Sin Laced Sweet Infatuation
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters in any way, shape, or form. They belong to the phenomenally talented Miss J.K. Rowling. But I'm sure you didn't know that all ready, right?
RED ALERT: Also, this story contains slash. This, in essence, is the act of two boys *COUGH* well, you get my drift, anyway it's them doing naughty things and thinking sinful thoughts. Whatever, if this bothers you, my words for you are short and quite direct if I do say so myself: LEAVE.
Chapter 4 - Broken
Draco Malfoy had never been so upset in all his life. He might as well have been dead, it felt the same. In fact, no.
This was worse.
The pain that swept over him was so intense and so ravaging that Draco could scarcely breathe. He lay aching, every inch of him screaming with agony.
His heart, his heart lay splintered in his chest, shattered into oblivion by that bastard Harry Potter. Yes, Harry fucking Potter.
He'd had Draco's heart in his fist, where he had begun squeezing the life from it many months before, but today he'd ground it to dust. Crumpled it mercilessly into thousands of tiny pieces, leaving Draco to stagger, hollow chested, numb with pain.
But if his heart was destroyed then why did it still hurt so much?
The pain shuddered through him in great aching bursts, wave after pulsating wave of torrential, excruciating agony. The stream of bitter, raw emotion tossed him roughly, jarring him and crushing him and suffocating him all at once.
He had been going to *help* Harry, to fucking help him. He hadn't meant to, but he'd been seized by this moment of rash heroism and he was momentarily blinded by his dark obsession. But then, stupid ass Ron Weasley had tried to do the same thing, and he'd shoved Draco away. Then he'd hit him, and humiliated him, and they laughed. They'd all laughed.
Draco moaned aloud. It hadn't been so bad until, oh god, until Harry...
Draco hadn't thought he was one of them, there'd been the slightest chance he might be different. Until Draco saw him, saw his Harry laughing cruelly along with all the rest. It had been like something out of one of Draco's nightmares, and all he could see was Harry's face, those green eyes glittering maliciously, those beautiful eyes...
Draco clutched at the wall to keep from sliding to the floor; his head felt it might explode. And when he breathed too hard his chest felt it might collapse. He was falling apart, no, his world was falling apart. The only scrap of sanity he'd clung to had been Harry. In this bitter, black world, Harry had been the pinprick of light. His love steeped reveries of Harry had kept him clinging to hope, allowed him to dream of something better.
But now those dreams were dissolving into nightmares and despite his valiant efforts to grasp hold of his cherished fantasies, they were slipping through his fingers. Vanishing, sliding away from him irrevocably, leaving him with nothing but blackness.
And when Harry had given him that look and, and spit on him...
The world of nightmares had become a bleak reality; there was no longer any hope, just blackness. Suffocating, draping, clutching, enveloping blackness. It consumed his heart like a disease, and he could feel it shredding his insides, rending him apart with jagged, icy claws.
The pain was everywhere; it was streaming in from every pore, slicing him open and shattering him bit by unbearable bit. It was in his chest, in his arms, his legs, his face. It was like every bit of him had begun to bleed without stop, and he was being bled away into nothingness. He was slipping away from himself, slowly sliding out of his own clutches. His misery was poisoning him and if he didn't do something soon, he feared he wouldn't last much longer.
Draco felt himself slithering miserably down the wall, the grimy, cold unbearable wall. It was some bathroom, on some floor, in some part of this *fucking* school. After the incident with Harry he had ran, stumbled, crawled, dragged himself as far away from that place as he could. And he tore blindly into the first dark human less place he could find.
The bathroom must have been deserted long ago because it was musty and dank and horrible. The walls dripped with something oily and unpleasant and cobwebs hung in a thick musty canopy overhead. The smell of rot, hung heavy in the air and a stench of long abandonment seeped from the walls.
It was freezing; Draco could see his own breath frozen into pearly white clouds, as it curled from his icy lips. A window, way high up in the wall had long ago been blasted open by the cold. The shattered glass plates that once covered it now hung dismally by a broken hinge and moaned ruefully when the wind screamed through.
It must have been cold because Draco's hands had begun to shake. Or were they doing that before?
For several seconds now, Draco had been thinking almost normally and he began to feel a flicker of pride, until he was suddenly gripped by another unbearable tide of excruciating torment. He fell forward, gasping and writhing, his hands clawing at the soiled broken tiles.
He couldn't bear this much longer, he thought shakily as he tried to haul himself to a sitting position. He knew it wasn't only his body that was weakened by it, more important of all his soul hung in tattered shreds and his heart was nothing more than a bleeding, crumpled heap.
He noticed the bandage he'd wound around his hand last night, had once more become steeped in blood. He picked at it wearily and then was suddenly overcome with memories of an achingly wonderful sort of dream he'd been having about Harry. He sighed brokenly and fell back languidly against an old chipped toilet bowl. He slowly shut his eyes, letting his head flood with lovely images of a forgotten dream.
Then something happened to Draco that hadn't happened for over a decade.
His throat suddenly became choked and tight, and the corners of his eyes began to sting. Something bitter, and acrid began to burn its way down Draco's cheek. The tender flushed skin beneath his eyes began to tingle, and a gasp caught in Draco's throat as his eyes suddenly swelled with searing, salty liquid that streamed forth feverishly, carving poisonous ribbons down his cheek.
They fell soundlessly without stop, painting his cheeks in a faint, salty sheen, and burning delicate skin an angry, livid red. His eyes burned with them and they were everywhere, gliding down his cheeks, past his mouth, around his nose, and slithering down his neck. The saltwater coursed through the cut beneath his eye sending it welling angrily with fresh blood, and blood and tears ran together along his face, searing parched lips and soaking the collar of his shirt.
