I Must Not Tell Lies

The words were etched at the back of his hand, severely painful. He could feel his blood rip apart, along with his veins as the toad-like face above him sponged her dried lips into a tormenting smile.

"Is that better, Draco?" Professor Umbridge cooed in a false brisk voice, a sweet flush washing over her usually wrinkled, pale face.

Draco looked down and experimentally wrung his fingers, but they were too numb to make any movement.

"I must not tell lies," he read aloud, each word relishing it's own substance at the tip of his tongue, at the midst of his saliva.

"You will remember that, won't you?" Professor Umbridge asked in a kind manner. "I wouldn't want Lucius Malfoy's son to be spreading rumors about his own father, now would I? Draco?" She raised an eyebrow, daring him to answer rudely. But he could not. His limbs were broken and a prickling sensation was running through his bloodstream. He could not breathe. He was suffocating on his own blood, his own spit, his own tongue, tonsil and his own air.

"I'll take that as an yes. Don't forget to 'stop by' tomorrow," Professor Umbridge reminded him giddily. "Perhaps then you can learn the lesson even more clearly."

He nodded toward her, his head making an upwards and downwards movement, rolling back and forth, rolling back and forth, like the rain when it splattered heavily in a storm, mingled with snow in December.

***

There was perhaps nothing else to do but to sit on his bed and watch. Stare at his surroundings, then gaze at the back of his hand. It had been almost five years since his father had pulled him aside and told him the rules. The rules about blood. How blood was the most important thing, how it circulated the flesh and how it meant everything to the bone. There were three categories in which blood were related. Good blood, bad blood, and traitorous blood.

The good blood, he said, was what we have. Malfoys are all purebred. Our blood is redder, firmer, sterner than anyone else's. It's Slytherin's blood. Bad blood is whereas blood is not pure. It is contaminated. Do not ever touch contaminated blood. Mudblood. Traitorous blood is blood that is pure, but the person thinks bad blood is worthy. Do not ever touch traitorous blood.

His father had confirmed it for the last five years. Until now. It was last week that he had begun to have doubts about the blood that ran through beneath his skin. If Hermione Granger had bad blood, how come she was so bright and better than him at classes? It made no sense. He had wanted to ask his father about it many times. It was last week, that he had been strolling across the Restricted Section when Madam Pince wasn't looking that he snuck a book about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

This book was like no other. It was brown and dusty, but not worn like other books. It's leather trimming and it's dust binder sides were attractive. The cursive writing could only be the biography of Thomas Marvalo Riddle, who had become the most powerful, greatest wizard of all time.

There was his picture. A small picture, but nonetheless, visible. Draco was shocked to find his picture. How could these lower folk think they were worthy to look at this picture? But Draco, curiously, looked. It was a handsome face, with jet-black hair not unlike Potter's, and a stern, placid expression over his features. Then, followed the information about him. Where he was born, when he was born, and his parents.

It was then that Draco dropped the book. It rolled off his hands and landed like a thump that echoed throughout the whole library. He did not care anymore if Madam Pince told him off or found the book. He merely walked away from it, recoiling.

The fact was, that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's father had been Muggle-born. It seemed ludicrous, ridiculous, and he found himself at disbelief. They had obviously got it wrong. But that book had been made only a year after his first downfall. They couldn't have gotten it wrong back then. They just couldn't have.

Draco had never been angry in his life. The rules of blood, that son of a bitch, he thought angrily. That son of a bitch is my own damn father. He had been told about the rules of blood.

So many, many times. He had been told it when he lost his first Quidditch match, when he failed exams the Mudblood had miraculously passed, and he had been told whenever his father was disappointed or discouraged with him.

And now, blood didn't seem important anymore.

But he just had to make sure.

***

He cornered Ginny Weasley promptly after his Quidditch practice in the hallways, where she had been scribbling frantically on a parchment. When he drawled her surname, she looked up, surprised, then panicked.

"What do you want?" she stammered. "I am not in the mood for your insults, Malfoy. I need to finish this." The panic grazed her face for only moments before she recollected her cool structure. "What is it?"

"I need you to do something for me," he simply told her, like a demand.

"I'd never do anything for you," she snarled, disgusted. "How can you even think that? Get away from me."

Shock ran through him, and he was not pleased. Uneasily, he shifted. "Weasley, it's me."

"What does that have to do with anything?" she sputtered, looking at him in complete bewilderment.

He glanced at her confidently. "Well, I am a Malfoy, and everyone follows Malfoys' orders."

She laughed softly under her breath. It was a small laugh, like a murmur. "Well, I am a Weasley. And I don't follow them."

She started to walk away but he caught up to her and grabbed her wrist painfully. She gave an sharp intake of her breath before turning her head, her voice unsteady and her chin trembling as she spoke. "Let me go."

"Hold on," he told her urgently, sinking his fingernails into her robes as far as possible. She gave a whispered shriek that faltered, hovering about the air, and his eyes locked with hers. The intensifying, electrifying moment was charging apart, and he felt that sensation again, where his blood was being ripped and turned into ice that ran through his skin. She looked away, her eyes closed shut as the sleeves of her robes drew blood that dribbled onto her bare palm and encircled the lines.

Draco's eyes pondered her face. It was a sweet, angelic face, with her hair cut short, barely brushing against her shoulders. Her lips were moist with the tears that shone across the corners of her mouth, and she looked as if she would never open her eyes again.

Giving a small exasperated sigh beneath his breath, he touched her nose with the tip of his finger, cautiously. He waited. He waited for something to happen, something that would contaminate his blood and demolish it. But nothing did. Nothing did. It had all been a lie.

A lie.

But he still had to make sure.

He withdrew his hand gently, and looked at the blood sprawled across his fingers. Her blood. Her traitorous blood. But he felt nothing different. Nothing at all. Her blood was not thick, like a hollow red liquid that tinted his fingers.

Draco waited for the explosion inside of him. His chest burned with grief. Everything, everything was a lie. It was a lie. It had always been.

Ginny's hand touched the back of his, and the blood on her fingers collided with his.

"I must not tell lies," she whispered, reading off the words on his hands. Her voice still shaking with the agonizing process of bleeding, she fought to look up and say softly, "Umbridge?"

He retreated backwards, the blood dripping onto the floor as he did. But he didn't care. He didn't have to care about Filch. He didn't have to care about his father or his blood or anyone else's blood. He could hear Ginny yell after him, but the memory was too blurred as his feet stumbled upon the red-stained floors and he had runaway. He had runaway from blood and a Weasley. It was unreal, the stories his father had told him. He had been foolish, naive, and stupid. How could he ever think any of it was real?

He didn't clean the blood that drenched it's sticky substance between his fingers when he got back to his dorm. He merely examined it, it's copper fragrance hanging in the air that constantly and always suffocated him.