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splendidissimus · 1 year ago

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2003 - Break

((Content warning: beating / domestic violence (dream), implied noncon (dream), loss of power control, accidental injuring loved one, hospital, loss of reality, mind invasion (minor) ))

((Promptspiration: @whumptober 2023: day 17: Touch aversion / "Leave me alone." ))

Genre: whump

Romance level: some

Angst level: 4/5

Draco's headspace: fear / guilt / irrational

((words: ~3100))

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Draco felt like he had barely fallen asleep when he was jerked awake by hands on his robes. He recognized Theo's face in the darkness and tried to get his brain together to figure out what was going on. "What's wr-"

"Shut the fuck up." Theo slammed him back. His head hit the headboard so hard it slammed into the wall and there was a cracking sound; he made a cut-off noise and felt light-headed, with pain shooting down his spine. "I am so fucking tired of your whining…"

"Get off…" He tried to be commanding, but his voice felt as faint as his head.

"What a surprise, more orders." Theo grabbed him under the chin, thumb and finger digging in behind his jaw, and forced his head back. The pain redoubled and his vision went blurry. Draco grabbing at his wrist did absolutely nothing to pull him off.

"I try," Theo said. Draco realised he was drunk — drunk and completely honest, for once. "I am patient, and tolerant. But you just can't help being a piece of shit. You know I can't get away from you because of your fucking love potion," he slammed him back into the wall again with all the frustration in his voice, making Draco choke on a cry as pain shot all the way down his spine and clamped his skull, "so of course you're just going to exploit that as much as you can, because why would you do anything else? Order me around like one of your lackeys because you know I'll take it. Whine to me incessantly like a child because you know I'll put up with you when even your own parents won't. I'm tired—" he slammed him back into the wall again, making him choke on a cry and his vision pulse red, "—of listening to you!"

"Stop…" It felt like a whimper. He weakly pulled at his arm, struggling to breathe, vision blurred by slow blooms of colour, except that he could still horribly clearly see Theo's face and the dark anger controlling it. "I'm sorry — please — I'll stop —"

"Oh, right, you'll stop being yourself? Guess what, even if you somehow managed it, it wouldn't matter! It won't fix this! I'm trapped! I could have had a good wife! I could have sweet girlfriend who actually cares about me! I could just be picking up skanks in a pub! But no — I'm stuck with you!"

His hand clenched around Draco's throat, hard crushing pain that made Draco claw desperately at his arm. Then he forced himself to let go and his hand seized into a fist and he punched him in the side of the head, and Draco cowered behind his arms.

"And you fucking know it. You fucking revel in it." He grabbed his arm and ripped it down so his shoulder wrenched. "You know I can't leave, so you fucking tease. A kiss every now and then as a reward? A fuck or two a year on special occasions? Just enough to keep me mollified, right? Just enough to keep me hanging on? And I should be happy with this? I should be honoured you let me have anything?"

"I can't—"

"You can." Theo shoved him down into the bed, gripping his throat. "And you will."

Draco came to with a jerk, choking and gasping, scrambling up in the bed. "Nott!" he croaked, voice hitching in a sob. "Theo!"

The connecting door between their rooms burst open, and Theo rushed in, face twisted up in concern. "It's all r—"

No no no— Draco slashed his hand out to cut off his words, and a shallow but bloody cut bloomed across Theo's chest after it with a deep gasp. "How could you?" Words tumbled out in a half-sobbed scream. "You can't just… Even if I…"

"Draco." Theo froze where he was, holding his chest, making an effort to keep his voice calm. "What is it? What did I do?"

"What did—? You just—!" He clutched at his throat where there was a phantom echo of Theo's seizing fingers.

"It was a dream," Theo assured him in a calm, reasonable voice. He cautiously crept closer while holding his bloody hand out as though to hold him back. "I couldn't hurt you. I couldn't hurt you even if I wanted to, because you can do this, right? So I didn't — it was just a dream."

