The Veiled Boy

The second ribcage, laced tightly, stealing his breath, was removed. Draco had to learn to breathe unburdened, so he mimicked the rise and fall of Harry’s chest. If individuals can be estimated in worth, such is, consequently, intersubjective. Draco, upon Harry's kisses, adorned that fraction that could convey his hold of high esteem. Though he still suffered, triumph numbed it for this quiet moment and allowed him to lie unfettered beside his Harry, now unveiled in the chiaroscuro living space. The hush fell over as the family retreated, the airs and colors mimicking with great irony the night of the argument that nearly tore them out of each other’s hands. His heavy head rested on Harry’s chest; comfort showed him a niche of private pleasures, which was difficult to admit when he ventured on dangerous ground. And he smiled when Harry’s hands found themselves again in his hair.

“Must you always touch my hair? I’ve washed it and brushed it; I haven’t a clue where your hands have been.”

“On you,” came his reply. “Only on you.”

Draco blushed; he attempted to hide how flattery affected him easily, but these contradictions slipped into nothingness, for Harry was always watching him. “Harry,” he whispered.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing, I just wished to hear your name in the air.”

Harry laughed. “You’re mad.”

“You spy out every weakness of mine… They’re all yours.”

He lifted himself from Harry’s chest and pressed his open mouth onto Harry’s, determined to be won. The hands, choreographed by the sensations previously dressed as sin, moved to his waist; Harry pulled their bodies to create one masterful form. There it is! The inconsequential love frightened men condemn for its audacity! Draco basked in the unsterile, unsanctioned; his guilt leaving in the wet sound of kisses, moans, and breathy sighs. Fly away into the hearth; heat is now felt against his bare shoulder; it echoes somewhere but not above them.

Ah, his limbs, now pagan, trembling in anticipation; arousal climbing the incline now without obstruction. Draco pressed himself rhythmically against Harry, ignoring Harry’s reminder to be silent. Their island was remote; Draco’s clumsy hand indulged against the clothed swell of Harry’s lust. Draco lost himself fiercely.

“Draco,” groaned Harry. With a swift turn, Draco found himself completely at his mercy; Harry pressed his face into the warmth of his clavicle, whispering incoherent affections. Fruitful in spirit, the passionate thrusts and friction of the thin clothes between drove them both closer without bounds.

The entire sensation concluded with a cry. Draco bit down on his lip, holding onto Harry’s panting body with a strength only possible for lovers. He was shivering upon completion, the weight of Harry enchanting.

“You okay?” Harry whispered. Draco nodded; he’d momentarily forgotten how to piece together his words. “I hope I didn’t go too far… I know you’re still wary about—“

“I started it; it’s fine,” Draco interrupted. “Just lay here with me. Don’t talk about it.”

“Okay.” Harry kissed him gently on the forehead before squeezing beside him, taking Draco’s shuddering body into his arms.

Draco stared at the fire crackling before him, the embers popping high before extinguishing themselves somewhere. It now lay, that charred piece, somewhere with the others, its brilliance fleeting and unfairly premature in its end. He recalled a verse suddenly, one taught in exchange for understanding of bizarre certitudes. It was sickness, all of this, because it could not produce a lineage. It’s unnatural. Did not my barren mother marry my father? How does such a romance, as fruitless as mine, gain the respect of them all? Why is their lowly respect something I still dare to silently crave? I may be adored still, for in the sense of my virginity, I am pure.

Anguish rang through the empty halls of the manor in ways of strident wails, with every break a strange silence, any interruption perilous. Each abrupt pause, each trembling interval of quietude, swelled with a sinister weight, as though the smallest interruption would shatter the fragile thread that held everything in place and dissolve all beyond reckoning. The Lord—without his beloved Draco—was a man teetering at the brink of complete madness, his mind a dizzying maelstrom. His followers watched in horrified silence as he moved through the manor’s dim-lit corridors, his bare skull clutched tightly in his hands, as though it might escape him if he momentarily loosened his grip. He shrieked, moaned, and screamed with ever-increasing vigor, each second of his life now purgatory without Draco.

