Echoes of Hogwarts
The memories of Hogwarts lulled Draco in the most inopportune moments, slipping through the shadows of his mind like stubborn ghosts who refused to die. No matter how hard he tried to bury them under layers of logic and discipline; they always found a way to emerge, enveloping him in a fog of sensations too vivid to be simple fragments of the past.
Sometimes, when he was in his laboratory, with the echo of Orion laughing in some corner of the room, he saw them with an almost painful clarity: the nights in the Slytherin Common Room, when the fire of the fireplace cast elongated shadows on the stone walls and they remained awake until late, exchanging biting comments about their companions or immersed in a shared silence that never felt uncomfortable. They were moments stolen from a destination that did not belong to them, a gash of normality in the middle of a world that was falling apart around them.
Other times, when Orion touched him without realizing it - a barely noticeable touch on the wrist, the fleeting pressure of a hand on his shoulder - the past filtered like a slow poison in his bloodstream. Then he felt the icy air of the Astronomy Tower again, the weight of the night rain on his skin, the involuntary shudder when those fingers intertwined with his for the first time. It had been a simple gesture, but with the intensity of a curse: an ephemeral friction that was still burning, like a fire that was never completely extinguished.
The rain hit the windows with a monotonous insistence. Draco watched the drops slide through the glass, feeling a vague dizziness as he followed his journey. There was something hypnotic about the way the water distorted the reflection of the outside world, in how it turned the landscape into a series of blurred shapes without defined contours. Then, he felt the weight of a memory settle on his chest.
It was that peculiar feeling that sometimes invaded him, as if his mind decided to open doors without his permission, dragging him to places he thought he had left behind. And this time, it was the fragmented reflection of the moon in the water that brought him back.
Back to a night when the world seemed too big and Hogwarts, too small. The autumn cold bit the skin, but Orion didn't seem to notice it. He was sitting with one leg bent and the other stretched out on the wet grass, the cigarette lit between his fingers. Every time he brought him closer to his lips, the embers fleetingly illuminated his features, highlighting the sharp angles of his face, the curve of his eyebrow, the shadow that fell on his jaw.
Draco, on the other hand, kept his arms crossed over his chest, hiding his hands between the sleeves of his robe. He didn't like the cold, but that particular night, he had followed him without questioning him, without even asking him why he had taken him out of the common room and guided him there.
Orion never gave explanations.
And Draco never asked him for them.
The silence between them was prolonged, accompanied only by the occasional crunch of the fire consuming tobacco and the sound of the lake stirring with the night breeze.
"Have you ever thought about escaping?"
The question floated in the air like smoke between them. Orion did not look away from the horizon, his voice carefree, almost lazy. But Draco knew him well enough to know that that indifference was a choice. A shield, sharper than any blade.
Draco didn't answer right away. He looked at the water, observing the fragmented reflection of the moon on the surface.
"I can't," he said at the end, with the firmness of someone who has repeated the same lie too many times.
Orion turned his head slowly towards him, with an inscrutable expression.
"That doesn't answer my question."
Draco closed his eyes for a moment. Something in Orion's tone, in the way he had formulated the phrase, slid under his skin like an invisible needle.
And then, for some reason he couldn't fully understand, he decided to be honest.
"Yes."
The word felt heavy on his tongue, as if saying it gave real weight to something he had always tried to ignore.
Orion did not react immediately. He only watched him with that calculating look of his, as if he was trying to decipher how much it had cost him to admit it. Then, he looked away and took another puff of his cigarette.
"If you ever decide to do it, let me know," he murmured.
Draco frowned.
"Why?"
Orion smiled, but without joy.
"Because no one escapes alone."
The wind took away the smoke and words just as easily, but Draco felt that they both clung to his skin.
The conversation was suspended in the air. Orion leaned back, leaning on his elbows, his brow relaxed, as if he was no longer thinking about anything in particular. But Draco knew that his mind never rested completely.
"People always think that the outside world is bigger than Hogwarts," he said suddenly, looking at the sky.
Draco looked at him sideways.
"And isn't it?"
