shattered

Unforgiven Remix

Disclaimer: Belongs to…guess who? Couldn’t possibly be J. K. Rowling, could it?

A/N: The plot idea belongs to Raining-Spells, but she gave her permission for me to post my rewrite.

 

One day she will come for me.

 

He clung to that thought, latching on to it as the one thing that would save him, his only happy memory of the life outside, the only thing he could remember. Everything else was just a blur, just a meaningless vague color of blonde hair and blue eyes looking out at…things. Happiness. He could barely remember what it was. Two dementors passed by his cell and he felt a little more of his soul trickle away, a little bit more of her slip from his grasp. Shaking his head, gasping for breath, he snuggled down deeper into his worn pallet, staring at the ceiling above him, listening to the shrieks of his fellow inmates.

 

They never stopped screaming.

 

Everyday their screams ate away at him, their mutters, grinding into him the fear that one day he would become like that. Because he would. He knew it deep inside. Everyday he was losing part of himself, everyday the dementors sucked away at his insides, his life, and all he could do was lie down on his bed and stare at the peeling ceiling.

 

The days passed by slowly and the nights stretched out even longer. He felt his hope slipping away from him, slowly but surely, going out there in the darkness along with all the other emotions the dementors took. She had to come. She had to. No one else would.

He was beginning to forget her, his only hope of freedom. Her brown curls, her chocolate eyes—already he forgot whether the sparkles in them were gold or amber, already he forgot whether she had had one enormous bookcase or two. She had an ugly ginger cat—and now he couldn’t recall its name either. He didn’t want to wake up one day and have forgotten her completely, even her name sucked away into the recesses of cold the dementors had for hearts. He lived in fear that one day the dementors would have her all to themselves.

He envied them, somehow. They were able to take her, take every trace of her, while he, Draco Malfoy, once richest wizard in the world, was left with nothing. Doomed for an eternity with nothing but his memories to keep him company. And one day even those would be gone and he would have nothing.

Nothing. The word rang in his head, ate away at it.

Or maybe nothing would be preferable to the pain he could still feel now. The day he got his mark was still so clear in his mind, the dementors forgoing it for the greater pleasure they received by his fear and hate he derived from it.

The sleeve, pushed slowly up his arm. There had been a slight irregularity in the weaving, Draco remembered. It had been in the shape, roughly, of a dragon, which had been why he liked it so much. After the branding, he threw it away and never touched it again. The red eyes, staring at him in a look of crazed enjoyment at the sight of his pain. The sizzling, the sickening smell of burning flesh, the pain—damn, the pain, the thing which above all stayed with him to this day.

And the knowledge that he was now bound to the Dark Lord, bound to Voldemort forever and ever and ever. “Forever and ever and ever and ever,” he repeated softly in a singsong voice, clutching his marked arm to his chest, rocking back and forth on his bed, hearing the laughter of the Death Eaters as they saw him fall to his knees on the cold, hard-packed earth that was the grave of Tom Riddle.

The shrieking of Blaise Zabini brought Draco roughly back to the present time, no less gruesome than his past. Another Death Eater friend, an African boy with startling blue-green eyes that were now clouded with fear and desperation.

“No, no,” his voice was pleading, full of desperation. Draco cringed as he remembered how proud Zabini had been back then, how stubborn and refusing to give in to anyone, even Draco. “Please, I didn’t, I never, please, gods, no, please, I’ll do anything—anything! Information, names, anything, please, by all the gods I swear it, please, please…” .

“All the Death Eaters are in the cells surrounding you, Zabini. Voldemort is dead, the war is over, and we don’t need any information. Or anything at all from filthy scum like you,” hissed a familiar raven-haired git with a scar on his temple. Draco thought he had seen him before, the sight stirred up vague resentment and hate, but the feeling, like all others, slipped from his grasp and fled shrieking into the dementors.

“Please,” he begged again, softly, lower, intensely. “I’m not ready to die yet. I can’t die. I’m only nineteen! I want to fall in love, I want to marry, I want to—live.” His voice cracked, and his head fell lower still, his need to live stronger than all else.

“No, don’t worry, Zabini, you’re not going to die.” It was the other one who spoke now, his red hair flaming in the dark.

Blaise’s head snapped up, a wild hope flaring in his eyes for a moment.

“We’re just going to…take something from you. Don’t worry, by the time you’re done, you won’t miss anything living…in fact, you won’t miss anything at all.”

An animal-like shriek filled the air as he realized what they were going to do. “No,” he choked out.

“Oh yes, Zabini. And you know what? I’m going to watch. Remember me? The little Weasel you used to tease? Yeah it’s me mate, Ron Weasley, and I think I’m going to enjoy watching the dementors suck the life out of you. They’ll be happy too; they haven’t had a nice Kiss since Lucius Malfoy a couple of weeks before.”

“Don’t worry, Zabini. At least you don’t have anyone to miss you…anyone to cry over you every night.” Both Aurors smiled grimly as they hauled him around the corner and out of sight.

Draco closed his eyes tightly. Surely they wouldn’t do that to him—he had someone who would miss him—didn’t he? But why didn’t she come? Why…the thought rang in his head until he was willing to do anything—even sleep—just to stop thinking.

 He shouldn’t have fallen asleep.

He saw her burning eyes.

He heard her terrified screams.

He smelt the blood drip from her face.

Make the nightmares stop.

Draco slammed upright, his heart beating idiotically fast, his breathing ragged and broken. Damn, he thought, as he saw the blood dripping from his hands. I should go over to the sink, he thought, but didn’t. Did it even matter? For some reason, he went over to the sink anyway and washed off the blood coming from the half-crescent shapes dug in his skin from his nails.

