No More

Notes: Lyrics are from Stephen Sondheim's musical, Into the Woods.

No More
by Jess and Lowlands Girl

Draco can't stop running.

He's been running through the forest since dusk. He doesn't know what forest it is, or where it will take him, but he knows he has to keep going.

--keep going keep going never stop moving dont let them find you--

There is no path, and here and there Draco stumbles over rocks and roots. He's only fallen once, but he can feel the bite sting of the scratches on his face and arms. He's desperate now. Too tired to think, too scared to plan. All he can do is keep running.

No more questions, please.
No more tests.
Comes the day you say, "What for?"
Please, no more.

Draco remembers standing in front of the mirror, hands gripping the sink, and willing himself not to cry. His breathing was ragged, and his head refused to meet the reflection that would be staring back at him.

This was too hard. He wanted out.

They'd said he was a coward, and he was. He knew it. They'd said he didn't have the strength for it, and it was true.

Draco remembers splashing his face with cold water from the tap. He turned his back on the mirror, ignored Moaning Myrtle, and walked out without once looking at his face in the glass.

He remembers the Come and Go room. The twists and turns of Hogwarts' halls and staircases had always been slightly disturbing and oddly comforting to him, and he had never once gotten lost there. Even now, in his memory, his feet take him automatically up to and through the seventh-floor corridor to that ridiculous tapestry of the dancing trolls.

He needed a solution, a way out of this mess. He needed help from ("No one! I don't need anyone's help." You liar)--

He needed help from his father. But he'd be damned if he would ever admit that out loud.

They disappoint, they disappear,
They die but they don't.

In the end, it had all come together perfectly: the darkness powder, the vanishing cabinets, the Dark Mark. It should have been perfect and then...he hadn't been able to do it.

In the end, he hadn't been able to do it. He'd done everything but do it. He'd been there, Dumbledore had been there, the Death Eaters were taking care of Potter and his pathetic Order. Everything had gone according to plan until...

Until it hadn't.

"Coward!" his father's voice screamed at him from inside his head. "Filthy little coward!"

His mother's voice was worse: "Draco, I tried so hard, so hard to save you..."

And then the Dark Lord's voice, not in his head but in his ears: "Young Master Malfoy, a pleasure. Crucio!"

And then pain.

He remembers the pain.

Now, Draco is running. Running from Death Eaters, running from his past, from his future... if he has one. Trees flash past, dark, dismal, depressing. Draco's feet pound into the turf, taking a path he's never used before but now finds strangely familiar.

--keep going keep going never stop moving dont let them find you--

In the trees, he can hear things--them. There's rustling, moving, the snapping of twigs and the tearing of cloaks. It's the sound of his future, now come to meet him.

He stops seeing the path--had he ever seen it--and starts to equate the voices and sounds with the faces they belong to. These faces he knows well; he saw them earlier. They belong to those who had stared at him, taunted him, and then become silent when their Master had walked up and stood before him.

Draco has failed.

They disappoint, they disappear,
They die but they don't.

They disappoint in turn, I fear,
Forgive though they won't.

They told him that, over and over again, days--weeks? hours?--ago as he lay in the center of that circle of punishment. Snape glared at him, silent while the other Death Eaters reviled and ridiculed him.

"Failure!" they shrieked. "Coward!"

He has heard all of this before. Even in that moment, his father's voice was louder than all the others, despite Lucius' absence. Again and again he heard the taunts, the same ones he'd heard, in a previous life, whenever the Mudblood beat his marks, whenever Potter beat him in Quidditch, whenever Draco was not good enough not good enough not good enough

A disappointment.

"Why not?" they kept asking as Voldemort punished him. "Why not? He was helpless in front of you!"

"Weak!" "Unarmed!" "Why not?"

Why indeed not? Lucius could have done it, Lucius would have killed Dumbledore in an single instant of unfeeling hatred. Lucius--

No more riddles, no more jests,
No more curses you can't undo
Left by fathers you never knew.

--was not here.