It was clear to all who looked upon him that the Dark Lord had become a grotesque parody of his former self. He was gaunt, skeletal, his eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights spent tormented by odd visions and dread of defeat. His body, once a figure of menacing power, now trembled under the weight of torturous paranoia. The decadence of his existence was now laid bare for all to witness. And yet, despite his plunge, when he stood before the council, his rage poured forth like a mighty flood.

With each word he uttered, he summoned yet more disquiet, each sentence a rebellious murmur against the natural order; God forbid he, of all people, suffer. Thus, pacing the room with the mechanical precision of a creature of withered ego, Tom Riddle.

They’d gathered in the room of council, adorned with the many treasures of the proud Malfoy lineage; they held no object of greater significance than the portrait that now graced the wall. There, captured in linseed oil, hung the image of the Heir, forever frozen at the delicate age of fifteen, just before his departure to Hogwarts, embodying in every line of his face a kind of radiant, untouched virtue. The perfection of youth, the promise of greatness. But Severus, whose sharp eye caught the subtle details that others overlooked, saw a truth beneath the painted surface—in the boy's eyes, a lurking, incurable loneliness. Originally, it was hung in Lucius's study, a proud testament to familial grandeur, side by side with the portrait of his wife. But the Dark Lord, in a moment of whimsy, had ordered it moved—positioned now above the grand marble mantle, where it could be admired by the entire council, and more vitally, by him. It had thus become an object of a strange, almost perverse reverence; a spectacle to stare at in moments of introspection, an image to both comfort and enrage the Lord in equal measure. That innocent portrait had mutated into an object of obsession, a cruel reminder of a losing war and twisted yearning.

Riddle, his gaze still hooked to the portrait, finally wrenched his eyes away. It was a red-faced, bulbous mask of rage, a grotesque contortion, the veins in his neck and temples protruding, fit to burst. The silence reigned, pregnant with the Lord’s word. The eyes of grown men everted in a dance of cowardice, their backs hunched in servile submission. Severus, from his quiet vantage, thought them in the perfect likeness of frightened children, though none more pitiable, none more contemptible, than the orator—the one whose every syllable seemed to gnaw at the air with the same anxious fury of a man contending against fate.

"All of you uphold the unavailing return of the Heir with your sheer incompetence!" The Lord spat at “tence.”

The man opposite Riddle, with exhalation, dabbed his cheek where Riddle’s venom had fallen.

"Pardon me, sir," the Lord hissed. "Have I spit in your face?"

"Please do not fret, sir; I meant no offense."

"No, no, let me get it for you." With a jagged knife, he drove it into his throat and with a swift jerk removed Macnair’s head completely. Spurts of blood jet out of the stump of his neck in thick crimson cords. “There!”

"Ah, so as I am without my son, I am now also without my stately Persian rug," observed Lucius outwardly, earning a look of vexation from the Dark Lord but nothing more.

"What restrains the blow of my dagger against you all if you prove so fruitless in your search of the Heir. Two days without leads, two days more without our Draco Malfoy, and two days more of vulnerability and weakness! Have you all adopted airs of opposition? I would be rid of you at once! Every day that I do not have that boy at my side (now pointing at the portrait) is another sentence against every single one of you wretches! Your aversion to success is an indisputable suggestion of treachery! Mind your efforts, mind your life! From this day on, should another pass without my treasured Draco, it will cost you! And today it was the head of that senseless Macnair! Where is he?!"

No one dared to speak.

"Two months! Two months without him! Possess the assiduous celerity in your hunt against the enemy, but in the revival of our Draco, who bears that form so esteemed by Heaven, you return with nothing! Not even a strand of his hair, his white-blond hair, or lint from his clothes! Why?!"

"If I may," Severus began. "Evidence suggests he is abroad, a ware of the highest kind, under the custody of the other side. Orchestrated by Dumbledore, I dare say unless we find him, we shall never know where my son is. Let us abandon our hunt for him and turn our noses to the headmaster. No man, especially he who possessed the inordinate desire for status and the wealth of life, shall go unbending under Lucius’s command. We will know."

"And where is the headmaster?”

"He's fled as of this morning; that is what I wished to tell you," said Severus.

"Fled? Have you any idea where"? Lucius rose to his feet in a believable panic.

"No; there was a conflict of interest. We, as in the Order, sir, were told by a letter just this morning that he knew the whereabouts of Draco. I raided his office, but he'd disappeared completely. I suspect he'd become selfish due to clashes with the Order; he's fled the country with the Heir, of that I am certain."

