#draco is manipulative | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

splendidissimus · 1 year ago

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2004 - I haven't slept in days, but who's counting?

((Content warning: brief mentions of SA / nsfwhump / incest / sexual situations, imprisonment, emotional abuse, captivity, sleep deprivation, starvation (minor) ))

((Promptspiration: @whumptober 2023: day 12: I haven't slept in days, but who's counting? / Insomnia @whumpitlikeyoumeanit: "Whumpee tied up alone in a bare room... by Caretaker." (Hey, I'm allowed to use my own prompts, right?) ))

Description I feel is necessary: Draco is going insane from lack of sleep from a new potion, and his family have to confine him until it wears off, and Draco goes Full Malfoy in trying to get out. It's frankly hard to tell who is keeping whom hostage. He is brutal. This has Big Rough Draft Energy. It should probably break 10k words when done properly, but there is some yadda-yaddaing to hit the highlights.

Genre: whump

Romance level: some

Angst level: 4/5

Draco's headspace: vicious / irrational

((words: ~8500))

------------------------------------

Draco's previous record for going without sleep was five days. And then he had started hallucinating a little bit, which, yeah, obviously wasn't ideal. He had solved that, though. Now he was on day eighteen and he was fine — beyond fine. He had solved everything. Sleep was no longer a necessity, and it was glorious.

But they didn't understand. Or they were jealous. They were trying to make him sleep. They didn't know he'd already anticipated that, too. Theo had been watching him take his sleeping potions for three days now, and he obediently took it and made a show of being 'sleepy'. But what he didn't know was that Draco had developed — well, bought the formula for and then tweaked — the perfect antidote. He was now completely immune to sleeping potions, spells, hexes, curses, potions, poisons, and magical effects. Let them try.

Theo stood in front of Lucius' excruciatingly neat desk with his hands behind his back, weathering his silently judgmental gaze and the more oblique inspection of the Elizabethan portrait behind him. Time was, that would have made him feel like he was a naughty student pulled up in front of McGonagall again; now he couldn't be bothered. "I need help getting Draco to Saint Mungo's."

"Why?"

He sighed through his nose. "He hasn't slept in…" He shook his head. "I don't know how long, but I'm betting it's a lot longer than it should be. At least a week."

"It's your job to be keeping an eye on these things."

"Hey," he said firmly, rejecting the blame. "I'm doing the best I can. Do you forget how sneaky he is? I'm not the one who raised him to be a perfect liar who thinks he needs to hide stuff like this." Lucius raised one eyebrow, but Theo declined to be intimidated. "He's not just been avoiding sleep, he's been actively faking it. I knew something was up so I've sat there and watched him take his potions, watched him apparently fall asleep. I think he's developed or bought a new potion that nullifies sleep magic, so he just waits 'til I've gone. Hours, if he has to."

"I was under the impression you were the one managing his potions."

"It's not like he's not got the use of his arms!" He threw up his hands in exasperation. "If he wants to go brew potions whilst my back is turned, there's nothing going to stop him. Unless you're going to hire in two more nurses and a house elf to physically hold onto him every hour of the day, he's going to be doing some stuff on his own, and some of it's going to be wrong, with the ideas he gets in his head and chases. And frankly, two nurses, a house elf, and me wouldn't be enough to stop him doing something he really wanted to, because you know there's only one thing that can even mostly control him."

"And, unfortunately, he can control her in turn," Lucius distantly agreed, tapping a quill on the blotter and looking thoughtful.

The caught Theo a little off guard, because he was pretty sure he'd never heard Lucius agree with him so casually before, without couching it in insult or begrudging or some manner of sneer. Wait. Was the secret to getting Lucius Malfoy to interact with you like a human being just… standing up to him? Wow, that would have been nice to know years ago.

"How is he functioning?"

"Weirdly well." Theo sat down in one of the chairs this side of the desk. "I want to be clear that I'm pretty sure he's off his nut, but at a casual interaction, you don't notice it. He seems energetic and in a good mood. A little volatile, but that's not really unusual."

"Is it actually a problem, then?" Lucius pointed out. "If he's found a way to be able to function without sleep, he might benefit from it."

"I did say he was off his nut, didn't I?" he pointed out. "But that's the problem, it's so subtle it doesn't look like a problem. Doesn't even sound like a problem when I try to explain it. But it's like… Okay, you know how when he's drunk, you can have whole hours of conversation, and it seems fine because he's all confident and charismatic, but if you really pay attention you notice he's not actually really responding to what you said at all? It's like that. His confidence and charm are carrying him, but I think he's actually starting to make really questionable decisions. For the moment it's mild enough that it looks like brilliance or eccentricity, but it won't last. And I want to point out that he's interacting with the public, just, constantly. He's going in front of the Wizengamot next week. Do you want him to do that in this state?"

Lucius made an acknowledging noise without actual words, continuing his pensive look.

"Plus," Theo said, slowly, trying to choose his words to phrase this with both the proper respect for Draco but also acknowledgment of the problem, "right now, he's in a good mood. He's basically treating everything as a game. Even me trying to sedate him, it's just a competition to him. That's fine, it's a good look for him. But I'm… kind of concerned… about what happens when that changes. If someone pisses him off, you know, with his," accidental, "magic and no impulse control? Or if something scares him, how'll he react?"

