Chapter 1
The world appears to him suddenly, from black sleep to a vast ceiling, the colour of white doves.
It's as if he has opened his eyes for the first time, coming alive in a blink. His head is foggy, swimming through stray thoughts in the incoherence of a mind still trying to wake.
His life has been nothing else beyond this; the blur of a beam-shaped ceiling, the haze of a golden chandelier, this comfortable bed with thick duvets cocooning him.
On the nightstand, there are glasses.
When he puts them on, the room comes clear with all its antique wooden furniture, full of glowing orbs all around him. One of them is beating, a steady thud-thud-thud, and he realises its string is leading into his chest. He realises that that is the sound of his heart.
Several of the orbs' threads go through his skin, all through him. They tug in his bones, his muscles, his stomach. Another one leads into his brain.
He touches them, tugs back at them lightly. When he pulls them all out of himself, the discomfort shivers through him and leaves him with a wave of nausea. But it settles down quickly. The orbs remain there, but are no longer aglow when they are not connected to anything.
He plants his feet into the carpet; soft, woolen, of expensive quality. It is the house of the wealthy in every way. He tries to stand, and his knees nearly buckle the first time.
His steps are wobbly as he catches onto a corner of the bed, waiting for the dizziness to pass before he gains his footing again, and then stumbles his way unsteadily towards the dressing table until he is nearly falling forward onto it, gripping the edge of the table, lifting his head.
In the mirror is a boy: black hair, brown skin, thin, all jutted bones and sharp lines. This is him, he realises with an unsettling, paradoxical familiarity, a visceral certainty of himself, and yet like nobody he has ever seen before, all at the same time.
He does not know his name.
He does not know who he is. Where he is.
With the sight of himself and all his lack of knowledge of the stranger in the reflection, this world that he knows nothing of outside of what he has seen in this room, the terror bears down on him, closing up his throat, his wide eyes staring back. They are green and he did not know they were until he saw them himself.
His breaths are building, heavy, gasping choking him. His mind is terrifyingly blank and he is removed from himself, looking in from the outside. He is shaking, his chest so weighted he can only stand there unmoving. He thinks he might die from how hard and fast his heart is pounding and how little he can breathe. He thinks, with a wild, bubbling hysteria, what was the point of keeping me alive if I'm just going to die right after I wake up?
Who is it that has cast all these orbs here, has kept him in their big and fancy room, kept him well for however long it has been?
This further uncertainty overwhelms him even more, nearly drowning him under. Somewhere in him, he understands that whoever kept him here is surely somebody that won't harm him, all the magical orbs pumping life into him being evidence of this. But he can't explain the way all the nerves under his skin feel on edge, his instincts gone haywire.
It's a long while after that the tide of panic begins to subside, and he manages to breathe again.
It's longer after that he pulls himself up by a grip on the dressing table, avoiding the stranger in the mirror.
There are still red alarms going off through his system, a sense of danger that keeps him ready for a battle that he can't foresee. His muscles are tensed for a fight. He half-staggers his way to the door.
Outside the room, he moves himself along the walls. It is all unsettlingly still, silent in what reveals itself to an enormous mansion, the corridors of the floor surrounding the vast middle. He follows down the banister that diverges into a staircase, supported by the glossy and wooden railing.
On the drawing room table, there are many newspapers collected in disarray, an opened envelope.
He picks up the opened and empty envelope first, sinking down on the sofa, turning it over.
Chimera Hills, unspecified. It is then perhaps under an Infidelius charm.
The letter is addressed to a Draco L. Malfoy . There is no name of the sender.
He takes up the newspaper next and looks towards the upper corner. The year is 2006. November is almost ending.
All down the columns, there are articles — politics, entertainment, legal reforms. Moving pictures of men in skull masks and black cloaks, standing by the sides with their wands, patrolling streets and guarding places. Muggleborn-oriented libraries and schools and houses and clinics are being burned down, dissidents murdered, innocents imprisoned, raiding of refugee camps, killing and leaving bodies hanging out into the open. They praise someone that they call the Dark Lord. Everything, it seems, is run by them. It's violence and bloodshed and inhumanity, but the way they are written about in the papers is glorified, as if these are all safety measures for the bloodpurists, protection of culture; the wordings all adjusted to fit propagandist shrivel. He swallows, his chest constricting. It is a bleak and terrible world.
He pushes himself up and makes his way towards the large, iron doors, and is stopped by a sight, a stand table by the couch.
He moves towards it, slow with bemusement. It takes a second for it to fully register, to make out the shape, connect things together.
And then, a jolt to his insides, cold all over.
Under the lamplight, there is the skull mask, haphazardly left there, the same one he saw in the newspapers.
The warning of danger in the pit of his stomach screams louder than ever. He grits his teeth and turns and half-staggers towards the doors.
When he grabs the handles and tries to pull, they don't budge. He shakes them, slams a hand against it, an angry cry torn out of him. His forehead drops to it, trying to compose himself.
He surveys the house for any windows and finds one in the kitchen. He takes the heavy metal kettle on the counter and hits the laminated glass as hard as he could.
He is sweaty and drained by the time he is crawling out through it, hurting himself on glass shards.
When he is standing out on the grass, holding his nauseated middle, he looks up and goes entirely still.
The entire mansion is under an orb of a thick magical barricade. It is transparent, but he sees all the faint reflections of light creating rainbows.
He is trapped inside.