Orion tilted his head, exhaling the smoke calmly.
"What do you think?" Look at our parents, our teachers... even the Death Eaters. They act as if they were free, but they are chained to something. To a surname, to an ideology, to a war that began before they were born. They can't get out of that circle. They just keep moving inside him.
Draco felt a knot in his stomach.
"So, according to you, escaping is not possible."
Orion turned his head towards him, his gaze fixed.
"Not if you keep playing with their rules."
Draco looked away.
"You talk as if you had the answer."
Orion let out a low laugh.
"I don't have it." But I know that if I stay still, they will devour me.
There was something in the way he said it, in the tension of his jaw, that made Draco watch him more carefully.
"Who?"
Orion looked away, as if the answer was somewhere on the lake.
"All of them."
For the first time, Draco wondered how long he had been feeling this way.
How long he had been trapped in a labyrinth with no way out.
Orion caught the cigarette in the air and brought it to his lips, giving it a slow puff. He exhaled the smoke lazily, watching how it dissipated in the cold air. Draco didn't know what worried him more: if the idea that escaping was not possible or the certainty that, somehow, Orion had already tried.
"Here."
Draco looked at him with a frown, but accepted him without protesting. He didn't take it to his lips, he just held it between his fingers, feeling the heat of the embers in his bare hand.
Orion watched him silently while Draco turned the cigarette between his fingers, seeing how the ash came off in small fragments on the wet grass.
"I don't smoke," he murmured, almost to himself.
Orion barely smiled, without surprise.
"I know."
Draco held his gaze for a moment before looking away towards the lake.
Orion watched him out of the corner of his eye, his expression was indecipherable, but his voice sounded more relaxed when he spoke.
"You still have nightmares."
The blond felt a chill run down his back. It didn't bother him so much that he knew. He was uncomfortable with the way he said it, with that carefree calm, as if he was talking about something obvious.
"It doesn't matter.
Orion let out a sigh.
"Anyway, it wasn't a question.
Draco pursed his lips, but didn't argue.
Silence settled between them again. Orion ran a hand through his hair, letting it fall behind his head, looking at the stars with a gesture that, for a moment, made him look much older than he was.
"The worst thing is not nightmares," he murmured. It's when you realize that you don't even need to be asleep to be sthated.
Draco didn't answer, but his fingers closed a little more around the cigarette.
Orion noticed it. He didn't say anything.
"I'm not going to tell you that they disappear, because it would be a lie."
Draco turned his head towards him with a frown, but Orion only shrugged.
"But it's easier when you know someone else is awake."
The cold wind crept between them, dragging with it a heavy silence. Draco looked down, as if looking for something in the ash that slowly fell between his fingers.
Orion took the cigarette from his hands with the same naturalness with which he had offered it to him. His fingers brushed his, just an instant, and in that fleeting contact, the scar on Orion's left hand throbbed like a parasite under the skin. Draco couldn't help but catch his wrist, examining the mark that snaked from the thumb to the forearm: it was not a simple line, but a seam of twisted flesh, as if someone had sewn his skin with molten steel wire.
"How did I not see this before?" Draco whispered, his fingers trembling on the rough texture.
Orion tried to withdraw, but Draco immobilized him with a pressure that betrayed his growing horror.
"It's not what you think," Orion lied, but the glow of sweat on his forehead betrayed him.
"It's a Sigillum Endurae," Draco stroked the scar, recognizing the symbols engraved in the flesh. A seal of purification.
Orion laughed, a hollow sound that resounded like a crow croaking in a crypt.
"My father called it education." At the age of twelve, he dragged me to the catacombs under the Graves mansion. There, where the air smells of rotten earth and the portraits of my ancestors whisper curses in Latin, he subjected me to the Ritual of Endura. "His voice broke, but not because of the memory, but because of the rage." Three days. Three nights. Chained to an obsidian altar, with a bone dagger in his right hand and an order: Purify yourself or die as a heretic.
Draco felt the breath freeze in his lungs.
"Purify yourself of what?"
