Blue

Draco can't remember the last time he saw his father smile.

Of course, now that Lucius is in Azkaban along with all the other murderous dickwads Voldemort seems to churn out, like dolls on a factory conveyor belt, it is unlikely that he is going to see it again for quite some time. And now that the shock of Lucius being gone has settled under his skin, pulling it tight over his bones but no longer pinching and squeezing and tugging at his eyelids in a vain attempt to rip them wide and permanently open, Draco isn't sure that he cares.

Lucius' eyes had been blue, as blue as the sky was when there were no clouds and it was winter and so cold your tongue turned into one big icicle inside your mouth if you weren't careful. Draco remembers his eyes, but that's probably because he sees them every morning and every night in the mirror when he's brushing his teeth, washing his face, shaving off the few hairs on his chin that might have been a beard if he hadn't been a Malfoy. Draco never smiles any more, so there's nothing to help him remember what it looked like when Lucius did, and that was a long time ago anyway. Back when Draco was small, when he had been too young for killing the pet rabbits he had looked after and named having been given them by his father earlier that week and hexing house elves just to practice for when he went to Durmstrang - which he never had - or for teaching the Dark Laws and the Dark Magic. Draco, looking back at things, is endlessly surprised that he had ever been too small, too young for Lucius.

His room is blue, too, complementing his eyes Narcissa said but Draco thinks that it's a nicer blue than his eyes, which are grey really, the way that clouds are grey when it might rain but it might not. Uncertain, undecided. The velvet-covered seats of the chairs are blue, as is the coverlet of his bed and the curtains that hang by the window that looks out into the grounds and the wallpaper that even has strips of blue velvet running down it, like those big chateaux in France where his Aunt lived where they had last been decorated two hundred years ago, before the Civil War and the Bastille and all of that.

Sometimes when Draco wakes up he thinks that he is drowning in the middle of the sea and if he screamed then nobody would hear him, because who is there to hear you scream when you're adrift in the middle of the sea? So he doesn't scream, and surely Lucius with his cold blue eyes would agree that not screaming is a very good thing for Draco to do, because he is a Malfoy and Malfoys Do Not Scream.

Malfoys Do Not Do a lot of things. Sometimes Draco wonders if it might have been easier to write a list of things that Malfoys Do Do, but then he supposes that the title of the list would have been rather unfortunate and certainly Lucius would not have condoned anything connected so with the family to have a name that could be mocked by the general and stupid public. Lucius, who is in a cell on an island in the middle of the deep blue sea with the Dementors and the murderers and the traitors.

Draco isn't a murderer - not yet, anyway - so maybe he won't have to go out to that island in the middle of the blue sea and stay there, always surrounded by it where anybody who could hear him scream was too busy screaming themselves to give a damn.

For some reason, French cheese was blue, too, blue like the blood that ran in his veins, passed down from noblemen who couldn't be trusted. Mal fait. Malfoy.

If the sea was blue and blue was the sea, then it was already inside of him and Draco half-imagined he could feel the saltwater abrading the insides of his capillaries, rubbing away the thin walls between them and his cells until it could dry him up from the inside and drown him until he dehydrated.

But then when he pricks his finger with the very tip of his dagger, just a little bit, the tiniest touch just to check and see, it's bright red, red like everyone else's blood. It welled up like a little wave had pushed it out through the hole in his fingertip, the hole that now stings like blazes and threatens to make him clench his teeth and screw up his eyes as he grabs for the tap and turns on the water, the water that washes away the blood but gets mixed in with it too and Draco suddenly worries that maybe it's getting in and filtering through his veins and turning his blood blue after all.

When he checks the next day his blood is still red and his fingertip hurts more than it did yesterday, because he pricked it in the same place and it hasn't really healed from the first time. But it is still red, and he breathes a sigh of relief because it is not blue, as he worried.

If you pricked Lucius' finger, would it be red as well, or would Lucius have blue blood like he had always claimed? Draco leaves this train of thought because it's highly unlikely that he's ever going to see Lucius again, not with the whole island in the middle of the sea thing, not unless Voldemort breaks him out and takes over the country and Draco has to kneel to him whether he likes it or not and pretend that he worships him whether he likes it or not.

The pie he shares with Narcissa for their dessert is blueberry, and Draco pokes at the filling for a moment before remembering his table manners and eating it slowly, his eyes fixed the whole time on the colour of the filling, which is very different from the colour of his blood but maybe a little like what it would look like when it was changing from red to blue, if that happens which he hopes it doesn't because if it does then he'll have to keep checking, and his finger tingles unpleasantly when he picks up his fork and breaks open the pastry and eats the blueberries.

Of course, even more unpleasant is the thought that since Lucius' eyes are blue and round just like the blueberries, even though they're a different colour, they could be hidden in the pie and he might not notice until it is too late. Draco pushes away his bowl and stands up, dropping the napkin that had sat in his lap onto the blue-carpeted floor and walks away without an explanation for Narcissa, who asks for none because she has lived with Malfoy men for so long that she cannot remember living with Black men, who had their own strange habits.

And Draco goes back to his blue room in his blue mood and sits on the blue bed, and stares at the blue walls, and thinks about blue blood and blue eyeballs and blue water, and feels like he's drowning.