"It couldn't be a dream… I was…" He grabbed his hair… his head didn't really hurt. He had such clear memories of the pain of having his skull cracked, how it ran all the way down his body and hurt to move, and now it was just gone… like it had never really been there. How could that be right? It was so real, it couldn't be a dream—

He gripped his head tightly and screamed into his knees. Something had to be real!

Theo reached the bed and touched his hands. A half-formed thought bloomed — he was coming to hold him down again — and he reflexively thought a blasting curse that threw him into the wall with a small explosion and a crash of breaking shelves.

Theo—! He didn't mean to do that! He reached out for a second before he stopped himself; he scrambled off the bed and caught a single glimpse of him lying there. He didn't dare check if he was okay, he'd probably hurt him again. He had to get away. He ran into his mother in the doorway and spun them around and pushed her toward Theo, backing away into the hall to put space between them. "Stay away from me!" He only had an impression of her startled face as he fled down the stairs.

With a formless surge of fear, he saw his father still up, in the parlour, coming toward the noise, and he threw a binding jinx at him to keep him away. He heard breaking glass. Then he was outside in the fresh air and swiftly Disapparated.

Lucius recovered his composure quickly and repaired the wineglass he'd dropped when he ducked Draco's spell. The front doors were standing open, but Draco was gone; he closed them with a flick of his wand and took the stairs up. "What is going on?"

"Did you stop him?" Narcissa asked from down the hall. He found her in Draco's room, with some annoyance. What was the point of Nott if he couldn't handle Draco's outbursts? But the room was a mess, and Nott was bleeding, while she worked to stop it.

"No, he left. What happened?" he repeated.

"He had a dream he thought was real," Nott said faintly, holding his chest. Lucius looked at the damage to the room again, how it was all centred around Nott, and the injuries to him, and saw instantly how this would be the perfect opportunity to pass off an actual attack as Draco's erratic behaviour. He looked at Nott swiftly and met his eyes, catching his mind unawares… and for once, he found no sign of a lie there.

Nott didn't realise he'd been read, and tried to take a deep breath. "He didn't snap—" He had to stop and cough, trying to breathe, again. Blasted in the chest, probably. "—snap until he realised it was a dream."

Then it wasn't the content of the dream that was the problem, it was that he had mistaken a dream for reality in the first place. He thought he understood. "I'll get him," he said, and followed Draco.

When Lucius Apparated to St. Mungo's, he could immediately hear Draco yelling. "You need to do something about it!" He was out of sight around the corner from the Apparition zone, yelling at someone in intake.

"Sir, calm down—"

"Get away from me!" There was a crash and Lucius came to the door — a Healer was on the floor and the receptionist backing away from the desk, and the only other person there was a patient waiting with a squash for a nose, looking over the top of a Prophet.

He threw a silent stunning spell at Draco while his back was turned — hardly honourable, but just to get this situation under control before he did serious damage.

But Draco threw up a shield spell to intercept it somehow in the instant he shouldn't have even known it was coming, and spun around, fluidly grabbing a half dozen of the floating candles with a gesture and flinging them at him. They bounced off the wall when he stepped back behind the doorway.

"Draco, stop," he commanded.

"Get away!"

"Drop your wand!" he heard called from the other side of the room, security coming from the street entrance or from a higher floor, perhaps. And of course that didn't work for a variety of reasons, and he heard Draco engage them while telling them to leave him alone. He came back around the door and found two guards trying to Stun him. He joined them; one of them would be able to take him down before he hurt someone.

In theory. In practise…

Whose brilliant idea was it to teach Draco to duel wandlessly? Oh right, Severus kindly taught him not to use a wand, and he started duelling when Narcissa cut him off from their vaults. Well, they had created a monster. He could cast magic so quickly and seamlessly that he hardly even seemed like a wizard using spells. He easily held off the three of them, performing not just simple defensive magic, but also complex calculations like transfiguring the wall to wrap around one of the guards and hold her.

