Draco Opens a Portal
Draco Malfoy was having a very bad day.
It hadn’t started off that way. In fact, he’d woken up with an unusual amount of pep in his step, so much so that Marcus Flint, Draco’s dubiously qualified Ministry escort for the day, had commented: “What’s got you looking so cheery, eh? Had a nice wank in already?”
Draco scowled. “Piss off.”
“Ah, there’s the Malfoy I know.”
The truth was it was Friday, and even though his final trimester of graduate school was running him ragged, the end was in sight. Plus, Nott had promised a rather smashing party that evening, with all the usual suspects – Zabini, Parkinson, Montague, the Greengrass sisters. Draco had planned to give productivity a sporting try for a few hours, then head on his merry way to getting good and fucked come nightfall. Literally as well as metaphorically, if all went according to plan.
Unfortunately for Draco, fate had other plans.
It was on his third try casting an experimental Portus variation that he unlocked the eldritch portal to hell.
“Blast,” he said, and was sucked into the swirl of darkness.
One time, when Draco was very small, his parents had taken him on a trip to see the ruins of Aboriginal wizarding societies in New South Wales. (Well, so his parents had claimed at the time. It wasn't until Draco was much older that he realized the whole thing was a pretense for business with some of his father's more unsavory contacts.) The journey had required Flooing from London to Singapore, and then Singapore to Sydney, where Draco had taken one step out of the chimney and projectile vomited onto several unfortunate souls caught in the blast radius. It took three days to get all of the soot out of his ears and fingernails, and had impressed upon him the strong desire to never make such a journey again.
This was about nine hundred times worse, Draco reflected as the molecules of his body were disassembled and transported across presumably the entire known universe. He felt an immense need to throw up, yet was unable to locate within himself the place the vomit would come from. He had no sense of corporeality whatsoever. This went on and on and on until finally he resigned himself to being stuck in some sort of endless time loop forever.
At that precise moment, his feet struck the ground.
The feeling of regaining his body was so jarring that Draco doubled over, one hand clutched to his solar plexus as he sucked great mouthfuls of air into his lungs. Draco had had the wind knocked out of him before (several times, in fact, he seemed to be a magnet for it) and this feeling was similar, but as if magnified throughout every cell in his body. It was several seconds before he was able to regain a sense of full lung capacity.
He straightened up, acutely aware of the fact that he had no idea where he was. In front of him was one very precisely trimmed hedge, with a second, ghostlike hedge hovering next to it.
Draco squinted. No, there was only one hedge. And beyond it –
A woman, he knew, though she was crouched in such a way that it wasn’t immediately obvious. The shape of her eyes, perhaps. Her eyes, which, by the way, were glowing silver, as if illuminated by some unholy fire. The same fire sizzled off her fingertips, casting sparks of molten silver onto the ground.
Only the immediate and inescapable need to vomit tore his gaze from hers.
There it is, Draco thought as he bent over and vomited the entire contents of his digestive system onto the ground. Acid scalded his throat.
And then someone was standing next to him. Someone with – no, he must be hallucinating. His journey through all of time and space had mixed up the part of his brain that processed vision and was hallucinating a pair of wings onto the man that stood in front of him, like some sort of ghoulish angel from hell.
The ghoulish angel spoke to him in a strange, rasping tongue.
“Is it Halloween?” Draco asked. “Have I leapt forward in time?”
More indecipherable language. Draco was becoming increasingly convinced that he wasn’t hallucinating after all, that there was, in fact, a man with wings standing in front of him, in an unmistakably threatening manner. He clutched his wand, ready to whip a stunner forward at a moment’s notice.
He was almost done with his Mastery in Dueling. He was an ex-Death Eater and had survived the Second Wizarding War. He was deeply familiar with combat, and certainly knew how to handle himself in the face of confusing and dangerous situations.
That was what he told himself, right before he passed out.
Blast, he thought for the second time that day as darkness took him.
Draco came to in blurry gusts. Snatches of gravelly language; hands, covered in cicatrices – they floated before him like hallucinations before his consciousness finally slid into place, alongside a viciously pounding headache. His whole body felt stiff and pounded over as if he had been tenderized. He cracked his eyes; wherever he had been brought was dark and close, like a Muggle sewer system, which Draco was unfortunately intimately familiar with (but that’s a story for another time).
He realized two things instantaneously: One, he was bound, at the ankles and wrists. And two, he was missing his wand.