"Of weakness." Of humanity," Orion spat, his eyes shining like burning coals. The first day, hunger. The second, thirst. But the third... -He took his hand to the scar, sticking his nails until it bled-. The third, the ritual required me to cut my own flesh, piece by piece, and offer it to family spirits.
A drop of blood flowed from the scar, black and thick. Draco stepped back, but Orion forced him to keep close.
"Do you know what it feels like when the sheets of your skin come off like old parchment?" Orion whispered, approaching until his breath, cold as marble from a tomb, brushed Draco's face. You hear the dead clapping. My father was there, standing in the shadows, encouraging them. Deeper," he said, "a Graves doesn't cry, we bleed.
Draco saw the scene with brutal clarity: a child Orion, naked and trembling, tearing strips of meat before the ghosts of his lineage. The bone dagger, carved with runes that absorbed every moan. The blood running down the altar, drawing an infernal circle that shone with greenish light. And above all, the echo of the screams of generations of Graves repeating *"worthy, worthy, worthy"* like a requiem song.
"Why didn't you stop?" Draco asked, his voice broken by a visceral nausea.
Orion let go of Draco’s wrist, revealing the now suppurating scar.
"Because when the pain reached its zenith, I saw the truth," he said, and for the first time, his tone was triumphal. The spirits didn't want my blood. They wanted fear. And I... stopped giving it to them. -He clenched his fist until the scar exploded in a fleshy smile-. I slid the dagger between my ribs and threatened to slice the heart that no Graves had managed to break. The dead were silent. My father howled. And this mark... -he stroked the scar with perverse devotion- is the signature of my freedom.
The wind blew, dragging the smell of copper and saltpeter. Orion took the cigarette from Draco's hands, extinguishing it against his own scar with a hiss of burnt flesh.
It was then that, in the midst of that confession of horror and liberation, Draco felt something that overflowed his usual indifference: a deep concern that moved him to the deepest.
With a gesture as sudden as it was sincere, Draco leaving aside his cold appearance, he leaned towards Orion. His gaze, normally distant, softened in a mixture of tenderness and determination. With the delicacy of those who pray to redeem ancient sins, he extended his hand towards the suppurating scar.
"You shouldn't always carry that pain, Orion," he murmured, almost as if his words were a spell to fade the shadows. Let me help you heal, and we can run away together
With a subtle smile that bordered on ironic humor - as if the irony of fate allowed him to dare to challenge the brutality of the past - Draco looked in his robe for a small bottle. Inside, a healing ointment, which seemed to shine faintly in the dim light.
With almost ritual precision, he applied the ointment on the wound, gently cleaning the dark blood and caressing the scar with gestures full of compassion.
"Sometimes, the only way to scare away the ghosts is to heal the wounds they have left, and escape without looking back," he commented without humor. I can't let that pain consume you, Orion.
- You should leave that house you are a prisoner of - Draco concluded with a voice that looked more like a sigh than a firm speech, whose sound ended up diluting between the breeze of the black lake, while he continued with his healing tasks.
The ointment seemed to respond to Draco's touch, transforming the wound into a less threatening scar, as if, little by little, the wound began to whisper the promise of a different future. Between the rain, the murmur of the lake and the flicker of the stars, the brutality of the past was attenuated in the warmth of a genuine gesture.
They didn't say anything else.
But when they returned to the common room, Draco realized that, for the first time in a long time, the weight in his chest did not feel so unbearable.
Draco blinked.
The drops kept sliding down the glass, but the distorted image of the rain no longer seemed the same. The room had a heavy atmosphere, as if the air itself was soaked in memories too dense to dissipate easily.
"You can't escape what's chasing you, Draco."
The echo of Orion's voice made him tense.
At first, he didn't know if he had spoken loudly or if it was just a vestige of his memory, but when he looked up, he found him there, standing, with an inscrutable expression. His figure was cut against the dead light of the lamp, his hair falling on his forehead in a careless way, the shadows accentuating the hardness of his features.
Draco forced himself to keep his back straight, stiff. I wouldn't give him the pleasure of seeing him affected.