"It's a concern," Lucius allowed.

Draco was naturally emotional; most of his moods were brief, but intense, turning like the weather. He was naturally cheerful and bright, and when he was up he was incandescent. But when he was down, he was brutal.

—

((yadda-yadda-ing over the cat-and-mouse of actually capturing him))

—

Lucius brought Narcissa to the drawing room. "Take us off the floo network."

"What?"

"I'll get it repermitted, we can live without it for a month."

"Tell me what is going on."

"Draco hasn't slept in weeks. We can't let him leave."

"That's absurd, if he truly hasn't slept he clearly should be in the hospital—"

"He just set fire to the house for a distraction, and Confounded you." That made her stop abruptly. "In the middle of a conversation, wandless and wordless. That is dangerous." It was impressive and could be beyond useful, but in this situation, uncontrolled… "And that's what he did to you. He can't be exposed to people he has no reason to care about."

"That's hardly our concern. It's the healers' jobs to handle situations like this."

While her focus on Draco's wellbeing at the expense of everyone else was admirable, she was perhaps overconfident in their social stability. She thought that any repercussions for what Draco did would be easy to brush off — that everyone else must give him as much leeway as she did and forgive him as easily.

"They can't hold him," he said flatly. "Putting him in the hospital will only give him more people to, at best, talk into releasing him — and more likely Confound or outright Imperius. Once he extracts himself from the hospital, he will be at large and increasingly more erratic. This may be our last chance to contain the situation."

"Draco does not need to be 'contained'. He has made it clear he has no intention of using the Imperius or of harming anyone."

"When he's in his right mind," he pointed out. "In his right mind he would not be Confounding you to control a conversation. He has proven that he is still perfectly capable of using the Imperius, wand or no." She looked flatly displeased with his analysis, but didn't argue with it. "The best case scenario, should he make it out of the house now, whether to the hospital or of his own accord, is that his madness becomes public knowledge and his reputation is irreversibly undermined. The more likely outcome is that he destroys everything he's built and is eventually locked away, first in Saint Mungo's and eventually in Azkaban when nothing else can hold him."

"They would not."

"What else is there to do with a wizard who can control anyone he talks to and has no hesitation using it? They've no compunction imprisoning lunatics alongside criminals."

Her lips pressed into a flat line.

"Disconnect us," he repeated, stepping away. "I have Nott and the elf watching the doors so he can't Disapparate. I'll find him."

She considered the fireplace thoughtfully as he left.

—

When she went to her parlour, she wasn't surprised to find Draco there; he knew his father was looking for him and knew Lucius wouldn't come here, at least not until he exhausted everywhere else. He looked up from the book in his lap, chin resting on his fingers, a little smirk playing about his lips.

She allowed that she could believe Lucius' assessment that he wasn't entirely in his right mind. Lucius only ever saw the worst possible outcomes, though.

"Is your father right, that you haven't been sleeping?"

Draco shrugged a little bit without changing expression. He seemed only mildly amused. "He might be."

"He considers this a problem worth solving." She studied him, the edge of smugness with which he was regarding her. "So do I," she added. "I need you to go to the hospital."

He looked at her for several seconds without changing expression, but turning his ring around his finger with his thumb, then shrugged a little and set his book aside to stand. "Very well."

Good — that would end this absurd situation with the least amount of drama possible. She nodded and led him out of her room, back to the floo fireplace in the drawing room.

She was reaching for the floo powder when she heard a scuffle behind her and, turning, found the house elf latched onto Draco, just before they disappeared.

—

Tolly Apparated with a struggling Draco down into a small room in the cellar where the wine had been moved out, leaving bare stone walls and ancient wooden cross-racks built into them. There was one solitary chair in the centre of the room.

The very moment they appeared, Nott cast Incarcerus and caught Draco in magical ropes that bound his limbs and wrapped around his chest. Draco threw a wandless curse at him that deflected off a shield that Lucius raised just in the nick of time, and in the same moment, the elf took his wand from his robes and vanished.

In the brief moment when Draco was disoriented by the loss of his wand, Lucius cast a different binding spell on him to replace the Incarcerus, because Draco would end that easily: the Living Rope curse, a Darker spell that needed the counter to be broken and would tighten as the subject struggled. It bound his wrists together and tied his arms behind him to the back of the chair, forcing him to sit. He also Silenced Draco, knowing that wouldn't hold long.

"I'll give you a moment to calm down," he said, pointed for Nott to leave behind him, and then stepped out of the room without turning his back, closed the heavy door firmly between them, and locked Draco in.

Nott let out a heavy breath. "We got him."

"Yes. Now you have to identify and counter whatever he's been taking that allowed this to happen."

Nott nodded. "I have a sample of it. I can take it to Saint Mungo's and work it out with them."

"Horace Slughorn," he corrected.

"Ugh."

