*Sorry for the long hiatus. School stuff, you know.*
"Malfoy, you need to eat."
"Do I? Because I'm dying anyway, so..."
"Malfoy, for whatever reason, Snape put me in charge of you. You look sick enough as is, you need to eat."
I glared at him and forced a spoonful of Beef and Dumpling Stew, prepared especially by the House Elves for me, down my throat. It hurt to swallow. Burned, actually, as if the food was scorching the flesh of my throat to ash. I winced.
"Are you alright?" Potter asked, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. I looked at his hand, at how small I seemed under it. My skin was so pale it seemed tinted yellow, my bones were jutting out in places they didn't used to. Everything I do is accompanied by a throbbing ache in my spine. I can't sleep without waking up to something of a seizure and having elixirs poured down my throat, which was even worse than the constant, sharp pain in my stomach, as though it had been cut by all the food I don't eat.
I flashed him a sarcastic smile. "Yeah, I'm doing wonderfully."
He retracted his hand with an eye-roll.
"Have some more." He urged, his lips forming a thin line on his face. The dim lights above us casted shadows under his eyelashes and cheekbones that made him look too serious for my liking. I frowned as I stared at the bowl in front of me, the spoon trembling in my feeble hands. "Come, on. Just one more bite."
I stayed silent for a moment, blinking away the stinging of fear in my eyes. "I can't."
"You got this, Malfoy. Just one more bite." He grinned encouragingly.
"You don't understand, I can't!" In a fit of white-hot rage at the patheticness of me, at the horrendous grasp that Voldemort continues to hold over me, at everything- I swing a fist at the bowl of stew, sending it flying across the room only to clatter against the infirmary door. Hot beef broth seeped across the floor. The loud crash of silverware and glass was followed by a striking silence, the air in the room growing awkward.
"Malfoy..." Potter trailed off, letting the tension of the quiet finish his thought.
"I'm sorry, I just can't do this anymore," I mumble, letting my gaze fall to my feet.
"Talk to me, Malfoy."
"There's nothing to say."
"Draco. Talk to me."
I looked at him, but all I could really make out was a Gryffindor robe and two shocking green eyes. I realized that tears were blurring my vision.
A beat passed.
"After he died, I thought for a minute that it was over. That I was free of 'The Dark Lord' and all the cruelty that followed him, me, everywhere," I took an unsteady breath. "But even still, I wake up every morning with complete and utter fear. I'm still scared of him. I wake up in the middle of the night in puddles of sweat, trembling, tangled in sheets, and I'm more afraid now than I was when he was alive."
Potter only nodded, and I wiped away tears that never actually fell.
"Look." I pulled up my sleeve, revealing a dark mark that's only slightly less prominent than it was before his death. The snake, intertwined and wrapped around the skull, almost seemed to laugh at me. "After everything, after he died- he's still controlling my life. I can still feel his evil choking me and sitting in my lungs. And now he's controlling my death."
My voice was trembling as much I was. Potter pulled out a quill and ink. He carefully reached out and touched my hand, watching me intently. Staring back, I let him pull my arm closer. Where he touched me, my arm burned with something that wasn't the horrible pain I was used to.
He cupped my arm gently, and let the quill ink flow in patterns on my skin.
He hummed and continued to draw, flower after flower, until my dark mark sprung into a hand-drawn garden, colored in light shades of blue, green, pink, and gold. I looked up at him, his half-closed eyes and the unsure smile that played on his lips. In his concentration, he didn't even notice.
I looked back down at my arm.
"There," He said quietly, not letting go. "You can barely even see it."
My eyes met his, and looking up at him, I felt more comfortable than I have in a long time.
"Yeah," I said with a half-hearted laugh, looking down at the absurdity of the thing, my lips brimming with laughter. "Can barely see it."
