𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐓| 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐟𝐨𝐲

𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐘𝐒𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍|𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒

Next chapter at 100 votes! Dedicated to dracossluttywriter
   — TWs for death, descriptions of dead bodies, grief

  IT WAS ONLY UP CLOSE that Seven realised the branches of the wisened willow inked upon Draco's skin were swaying slightly, as if moved by an impossible breeze. She tried to ignore the way the empty noose swung too.

She saw the hint of another tattoo, one she hadn't seen before through the endless downpour of blood that had slicked his skin whilst in the ring. Only now the bandages obscured the vast majority of the image. Though she could still make out the hilt of a wand, and the forked tongue of the serpent that curled around it, peaking out from the upper lip of the gauze, the body of the wand centred with his spine. Maybe she'd just imagined it — but Seven could've sworn she'd seen the snake tighten around the wand when it had seen her, it's milky eyes peering out briefly, before ducking back under the bandage as it shifted.

She couldn't stop herself, and at first, she hadn't even realised the way her hand had raised, fingers hovering millimetres from the intricate designs. They gravitated at once to the image of the willow, ghosting the sparse expanse of branches and wondering, were they dead?

Seven didn't have to wonder for long, as beneath the whisper of her touch the tree came alive. Branches flexing and spreading, climbing higher, wrapping around one another like vines, curling over the apex of his shoulder — the right hand side of his ribs, disappearing onto his front where Seven could not see; flaring to life at her touch, reacting to her as if they were all the words Draco never dared say aloud — all the things he forbid himself to feel.
A moment later leaves began to blossom from the barren branches, a beautiful mess of black ink and hollow spaces, coming together to create something much more than words dared to describe.

  Her fingertips hovered, barely a breath separating her skin from his. She wanted to desperately to close the distance, to touch him — his art. Yet something about it felt strange. Something felt wrong, as if forbidden, as if even without spoken vernacular she knew it would only bring bad news.

  Still, despite the gnawing in her gut, Seven couldn't resist the way the willow whispered to her, fruitful branches outstretched like fingers begging to intertwine with her own. At her presence even the noose had became a thing of beauty, appearing to have been overcome by nature's hand. Moss had begun to engulf the rope, and flowers so small she almost couldn't see them had found a home in the base of the curve where a throat should fall.
  A beauty in the blasphemy.

  At last she relented, touching him, and all at once his ink came alive. Suddenly Seven was no longer standing over an unconscious Draco in the deepest depths of Navy's underground compound. Instead, she was standing before a willow. The willow.

  Rotting leaves coated the landscape, decaying to cast the scene a sad shade of brown, the same colour as a fading bruise, any final hints of yellow clinging to life were fast fleeting.
  The tree itself, however, was dead, and entirely like that Draco had portrayed.
  These branches were not beautiful, but instead vicious and jutting, striking the sky at violent angles and cursing the clouds to a miserable grey that was impenetrable to light. Even the air itself seemed to be depressed; heavier than usual.

  — But what caught Seven's eye most of all, was the noose. There were no flowers in sight now. No beauty, only blasphemy of the cruelest creation.

  A corpse hung from the thickest willow branch, a woman. Lank hair that seemed some strange mix between  blonde and brown obscured most of her gaunt face, and at her feet knelt a grieving boy.

  A boy with white-blonde hair and shoulders that carried the weight of the world.

  All at once the tragic scene vanished, as if out of the same nowhere it had appeared from. Only this time when Seven opened her eyes, Draco's grey ones glared back at her.
  His fist wrapped around her wrist was the only confirmation that what she'd seen hadn't been a dream or madness inspired hallucination.

"What are you doing?" His voice was breathy; borderline frantic. After all, he'd build his walls so high that now even he was trapped inside, but he liked it that way; there was safety in being alone. Yet still, Seven always seemed to find a way through.

"I — ," She was uncertain of what to say, what could she say? " — Sorry."

But what was she even sorry for?
— Sorry for coming here so late at night? Sorry for watching him, touching him? For uncovering a secret she never even knew existed? For not turning back the moment she'd seen that part of him?

"You had no right..." He was angry, in a way she'd never seen before, so much so it stole his words away.
This was softer, no violent edges, and yet why did this hurt her the most? Draco looked nothing less than devastated, just as he had knelt before the willow tree, a hateful sheen glassing his cold eyes. "That was not for you to see."

"I'm sorry." She said again, sounding stupid and feeling worse.

After all this time together, Seven realised with a horrible sadness that she'd never really known him at all, she had only liked to think she did. All she'd ever really known was his name, though like her own that may well have been a lie too. His name, and the fiancée he'd claimed to have, though in that moment Seven felt guilty for thinking bitterly about this unknown women when Draco was hurting this way.

"What..." She tread carefully, as if dancing around a wounded animal that could strike at any moment. "... What was that?"

For an impossibly long time he was silent; as if debating if she was even worth the answer. But then finally, just as Seven began to fear he may never answer, Draco spoke; voice a husk of what it once was. "Believe it or not Seven, not all of us are trying to fight our way to the top... Some of us are trying to fight our way back down from it."

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