew that he saw it like that, he could sense it under the weight of his gaze that was harmless enough to be a caress, but strong enough that his skull was cracking like bone beneath a boot.

Voldemort's eyes settled finally on his father that sat to his right. His stare regarded him differently this time, like there was a dribble of respect in the scrutiny, and he watched his father's chest sink slowly around the exhale of the breath that he had been holding for years longer than Draco had fully understood what the mark on his arm meant.

Lucius Malfoy was a dark shade of power, one that Draco wished that he desperately wasn't because it wasn't one that he knew how to counter, one that gave Draco only two choices in this life; to find a light white enough to counter him, or to drown in dark and emerge as him.

It didn't matter how many times Draco scrubbed the Malfoy plaque and made it shine silver; the metal was always rusted beneath the surface, and it was only a matter of time before it was entirely corroded. He didn't know when that day would come, but he knew that it was the day that he finally accepted that there was no life different than the one of his father's held breath and sliver of respect.

Lucius remained as silent as Draco did, as the rest of the Death Eaters did, as they watched the Lord revel in Lucius' found crutch in the quiet. It was another show of strength, strength that was crushing Lucius slowly over years and years to make it all seem as though he was given freedom from the weight when it was just the slowest abuse of power that existed.