When he raised his wand to bind Draco while he was distracted, Draco gestured at him with a sudden glance and his arm fell instantly limp and literally boneless, flopping like a glove filled with water. His wand flew back into the entry room somewhere. Draco's attention was already turned on another threat, flinging the desk into the air between him and a flurry of spells that were no longer merely intended to Stun and bind, as they realised the level of threat he posed.

"Draco!" he snapped in his most commanding voice, because he knew Draco would respond to the sound of authority the way he needed — he looked. Lucius met his eyes and applied Legilimency with all the force instead of finesse possible, to really make him repel the invasion.

It was extremely unpleasant; it took no effort whatsoever to get into Draco's mind, and it was sheer chaos. He had always been overly emotional, but he had been taught from a young age to control that and compartmentalise it properly. Now that had broken down into a howling maelstrom of impressions and feelings that conveyed almost nothing but layers and layers of different kinds of fear.

He couldn't withstand that assault for long, but it worked. While they both flinched away from the contact, Draco was too distracted to block the guards' spells. Two stunning spells hit Draco almost at once, and he crumpled. He hoped Draco's heart was strong enough to take it.

"Master's wand," a small voice behind him said, and he looked down. Sometime in the chaos, Tolly had Apparated in with Nott, whose injuries were apparently beyond home remedy, and who was now leaning heavily on the wall where he could see through the doorway, holding his chest and breathing laboriously. The elf was holding up his wand with deferentially drooping ears.

A surge of revulsion at the sight of an elf with a wand showed on his face, and he snatched it up without acknowledging it. "Inform Narcissa," he instructed. She cringed a bow and vanished.

After getting his arm tended to, Lucius waited around in the café on the top floor until morning when he was allowed to visit. The delay gave him an unfortunate amount of time to consider what broken impressions he had taken from Draco's mind, and he didn't like what he saw there.

When it was time, he found Draco in ward 49: long-term patients whose minds had been affected by magic. It was grim. The ward itself tried to be cheerful enough, in clean neutral colours and littered with the residents' personal belongings, but it was still a half dozen helpless people stored in a locked room without an ounce of privacy or dignity. And it was seeming ever more likely that it would eventually be Draco's permanent fate.

They wouldn't leave him here, of course. Even if he needed permanent care, they would bring him home and bring someone in to provide it. But the haunting spirit was the same.

The witch watching the ward was occupied with one of the Longbottoms having a fit, and he went on to find Draco's bed without announcing himself. He sat beside the bed with his arms crossed, staring at him. He wasn't sure if Draco was asleep or unconscious, either sedated or Stunned, but he looked like he was where he belonged, and that itself was unpleasant.

Not long after the beginning of visiting hours, someone else entered the ward. Lucius listened without moving as he approached the ward matron and asked after Draco.

"Is everything all right, Auror? He was brought in unconscious and hasn't woken yet."

"Just following up."

He finally got up and stepped out to meet them just before they arrived at Draco's bed, pulling the curtains closed to hide him. The matron showed surprise that he was there and greeted him pleasantly, but he focused on the Auror, a portly older man with a grey moustache and a bowler named Janssen. "He's still asleep. I take it this is about the incident last night."

"It is."

"My son had an… episode. I think you'll find that no one was seriously hurt."

"Spells were exchanged in the hospital. We obviously have to check on that." He flipped his notebook open. "I see here that you, a Healer, and two responding guards required treatment after this 'episode', as well as a Theodore Nott."

"That's a private matter."

"When it sends people to the hospital, domestic matters become our business."

"I didn't say 'domestic'," he snapped. "Nott is his assistant."

"Who he injured?"

That was a question. He was fishing. Just like an Auror, barging in where he didn't belong, when he didn't know anything… He took hold of his anger and pushed it away. "What do you want?"

The Auror looked back at him and saw he wasn't going to play along. "To hear his side of the story. Can you wake him up?" He nodded to the matron.