"Invoke Draco's name, and pay him whatever he's looking for." Lucius trusted people he was paying far more than those whose loyalties were split up between institutions and ideals that were hopefully encouraging them to do what he wanted.

"I repeat: ugh. But fine. I'll work with Slughorn, for Draco."

"Master?" He looked down to see the elf at his feet, gingerly holding Draco's wand, and he immediately took it from her and set it on a high shelf that was now over-filled with disorganised wine bottles.

"You are not to free Draco," he told her, "tell anyone about this, or obey any of his orders until I tell you otherwise."

"Yes, Master…" She looked fearfully toward Draco's prison.

His eyes narrowed slightly at her expression. That could be a problem. She obeyed him out of fear, propriety, and magic — but she actually liked Draco. A willful house elf had options. She might find a way to twist his words to allow her to help Draco, or manage to disobey his orders long enough to do so and then take the punishment. He needed to head that off.

"This is for his good. He is unwell. He may sound reasonable, but he is not. Don't be fooled."

"Yes, Master." Her voice was more firm this time. "Mistress is coming," she added.

That wasn't surprising, but promised to be difficult.

Narcissa ran down to the cellar. "Lucius!" She was openly furious. The house elf cringed and disappeared, and Nott took one look at her and hurried up the stairs, managing to make his gangly frame scurry.

Lucius didn't move. "We have him," he said evenly.

"You lied to me!"

"He can read you too easily. If you'd known the plan it wouldn't have worked."

"You have no right to use me against my son!"

"Our son," he corrected patiently. "It isn't just you; he can read all of us. Whoever acted the bait would have been lied to. But you are the only one he would completely believe was trying to help him, so it had to be you leading him into the trap. I gambled that, it being for his sake, you would eventually forgive me."

If she would eventually, she hadn't yet. Her expression only grew colder. "Where is he?" she demanded.

He lifted his wand and drew a rectangle on the wall in front of him. The other side of the wall had been previously prepared, so his rectangle became semi-transparent, a greyish "window" into the room that was now Draco's cell. He was generally facing their direction, still bound to the chair, head hanging onto his chest. The light was coming from one torch beside the door, and there was a portrait on the side wall, the same Elizabethan Lucius Malfoy who hung in Lucius' study, currently looking fairly bored as he toyed with his walking stick and watched over Draco.

"What are you doing to him?" Her voice had risen, somewhere between fury and fear. Though she can't have thought he would actually harm him. It was likely just a shock to see him that way.

"Ideally, I am stopping him from hurting anyone."

"Lucius, this is mad!"

"Trust me."

Nott's heavy step came down the stairs again, and hesitated, so Lucius glanced back at him to get him to speak. "He's still got his potions," Nott said. "I just thought about that. That might not be a good idea."

He nodded toward the window again. "Relieve him of them."

"Right." He went around them and unlocked the door.

Draco lifted his head when he came in, and his eyes were wide. "Theo." His voice was breathy and relieved. "Thank Merlin, get me out of here…"

He knew better than to look him in the eyes, since that seemed to be helpful to Draco Confounding people, but it was hard. It was hard to see him like this at all. "I can't," he told him quietly, and came up to him, and started searching his pockets.

"What? What do you mean, 'you can't'?" Draco squirmed to try to stop his search, but tied as he was it was only a little inconvenient. "Please!"

"I'm sorry, Draco." He didn't find anything but Draco's potions bag and wallet in his pockets, and he cleaned them out quickly.

"Theo, Theo why are you doing this to me?" Draco pleaded, breath hitching. "Please look at me… please… Is it because I didn't want to suck your dick? I'm sorry, I just didn't feel good, but I will, I'll do whatever you want, just let me out. Please, I'll… you can fuck me, just please, please let me out," he sobbed.

Theo fled out of the room and slammed the door. He could still hear Draco sobbing with the occasional 'please' from the other side. Narcissa was staring at him coldly, while Lucius continued to look through the window at Draco.

"I didn't." His words tumbled over each other. "It's not— I wouldn't—"

"It's fine," Lucius observed clinically. "He's opening strong."

"This is not a game!" Narcissa snapped.

"We'll see. Nott, stay here a few minutes."

Theo hung around, trying not to look at Draco. Instead he unshrunk the potions bag and started setting them out on the wine shelf beside his wand, labels facing out, so they could be grabbed if they needed them.

Draco's sobbing eventually faded away to silence, and then, in a few minutes, he dropped his head across the back of the chair so that he was looking at the ceiling. A few minutes after that, he started pushing the chair up on its back legs, balancing there.

"Go back in," Lucius instructed.

Theo glanced at him, and at Draco, and then silently did as he was told.

Draco dropped his chair down when the door opened, and raised his eyebrows very slightly when Theo came in. "Oh, you're still here." Both face and voice were completely normal. "I actually thought that might work. They are watching, aren't they?"

"More like might get me killed! Why would you say something like that? You know I'd never hurt you."

"Technically, I never said you did. I suggested that you were leveraging your power over me for sex, which, let's be honest…"

"I never have done!"

Draco shrugged a little and leaned his chair back again, going back to looking at the ceiling. "If that's what you really think."

