The Malfoy Project

𝟓𝟑 - 𝐓𝐨 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭

18+ content

✼¹

     "I swore to myself I would never stand up for people like them ever again."

     My cheeks are damp by the time Draco finishes speaking.

     "I thought you didn't like crying," he tries to joke, but I can't find it in me to laugh. My mouth is pressed into a thin line to keep from sobbing out loud.

     "Say something," he pleads.

     "You were twelve," I finally manage through hitching breaths.

     "You asked for a reason."

     "I didn't think— Draco, you were only twelve."

     "I'm sure Potter's had it worse, in other ways. And Hermione."

     "Why didn't you tell anyone?" 

     "Ainsley," he begins patiently, "in families like mine, it is taught from a very young age that 'ordinary' Wizarding folk are feckless, dim-witted people who have neither the smarts nor the resources to do a damn thing about anything. Why seek help from 'outsiders' when it is a select few who hold the power and money to actually do something?"  

     I want to reach him, hold his head against my neck, but he is stiff with the shame that still oozed from his story. I can already see the headline flash before my eyes — MAGNIFICENT MALFOY HEIR BEATEN TO BLOODY PULP BY SADISTIC FATHER — and finally understand why he never wanted to tell me any of it. The Prophet would have a field trip with this story.

     "Is that— is that why you don't want to... be here?" I ask hesitantly.

     "It was the first time I thought about it," he admits. "It was the first time I felt it. That ball of knives in my throat, it just kept... sinking lower and lower. It never quite went away."

     "And you think Lucius deserves to die for it?"

     He gets up from the bed and stares at the snowfall through the window. "I'm saying I don't care if he does."

     Perhaps I cannot understand because my own parents had been extraordinarily kind, loving people, and they had been taken by a force I could neither see nor stop, leaving a void within me that can never be filled. I sighed. "He's still your father, Draco."

     "Don't call him that. He's not my father."

     "I know he's done horrible things, but, I don't know, he seems regretful of that now. And he's not particularly inclined to share his true feelings. Maybe he really does feel sorry. You know how fathers are sometimes..."

     I see his jaw clench as he spins to face me. "I said he's not my father." His fingers fly to the buttons of his shirt, flicking them open one by one to reveal a widening triangle of bare chest.

     "I know, but—"

     He whips the shirt off, flings it to the ground. "Do fathers do this?"

     The twirling snowflakes cast fluttering grey shadows over his back, and at first, I couldn't be sure what I'm looking at. Then the breath dies in my throat.

     It is skin — or what is meant to be. The flesh on his back is leathery and gnarled, notched with scars from his shoulder blades to his tailbone.

     They aren't thin, pretty lines that zig-zag like pink lashes of lightning. No, these are hideous scars: a patchwork of pitted skin that had been torn apart and healed and torn apart and healed over again. The indentations run deep as water troughs, pebbled like a riverbed and cragged as a mountainside. I can see the curved recesses where the poker had embedded itself, the sunken depressions moulded by something blunter, like the head of a silver snake.