Pulling back the curtains to expose the sleeping Draco, she stepped up beside his bed and uncapped what looked like a potion, but instead let out a strong scent of flowers. Lilies, daffodils, grass, and water - it smelled just like their gardens in the summer. Had he really been here so often that they had these tricks on hand to keep him calm?

"All right, Draco, honey," she was saying in a soothing voice as she roused him with a spell. He opened his eyes calmly, and she smiled. "That's it, welcome back…"

Lucius could not have said what he saw that told him everything was about to go horribly wrong, but he trusted his instincts and stepped backward. In the next instant, Draco cast a shield spell so powerful it flashed in a visible violet orb around him, and shoved everything — nurse, Auror, table, curtain dividers, the bed on the other side it — ten feet away from him in every direction. Someone screamed.

"Stay away!"

Janssen was thrown to the floor, and he pulled his wand before even getting his feet back under him. Lucius whipped his out and disarmed him before he could use it.

"What are you doing, Malfoy?" The Auror scrambled back to his feet and snatched his wand off the floor without taking his eyes off him.

Lucius held up his wand in two fingers, overtly unthreatening. "He is not fighting."

And it was true. Draco had grabbed his hair and pressed back against the head of the bed, one hand outstretched and shaking, hiding his face. He hadn't cast another spell and wasn't even watching them.

"You attacked an Auror — you'll go back t—"

"I stopped you escalating a volatile situation," he interrupted. Threatening him with Azkaban in range of Draco's hearing and magic was a dangerous idea, he had a feeling. "He is not fighting," he reiterated, and dropped into a low, controlled voice. "He is terrified."

"Stop this!" the ward matron commanded. If she minded being thrown about by Draco's spell, she didn't show it at all. "The both of you need to leave, you're upsetting them. It's all right, honey." She rubbed Frank Longbottom's shoulder to relax him. Somewhere in his broken mind, he must have remembered being an Auror, because he was standing in front of his wife and a cowering Lockhart with his arm outstretched as though he had a wand, glaring at him and Janssen.

Lucius took a step back to defuse the situation. For the moment, he would cooperate. "Stay away from Draco," he warned her. "He's not trying to hurt anyone; he's lashing out in panic when people try getting close enough to touch him."

"That won't be a problem," she said, her tone of voice incongruously soothing and attention still on Longbottom, getting him to lower his arm. Perhaps they responded to tone rather than words. "No one wants to scare anyone, do we?"

"I'll be relieving him of his wand first," Janssen said firmly, making no move to leave.

"He isn't using a wand," Lucius told him flatly.

The Auror glanced at Draco swiftly and then looked hard at him. "Accidental magic?"

He clenched his jaw rather than admit to it. That would have been an embarrassment ten years ago. Even fifteen years ago he'd basically had control of his magic before he even had a wand. Now to admit that the family harboured a full-grown adult guilty of such emotional and magical… incontinence…

"Out, gentlemen," the matron commanded, sweeping them with a steely stare.

Lucius put his wand away and pointedly waited for the Auror to precede him out into the corridor. The door audibly locked behind them.

"This is a dangerous situation," Janssen was saying, scribbling himself some notes. "Uncontrolled magic of this magnitude… if it is uncontrolled…"

"Do you see which ward you are in?" he demanded in a low, sharp voice, his anger barely reined in behind it. Lunatics. Every patient in this ward was a lunatic.

Every last one.

"Leave. Him. Alone."

Janssen looked at the Janus Thickey ward plaque for a silent second, then left without another word.

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splendidissimus · 1 year ago

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August 2001 - Rowle (excerpt)

((Content warning: beating, Cruciatus torture, sleep deprivation, bondage, captivity, numb whumpee, hair pulling))

((Promptspiration: @whumptober 2023: day 11: All the lights going dark and my hope’s destroyed. / Captivity / "No one will find you." @whumppromptoftheday this "whumpee doesn't even flinch anymore" prompt ))

((Reminder that Rowle (massive blond guy, violent and reckless enough to kill other Death Eaters with friendly fire) is one of the two Death Eaters whom Voldemort forced Draco to torture for their failures; Harry saw it in a vision in DH. In this universe, Rowle in particular developed a hatred for Draco for it. A bunch of Death Eaters here recently escaped Azkaban and Rowle was sent to bring Draco back to be held prisoner with the others but decided to punish him instead.))