"Draco…"

"No hard feelings, right? I mean, you are keeping me prisoner."

"Draco, we're just trying to help you. You need to sleep."

"With friends and family like you, one hardly needs enemies."

"I'm sorry." Theo backed out of the room again, and this time he locked the door.

When he looked at Draco's parents, his mother was staring blankly through the window with her arms crossed, and his father had his hands clasped behind his back.

"If either of you doesn't have the stomach for this," Lucius said, "it would be best you leave now."

Neither of them answered, but neither of them left, either.

—

Near the top of the first hour, Draco began calling for his mother, and after a few minutes she gave in and went to him. He leaned forward as much as he could, bound to his chair, when she came in. "Mother, please…"

She felt his forehead with the back of her hand and summoned the elf to bring her a blanket.

"Mother." He was looking up at her with wide eyes, vulnerable in his drawn face. "Mother, look what he's doing." There was a quaver of fear in his voice. "This is insane."

"It is for your good." She put the blanket around his shoulders. "It won't be for long. Once you sleep, this will all be over."

"That's crazy, Mother. Look at this…" He twisted to try to show his bound wrists. "This isn't for sleep, it's for torture!"

"No one is here to torture you." She ran her hand down his hair. "You only need to sleep."

"I can't, not like this. Who could?"

She stood with him for a while, but it wasn't really sustainable. Eventually she made a minor adjustment to the blanket to make sure it was tucked around him to keep him warm. "I have to go, but you are not being abandoned," she promised. "I'll be right outside."

"You're going to leave me here?" His voice was getting shrill with fear.

"Only for now."

She was almost out the door when he called out to her again, voice cracking on the edge of tears. "Why are you letting him do this to me?"

She didn't allow herself to look back and quickly left, closing the door between them, only then clenching her hand into a quiet fist.

"He's trying to drive a wedge between us," Lucius said.

"I know." She still didn't want to look at him. She silently took herself back upstairs.

—

When Theo got back from meeting with Slughorn in Hogsmeade, he found Draco still tied to that same chair, in that same position. "We can't at least let him walk around, or lay down, or something…?"

"It isn't possible," Lucius said flatly. "We only barely caught him the first time. To give him back his hands is to give him back a dangerous amount of magic. He's dangerous enough as it is. Without being able to Stun him, this is what controlling him looks like."

Theo looked at Draco again with an uneasy feeling. He didn't really disagree… He'd seen, he'd been on the receiving end of, what Draco could do without a wand. But this didn't feel right…

"He's also willing to hurt himself to manipulate us," Lucius said distantly.

Theo glanced at him quickly, then looked back into the cell. There was a smudged back mark on the stone wall, that spread toward the ceiling, and he realised Draco's blanket was gone. He'd set another fire, he surmised. Trying to force them to send him to the hospital by breathing smoke? Trying to scare them?

"At least this way, his options are limited."

"I understand…"

—

"I'm bored of you," Draco commented to the portrait. "Go away,"

"Would that I could," the portrait sighed. "But you're such a scintillating conversationalist I find myself rapt."

"Of course," Draco said. "It's my conversation, not your orders to spy upon me that keep you here."

"Of course it is." He yawned delicately behind his sleeve.

Draco silently considered the painting for a minute or two, then narrowed his eyes to focus. "Diffindo," he snapped, and a great slice raked it way across the canvas. The portrait's inhabitant yelled and ran for safety in a different frame.

"And that's what I think about your spies, Lucius!" he called out to the empty room, and smirked toward the ceiling.

It was hours before anyone came to deal with that, and in that time Draco's smirk soured into a cold glare. He glowered and shoved the chair back, scraping over the floor, ramming it against the wall to try to break it, to no avail, although it did make his hands hurt. Then he started ripping out the shelves with his magic, littering the ground with broken shards of ancient wood, occasionally grabbing them and throwing them around the air with a yell. Those bastards! They just left him there to suffer…

When the door unlocked, he jerked his head up, and just as it opened he yanked his head to the side, and with that motion the ruined portrait frame flew off the wall and slammed into the floor right at his father's feet, spraying him with splinters and forcing him to cover his face.

"Oops," Draco said blandly. "I must be doing accidental magic. Seems someone's taken my wand."

His father gave him an unimpressed look and shook splinters out of his sleeve. "You know that was meant to keep you from being alone."

"You know what else keeps me from being alone? People. Like the kind that I can be around by not being locked in this room."

"That is true," his father said mildly. "You should have a nap and then go find some."

Draco raised his chin with a sniff and glared.

"Elf," Lucius said, looking over the room, and Tolly appeared at the doorway. "Clean up this mess before you bring Draco's breakfast." He looked back at Draco. "Next time you feel like throwing a tantrum and destroying your only company, perhaps wait until it isn't the middle of the night so someone will be there to deal with it."

"You know, that is the one thing you have over Rowle," Draco noted. "When he had me locked away, I could still see hints of daylight. Not with you, though. Your torture is much more effective. This deprivation really goes nicely with my warped sense of time. I can't tell if it's been an hour or a week I've been here. Bravo."

