Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Dead like a Phoenix	By : OrangeMira Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3136 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I own no part of the Harry Potter Franchise and I have made no money from this story

Chapter List
- 1-Dead like a Phoenix
- 2-2
- 3-3
- 4-4
- 5-5
- 6-6
- 2
- 3
- 4
“I dream’d a dream tonight.

And so did I.

Well, what was yours?

That dreamers often lie.”

Romeo and Juliet:I:VI: 52-55

Draco Malfoy never consciously chose to be alone. Like everything else in his life, he sort of fell into it.

He knew he needed a job, his mother had left him exactly nothing after her suicide, so he had put an ad in a few select papers unobtrusively advertising his brewing skills. Then, he’d gone to his father’s laboratory to take stock of the ingredients that the ministry had deemed ‘safe’ upon their initial search of the manor nearly two months prior.

He began to alphabetize the lower shelf, it was busy work but perhaps that was what he needed. The upper shelf held more of challenge.

Draco took a deep breath and reached for a vial of distilled Wolf’s Bane. No matter how hard he pushed, how many tears escaped his eyes and how tall he stood on his tip toes, he could not grab it.

The sad thing was, the vial rested just two, maybe three inches above his forehead. Personally, he was glad he could still brush his hair, even if it was a bit of a struggle.

He strained for a second more, and in a fit of frustrated rage, grabbed a bottle labelled Essence of Cat Milk and whipping it at the floor. It was a pitiful effort; the glass seemed to shatter without any real feeling, as if an ounce less force would have failed to even crack it. A low sob crawled up his throat and burst forth a coughing mess. With an annoyed wand flick he banished the ruined ingredient.

Taking a slow, deep breath Draco calmed himself as best he could, and cast a wordless levitation spell, slowly and carefully lowered the vial onto the table.

It took hours, and every drop of his miniscule patience. He took breaks, put his fist through the wall more than once and nearly ripped out every hair on his head, but eventually it was finished. He had never done anything like it, never done anything that required so much concentration, so much time, and had such a tiny reward.

His first order came later that week. It took him two tries to get the potion right. Not because it was difficult, but because he was having major problems training his muscles to stir again. He wasn’t so fast when it came to adding ingredients, and he found his eyesight was somewhat worse than it had been in school, so it was difficult to read the old book.

Fearful of his body’s rebellion, Draco did research in his family library and discovered a method of stretching called yoga. He was awful at it, and couldn’t do most of the positions, but he could feel his muscles beginning to loosen.

Draco Malfoy could stir a caldron properly after two months, though second shelf would elude him for the rest of his life.

Once his body had been taken care of, Draco’s thoughts turned invariably to his past, to who he once was:

He was Draco fuckingMalfoy. He was the top of his class, the ruthless death eater, the god among insects. He was rich, his blood pure, his future was a path set before him, all he had to do was walk it. His demeanour was calm, his mind was cruel and his tongue cutting. He was quick with his wand and good with his cock.

And then, one day, some infinite time after the battle of Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy looked in the mirror. And a sad, corpse skinned thing looked back at him. It had blond hair like him, but it was knotted and long. There were grey eyes in its face but they looked starved and the black pillows underneath frightened him. And there was crater under its chin, blood on its lips and scars all over its body.

And it was him, it was him because he waved and the thing waved back like some sort of terrible puppet.

He wasn’t going back to Hogwarts, they had strict policy no Death Eater policy. The mark on his arm was no longer one of pride, but of shame and remembered terror that labelled him a social pariah. His fortune was decimated, half of his property had been seized by the ministry, and he had no future. He couldn’t even get hard anymore or manage a single snide retort. And his blood, that had been his greatest pride, may as well be as dirty as Grangers with werewolf venom running through it.

In that moment Draco Malfoy broke. It was a slow fade of memory boiling to the surface, repressed images of torture, of hands clenching, bound above his head, of blood staining starched sheets and whispers of Cruciolike a lover’s endearments. He sat on the floor, looking into the mirror with tiny gusts of sound escaping his lips, every now and then.

When he was younger, Draco could separate his mind into planes. There was the subconscious, and of course his conscious. In his subconscious, he squirreled away his pain, his fear and all the negative experiences he could manage to cram in. His conscience mind he filled with pride, cunning and cruelty enough to keep the other things from seeping through the cracks in his mental barriers.

There was a third plane also, but it only presented its self when Draco was a young boy and his father came to visit him at night. It had become harder and harder for Draco to find as he grew older and Lucius grew bolder.

But Draco Malfoy was broken and he was forced to examine those memories which had blocked out, and the feelings he tried to erase. It made him sick, and every time he even thought the word ferret he stopped breathing.

In this time, a period that lasted around three months, he didn’t come to terms with the abuse he’d suffered, and the abuse he’d given in return, but confronted it. For the first time since he was a tiny child, Draco allowed himself to feel emotions other than anger and contempt. It wasn’t easy; it was harder than levitating the potions, or fixing the vanishing cabinet, harder even then staying sane in the POW Camp.

He did go a little crazy then; spending hours a day writing, desperate to get it out. Some days he wanted to stop and put the cap back on the bottle, to forget all that he had remembered, but he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know if that meant he was getting weaker or stronger.

He never considered suicide, though sometimes he did cut himself. Small cuts though, most barely breaking the skin.

Slowly his experiences became part of him, and he felt as if, for the first time, he knew himself. He was no longer full of false confidence but allowed his emotions to present honestly, then analyzed them. He didn’t like what he saw.

Draco Malfoy, in short, became a new person. Or perhaps, more accurately, the person that had long ago hidden himself in the depths of Draco Malfoy’s mind finally managed to escape.

“Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”

- Dorothy Thompson
- 2
- 3
- 4
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Dead like a Phoenix