The Malfoy Project

𝙳𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚘 #𝟼 - 𝙿𝚒𝚊𝚗𝚘 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚔𝚢

A/N: Here is where Draco's timeline begins to converge towards his parents' timelines, where they will eventually meet and cross over! 

༻⚜༺

     I first knew pain when the Healer beat me at St. Mungo's.

     I was just a baby then, a smushed-up baked bean with neither hair nor eyes, fresh out of the womb and as ugly and thoughtless as can be.

     But I remember the pain.

     And I remember after that. It had not been Mother who held me. It was someone else. I do not know who, it might have been one of the nurses or matrons or maids, but it was not Mother.

     I was too young to comprehend anything, of course. These memories do not come to me in wholes. Rather, it is the feelings I remember. It is as if someone had placed these memories over a burner, reduced them to ashes, their natural elements, then rubbed those ashes on my body. 

     They sink into skin, staining my bones with their permanence. If someone were to set a fire under me likewise and tried to distill me like they do with compound materials, he would find, at the bottom of the plate, these memories.

     There was a feeling of unwantedness. I did not belong in this world, and I knew it. 

     When I was brought home, they placed me in a cage. I knew because there is a hazy image retained in my mind of an empty ceiling as high as the sky, the grey worming of marble like a looming thunderstorm.

     It was all I could see — nothing above me and nothing below, no other world beyond the white bars of the cot they had trapped me in.

     And I remember crying. I felt sewn to my pillow and mattress; the soft cotton sewing itself onto my skin. It was unbearable. I cried and cried and cried for hours on end, wailing for someone to pick me up, give me milk, to rescue me. No one came. No one came when I stopped, either. And then one day there was Dobby. 

     He seemed to appear out of thin air. He tended and clothed and bottle-fed me. He sang to me rhymes, rattled toys over me, screeched out tongue-twisters, and jigged up and down to make me laugh. But that was only because they allowed him to.

     Sometimes Mother would peer at me from above the bars, her head obscuring the marble storm above. And then it would disappear, and Dobby would take her place. I didn't know who Mother and Father were, only that seeing their faces meant I would be picked up by that elf again. I would be fed and full, and I would laugh.

     Some time went by and I felt my body stretching and expanding, like some creature tearing at its cocoon. I discovered I could travel from place to place if I moved these things Dobby told me were called 'feet'. A year later I was zooming around the house like nobody's business, careening into walls and tumbling down the stairs.

     But I was always very careful never to knock things over, because that meant a man with hair like morning light through the window would come and there would be angry voices and pain on my bottom or arm or the back of my neck.

     Sometimes Mother would try to touch me or pick me up, but her hold felt so uncomfortable, so unpossessive and reluctant, that I would instinctively wriggle out from under her arms. It wasn't because I didn't like her, I just didn't know her.

     But we lived together, and I inevitably saw more and more of her as I explored the house. She was very clever and knew a lot of things. Every time we were in the same room, she would point at something and say a word, then ask me to repeat after her. I thought she must have been some kind of goddess, for how was it possible for a human being like myself to store so many words in its brain?