"Well, I would give you a clock," Lucius said, using his wand to draw up another chair by the door and taking a seat, legs crossed amidst the detritus of Draco's night, to look at him. "But clearly it wouldn't be long for this world."

"Well, at least the gears would be more interesting to throw around than this junk." Draco looked at a large chunk of wine shelf meaningfully and it flew across the room, making the house elf yelp.

His father didn't respond to that, just fastidiously cleaned under his fingernails, and Draco glared at him with mounting resentment. He was so smug…

"When Rowle had me prisoner," he abruptly snapped, "he made me suck his dick. You know, because that's what fairies do. Is that where we're going here?"

His father's eyes shot up. "Disgusting," he said icily.

But it gave him a reaction, that soothing balm that gave him back the feeling of control, and, satisfied, he leaned back in the chair. "I know," he agreed. "But I'm not the one who has me tied up in a cellar, just like the last guy. Forgive me if I can't help but notice some unflattering parallels."

"It doesn't have to be like this."

"Oh, no, of course not. Let me guess: I made you do this. Or Voldemort made you do this. Or your father made you do this. You didn't make any choices that led to this situation. Poor Lucius, just swept around on the currents of circumstance."

His father's eyes remained cold, but his voice turned steady and calm. Patient. "Stop this, Draco."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Very much," he sighed. "Your only enemy here is whatever demon inside your head is making you behave this way."

"Not from where I'm sitting."

His father didn't answer, and his resentment began mounting again. In a while, he rocked the chair back into the wall, then again, testing how hard it hit his head each time.

After the third, his father summoned the chair back, scraping, to the centre of the floor, and then cast a sticking charm to hold it in place, so Draco couldn't even rock it back on its legs now. Draco twisted around in the chair, feeling the ropes tighten, and couldn't keep from yelling out his frustration. "Just fuck off already and leave me alone!"

"I will not."

—

Because he'd destroyed the portrait, it now fell on the three of them and the house elf to keep watch over Draco at all times. It wasn't safe to leave him alone, and if he was alone they wouldn't know if he actually did start giving in to sleep.

But the real reason was that Draco simply couldn't handle being alone. Isolation was far crueller to him than to most people, as had been demonstrated repeatedly in the last several years, and the point genuinely wasn't to torture him. If there were any real way to simply hold Draco in a warm, comfortable bedroom where he could chat with his friends and play games until he fell asleep, that would have been far preferable.

But no. His wandless magic — wandless but mostly assuredly not accidental, every single attempted Confounding and thrown teacup and fire set was under his complete and calculated control — turned every every small luxury into a weapon or an instrument of self-harm, so that he could have nothing but bare stone walls even he couldn't hurt himself with. He turned every attempt at care into a new gauntlet of emotional sadism as he probed for a crack in their defences to exploit, so that his mother had to steel himself before she entered the room and whatever fresh hell of accusation or pathos he was going to heap on her, and Nott threw himself into the analysis of his potion so that he had something more productive to do than weather another storm of Draco's guilting and debasement.

It was hardest to handle because probably very little of what Draco said was an outright lie. That was what made him such an excellent manipulator — he had a real gift for weaponising the truth. It was quite possible the pitiable things he was saying were his real thoughts, or had a kernel of his real thoughts at the core of them, merely now laid bare in the way calculated to elicit the most sympathy, or, if that failed, to hurt them the most. Every cruel observation wasn't merely a cutting insult but a blow to the heart of genuine insecurities he had gleaned. All of his accusations had either crossed his mind, perhaps not what he believed, but things he had at some point felt, or were things he knew they were afraid of. And he knew exactly how to turn every one of those feelings into a deadly curse.

The house elf was largely immune to Draco's attacks because he knew it was pointless to manipulate her, knowing it was impossible to get her to do anything for him against her master's orders, but she couldn't watch him at all times; aside from the needs of the house itself, which were being neglected, when Draco grew too bored he would still attack her just for amusement.

Lucius took most of the time the house elf did not. It was as much his role to keep Narcissa and Nott from being bewitched by him and giving in to him as it was to keep him bound there, and the best way to do that was to minimise their time with him.

He was the most suited to bearing Draco's attacks… and the only one who managed to turn Draco's mind elsewhere for any length of time. He was able, temporarily, to distract Draco and keep him calm by challenging him to mental chess, or directing him into debate or diatribe where his vitriol could have free rein without turning personal.

But it wasn't safe. Draco was always looking for an opening. He once used chess, of all things, as a cover to Confound him, and the elf pulled him out of the room before he could free him; Draco's laughter after that episode was still haunting. His attention could turn in an instant, and the moment Lucius let his guard down the vitriol did turn personal and he found a way to turn the words against him.

Even he could not hold up under Draco's attention indefinitely. He didn't let Draco be alone for more than a half hour at a time, but he did have to retreat to the other side of the door for respite every few hours. He stood in the same spot whenever Narcissa or Nott took his place, on guard for Draco's influence, and left the room only when the house elf took over the duty.

This was not sustainable.