Lucius had let Draco go it alone, did not answer any of the letters that his mother had so cunningly smuggled into Azkaban. Lucius faded from their world, preferring a safe cell in Azkaban--no longer horrid, no Dementors--to the pressures of the war.

After the Dark Lord had finished, Draco curled up on the floor, the tears mixing with the sweat and the blood.

No more quests. No more feelings.
Time to shut the door. Just...
No more.

And then everyone was gone, everyone but one:

"Get up, Draco." Snape was beside him, Snape, who had done it, killed--killed. Draco owed Snape his life. Draco hated him for it. Draco didn't--couldn't--trust Snape.

"We have to go, Draco." Snape stood over him. Pulled him up.

Draco tried to look at Snape but couldn't. Can't hold his head up can't hold his leg up He started to fall.

"Draco." Snape said his name again. In that moment, in Draco's battered and beaten, barely-conscious state, it was all that mattered: his name. He was alive.

He opened his eyes.

"Where?" Draco managed, coughing with the effort. Here was Snape to help him again, to rescue him again. It's time to go, he was saying, and Draco wanted to protest, No! Not you!

Snape had been there for him, Snape had helped him; Snape had done the deed when Draco couldn't. And Draco hated him for it. But Snape, he realized, was his only hope.

What side was he on? Right now, he was on Draco's side.

"Where?" he repeated, and this time he didn't cough.

"Wherever we can," Snape replied. And then they were nowhere.

Running away: go to it.
Where did you have in mind?
Have to take care; unless there's a where,
You'll only be Running away: let's do it.
Free from the ties that bind.
No more despair or burdens to bear
Out there in the yonder.

They were in a clearing, surrounded by dark trees. "I can't take this path with you," Snape said. "It is yours alone. Keep running." He leaned down and looked Draco in the eye. "It's your only chance."

And Draco runs.

--keep going keep going never stop moving dont let them find you--

He thinks he's sprained an ankle; his breath comes in pants, each sharp intake causing pain, each exhale making him cough and spit blood.

Running away: go to it.
Where did you have in mind?
Have to take care; unless there's a where,
You'll only be wandering blind.
Just more questions, of a different kind:
Where are we to go? Where are we ever to go?

Draco stops and looks up. Daylight is creeping in, over the tree tops and into the clearing. He feels it then, the burning sensation in his arm. Panting, he reaches to scratch it, realizing what it must mean.

Running away: we'll do it.
Why sit around resigned?
Trouble is, son, the farther you run,
The more you feel undefined
For what you have left undone;
And more, what you've left behind.

There is nowhere to go.

He touches the Mark slowly, longingly. He wishes it had never happened now. He wishes he'd been let a child for a little longer, he wishes Dumbledore had fought back, or that he'd never been given the assignment, or that Lucius had not been caught--

Thinking of Lucius makes him want to cry, but Draco is too old now to cry, too weary. He's going to die, he knows it, and somehow it's a bit of a relief.

There is only one place he can go.

To the Dark Lord.

We disappoint, we leave a mess,
We die but we don't.

Draco lifts his head, realizing he's not gone anywhere, that he's back where he first saw the shadows, heard the rustling.

They have come.

Draco hits the ground, too tired to stand. He will never run again, but he doesn't really care. The curse tears through him, ripping his nerves apart, the pain of its finality a blessing.

And he thinks of his father.

--Lucius is not there to help him Lucius is the disappointment this time not good enough not good enough not good enough good enough--

We disappoint in turn, I guess,
Forget though we won't.

Voldemort kicks Draco's inert body over.

"Completely worthless. Just like his father."

Like father, like son.

No, is Draco's last thought. Not like his father at all.

No more giants waging war.
Can't we just pursue our lives
With our children and our wives,
Till that happy day arrives... How do you ignore all the witches;
All the curses; All the wolves, all the lies,
the false hopes, the goodbyes, the reverses;
All the wondering what even worse is still in store;
All the children; All the giants. Just... no more.

In the circle surrounding the prone body of Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape looks on. He blinks, balls his fists, and wonders when all of this will end.

-fin-