Dramione || December 9th: Breaking Out
It had been a long time coming, but there was one word that threatened to fall from Draco's lips with each exhalation of breath;with his drum of his fingertips against the cool handle of his wand. With each and every moment that passed by at an excruciatingly slow rate, his tongue and lips formed the one word that ached so desperately to tear itself from the back of his throat. It was a word with two syllables and a hell of a lot of bite; the way the letters curled and rolled off his tongue...sometimes, in the wee hours of the night, Draco found himself mumbling the same phrase over and over again under his breath; tucked securely beneath the covers in his stately mansion of a prison, the young Malfoy warmed himself from head to toe with the one word that still meant enough to evoke a sense of empathy in his broken, fractured heart: freedom. It was a word he hadn't dared to speak aloud in the presence of others in years; it was a phrase that meant so much and was addressed so little. It was the one thing Draco hadn't experienced in years...and he yearned for it. His soul wept and his heart ached in the absence of his freedom; his humanity had been stripped from him, and in its stead he'd been forced to slip into a more emotionally repressive slip of skin--the skin of a soldier. A warrior sent to deter the Wizarding World from rising up and against their leading commander: the Dark Lord.
For years, Draco had served this creature falsely; he refused to call Lord Voldemort a man. Voldemort hadn't been a man for Merlin only knew how many years; he was a creature now--a snake right to his very core, and every bit as cold and bitter as his shrill voice indicated. Draco found himself repulsed by his commander each and every time he was forced to stand within ten feet of the tyrant; the milky hue of his skin reminded Draco of what the world would look like bathed under a sickly moon. And there was something about those eyes--those piercing red and calculating slits that unnerved him; as though he knew everything about you without even having to perform a simple Legilimency spell.
But he didn't know Draco; perhaps he never had. Or perhaps he'd just been particularly skilled at hiding it. Either way, Draco had yet to be caught...and he didn't want to risk his chances of survival by sticking around any longer than necessary and letting his double agent status slip through the cracks. Voldemort might not have known the apparent transparency of Draco's allegiance just yet...but he would soon enough.
Many did not give the Dark Lord enough credit for his cunning and highly observant demeanor. Draco, however, was one of the few who did.
He had...personal experience in the matter.
The trickiest bit of the entire matter had, of course, been a method of escape. He'd sat withering away in his room for hours on end, pretending to memorize battle plans and strategies from the many maps and pamphlets that Malfoy Manor had on end. Chewed the end of his quill until the ink threatened to leak out; dug his fingernails against the decaying polish of his mahogany desk. He passed the time in whatever idle manners he could come up with, all the while allowing his mind to work and the gears in his head to shift at an ever-moving rate. He was determined to devise a fool-proof plan...after three days had transpired, he began to realize that it was more than a little impossible. No plan was without risk or potential failure; each one had obstacles and deterrents worse than the next.
It was in the last leg of his days at the Manor, however, that he finally came up with an...adequate plan for escaping. Granger had informed him in one of her more recent letters that she--along with a few other trusted and (supposedly) trained members of the Order--were to meet him at a specified location past the boundaries and magical force field his childhood home was nestled securely inside of. If he had been free to wander the corridors of his own home, this wouldn't have been a problem in the slightest; as it was, however, both Bellatrix and Yaxley had found it pertinent that guards be stationed throughout the Manor...including the grounds. Naturally, Voldemort had agreed. Predictably, he'd thought of the plan first. No one dared to argue with his logic.
But nevertheless, security was relatively light on the night of his escape; perhaps fate was on his side...for once. Though an eerie sense of foreboding loomed over him, Draco was able to pass each and every guard without even so much as a glance from any one of them.
It was saying goodbye that was difficult. His parents didn't know where he was going...or when he'd be back. He'd given them as little information as possible to spare them--he couldn't stand to think of what would happen if the Dark Lord got hold of either one of their memories and found out that they were hiding news of a fugitive from him. He shuddered at the thought, in fact. His goodbyes had been brief and fleeting; his father didn't understand. His mother attempted to. They looked miserable and weary; broken and neglected as their son prepared for his take of leave. But there was one sentence that hung on Draco's lips--one hushed phrase that he hoped would carry with his parents for as long as they were forced to stay separated from one another.
"I'll come back for you soon; I'll come back when it's safe."
The trouble with war, of course, was that there was no such thing as safety. More practically, what Draco had meant was that he would come for them as soon as he knew he could escape without inadvertently causing either one of them to a.) get trapped or b.) get killed. Neither option were favorable in the slightest, and so it was with a heavy heart that Draco bid adieu to his parents, with little more than a promise and the hopes that they took his word for what it was: sincerity. It was the first time he had voluntarily left them without any idea of when his return would be. It was the first time Draco Malfoy felt he had truly betrayed his parents.
It was a sickening, gut-wrenching sort of sensation. It was as heavy as a bowling ball, and sloshed around in his stomach as he made his way through the hedges dividing his Manor from the rest of the world. Even when he passed the boundaries of his house--even when he felt a tingling sensation of pricks and pokes erupt in his fingertips and spread through the length of his body (a sense of elation or euphoria, he could only presume), the feeling did not lessen or disappear. Still, that weight settled in his stomach; dead and hollow. It spoke volumes of what his parents meant to him...and what his escape meant for their relationship with one another.
He just hoped that they would be able to forgive him. Perhaps not by the end of the day or the week...but sometime. Sometime soon, preferably.
The trek was far longer than he would have liked, but far shorter than it could have been, and it was when Draco began to trudge his way up a seemingly never-ending slope that a spark of hope began to ignite in his abdomen, eating away and licking up the heavy sense of guilt that resided there, and replacing it with a foreign new emotion: hope. He tugged on the straps of his backpack and dug the heels of his battered shoes into the frozen December soil. The Order party would be here, and he would go back with them. He would sleep in a warm bed and eat whatever rationed food he would be allowed. He would not live a perfectly happy life, but he would live one free of imprisonment.
This was freedom, and this was where it started.
