The Feathered Serpent

chapter two: entering the game

The world is a vampire sent to drain

Secret destroyers hold you up to the flames

And what do I get for my pain?

Betrayed desires, and a piece of the Game.

Bullet with Butterfly Wings - The Smashing Pumpkins

Life is full of turning points. Usually we are so involved in the space between seconds we fail to recognise these sea changes for what they are until they are well past. Sometimes however, they are too evident to miss even for the most oblivious of participants.

* * * *

The summer holiday that followed fourth year had been a bad one for Draco. Usually he saw little of his mother and even less of his father, but this year had been different in every way, starting with a highly unpleasant interview.

His father had been furious when he discovered Draco covered in the hex marks bestowed upon him by the Unholy Trinity (Draco's private name for Harry-Bloody-Potter, The Mudblood and The Weasel). Not hotly furious either, but deeply, coldly, furious. The kind of glacial wrath that secretly terrified his son and caused a small hard knot in the bottom of Draco's stomach as he looked up into the pale pointed face so like his own. Sometimes it seemed to him his father was an eldritch mirror of what Draco was to become; the future in waiting. Whether that was a blessing or a curse he was undecided. At the moment however, standing in Lucius's office, the chill vibrations of anger echoing off the emerald silk hangings and mahogany, it was definitely not the former.

"So..." his father's words were a soft hiss, menace spiralling through his voice like a curl of smoke. "Yet again, you let Potter and his little friends - a Weasley and a Mudblood no less," the words spat like sparks exploding from over-dry firewood "make a laughing stock of you."

"There were three of them."

How he hated the sullen stupidity of his answer, but when confronted by his father like this, his throat closed over, any cleverness left him and he was reduced to the tones of a sulky ineffectual child.

"That is no excuse! You are a Malfoy! A pureblood! But you let some Mugglebred scum and the dregs of the wizarding world overpower you as easily as if you were a Squib. Did you even get a single spell off? No?" Lucius didn't wait for a reply, "Why doesn't that surprise me? You're a disgrace to the Malfoy line - so retarded some Mudblood bitch gets better marks than you, incapable of defending yourself in the most rudimentary manner, and not even..."

The lecture went on and on, sharp vicious words dismembering Draco's intelligence, character and actions. The jibes at his Quidditch failures especially stung. By the time the cold dissection had finished, Draco was trembling, nauseous, and trying desperately not to give in to the hot dull ache of tears that pressed up behind his eyes. If he were weak enough to cry now, whatever punishment he was given would be much, much worse.

"What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I'm sorry Father. I didn't mean to disappoint you."

And he was sorry. It hurt inside; hurt that his father thought he was a failure. He felt wretched when he didn't live up to Lucius's expectations - there was nothing he wouldn't do to achieve the rare but wonderful warmth of his father's approval. He didn't mean to disappoint him, truly he didn't. And it wasn't his fault. It was those damn Gryffindors. How he hated them. It just wasn't fair.

He would have liked to drop his eyes to the polished top of the desk in front of Lucius, but that was never a good idea. Lucius had made clear his opinion of the disrespect in refusing to meet his gaze on a number of occasions, so Draco had to stand there and endure the sneer on the face opposite his.

Lucius leant forward, chin resting on meshed fingers, and studied his son for long moments. When he spoke again, the anger was gone from his voice, and there was a calm matter-of-factness that was almost as frightening.

"Well, I am sad to say you have disappointed me, Draco. It can't be from lack of talent - you are a Malfoy after all, your ineptitude this afternoon notwithstanding. Obviously you just aren't trying hard enough. I think this summer we'll have to rectify that laziness."

Draco didn't like the sound of that, not one little bit, but he knew better than to comment or protest the judgement.

"Yes, Father," he murmured.

Lucius ignored him and rang for a house-elf, saying nothing until it arrived.

"Take Master Draco to Halliwell." he ordered it. "You will attend him afterwards."

Draco was unprepared for the surge of panic and blurted out,

"Father! Please, I...I..." he trailed off at the raising of Lucius's eyebrow.

"You will accept your due punishment without complaint, like a Malfoy should. Now, I will see you the day after tomorrow." Clearly dismissing his son from both his presence and his mind, Lucius opened a blue folder in front of him and began to read.

As he turned to leave the office after the house-elf, for the first time in his life the traitorous thought registered in Draco's mind that whilst he was supposed to accept his punishment without complaint, his father always managed to wriggle out from under any punishments he was justly due.

* * * *

The rest of the summer hadn't been much better.

By the time he returned to Hogwarts for his fifth year, he had spent more private time in his father's company in the two months past than he had in the rest of his fourteen plus years. In addition, he knew how to cast most of the common hexes, several uncommon and incrementally unpleasant hexes, and a couple of rare and extremely nasty Dark Magic hexes. He also knew what each and every one of them felt like. In painful detail.

He furthermore knew Voldemort had definitely returned in person.

The clues to that deduction were not so hard to put together - the not-so-secret secret meetings, his father's frequent mentions of "when the Dark Lord has power", the swaggering manner and barely-veiled gloating of the visitors to the Manor, the increasingly erratic and disturbing behaviour of some of said visitors...

He couldn't talk to his mother about it - her cool and usually indifferent presence had been completely absent that summer. Visiting relatives in France was the reason he was given. It could have been completely false, completely true, or one of a hundred different variations on the truth. He did wonder though if it had been a conscious or voluntary desertion. But in the end the reasons didn't matter - she wasn't there.

He didn't want to mention the situation to his father - not only was he embarrassed and didn't want to do anything to make himself look weak in his father's eyes, but Lucius had been...sharper, and less paternal, of late. There was a little part of him that whispered maybe his father had always been this way, maybe he just hadn't seen enough of him to realise it, maybe he'd been too blinded by hero-worship to notice it, but he mostly ignored that voice.

He realised it would be stupid to go carrying tales to his father on account of what would be passed off as a few misunderstood words and some overly bluff friendliness. He didn't try to convince himself that was what it was however. Draco was, after all, a Slytherin par excellence, and thinking the best of someone was an idiotic Gryffindor fallacy. He knew there had been nothing innocent in either the words or the touches. Draco comforted himself with the thought that arrogant though they were, none of his father's friends would dare do anything to Lucius Malfoy's son.

Nonetheless he carried his wand with him everywhere, within easy reach. He also kept to the back hallways and secret passages of the Manor, using the main corridors only when absolutely unavoidable.

Accustomed to a lifestyle of casual supervision, erratic chastisement, and bouts of sporadic, if distant, spoiling by his parents, the shifts in his treatment and worldview sat ill with Draco. Cracks were appearing in the perfect icon of his father, and though he knew Lucius only insisted on this sudden strict discipline for Draco's own good, once the initial thrill of having his father's undivided attention had passed, it was hard not to resent and dread Lucius when his lessons caused Draco pain, day after day. Added to this the feeling of being a hunted animal within his own home, and the summer became an endurance course. Eventually, the harassment and distress became entwined inextricably in his mind with the reappearance of Voldemort. By the end of the holidays, glorious New World to come or not, he sincerely wished the Dark Lord had never come back from the dead.

He also knew whose fault it was that Voldemort had returned.

Draco hadn't thought it possible for him to hate Harry Potter any more than he already did. It seemed he'd been wrong. Draco noted it down as yet another item on his list of 'Unmentionable Things I Learnt This Summer'. And made another mental note to make sure this coming term The Boy That Lived regretted that he'd done so.

* * * *

Unfortunately for Draco, in retrospect, that had been the least unpleasant of every subsequent holiday that had led up to this - his final year at Hogwarts.