For some reason, staring at those little shapes made him want to cry, made him want to break down and scream and have someone to hold him, to smooth his hair and sooth him. But then he was a Malfoy, wasn’t he? Malfoys never cried. Even if they were in Azkaban.

“Malfoy, you have a visitor,” called an Auror. His heart jumped. Could it be—quickly he splashed water on his hair to smooth it back, knowing even as he did so it would be no use. For a moment he longed for his previous sleek hair, the beautiful fine blond hair that always lay flat. But then, he’d lost so much since those days that hair was hardly the worst of it.  

Coming out of the cell, he stopped. What if it was fake? She hadn’t come before, why would she come now? What if they were taking him to the dementors like Zabini? What if there was really no visitor coming for him at all? His rational mind told him that the last Kiss they had performed was two weeks ago; they were hardly likely to schedule two of these in one day. It was no use; he panicked and struggled wildly against the two Aurors that held him, frightened by his damn overactive imagination. One of the Aurors—was it is his imagination, or did his green eyes glint with satisfaction?—hexed him with an unnecessarily painful curse and levitated him along the corridor until he saw the booths where the visitors came to talk to prisoners, separated by a thin wall of glass and a couple of Aurors. His eyes widened in shock and relief as all the memories stolen from him by the dementors came flooding back.

Hermione Granger sat there in a wooden chair on the other side of the glass, staring back at Draco with an expressionless face. Damn he missed her hair, he thought irrelevantly as he was lowered—unnecessarily hard, he thought—on the chair, the hex lifted. Finally she came to visit him, and all he could do was stare at the way her hair framed her face, her beautiful curls wrapping around each other and tumbling down her back in an expanse of chocolate

 “Afternoon, Malfoy.” Her voice was cold, hard, and all he could think about was how she had called him Malfoy. Not Draco, Malfoy.

“Is it already?” He found himself stupidly replying. She forced on a smile and nodded her head in his direction.

“It is.”

“I thought you weren’t going to come see me,” he said suddenly, his voice void of emotion, cutting to the quick as he had always done, even throughout their relationship. She stared at him for awhile before sighing and biting her lip in that adorable way that made him long to kiss her again, just one more time.

“I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t?”

“No.” They sat in silence staring at each other before he spoke again.

“Why are you here, Hermione?” He asked leaning forward in his chair towards the glass; one of the Aurors twitched behind him as though reaching for his wand.

“I needed to know something.” Draco leaned back, staring at her silently, waiting for her to speak. He had thought she was going to say she loved him still, even after what he had done. That she was going to save him from this horrible place and they would live happily ever after. He was wrong—he knew that now. He shouldn’t have forgotten that she held grudges. He longed for the days when he could kiss those grudges away. But she hated him now. He could see in the coldness of her eyes. Even if there had been no glass between them, no Aurors keeping watch, she would never have let him kiss her, probably slapping him again as she had done in third year.

He had thought she would say that she loved him.

The fact that he knew it was absurd didn’t diminish the sting of their absence.

He knew she would never say those three little words again. She couldn’t even say his damn name.

 “Why did you get the mark, Malfoy?” He let his eyes linger on the hollow where her neck and shoulders joined, the place where he had loved to kiss her, before replying.

“A lot of things. Power. Pressure from my father. Threats to kill those I loved.” Threats to kill you, he silently added.

She nodded her head slightly and studied him for a moment, her eyes glittering in anger and hate.

“You got the mark while we were still together, didn’t you.” It was more of a statement than a question, but he answered anyway in the monotone he had used during their entire visit together.

“Yes.”

“So all the time you were kissing me, all the time you were telling me you loved me, you were out sneaking off to your little Death Eater meetings.”

He nodded, the hardest thing he had ever done.  

What else to do? All he wanted to do was to memorize her as she stood before him, burn the image of her curves and her hair and her eyes in his mind. She stood to go, and his eyes flashed with hurt, though he had known it would happen—had tried to resign himself to the fact that she no longer loved him.

“You’re not getting me out.” It was a statement, not a question, and she answered it as such.

“You can rot in here for all I care, Malfoy.”

“You don’t care whether I live or die.” Another damn statement.

“No. You made that damn choice for us long time ago, when you chose being a Death Eater over loving me.”

I never did, he wanted to say. But of course he couldn’t. So he sat there and watched her glare at him and go out, with all her anger and hate still within her. Not a tear for him, not even a good-bye. But then, why should she? He was nothing but Death-Eater scum to her anymore.

That night, lying in his bed, pounding his fists on the pillow, Draco Malfoy, last of the pureblooded family of Malfoy, cried his heart out.

He didn’t care anymore—not about remembering, not about the Kiss—because he knew that he was going to die. It didn’t matter if it was the next day, or the next week, or the next year, because the dementors were going to have him. She didn’t care whether he died.

She didn’t bloody well care.

It was late morning, the sun’s rays peeking into her window, when Hermione Granger woke up and splashed her face with water. She had cried last night, cried harder than she ever had since the War—over him. Bloody Draco Malfoy had done it again. She had sworn she wouldn’t let him do this to her, promised Harry and Ron that she would be okay—but he had broken her heart again. Gulping down a potion to rid her of those stupid puffy red eyes, she opened the window for the owl that was carrying the paper. Giving it the few knuts it wanted, she let it out and slammed the window after it with unnecessary force, then picked up her daily cup of coffee and opened the newspaper.

 

The mug went crashing on the floor, shards of blue pottery flying everywhere, steaming brown coffee splashing onto the chair, the table, her clothes. She barely felt its sting as she stared, trembling at the paper, willing its words to go away, to not be true, for her eyes to have read wrong. Vaguely she heard somebody screaming and realized it was her.

 

No. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. This was all a dream and if she screamed loud enough, long enough, she would wake up and none of this would have happened.

Draco Malfoy had been given the kiss at 5:15 am this morning.

She did care.