This feeling, this feeling of crying, it was so oddly foreign, but as the tears cascaded faster down his cheeks he began to remember. It was as if a part of him had dried up eleven years ago and had begun to rust and decay, but now it was running in full fashion, and he surrendered himself to it almost gratefully.
And although he cried, sobbing was beyond him. He didn't make a sound, only let himself fall to the floor, trembling brokenly, feeling the tears come and come. He ached inside, undyingly, and he felt with each shower of tears his soul was streaming from his eyes.
Time became inevitable, skittering by Draco without him noticing and it could have been hours he had lain there. It was only after a long silence in his mind that a word suddenly flashed there, a name. Harry.
It was just a thought, his name flashing across Draco's mind like a flicker of lightning, brilliant in the dull gray clouds of a coming storm. But the sudden thought sliced through Draco like a knife, succeeding in taking the gaping hole in Draco's heart and wrenching it open to a yawning, empty void. It occurred to Draco, most suddenly, that *this* was Harry's fault.
Draco sat up and dragged himself in front of a partly shattered mirror, black with age, propped up against the decaying wall. He scowled at himself bitterly; he was repulsive. Then again he had always had been but Harry had led him to further deterioration.
It was true; Draco strutted around the place with an air of unquestionable arrogance, a sort of smug self-satisfaction that he gave off wherever he went. He managed to carry himself with striking charisma, and he seemed to simply emanate the seeming knowledge that he *knew* he was gorgeous. But in truth... it was all a lie.
All an act, a clever facade Draco had erected before he could remember, to cover up the blatant holes in his real personality. In truth, Draco despised his self-image, he found himself repulsive. But in order to shy away from that truth, he pretended it didn't exist.
Simply really.
Draco had been instructed from a very young age to fabricate, to deceive people, spinning lies in a glittering gossamer web. Luckily for Draco, it came easily to him. It was second nature for him to step into his usual eloquent self, the one that propelled self confidence and simply reeked admirable poise.
Unfortunately for Draco, when the lights went out, his clever mask fell away.
He glowered at himself disdainfully, taking in the sunken cheekbones and decidedly too defined jaw line. Too much messy blonde hair, tangled in thick chunks fell into his eyes. He despised every curve on his face, every delicate bone that jutted somewhat effeminately from beneath his eyes. His eyes were what he hated most of all, he noted darkly as he stared into the hollow caverns above his cheek. In the dim light of the bathroom everything was a bold shade of ebony, and one eye was cloaked completely in shadow.
Suddenly it became evident why his own gaze often caused him to shrink back in distaste. The eyes that blinked back at him were the same frigid, ice blue of his fathers. Haunting and starkly poignant, they always sent an abrasive shiver down Draco's spine.
He turned away somewhat forcefully, chasing disturbing thoughts of his father from his mind. A solitary tear wavered down his cheek and he wiped at it vehemently, eyes unable to stray from the image in the mirror. Despite his lack of admiration for his usual self image, the face that stared back at him now was nothing short of revolting.
He was a mess.
His hair lay in bloodied clumps against his forehead. His face was grimy, smudged all over with, with ...*something* black. Tears made naked trails through the dirt and stood pale and forlorn against his darkened skin. Everything was bloody, his cheek, his face, his hand, his shirt. And as he rubbed hopelessly at his eyes, blood from his hand smeared along his cheekbone in ugly, crimson streaks.
*This* was Harry's doing. It was Harry's stupid friend who had hit Draco in the face, it was Harry, after all, who made him cut his hand, Harry who'd caused him to waste away eating nothing, it was Harry who'd robbed him of sleep, forming those horrid dark circles round his eyes.
Harry, Harry, *Harry*.
Draco stared at his reflection with disgust, hating it more and more the longer he looked. He wanted to break it; he wanted to obliterate it, at the same time desperately wanting to break Harry's face. Rage swelled in him, momentarily brushing aside the pain and it was deliciously empowering.
He raised a trembling fist and then paused, breathing hard, before he threw all his weight into shattering that horrible mirror.
There was a terrible crunching sound as the glass was ground into thousands of tiny bits and Draco sucked his breath in sharply as he picked shards of glass out of his bloodied fist.
It should have hurt. It *looked* like it hurt, but somehow he felt nothing and the fact that he was now buzzing with numbness only succeeded in making him more angry. It was again the blatant and horrible truth, glaringly evident that this was Harry's fault. Harry had made him break the mirror.
Draco continued to pluck the glass from his knuckles and felt anger boiling savagely in his chest. It burned at his lungs, and he felt ravished by it. And that hurt. Everything hurt because of Harry.
That miserable bastard had ruined Draco's life and Draco was sick of it. Once again he wanted to hurt Harry, he wanted to hurt him for making Draco hurt. Wanted to bring him a pain so intense it would break him, shatter him just as it had done to Draco. And all of a sudden, Draco was stricken with a brilliant idea.
He suddenly knew a way he could crush Harry while at the same time getting exactly what he wanted. It was just an idea of course, but the more Draco thought about it, the more it seemed right, and all at once, Draco was flooded with a sort of sick satisfaction.
He was finally going to get what he wanted and the knowledge of this somehow gave him energy. Energy to climb unsteadily to his feet, wipe futilely at his face with the back of his hand, and leave the miserable bathroom behind. The feeling of control that seized him was just enough to tide him over, to keep him from tearing his hair from his scalp, to keep from thrusting a knife into his own chest.
He was dancing on the brink of sanity and this; this would keep him back long enough to survive.
~