Draco Nascent I: Valley of Shadows

Draco Nascent I: Valley of Shadows

Chapter Three: Draco, Lost.

The sun set hours ago leaving London's shining nightlife in full swing. Young muggles laughed while clicking glasses to birthday celebrations and drinking songs beneath the neon lights and faded stars. Traffic echoed across the Thames where ghosts of Britain's Kings of old spent days lounging on their vessels up and down, back and forth. Still ignorant, the muggles laughed, toasted and passed the chis around.

Across the street, Draco watched them. The hunger boiling in his frame led him by animal instinct towards the smell of food and into the city. At some unknown mark of time, his robes had altogether fallen off his shoddy frame. As he slowly devoured a turkey sandwich he had discovered cast aside in the bin of a city deli, he looked almost inconspicuous aside from the dirt darkening the fairness of his skin and drawing out every pointed, aristocratic line of his body and clothes.

His hands ran through the chaotic silver strands by force of habit rather than memory. Passing-by muggles conveniently ignored the teenage boy sitting on the bus bench. The line stopped by earlier, but Draco didn't have money on him. Not that it mattered--he could not process a concept of "money" to begin with and had fixed the driver with a haunted blank stare. In y case, Draco ignored the bus, the people, the cold of his hands holding wilting lettuce and green turkey. The world greeted his dead eyes, ears and touch. Only his instinct of survival kept him moving, kept him seeking out food, out of traffic--kept him going in the night while his eyes gazed darkly on the moving world around him that burned with its brightness.

A part of his subconscious clicked on. Without actively telling him, he knew London was dangerous. A wizard might walk by at any second and recognize him. Robes gone, but he still wore his Hogwarts vest with the green and silver Slytherin. Diagon Alley, the Ministry of Magic, St. Mungo's. His world, at war, Death Eaters undercover. Would they be looking for him? Draco's departed face frowned. For a moment he saw vaguely a pale-haired man and a woman, other faces, red eyes, green eyes. Light? Bad faith?

The sandwich fell discarded as he stood up and began to shuffle down the sidewalk. The heavy zombie gait servedo scuff shoes Draco Malfoy once cared to keep clean and fresh. Black loafers with real silver clasps although now, his left shoe's was missing. If he cared to notice...

Metal caught his hand, causing him to pause and remove his eyes from the sidewalk. London Grand Central. Express to France. L 59.99. His feet began the descent. One palm shielded the glare from wreaking holes into what little sense his brain made of seeing.

The Channel Express. At the bottom, his feet dragged towards the signs, closer to the departure counter. Excellent timing, by years of drill, made perfect, part of his thought chimed. Five minutes flashed the sign, currently boarding. The counter caught upon his hips. His clumsy body jerked and looked vacantly at the metal bar, before pushing ahead again. Still the bar clutched back and Draco frowned, stepping forward with more force. The bar gave up and let him pass onto the platform. At once, Draco headed towards a rear car.

"Ticket, please."

Hesitating, Draco swayed. The attendant glared across at him from under two bushy brows. His gloved hand remained suspended in air.

"Ticket?" mumbled Draco. The sound grated harshly through his skull, completely foreign and painful as if he had more spoken in several days.

"If you don't have a ticket, you don't get on," The conductor flicked up his cap to give Draco a closer appraisal. "Trying to run off, aren't you? Take my advice, chap. You're better off going back where you came from. Running away--good Lord, your family must be worried sick!"

Draco's mind snapped.

Do it--run away--coward--green--

Without hesitation, his wand flew out of his pocket between the bushy brows.

"Imperio."

Through his half-lidded eyes, Draco watched track lights pulsate past. No one else was in the car. The guards left him alone believing the dusty silver boy fast asleep. Instead the peeking empty eyes followed the hypnotic curtain cords swaying back and forth. In the wide open space of his mind, he could see a pendulum swinging and slowing, and black shapes passing webs between trees capturing and slowly erasing preying memories and fading shapes of people, in black, red, gold, blue, green...

When Draco departed in France, he never looked across the Channel. The lingering conscious part of him knew he would see the ocean darkness. Mostly, he'd already forgotten what lay behind him and whatever nagged at him was easily pushed away. Hands loose in his pockets, he succumb again into leting his instinct shuffle him down the sidewalks and away from the lights.

Before dawn, Draco found a ditch beneath a tree. He wandered out of town during the night--always night. The sun burned his eyes and skin. He curled up inside the hole, scrambling for a blanket of leaves while resting his cheek on his palm. Part of him was mindful of the scab on his face, although nearly healed. His fingers crawled up around his neck to loosen the suffocating Slytherin tie, without ever thinking. I'm choking.

Nightfall. He woke from his sleeping place next to a garbage bin in a back alley. A low grumble from inside his body reminded the beast that threatened to consume itself. He swung over and searched for the smell of food. A festering sausage link and a piece of cake covered in mayonnaise.

Draco ate it without hesitation.

