Why the Hell Are You so Sad?

Prologue: Things Fall Apart

Draco Malfoy sunk his head into his lap, curling into a ball in the most remote corner of the Malfoy Manor library. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself, as if trying to warm his cold, frigid body: in reality, there wasn't a difference that his arms could make anyway - they themselves were sapped and frozen, numb. In the middle of June, for crying out loud.

He closed his eyes, dilated and painful in the bright sunlight streaming in from the long panes of a nearby window. They had stripped the windows bare of the stately, heavy curtains that had once graced them, leaving them stark and naked. They reminded Draco morbidly of fleshless skeletons, their wide gaps between the wrought metal grinning toothlessly at him, mocking him for his existence.

Already the dust had settled into the Manor: Draco could see the spiralling particles falling lightly through the air in the shameless sunlight, dancing amongst the polished, endless rows of shelves; the books that Father had prized most had been raped from those shelves, defiled by the hands of those who had condemned Father. The air. The air tasted wrong, thick with the absence of Father. The books that remained were classified as harmless, rejected because of their Muggle authors.

Draco opened his eyes, unfurling himself. He looked up at the books that were left beside him, the rejects that both they and he were: deemed useless, and thus neglected. Draco almost wished he had been thought to be a threat; he would have liked to see what they would do to him. The Good side. The side of Light. A sardonic smile flirted across his face. He reached a slender finger towards a book, its spine so badly kept that the words had long since faded away. The cover was as mouldy, sickly grey as the grey rings under his eyes; he had not slept well, if he had slept at all. Draco flipped through the pages, smelling the bittersweet scent of faded words and letters as he did so. His eyes flicked casually, tiredly over the sloping lines - it was a poetry anthology.

'a tip balance, then a spiral, / then a thirty year gap as it falls through / the dust hole into my waiting hand.'

The Aurors had descended upon and ravaged the Manor starting yesterday, and they were still around in their batches, trying to dig further and deeper into Father's secrets. It had felt empty when they had not yet arrived; when they did, it had been as if an invisible bloodshed had torn through the house. Mother had broken down. It wasn't a pleasant sight, never was. All the blonde hair loosed all over her shoulders, all the pathetic wringing of her hands, all the crying...Draco wasn't surprised, just numb, numb and cold as they ripped and cursed and ripped and cursed...

'Such concentration on a single rose, / you look as though you watch it breathe the scent/ till I am watching you and held intent,'

He could still hear the slashes of the fabric as they clawed on their furniture, like moles and rats, searching ceaselessly for things hidden...

'like moon-men lost on the moon / watching the earth's green flush / tremble and perish.'

He hadn't noticed his own hot tears glistening his cold, pale cheeks until they fell onto his thirst-dried lips; in the reflections of a mirror - Father's mirror in Father's drawing room -- which had been smashed right into the centre he saw a hundred of himself, grey-eyed, grey-skinned, grey-lipped. A transparent tear which had slipped off his lower lashes had plummeted silently down to the edge of his upper lip, wetting it; a slight colouration formed beneath the tear, as if the tear itself had brought back some of the colour of his lips.

'I'm always here, if you want me -- / For I am the centre of the universe.'

Draco would have always thought himself too worldly-wise, too jaded to revolve his life around someone so much that his or her absence could affect him so. Father had been a constant - more so than Mother, she never seemed very prominent, fading in and out appropriately into the expensive wallpaper...that had been stripped too...

So much had changed in such a small space of time: Draco couldn't find it in himself to seek his friends; they were in the same boats, most of them. And somehow, Draco wasn't about to show that he was this affected...

'I would like kindness, assurance,'

More than anything Draco wanted to block out the multitude of voices in his head. Unanswered questions dormant for so long were resurfacing, mocking him.

Mocking him.

'The tool, the not-quite-fool,'

Questions and memories pulling him under, Draco felt too old and weary...he had already been through the procedure of being duly hacked off with Saint Potter in Hogwarts just three days ago - it seemed like three million...

It was no use anyway. Whenever had it been of any use?

'degenerate white dwarf'

Father. There to pull Mother out of yet another pathetic state, and there to tell Draco what to do. There to be simple and straightforward in ordering Draco as to what he was supposed to believe in.

Draco really did laugh this time. Mirthlessly, slightly insanely. To think about it. Lucius Malfoy. Simple and straightforward. Until two days ago those two adjectives would have been the furthest words Draco would have used to describe him.

'And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world / Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -- / On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -- / there is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.'

More than glass between the snow and the huge roses...

Draco leant back into a wall, his eyelids hanging so low over his eyes, he could barely see through his lashes.

Two flights of stairs away, Draco heard a familiar hesitant voice, choking slightly on her aristocratic tongue.

"Draco...we have to go now."