Genre: whump

Romance level: none

Angst level: 5/5

Draco's headspace: numb

((words: ~800))

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Draco woke already in pain. His head was pounding. His neck and back were just aching tightness from being bound in the same position so long. His mouth was rough and thick and dry. His eyes felt like sand when he forced them open; it didn't feel like he'd slept at all. He was lying on the cold dirt floor with a sharp pain running up his side; he supposed he'd been hit or kicked awake.

Rowle must have hit him, but by the time Draco was coherent enough to notice him, he was pacing the short confines of the cellar. He was thumping the side of his fist against the beam Draco had been tied to every time he passed under it, creating a distracted rhythm punctuated by the rare quiet "Fuck."

Obviously something was wrong. It didn't seem like it was going to help Draco any, though. Nothing that made his captor angry was helpful to him, it just made his life that much less pleasant.

The cellar door was standing open, showing a patch of clear blue sky. It was a few feet of floor and then a short staircase away, and yet it no longer even registered as an escape. It was just nice that, for this moment, there was light. He distantly watched Rowle's silhouette pass in front of it.

Rowle suddenly threw himself explosively off the beam and kicked him hard in the side, throwing him onto his back with a quiet groan. His tied arms were pinned uncomfortably under him and he twisted to his side to try to relieve the weight from his wrists.

He saw another kick coming and he just closed his eyes to take the blow. Begging didn't help. Defiance certainly didn't help. It was too hard to even bother; he let noises of pain come as they may, without trying to control them or to give him anything. Maybe when he was done he'd just go away again…

He took a kick to the mouth and the taste of blood followed it with the pain. He coughed into the floor and spat out blood.

Rowle went back to pacing. Maybe he was satisfied. Maybe he was just worn out enough to calm down. "They're all gone," he said, pacing back across the light of the doorway. He wasn't even really facing him — he wasn't really talking to him, he just had no one else to talk to. "Already caught and locked back up. Already. Those that aren't dead. That was the stupidest motherfucking idea, going after Harry Potter's wife…"

Draco slowly, stiffly pushed himself back to sitting. His back screamed at him for it. It was better than lying in the cold dirt, though.

Moving got Rowle's attention. He should have known better. Rowle whipped back and grabbed his hair, pulling him, staggering, up to his feet but bent backward to look up at him. He could smell rank alcohol oozing from his pores. "This is because of you — if not for you, I'd have been long gone. Out of the country."

He wouldn't have. Even Draco, even now, knew that. He could always tell when people were lying to themselves. He just wanted someone to blame, instead of his own habitually bad choices.

It didn't seem like a good idea to point that out.

"I'm not going back." Rowle shoved his wand into his face.

Kill the witness? Was that what he meant to do now? With his parents and Theo already killed, what did it matter? One wayward tear escaped the corner of his eye, and he couldn't move his head to wipe it on his shoulder, so he stared into the distance through Rowle instead.

Rowle scowled and threw him down by the hair. "Crucio!"

Draco hit the ground hard, unable to break his fall, and seized under the waves of crashing pain that pulled taut whatever muscles he had left, screaming brokenly.

When it ended, he was curled up in the dirt, gasping for breath and holding still against the lesser pains that still wracked him. Rowle was on his way up the stairs, climbing out of the pit to leave him alone. In a few seconds he would be gone.

"It's only a matter of time," Draco croaked hoarsely. "They'll find you, too."

"You know what?" Rowle looked down at him with a snarl. "Maybe you're right. Maybe they'll find me and throw my ass back in Azkaban and throw away the key. But they'll never find you." He slammed the cellar door closed, throwing Draco back into utter darkness, and the sound of stones being summoned into place on top of it rumbled through his prison. And then it was silent.

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