He wandered down the path with hands shoved in empty pockets. For the first time in his empty journey, Draco stopped walking. He stood surrounded by waving fields marked off by looming fences, haunted silos and shadowy, cool homes. Stitch by stitch, the transparent grey released its hold on the stony road, absorbed the bruised fields, the cobalt black sky and higher until the color met upon the full moon.

At first he heard the howl of a desperate creature echoing up to his conscious. Once upon a time he heard that howl at the moon from a man he vaguely knew. What is a man? He saw a bright circle in a black sky, a guardian, a silent, shape shifter, striking--slinking--across...something.

Draco had a thought. While his dull gaze absorbed the moon into his eyes and reflected it back into the sky, a part of him felt silver and he had a thought.

A town, like all the other towns he had passed impassively through. Red and brown muted bricks of places, humming of busybody cars pressing forward filled with the smell of food, dull voices and empty faces that made the streets, the house, the lamps... he paused in the darkness, seeing a creature moving in the streetlight.

She had not been alone, but he saw only her and her naturally silver hair. Something told him fear! But he did not. She observed with crisp and clear blue eyes, blue as the sky he walked under.

"Bad faith?" she said. And again, louder. "Bad faith?" Draco didn't know what that meant. He began walking again, instantly forgetting her presence and the shocked expression on her hawk-like face until he saw the quiet beacon of the night sky. That's what it was in, the sky. His eyes melted into the moon.

Draco began walking again.

He fell forward onto his palms. The shadows greeted him with a hidden root and slamming him into the jagged slope. He lifted his waning body back up and turned his palms upward. Red, stinging vicious red, the color of passion and life. Night shadows caressed his palms. Red melted into black. It comforted him, because a whisper said he should not be able to bleed. He forgot about blood.

He rolled over onto his back, listening to the wind whisper through the trees. He turned his eyes down onto his feet stuffed into strips of leather. The soles flapped at him and winked around his exposed toes. He removed the remains of the shoes. He stayed on the path through the mountains and watched the stars slip through the trees. Near dawn, he stripped the patchy Slytherin vest and tucked it under his head.

At sunrise, he left it behind.

He dreamed.

How long had it been since he dreamt? He rested in a barn between the soft rustle of hen feathers. The night had not set yet as he stumbled his way onto the farm. He had collapsed, running his bony purple fingers down his strange arms.

Despite all his unconscious protests, his body bound him in place. Over him leered an older woman--light blonde hair, blue eyes, sultry lips and a pointed sheer nose. Only two words could describe her--delicate and deadly.

You exist, she whispered, for me.

Her body slipped over him. He tried desperately to scream, but he did not possess a voice. She was his voice--he whis voice--him, the silver-haired man watching, not stopping, as Draco pulled against his chains. She sliced her nail down his face.

The man leered closer. He could see their reflection in the mirror, identical in all but height and proportion and the growing luster of silver in his own eyes. Silver hair and poisoned silver eyes someday whispered they would glow, just as the man's did. He felt the wand jabbed into the side of his face.

You were made just as I was made, the man said. To carry on our service to the darkness, to carry on all that we are. Why do you run away, as if fate gave you a full life? We are the half-living, the cursed ones. We made you to serve us, to ensure your calling. I made sure myself you would be perfect.

He saw his silver skin. Blood stuck between his finger, webbing them, itching down his arms and crawling up i his spine and Draco screamed.

The wand stabbed into his throat and suppressed his drumming heart. Between the silver blood, living green eyes and a frame of black hair wrenched at his existence, lips telling him his fate. But it was the centaurs speaking, in another voice he had heard once--the voice of creation--

The blood of a unicorn, when consumed, will prolong life. But it will be a half-life, a cursed-life.

The wand thrust forward.

Draco burst out of the henhouse, ignoring the agony of his bruised soles. He pushed forward, until his legs caught on a vine and split the skin of his trousers. He slammed into the ground in more speed than his body had displayed in months, drew himself up on his knees and shivered uncontrollably.

He remembered he was supposed to be dead.

Demon, he thought. Demon, demon, all of you!

Clouds revealed the half-moon waning. He dragged his black nails down the back of throat and howled in pain beyond the physical realm. He began tearing at his flesh and scratched at every exposed piece with frantic fervor. He itched, he was dirty, filthy, and his brown nails rubbed his flesh raw, red, drawing the black littered silver blood, the blood of the dead.

"You are nothing," Harry said.

He leered. "Harry," the last remembering light whispered. "You were right."

In shock, Draco froze in his last conscious memory, a mix of hundreds of moments in his vain existence pounding between his ears. Beneath the accumulated dust on his skin, the last trace of living color faded away as his pupils darkened wider in terror. Between the green blazed the streak of a curse that strangled his beating heart. Draco screamed as the last memory exploded and sent him flying--

--he tripped. The back of his head struck a rock. The last of his guttural screams echoed off the valleys with the splintered existence of Draco Malfoy darkening in the moon-silver open eyes.