The Lord let out a shriek and threw himself against the portrait, his hands clawing as if trying to pry flesh and blood from the confines of the gilded frame. “All of you get out! Except Severus.”

Lucius stood, his eyes momentarily meeting Severus’s as they began to rise from their seats. Macnair’s body and detached head were picked up by the pathetically obliging Pettigrew. The room was left deserted, and the professor stood behind the Lord; limpid were his torments against the unbearable pain he’d suffered. Misled he was by some odd notion of false hope, now shrouded with doubt; the Lord seemed unable to stay another second in this pre-Draconian order.

Once the last occupant left the room, the heavy doors fell shut like a god’s mallet on stone, and the Lord began to speak. "I see him in the flesh before me now.” He held his hands out in front of him to caress his disoriented phantasm. "I long to feel him solid, warm, and soft like the underbelly of the finest white rose with thorns of scythes red with the enemy. You cannot, though you've known him longer, comprehend this gnawing ache, this pathetic human terror. Has our glory, for me and Draco, slipped into some irretrievable void? I cannot accept it! Dull nothingness without my child, my forgotten dream! Bring him to me, and from my grip my child will never stray!"

"Your child, sir?" A sudden rush of revulsion threatened Severus’s thus reigning tolerance; nausea of such implication coagulated and strangled him; his inquisition departed hoarsely.

"Yes!" The Lord turned quickly to Severus, his eyes flashing with the frenzy of a madman. "For without my faculties for miracles, that barren concubine would have never been with child! His blood and flesh are not mine, but the intangible, the forbidden, the will of fate placed beautifully by me." The Lord adopted airs of fond reminiscing; he slipped past Severus to approach once again the portrait of Draco. "His father's hair woven from silver, eyes celestial wonders, grace and frame his mother's, but his worth is mine. Because of me, the world may shrivel at his touch, and the marrow of the bravest man may freeze! That night I played with fate; I tested the limits and bestowed upon us the most treacherous angel! Thank me, Severus! For now, you know"!

For a while Severus had turned this thought over and over in his head; his theories were baseless against the secrecy of the father and mother. And the truth now penetrated the tomb-like air and pressed against his bruised soul. Severus staggered to the divan, clutching with white knuckles its gilded arm. "You cursed him."

"Curse! Severe a tongue, Severus! No, I gave that small, delicate bird iron wings! I scorched the promise of a ludicrous invalid and brought forth an unrivaled necromancer in the likeness of myself! My very own mind to bend, will to charge!"

Severus’s stomach, that traitor, knotted in protest; every nerve recoiled from the mere sight of the abomination before him. It wasn’t just the Lord—it was the presence of the truth that gnawed at his sensibilities. "Don't you know that they believe that disease was an unintended byproduct of that favor you'd generously offered? How can you face the father knowing that the torment that rages and debilitates his innocent son was a calculated insertion?"

"Do you dare scold me, Severus, when you knew of it? You are a smart man, and yet you pretend to be acquitted!"

"No, I did not know, but my thoughts hovered above unwillingly. What ritual, sir? What curse did you give him?"

"Ah, see, this was not as calculated as you perhaps deem it to be; believe me less wicked when you learn that I had merely allowed entry of every wretched thing into the child, that I did not heed the warnings and instructions of the good Book. A counter-curse was never placed; if Draco was not exceptional, it would have killed him stone dead at scarce a year! But he is sixteen now and, as I had predicted, took charge of the most malevolent, foulest magic ever beheld; no soul has ever wielded it sooner than it slaughters. Sixteen years ago it had no name, no cure, no foundation; it moved sadistically through this enervated world untamed, but now we know it to be called Draco. My silent prayer, my exquisite Draco!" The Lord let out a cry of hysterical laughter.

Severus clutched his robes tightly, so true that sanity and clemency could never be ordained without devastating the very thing that made it sacred. He could not produce another word.

“And he’s somewhere far with that cynical wretch, Dumbledore! He gets to feel him, feel that power around him, and lie in it, lie with him. My adoration of my asset borders on the grotesque; how I yearn for the feeling of his air, the scent of his hair! I’d taken it all for granted when he was safe under that silken coverlet. I should have taken him myself!”

