Summary: The silver thorn of a bloody rose, fire and ice mixing to produce agony, Draco’s left questioning
everything—including himself.

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers
including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No
money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. Hurt (Quiet) is by Trent Reznor of
Nine Inch Nails, off of "Further Down the Spiral."

Author's Note: For Niki, otherwise known as Nory, Queen of Squibs, my beta-reader extraordinaire and my
favourite Slytherin.

Hurt (Quiet)

by Emma Moniz
 
 

Red rivers washing away the numbness, the ice. Searing through it, like tongues of flames lapping at the well of my
misery. That’s a deep well. Deeper than I want to consider, and so I don’t. It doesn’t exist for me anymore. There’s
just now and the scarlet, rushing down, staining white, staining green, staining black, absorbing it all into the bonfire
of vanity.

Oblivion sings a sweeter song than memory could ever hope to compose. But I can’t find it. The song dances out of
the range of my hearing, on the far side of this red river. It mocks me, standing outside the fire, unwilling to part this
river of flame and I can’t cross it. I can create it, I can destroy it, but once I destroy it, oblivion flitters out of my reach,
leaving me here, leaving everything in sharp focus, needles pricking at me and leaving me to bleed.

They don’t know. No-one knows, and that’s the point of the exercise, really. I mean, what poignancy would this entire
damn fiasco have without the shock value? They don’t know, and they won’t know until the day I press the blade too
hard into my wrists, until the day I can’t stop it. Until the day oblivion sucks me down to the bottom of the spiral, and
I’m left an empty husk to be discovered, mourned and then forgotten. I wonder if anyone would truly care? "Poor
Draco, he never was quite right. I blame his father, personally." Yes, that’s what they’ll say. And that’s part of a bigger
truth to which they’ve all remained pleasantly blind.

Old money, old blood, but it isn’t blue. Look at it. It’s scarlet, twisting down my arm and searing deeply into my
pale flesh. Milky luminescence, tainted by impurities. But which is most impure, the blood or the Dark Mark, I’ll
never know. I suppose they’re one and the same. I give my father that credit where the credit is due. Was he proud
of me when the Dark Lord branded me, the youngest Death Eater ever so named? Was he proud of me then, the
scum-sucking asshole who used me for his own perverse pleasures then cast me off to the Dark Lord for the same?
Did he care? Or am I just a tool, like this dagger, the silver thorn of a bloody rose?

Over and over, I see things, I feel things, me who feels nothing, who respects nothing. Who is nothing. And that’s the
tragedy at the heart of my truth. Maybe it’s simply the truth at the heart of my tragedy. Truths and lies and twisted
shadows burned into the silver light that I could have been, could have known. Why couldn’t my father have stopped
at condescending bastard? Why did he have to push me on to tool of the ultimate evil? I’m not evil. At least, I don’t
think I am. I’m a bastard, cruel, unfeeling, unthinking, but I’m not evil. If I was evil, she never could look at me the
way she does.

And she does look at me, pin her hopes on me and that frightens me. I want to push her away, make her nothing in
my view again, make her understand that my fire may be cold, but it burns. That I bleed by my own hand just to make
sure I can feel something. Anything. And sometimes I question that. Pain isn’t emotion. Pain covers up emotion. But
I can feel that. And it means that I’m still alive, even though if I shift the blade just a little, I could change that, too. I
want to change that. I want to forget all of this ever happened, forget that I ever existed and leave all this shit behind
me for my father to deal with. I’m not perfect, so why should I bother? I’m not even good at being a bastard.

I used to be when the world was more simple, and there was only mother and father. When the only thing that
mattered was father’s approval and the pain that came at his hands when there was no approval. Pain mixed with
pleasure, at least on his end. I ceased to feel the pain from his hands after a while. And when I felt nothing when he
abused me, when I felt nothing when he used me, I started to cut myself. Just to prove that it was still real, that I was
still real and not one of the ghosts that haunt the manor. When I came here, there were more people to please than
father. And I realised that some of them mattered and some of them didn’t. What took longer to sink in was that
father’s opinions were the ones that really didn’t matter in the long run.

And this pain, the physical pain, is easier to deal with than the emptiness and the anger and the bitterness, the sheer
angst of it all. I’m sick of the goddamned angst. All I want is to feel something. Something that doesn’t burn me,
something that doesn’t wound me, and I don’t know how. So I cut myself. I draw the blade across my skin in perfect
lines, making the blood rush to the surface, drip down my skin, stain my robes and the blankets on my bed, an unholy
mixture. I cut the Dark Mark, I rip it from my flesh only to watch is grow back like some kind of cancer, eating me
away from the inside. It is eating me away. And one day, I won’t feel the blade anymore. That’s the day when I’ll be
truly lost. And that’s the day the blade will bite deeply, and I’ll cross that red river to the next great adventure. Maybe
there I’ll feel something.