Orion tilted his head slightly, studying him. His look had not changed over the years: he still had that suffocating intensity, that way of dissecting people as if he could see through their skin, through their bones, until he reached the bottom of what they were trying to hide.
"So what do I do?" Draco murmured.
Orion sighed. He ran a hand through his hair before falling into the armchair in front of him.
"Start by accepting that there are things you can't bury."
Draco looked down at his own hands.
To the naked eye, his skin was intact. Pale, cold to the touch, with the same lines as always. But when he blinked, the image changed.
The sleeves of his coat were rained and stained. His arms, covered with open wounds, trembled at the contact with the air. The blackened veins stretched like rotten roots under his skin, beating with an erratic rhythm.
Draco gasped, looking away immediately. No. It wasn't real. It couldn't be real.
He closed his hands into fists, feeling the texture of his skin intact. He forced himself to breathe, to calm down, but then a metallic smell leaked through his nose.
Blood.
A tremor ran through his body. He looked again.
The burns on his arms seemed recent, with the flesh red and still smoking, as if he had been trapped in a fire impossible to extinguish. The wounds opened more with each beat of his heart, the skin giving way under an invisible pressure.
Draco staggered.
Orion noticed it.
Without saying anything, he stood up and walked to the laboratory table on one side where there were a series of kitchen utensils. The sound of water running in the coffee maker filled the room, an everyday noise that contrasted with the invisible tension that had been installed between them.
"It won't fix anything," he said, returning with two cups in his hands, "but it helps.
Draco took it without protesting.
Orion sat on the edge of the table, holding his own cup with both hands. Unlike Draco, he didn't seem affected by the memories, although his gaze had a different shadow, something difficult to decipher.
The silence spread between them, only interrupted by the rain hitting the windows.
"Do you still have nightmares?" Orion asked suddenly.
Draco swallowed the coffee without answering immediately. The heat spread down his throat, but he couldn't dissip the knot in his chest.
"Sometimes."
Orion looked at him over the edge of his cup.
—You lie.
Draco pursed his lips.
"And what does it matter?" It's not like you don't have them either.
Orion smiled, but it was an empty smile, without a trace of mockery or satisfaction.
"You're right."
The tone of his voice was too calm. Draco knew him well enough to know that meant he didn't want to talk about it.
But then, Orion put the cup aside and rolled up his shirt sleeves with a leisurely movement.
Draco was not surprised to see the scar on his forearm.
He knew them.
He himself had wrapped them with ointment years ago, pressing awkwardly to stop the bleeding. It had been part of a seal of his lineage, a mark that was not only worn on the skin, but on the blood. Draco had never said it out loud, but the idea that Orion had had to go through that infuriated him on a visceral level.
Orion didn't give him a chance to talk.
"Do you remember what you told me that time?"
Draco held his gaze.
"I told you to get out of that house."
"And I did it."
Orion flexed his fingers before covering his arm again.
"But I didn't run away."
Draco frowned.
Orion exhaled and rested his elbows on his knees.
"You've always wanted to bury what you were, Draco." His voice was low, without judgment, but with a sharp edge. You want to uproot it and pretend it never existed. That you were never who you were.
Draco felt a lump in his throat.
Orion tilted his head, watching him.
"I don't."
The simplicity of his words hit him harder than any spell.
"So what did you do?"
Orion smiled, but this time there was something real in his expression.
"I took every part of myself." Every scar, every lesson, every shitty decision that brought me here... and I made them mine.
The rain kept falling.
"I'm not my family, Draco." But I'm not just the one who survived them either.
Draco felt a chill run down his back.
Orion looked at him, expectant, as if waiting for him to say it out loud. As if he challenged him.
Draco held his stiff posture. He wouldn't give in first.
The silence thickened.
Orion took a sip of coffee, as if what he had just said was not something that would change the way Draco saw him. As if he hadn't finished disassembling everything he had believed about redemption.
Draco looked away from Orion's scar, trying to dispe the restlessness that was tangled in his chest. Something in that story disturbed him, but not because of the horror or brutality, but because of the way Orion narrated it: without drama, without bitterness. Like someone who has looked into the abyss and has decided that, at the end of the day, he deserves no more reverence than any other shadow.
