Scarred

"Overbearing panic attack entrenched in my veins

In an hour I'll be okay

I pray this thing will go away permanently someday

I've seen more than

I should have to

I've seen this on my own" (1)

It was a lazy Saturday, a week after the pushover Quidditch victory against Hufflepuff. Malfoy was eating a rasher of bacon demurely, thinking about last night's practice, and the game of chess that Adrian Pucey had challenged him to later that day. He was planning on laying low that Saturday, maybe finishing up the Transfiguration essay due next week, but when he looked up and saw Circe, his eagle owl, he changed his mind.

As the other students got their packages and letters, Malfoy reached out his hand and deftly caught a parchment envelope closed with his father's wax seal. He wondered what on Earth his father could be writing about in the middle of the school year, and studied the handwriting on the front of the envelope.

After living with his mercurial father for over a decade, Malfoy had trained himself in the subtle art of deciphering the elder's mood and current vexation from his handwriting. He saw immediately that the thick, calculated print of "Draco Malfoy" on the front of the envelope indicated that his father was in the quiet, understated anger that, should he dare cross his father, would quickly boil over and slap his son across the face.

Malfoy shuddered with the re-emergence of the countless childhood memories, raising his hand instinctively to his pale, hard face, and looked at the letter again. It felt hot in his hand, like a Howler about to burst into flame, but he knew the sensation of heat was only imagined by his taut nervous system. His father would not want to be kept waiting, but Malfoy allowed himself a few minutes to steady himself for whatever was inside the foreboding envelope and tucked it into a pocket.

"Occasionally I feel like the walls around are closing in on me

Physically I feel sometimes I need seclusion to be free

The irony at last I see reality is my perception

And my personality is my reflection" (2)

He had excused himself from Crabbe and Goyle, freed himself from the table, and wandered back to the Slytherin common room. Now, he was sitting in his four-poster, his slim body tense and alert as he slowly broke the wax seal. He saw that the creamy parchment held but a few lines, indicating their potency, and his father's handwriting was the same calculated print.

It has come to my attention that your grades are not what are to be expected. I myself was ranked second in my class your year, while you are not even in the highest five. Your grades must improve immediately. Your duty to our family is to do well in school, and those who do not do their duty must be dealt with.

That was it - no greeting, no ending, just a thinly veiled warning to shape up. Malfoy drew in a ragged breath and thought about being "dealt with".

First would come the glares and the tiniest change in pitch in his father's stern voice. Then would come the blows: when he was very young, he would be spanked with a switch of cruel oak, but his father had soon moved his strikes higher to discipline his son across his back. Only rarely would the elder slap the younger on the face; the family's pale complexion showed the red handprint for many an hour afterwards, and it would not do for such a visible mark of disobedience to be seen.

"I try to scream but I can't breathe

Can anybody hear me?

I try to dream but I can't sleep

Can anyone shield me?

I shut my eyes and hold my cries to myself

My pride's on the shelf

But I won't quit, never quit" (3)

Bars of retrospective heat flashed across Malfoy's shoulder blades, the numerous welts only barely visible in good light and easily covered with a shirt. His father was good at not leaving scars in the physical sense, but his son had absorbed each lash of the switch and was mentally branded for life.

"You must be dealt with, Draco," came his father's harsh voice, conjured from memory.

"Yes, Father," he replied gravely, his cold grey eyes becoming unseeing. He slid his right hand beneath the mattress and prodded around carefully before finding the shard of smooth, cold silvered glass.

"This song is a poem to myself

It helps me to live

In case of fire, break the glass

And move on into your own" (1)

Malfoy slowly pushed up the left sleeve of his sweater and studied the fine network of dark lines crisscrossing his pallid arm. He held the jagged piece of mirror between his thumb and forefinger, making sure his grip and breath were steady. His pulse began to thud as he raised his right hand and the stream of anguished recall began to flow into his pounding brain.

"Don't speak when you aren't spoken to!"

The first line appeared, a thin stripe of angry pink. Malfoy shut himself to the sharp pain and felt himself release the memory.

"Act dignified, you hooligan!"

A second bar. The blood from the first rose into three little spheres of red, and the heavier second was enough to draw the blood outside of the cut into his silvery arm hair.

"You're a disgrace to the name of Malfoy!"

Memory, pain, liberation. Memory, pain, liberation. Memory, pain, liberation.

His seventh stroke was deep, and the pain fiery enough to draw Malfoy fully back into his present senses. He stopped and carefully examined the seven horizontal slits on the top of his left arm, the pain buzzing dully in his brain. Waiting for the seventh cut to congeal, he concluded that he had done worse before and would be okay. Finally, he pulled down his shirtsleeve and stood up.

"I finally feel my wounds are healing, releasing and pouring out of me

The pressure's success becoming apparently a bigger part of me

I'm looking back at the things that I can't remove

My past's okay with me

The future's brighter than I could imagine it to be" (2)

Malfoy threw the parchment into the dormitory fireplace, no longer concerned with his father's clipped words. He fantasized about raising a son that he would understand - someone to admire, be proud of, maybe even to love, in a fatherly way?

Promising himself to never bring up his children in fear, he sighed and wiped the blood off the fragment of mirror. He smiled inwardly and returned it to its secret place beneath his mattress.

He glanced at his reflection for only a second - nowadays, his own pale face reminded him too much of his father's.