—

"Damn it, Draco!" Theo was this close to throwing the toast in his face. He probably hadn't been eating enough during all that time the potion was keeping him awake, and now he was refusing food entirely. He hadn't had more than water and a few cups of tea since he'd been imprisoned, and his body was showing it. He was quickly going from thin to skeletal, with his clothes hanging off of sharp shoulders and the ropes biting into the knobs of his wrists. It was like the potion keeping him awake was eating him alive from the inside to do it. "This isn't about control!"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I must have got confused by the ropes and the locked door."

"I'm trying to save your life!"

"Of course you are; if I weren't here you'd have to go out and find yourself an actual personality. Could you be any more pathetic?"

Theo let out a helpless groan and dropped onto his knees, with his arms on Draco's lap, holding his head. "Draco… Please, just fucking don't die…"

"If I do, Theo, it's not going to be my fault."

—

Draco was crying. Not sobbing, but almost silently, shoulders shaking like he was trying to suppress it, head bowed into his chest so no one could see.

"This has gone far enough," Narcissa said sharply, going for the door.

"Stop."

"You're the one who needs to stop! Look at what you're doing!"

"He's manipulating you."

"It's not fake," Theo said quietly, staring through the window at Draco. "I've seen him cry enough… that's real."

He flicked that away. "So it's not false. It's still intentional. He's been making and allowing himself to cry to manipulate you since he was two years old; this is not a new tactic. If you let it work this time you're dooming him."

She ignored him and pushed her way into the cell. Draco looked up, eyes wide and startled, then ducked his head, embarrassed, to wipe away his tears against his shoulders.

"Mother…"

She came and wiped tears off his cheeks. He resisted at first, then gave in and leaned into her hands with a sigh, eyes closing. Maybe this would relax him. Maybe that was what he actually needed to sleep.

"Why don't you ever protect me from him…?" he asked in a faint, flat voice.

She drew a sharp breath through her nose and gently lifted his chin to search his face. His eyes flinched away from hers in quiet shame and looked away to the corner of the floor.

"I know what you're trying to do," she said quietly, and ran her hand over his hair. "It isn't going to work."

He didn't look up, or give up the act.

She ran her hand over his hair again, and stepped back out of the room. Lucius started to move, but she made a sharp gesture at him with one finger and carried on up the stairs.

Because she knew that Lucius had harmed Draco. Maybe even hurt him. She had laid ultimata when Draco was young to keep Lucius' darkness and violence away from him. She had intervened when his discipline became too harsh. But they were both prone to operating in shadows, to hiding and secrets. What did she not know? Had she been too distant? Placed too much trust in him? Should she have stood between them more? Had she failed Draco?

She knew she had, on some level. But not this badly…

—

"I'm cold," Draco said quietly. His voice was submissive, almost broken. Tired of fighting.

"Then you shouldn't have set your blanket on fire."

"You're right. I was just… scared, I guess. I thought you'd have to let me go. I wasn't thinking clearly. May I have another?"

"No."

"…I understand," he said in a small voice, and let his chin hang onto his chest. He was quiet for a little bit before he spoke up again.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. "For everything. I should have been better. You deserve better. I'm trying, I try so damn hard, I just keep… fucking everything up…"

He didn't respond. Maybe, if he'd thought Draco were actually saying something he meant, he would have, but as it was, it was better for it to just be noise.

Draco was quiet for almost long enough that he thought he meant to stay that way. When he did speak, his voice was low, but without a trace of submission or meekness. "You have to sleep eventually," he said in a quiet, nearly casual voice, and then lifted his head just enough to meet his eyes. His eyes were piercing and cold as any blade. "I don't."

Lucius was not intimidated — Draco interpreting the fact that he stood that way would be a mistake. But he was a realist, and he knew when wariness was appropriate; if there were any one of them Draco would actually try to harm, it would be him, and it would be best to change the situation before he started getting ideas. "You will, eventually," he promised, and left the room.

—

The quality of Draco's breathing changed.

Lucius looked up and studied him. He was leaning forward, gasping quietly, eyes on the floor. "Draco?" He stood warily.

"...heart..." Draco gasped out.

Damn it, he'd been afraid of this. He stepped behind him to look, but he saw exactly what he expected to: on his wrist, above the ropes biting into him, the wrist cuff that measured his heartbeat was flashing in rapid alarm. Between the fact that he couldn't take his daily heart regulating potion and the stress...

He stepped out of the room without a word, leaving the door ajar to listen to Draco and looking over the shelf of his potions. He had medications for all of this. There was an emergency sedative precisely for the times his heart ran out of control.

The problem was, they couldn't use them. Nott had brought up a good point: in Draco's mindset of subterfuge and paranoia, they had no way to know which of his medications he had laced with the problematic anti-sleep concoction, but every reason to believe he had done so.

They also had every reason to believe the specific heart medication for this situation would be completely ineffective, at best. It was a sedative. It slowed his heart, for sure, but it also put him to sleep. The chances that his anti-sleep potion would nullify the sleep effect but leave the heart effect intact were slim. It was a carefully balanced blend custom formulated for him, and mixing it with this effect would be reckless and dangerous, even if it weren't laced.