Orion leaned towards his jacket, sliding his fingers familiarly over a small leather case. He opened it calmly, revealing a deck of cards with worn edges and aroma of ash.
Draco narrowed his eyes.
"Don't tell me you believe in that garbage."
Orion sketched a Ladin smile.
"How long have you been so skeptical?"
Draco snorted, crossing his arms.
"Since I spent two years listening to a crazy old woman predicting my death at the bottom of a cup of tea.
The memory slipped between them, a blurred image, the Divination room, the thick air with incense, the heavy curtains that barely let the light through. The teacher's voice echoed, guessing gloomy futures with each turn of her hand.
Orion let out a brief laugh.
"I had forgotten." You're right, that woman had no idea. But... you know that not everything in Divination was pure chance.
Draco looked at him puzzled.
"What do you mean?"
"I became quite good at that "science" when I became an aurora. I needed something more than pure magic to read people, anticipate their movements, and know what they didn't say out loud. The letters, the stars, the symbols... are just a way of seeing what is hidden with the naked eye.
Draco frowned.
"So you do believe in all that."
"I don't think so, I read it” -Orion shuffled the cards with skill, the playing cards sliding between his fingers fluently. The movements were precise, as if each card had its own destiny, a destination that he could control. The same ability he had acquired under the pressure of his work, which required him to foresee what was to come. It's just a form of conversation, Malfoy. You ask, the letters answer.
Draco didn't answer, but he didn't turn away when Orion pulled three cards from the deck and placed them face down between them. The air felt a little denser, as if, somehow, the shadows of their own past began to squirm silently around them.
"Present, past and what you still don't understand," Orion murmured before turning over the first card.
The Tower.
Draco felt the weight of the image even before Orion spoke. Lightning breaking a tower in two, fire devouring its foundations, figures falling into the void.
—Destruction. Fall of what you thought unwavering," Orion said, without the need to add more.
Draco kept his face impassive, but his hand closed into a fist on his knee.
Orion turned the second letter.
The Eight of Swords.
A bandaged figure, surrounded by swords stuck in the ground.
"Self-imposed prison," Orion murmured. They made you believe that you had no escape, but the cage was in your mind.
Draco felt his stomach shrink, but he forced himself not to look away.
"It's nothing I don't know.
Orion slid his fingers over the last card before turning it over.
The Devil.
The air seemed to thicken. A chained figure, eyes shining like embers, a laugh that resounded somewhere that neither of them could see.
Draco felt a chill run down his back.
"Are you going to tell me that I'm cursed?"
Orion didn't smile this time.
"No." But something has you trapped. And it's not just the past.
Draco felt a knot tighten in his throat.
"That's enough."
Orion didn't even blink.
"Why?" Why don't you like what you see?
Draco slapped the cards away.
"Because this is stupid."
Orion watched him, patience slipping from his face.
"No." What's stupid is pretending that this doesn't eat you inside.
Draco stood up suddenly.
"I don't need you to psychoanalyse me with illustrated paper."
Orion got up just as quickly, an icy glow in his eyes.
"And I don't need you to run away every time someone confronts you with the truth."
Draco felt his anger overflow.
"I don't need help."
Orion stepped forward.
"Say it again." But look me in the eyes when you do it.
Draco opened his mouth to answer, but something changed.
The air became heavy, as if a shadow had slipped between them. The skin on his finger began to burn with an unnatural heat, the hernias that he knew were not real began to open and burn as if something was fitting knives in his hands.
Draco felt the room tilt under his feet.
Orion frowned.
"Draco..."
But Draco didn't listen to him.
Because in the reflection of the mirror behind Orion, his face was not his.
Sunken eyes, withered skin, lips half-open in a whisper that produced no sound.
The room flickered, distorting into liquid shadows.
Draco felt the cold climb down his spine, slow and calculated, like fingers wrapping his throat.
And then, the whisper.
Not from his mind.
Not from Orion.
Something else.
Something that had always been there.
Waiting.