The time for gentle profanity was over.
“Well, fuck,” Draco said into the darkness.
“Spfeguelen fraulefgebby,” the darkness replied.
“Not this again,” Draco muttered as a grotesquely winged silhouette melted out of the gloom. It was the same creature from before. Shadows wreathed him like clouds around the moon, and despite the faint illumination of an overhead torch, it was oddly difficult to pull his full appearance into focus.
Draco squinted. He couldn’t tell whether the bizarre penumbra was the result of spellwork or the trans-dimensional concussion surely blooming in his brain tissues.
“What are you?” Draco inquired. “Animagus gone wrong? Harpy from hell?” He surveyed the man’s wings, which were devoid of feathers and instead looked leathery and lithe, like those of a bat. Tiny claws jutted out from each juncture of cartilage. The overall effect was impressively ominous, but Draco thought the wing tissue was probably likely to easily tear. In fact, the whole skeletal structure of the wings had to be hollow and somewhat fragile, if they were truly functional.
He could use that.
As if he could sense Draco picking out his weak points, the man-bat-creature stepped closer. A cold breeze caressed Draco’s skin, and curls of shadows seemed to leach from the darkness towards him.
Then he could no longer see.
Being stripped of his sight was acutely unnerving. Draco’s heart rate instantly skyrocketed, pounding out a warning at his pulse points. He futilely strained at the restraints around his wrists. An unnatural cold was seeping into his feet and fingers, and he clenched his fists open and closed to avoid losing feeling.
Whispers twined through the air, but whatever information they divulged remained unknown to Draco. He felt like a mouse, trapped in the nest of a viper.
A lance of cold pierced his chest, and then Draco felt it – a touch of Other, prying and stabbing at his mind. He’d expected this, had trained intensively to withstand such attacks, but the shadowy vise slowly strangling his consciousness felt dauntingly foreign. There was no single point of contact; it was as if the tendrils of darkness had enveloped his mind and were now attempting to break in by force of asphyxiation. Draco’s mouth was dry, his head pounding. The squeezing pressure concentrated the pain to a white-hot iron behind his eyes. Sheer willpower would not be enough to keep them out.
But he did not need to rely on sheer willpower to outmaneuver the ghastly demon torturing him. He would outwit it instead.
Draco took a few seconds to organize his consciousness. On the plus side, his interrogator clearly did not understand English, which would render a large chunk of his thoughts useless. On the other, Draco hadn’t a sodding clue what this – creature – was, or what he wanted. He would have to proceed with caution. He took a steadying breath, ensuring his mental chess pieces were properly in place.
Then the game unfolded.
Blind and pressed in on all sides by enormous psychological pressure, Draco hardly had to fake the cracking in his mental armor. He dipped a hand into the pool of fear lodged behind his ribcage, letting it filter into his thoughts until he felt nearly paralyzed. What if he were blind forever? What if this nightmarish creature drove him insane?
It was easy for the shadows to break in after that. They drove in, battering the rest of his mental walls to smithereens, ripping at his thoughts for something aching and raw to latch onto. Rather than a single point of contact rifling through his memories, there were dozens. Draco absurdly pictured a many-armed octopus, taking hold of his mind and shaking it for loose galleons, before the mental image itself was snatched up by a tentacle.
The shadows latched onto thoughts attached to emotions, particularly fear and shame. They quickly found Draco’s memory of getting the Dark Mark, and the many times Voldemort had tortured Narcissa and Lucius in their own house. They found more inane memories, too – Being slapped by Hermione Granger in third year. The first time he’d ever shagged a girl, the shame of realizing his devastating good looks didn’t automatically translate into skill in the sack. (That was a problem he had QUICKLY rectified.) It was like being turned inside out, his most deeply-held emotions baldly on display. Draco chased after them, feebly trying to protect what remained, but the shadows grabbed hold of everything he tried to hide. He gave up memory after memory, right up to experimenting with Portus that morning and being whisked away from his plans of Friday evening debauchery into this nightmarish new world.
He sacrificed so many private thoughts that even the most skilled legilimens would have trouble detecting that Draco had anything left to hide.
The process was torturous. He felt close to screaming, or breaking down into sobs.
But then, abruptly, the shadows evaporated. The pressure was gone. Draco collapsed forward, straining against his restraints. Lifting his head up to look at his torturer took a monumental effort.
But where previously the nightmarish figure had stood, melded into the shadows, only the cold stone wall remained.