He touched the bottle of sedative, still considering it, for a moment. What was the alternative? Sit back and stonily watch him have a heart attack?

Inside the cell, Draco groaned weakly.

He supposed the real only option was to bring him to the hospital. Maybe he was weak enough or distracted enough they would be able to control him. The risks of what he might do were real, but it would keep him alive...

"Wait!" Nott's voice came from the stairs, and his tromping steps brought him into sight soon thereafter. "Hold on, Tolly got me..."

He narrowed his eyes slightly. Hadn't he been with Slughorn, presumably in Hogsmeade? Willful elf...

"You haven't given him anything, right?"

"No." He dropped his hand from the potions. "There's nothing safe to give him."

"I'll see if there's anything I can do." He hurried past into the cell.

Lucius watched from the doorway as Nott inspected Draco, crouching in front of him, taking his pulse, taking a reading with his wand... Draco weakly twisted to get away from him.

In a minute, Nott stood again, face stony. "Draco, you..." His wand hand clenched tight as he turned away. "He did it to himself," he said in a flat voice.

"What are you talking about?"

"He hyperventilated to speed up his heart to set off the alarm so we'd give him his tainted potions, or send him to the hospital where he could escape, or... fuck it, just to watch us panic, probably. Who knows. It's already slowing down because he can't keep that up."

"Then he was never in any danger," he realised coldly, staring at Draco.

"No, that's the fucking stupid part! It's so bloody dangerous! When that alarm goes off it means his heart's going a hundred and forty times a minute or more, and just because he did it on purpose doesn't magically make it all right! It's still damaging his heart, still wearing out the spells holding it together, he's still going to throw himself into shock or a heart attack, and fucking die, and he doesn't care!"

Draco could obviously hear them; they were still standing there in his cell and Nott's voice was raised nearly to a yell now. But he didn't seem to care. He took a deeper breath and leaned back in the chair.

"He's just..."

"If it's any consolation," Draco said behind him, "it feels rather unpleasant."

Nott whirled on him, wand clenched, then stormed out of the room. "You want these bloody things so badly?" He yanked a potion off the shelf on the other side of the door and threw it. It exploded like a bomb at Draco's feet, spraying shards of glass and muddy red liquid that looked like old blood. "Have them!" Another flew past his head -- Draco flinched away from it -- and exploded against the back wall. A third one hit the floor beside the leg of his chair and didn't break, but skittered away toward the corner. "Fucking choke on them."

Draco looked up without a word, and Nott stomped away. In a second he was back in the door, though. "I just really want you to know that I was aiming for you," he said. "I just fucking missed." Then he was gone. They could hear the door at the top of the stairs slam distantly.

"You don't have anything to say?" Draco shook his head, leaning forward, to make sure there was no glass in his hair.

Lucius summoned the stray potion to hand before it could be forgotten and give Draco the chance to get it. "I applaud his restraint."

—

"You're the reason I tried to kill myself," Draco said in a casual, intimate voice, too quiet for anyone outside the room to overhear even if they were watching. "The thought of living with you a moment more was unbearable. Of being beaten down by you, pushed around by you, of trying to be made to live like you. The only way I could see to get away from you was to take all my potions and never wake up." He leaned back, gaze seeming wistful. "Even afterward, I still wished it had worked. I wished that she'd been a few minutes later and hadn't saved me. Shall we tell her that?" He dropped unblinking eyes down to watch him. "I think she deserves to know that, don't you?"

Lucius watched him expressionlessly, unmoving.

"Or are you going to let me out?"

"You can say whatever you feel you need to," Lucius said evenly. "You are still not leaving this room."

"She will never forgive you."

"So be it."

—

"I've got it." Tolly was the one spending the hour with Draco, and so Theo managed to find his parents both in the room outside the cell. They could have been using this time to rest, but instead they were still using it to watch Draco, compulsively, just out of reach of his abuse.

"The antidote. Slughorn wanted credit for Draco's anti-sleep potion and I told him he was welcome to it, since it apparently drives people fucking crackers. But I've got it." He showed off a phial the size of a large finger. "Now we just need to get him to take it."

"Asking nicely seems to be out of the question," Lucius said dryly. "Will it be effective diluted in his food?" Well, tea, which was all Draco really ate.

"It would be, but I don't think he'd take it. He's so paranoid, so vigilant, he'd know something was up." Theo put the potion and his hand back into his pocket, watching Draco with them. "What about acting like it's a sleeping potion? Then he'd think he was immune to it and drink it out of arrogance, to rub it in."

"Maybe two days ago," Lucius said. "He's more likely to destroy it out of spite, now. It's useless to try to Bind him or similar, a wandless Protego is almost signature…"

"Imperius," Narcissa said.

They were both quiet.

"He wouldn't forgive you," Theo said after a long minute. "He already feels like we control him too much. The moment he got better, he'd leave and we'd never see him again. …If he got better at all, instead of having a breakdown and being locked up in Saint Mungo's."

Lucius nodded. "I would rather not, anyway," he admitted.

"…Do we have to just physically hold him down and pour it down his throat…?" Theo wondered.

"A better question is if we can."