“Such words ought not to be spoken before me!” cried Severus in a fit of rage. “Dare to imply your kidnapping of the Heir before his godfather, before he who’s dedicated sixteen years to that boy!”

The Dark Lord tensed, slightly annoyed by the ever-obliging friend’s sudden outburst, and merely smiled. “Ah, so we all want the Heir. Man, in his very nature, is a selfish animal. But you are content merely to watch, are you not, Severus? You are content to watch the boy exercise my power, exercise great Death unto the worthless. To paint towns of mudbloods red. You have no real interest in the curse, do you? And, as his absence suggests, you are also content to watch the Heir be taken away.”

“You imply that I’ve allowed this to happen?!”

“That you’ve let your gaze slip for a moment. The headmaster was waiting for it. And you let it happen. So, have you any right to condemn me for my mourning? Has the father? The father who placed the governess at his door to protect that boy from me? Haha! Have I made it so obvious? That young voice, that gentle movement, a dissonant symphony for me alone! And so oblivious was he, that effortless angel, against my hollow shell! I wished for him to become me, to house me—“

“My Lord, pray do not continue,” whimpered Severus.“What do you speak of?! I fear your head has gone!” Severus cried. “I know of your desire to wield him like a weapon, but your selfishness has taken the form of affection! Tell me I am wrong!”

“What am I without that young man, that distant and irrevocably other! I ought to have killed the governess, grabbed dear Draco from his coverlets, and run off! I had restrained compulsions; the landing separating us was too great, me and that great apparition fleeting! I understand madness now in an all-consuming clarity! A great Lord such as I was afraid to disturb him! You’ve seen what he can do, haven’t you? If, one day, I’d found my way into the darkness of his bedroom, bound his wrists, and covered his eyes, he would still be able to triumph! In quieter moments, I imagine the precise shape and contours of his frame in my hands. When, in the rare moments of pure bliss, I placed my hand upon him, my entire body burned in agony!” The Dark Lord raised his tearing eyes toward the fresco-painted ceiling. “Let him be comfortable, let him grow used to our comforts so that we may charge his great wrath easily with provocations. Let him move through my space unaware, breathing my air! Soon he shall understand that there is no real purpose for him except to perform his duties for me; that I’d given him his life; that without me the delicate flower might wither away. The thought of breaking him, of watching him unravel, of turning that pale, porcelain perfection into something that only exists for my eyes. His physical shell would become mine to shape, to mold, to break in whatever ways I deem necessary. I would twist his then pliable existence into something that only propels my furtherance.”

“Do not speak any further!” 

“My heart cannot feel, dear Severus,” the Lord smiled. “I haven’t one.”

“Stop!”

“Ah! But do not look upon me as if I am a monster; you shall understand it all when the day comes. Draco shall understand too, one day. And he will thank me for all that I’ve done for him, for the purpose I’ve given him, and for the life. And he shall yield to me completely when he finds out that I have saved him from nonexistence. Do you understand now?”

”Silence, you wretch!” 

The Lord let out a rumbling laugh. “Severus, so righteous! Sincere paternal affection has softened you. I dare say you’ve rather lost your touch… But your aversion in using the Heir gladdens me, incidentally, you are one less person who may ask to share.” 

Severus simply turned away and left the Dark Lord before the portrait. His eyes vibrating in his skull, his anger and nausea so great. How he loathed the Lord now more than ever, that absurd parody of life so unworthy of the air he breathes and the space he dares to occupy! Severus marched into Lucius’s office and told him everything.

Lucius stared at him unblinking for a long while. In a fit of rage, he grabbed his writing desk and threw it off of its unprepared legs. Glasses, whiskey, pens, and papers were scattered on the ground in a dazzling assortment. Fistfuls of papers crumbled in his hands and were thrown into the open hearth. The man screamed; he grabbed his hair with trembling hands. The scene came to an end when he fell at Severus’s feet, making himself small in surrender. Lucius Malfoy’s composure, pliant and ever-bending against the torrents of the worst storms, finally left him. Superficial roles of minister and council leader fell stillborn at the hands of Father. Severus faltered for a moment, afraid to see his friend so vulnerable and immobilized by guilt.

“I shall kill him.”