Rating:
PG-13
House:
The Dark Arts
Characters:
Draco Malfoy Lucius Malfoy
Era:
Multiple Eras
Stats:
Published: 12/24/2001
Updated: 12/24/2001
Words: 1,143
Chapters: 1
Hits: 988

Hurt (Quiet)

Emma Moniz

Story Summary:
The silver thorn of a bloody rose, fire and ice mixing to produce agony, Draco’s left questioning everything—including himself.

Posted:
12/24/2001
Hits:
988
Author's Note:
For Niki, otherwise known as Nory, Queen of Squibs, my beta-reader extraordinaire and my favourite Slytherin.

Hurt (Quiet)



* * * * *


i hurt myself today
to see if i still feel
i focus on the pain
the only thing that's real

 

Red rivers washing away the numbness, the ice. Searing through it, like tongues of flames lapping at the well of my misery. That’s a deep well. Deeper than I want to consider, and so I don’t. It doesn’t exist for me anymore. There’s just now and the scarlet, rushing down, staining white, staining green, staining black, absorbing it all into the bonfire of vanity.


the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but i remember everything

 

Oblivion sings a sweeter song than memory could ever hope to compose. But I can’t find it. The song dances out of the range of my hearing, on the far side of this red river. It mocks me, standing outside the fire, unwilling to part this river of flame and I can’t cross it. I can create it, I can destroy it, but once I destroy it, oblivion flitters out of my reach, leaving me here, leaving everything in sharp focus, needles pricking at me and leaving me to bleed.


what have i become?
my sweetest friend
everyone i know
goes away in the end

 

They don’t know. No-one knows, and that’s the point of the exercise, really. I mean, what poignancy would this entire damn fiasco have without the shock value? They don’t know, and they won’t know until the day I press the blade too hard into my wrists, until the day I can’t stop it. Until the day oblivion sucks me down to the bottom of the spiral, and I’m left an empty husk to be discovered, mourned and then forgotten. I wonder if anyone would truly care? "Poor Draco, he never was quite right. I blame his father, personally." Yes, that’s what they’ll say. And that’s part of a bigger truth to which they’ve all remained pleasantly blind.


you could have it all
my empire of dirt
i will let you down
i will make you hurt

 

Old money, old blood, but it isn’t blue. Look at it. It’s scarlet, twisting down my arm and searing deeply into my pale flesh. Milky luminescence, tainted by impurities. But which is most impure, the blood or the Dark Mark, I’ll never know. I suppose they’re one and the same. I give my father that credit where the credit is due. Was he proud of me when the Dark Lord branded me, the youngest Death Eater ever so named? Was he proud of me then, the scum-sucking asshole who used me for his own perverse pleasures then cast me off to the Dark Lord for the same? Did he care? Or am I just a tool, like this dagger, the silver thorn of a bloody rose?


i wear my crown of shit
on my liar's chair
full of broken thoughts
i cannot repair

 

Over and over, I see things, I feel things, me who feels nothing, who respects nothing. Who is nothing. And that’s the tragedy at the heart of my truth. Maybe it’s simply the truth at the heart of my tragedy. Truths and lies and twisted shadows burned into the silver light that I could have been, could have known. Why couldn’t my father have stopped at condescending bastard? Why did he have to push me on to tool of the ultimate evil? I’m not evil. At least, I don’t think I am. I’m a bastard, cruel, unfeeling, unthinking, but I’m not evil. If I was evil, she never could look at me the way she does.


beneath the stain of time
the feeling disappears
you are someone else
i am still right here

 

And she does look at me, pin her hopes on me and that frightens me. I want to push her away, make her nothing in my view again, make her understand that my fire may be cold, but it burns. That I bleed by my own hand just to make sure I can feel something. Anything. And sometimes I question that. Pain isn’t emotion. Pain covers up emotion. But I can feel that. And it means that I’m still alive, even though if I shift the blade just a little, I could change that, too. I want to change that. I want to forget all of this ever happened, forget that I ever existed and leave all this shit behind me for my father to deal with. I’m not perfect, so why should I bother? I’m not even good at being a bastard.


what have i become?
my sweetest friend
everyone i know
goes away in the end

 

I used to be when the world was more simple, and there was only mother and father. When the only thing that mattered was father’s approval and the pain that came at his hands when there was no approval. Pain mixed with pleasure, at least on his end. I ceased to feel the pain from his hands after a while. And when I felt nothing when he abused me, when I felt nothing when he used me, I started to cut myself. Just to prove that it was still real, that I was still real and not one of the ghosts that haunt the manor. When I came here, there were more people to please than father. And I realised that some of them mattered and some of them didn’t. What took longer to sink in was that father’s opinions were the ones that really didn’t matter in the long run.


you could have it all
my empire of dirt
i will let you down
i will make you hurt

 

And this pain, the physical pain, is easier to deal with than the emptiness and the anger and the bitterness, the sheer angst of it all. I’m sick of the goddamned angst. All I want is to feel something. Something that doesn’t burn me, something that doesn’t wound me, and I don’t know how. So I cut myself. I draw the blade across my skin in perfect lines, making the blood rush to the surface, drip down my skin, stain my robes and the blankets on my bed, an unholy mixture. I cut the Dark Mark, I rip it from my flesh only to watch is grow back like some kind of cancer, eating me away from the inside. It is eating me away. And one day, I won’t feel the blade anymore. That’s the day when I’ll be truly lost. And that’s the day the blade will bite deeply, and I’ll cross that red river to the next great adventure. Maybe there I’ll feel something.


if i could start again
a million miles away
i would keep myself
i would find a way