Once More Unto The Breach // DHr

f o u r

Serpentine eyes trail over Draco as he strides casually into the dining hall, with his hands in his pockets and wearing the heavy mask of indifference. Upon taking his dutiful seat between Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange, he smirks up at the head of the table, fully aware that the serpentine eyes never left his figure.

"If it isn't the Malfoy heir coming to join us for breakfast." He announces in delight.

"Missed me, My Lord?"

Voldemort's laughter pierces through the air, the sound more akin to metal scraping metal than anything, causing Draco's jaws to clench. Never has he met anyone with a laugh that could make ears bleed.

Well, except Pansy's. Before she was killed.

This is not the time for that. Reopening wounds of dead classmates, dead friends, has no place in a war where he's out in the open and could be next should he not regard his steps carefully. Draco has found that while he doesn't particularly care for dying, it's the how that crawls under his skin.

He schools his thoughts and compartmentalises whatever feelings have begun to bubble up from within him, and puts up the mental barricades as high as the ceilings of the Manor, to which he once thought of as his safe space, all in a shining effort to make damn sure that the monster living in his house will not be able to make another home in his head.

"You are far too frail these days, young Malfoy. Troubles with the new recruits perhaps?" Voldemort asks, looking straight ahead at him while cutting through his plate with a deft precision using a mere butter knife that Draco's thoughts transformed into a vision of a limb being in the place of the poached egg and blood instead of the yolk.

Meanwhile, the Carrow twins sharpen their knives in front of him at the mention of the team in their care.

The new recruits, the fresh meat, children who were orphaned and forced to join the dark side lest they have nowhere else to go, lest they die in the most painful ways no ordinary human could even imagine. The cursed.

"They bore me, My Lord." He shrugs, pushing the scrambled eggs around in his plate, a lazy smile on his lips. "Eager for a place on the table. All bite, no tact."

Bellatrix Lestrange clicks her tongue in disagreement and raises her glass of wine too much too fast that the contents actually spill onto her plate, soaking her toast in deep red liquid. "I do believe that they are doing the Lord's work! Quite splendidly, if I do say so myself." Her eyes blaze in pride and wicked amusement. "Did you know they burned down three Mudbloody towns just a few days ago all at once?" She throws her head back, cackling, the veins around her neck becoming more and more visible by the ticking second, appearing like strangulation marks to Draco. "The smell was so unbelievably horrid, it even made me sick!"

No, Draco did not, in fact, know about this, and he could have moved on with his day without the knowledge, without the graphic imagery of a great, undefeatable fire that only reminds him of Vincent and the way his hands slipped from his, and how he did not catch him in time, and his screams, and his burning flesh.

"Talk of spilling toxic blood so early this fine morning."The voice of Voldemort tsks, though a smirk is planted on his thin, cracked lips. "Tomorrow will be much, much more satisfying." Voldemort then smiles, ever so slowly, until his teeth are bared – fanged, mutilated, decayed – and Draco fights an urge to wince at the sight as chills involuntarily run down his spine.

"Come tomorrow's nightfall, dear friends, we shall feast on phoenixes."

Beside him, Narcissa doesn't flinch, and Draco doesn't try to wonder who the traitor of the enemy could be.

He fails at his little mind game in the end, much like his track record for everything else, but at least now he has a name.