"I have four doses. If he breaks a couple…"

Lucius glanced over at met his eyes, considering, then looked at Narcissa, and Theo followed his train of thought with a moment of realisation. It might work. He took out all four potions and held them out to Draco's parents, keeping one for himself and giving her two of them; she blinked at it and at him, then noticed they were looking at her. She looked back at Draco, and nodded as she took them.

—

On the fourth day, less than twelve hours after being fed the antidote, the quality of Draco's manipulations had changed. When Narcissa came to give him his breakfast, relieving the elf of its vigil, he jerked his head up to look. His eyes were red and sunken into dark circles. "Mother… I give in, all right? Just tell me what you want."

She studied his face as she finished up his tea. Whatever Lucius believed, she knew Draco, and she wasn't blind to his manipulations, even if she, perhaps, found them difficult to resist; she could see there was something else there now. An edge of desperation, a genuine franticness. Perhaps he was such a master manipulator he could have faked trying-and-barely-failing to cover up his desperation, but he wasn't, not now. "We don't want anything from you."

She helped him to drink his tea, but he turned his face away, and she touched his hair to urge him back toward it. "I only want you to sleep and get better," she said.

"There's got to be something else!" He whipped his head away from her, and the teacup ripped out of her hand and shattered against the wall. "Let me go!"

When he flipped the tea tray on her, she left the room and sent the elf to get Lucius. Theodore arrived swiftly as well, but Lucius kept anyone from going back into the room. It was cruel, but it was necessary; Draco was becoming more erratic in his desperation. For the first time, the flashes of his magic throwing things around the room did actually seem accidental. It was probably more dangerous than it ever had been; manipulative, he would be cruel, but erratic, he could truly hurt someone from fear or rage and regret it in the next instant, when it was too late.

They could watch the crumbling of his will as the treatment faded, quickly now that the first cracks had formed. His chin sank toward his chest and then jerked up seconds later, over and over. He lolled his head and squirmed in the chair, trying to keep himself alert. He muttered to himself, nothing really sensible, and then broke out into a scream. "Don't make me sleep! Please, I'm sorry, just don't make me!" He broke down into brittle sobs. "Please… please don't…"

He continued begging for some time, growing more incoherent, the words slurring into an exhausted mumble that faded into wordless sobs as he lost the energy even to voice his futile pleading, knowing it would do no good, no one was coming. His sobs trailed away into hitching wet breaths, and those evened out as he finally cried himself to sleep.

Narcissa closed her eyes in quiet relief once she realised he was actually, finally asleep, and Theodore actually sagged against the wall with his head in his arms. Her arms ached from gripping them so tightly. "Elf," she summoned. She heard an acknowledging squeak and, looking down, realised that it had been there watching from the corner as well.

"Wait," Lucius said grimly, staring into the other room. "It may be a ploy."

She nearly snapped at him, for caring so little about their son that he could watch even that and only see an enemy, but then she noticed his face. He looked tired. Maybe not physically, or not only physically, but from bearing most of the weight of keeping Draco imprisoned, of having to remain hard-hearted because someone must. Yet he still had to make sure that it was safe before he allowed himself to relax. While they gave in to relief, he didn't let himself feel it yet.

He was starting to move, but she touched his arm. "I'll check." She unlocked the door to Draco's cell. His wariness was contagious, and she wasn't entirely unguarded as she approached the lonely figure bound to the chair. She still didn't believe that Draco would hurt her, even now, but if he was making some last desperate effort for his freedom, he could lash out wildly…

"Draco?" She crouched in front of the chair, looking up into his face. He looked… if not peaceful, then at any rate unaware. He didn't move at her approach, and the quality of his breathing didn't change. After a moment, she reached up and lightly cupped his cheek, pulling her fingertips through his hair for a moment. Then she looked back to the window and nodded.

Theodore entered with the potion bag, taking out a Dreamless Sleep. "To keep him down," he said unnecessarily, and she held Draco's head to help him feed it to him. Draco stirred and tried to wake, alarming her, and she stroked his hair, settling him back into his sleep. She kept him until the potion had time to take effect.

He stood up, hesitating, watching Draco. "I do have some Draught of the Living Death left," he quietly, leaving the decision to them.

She glanced at him and at Lucius, looked into Draco's face, and in a moment nodded. The idea of him waking up again anytime soon was… unbearable. She held him while he fed him that, and Draco's breathing slowed to imperceptibility. Compared to the last few days, it was still a relief.

Lucius released Draco from his bindings and caught him as he collapsed. Blood dripped from Draco's fingertip, a thin line winding from the deep, raw circles that showed how he had struggled against the ropes over the last few days, and especially the last few hours.

"Put him to bed," she instructed the elf. "I'll be there shortly."

"I'll go," Theodore volunteered. "He needs healing… He might still need the hospital…"

"I'll be there regardless," she said firmly. The elf disappeared with Draco's limp body, and Theodore hurried after them.

She touched Lucius' back. "You did well."

"There is no guarantee he will be in his right mind even after sleeping," he warned, looking distantly at the now-empty chair.

"If not, we will handle it then. Rest."