𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐓| 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐟𝐨𝐲

𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐘𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐄|𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖

Next chapter at 300 comments! Dedicated to themars_w
— TWs for graphic depictions of dead bodies, character distress

THE WILLOW STOOD, just as it had the last time Seven had faced it. The scene was the same.

  The hanging woman. The grieving boy. The stench of death seeping through her skin.

  "Who is she?" Seven asked aloud, not sure which she feared most; the echo or the answer.

  "My mother." Draco's voice crawled through her mind, as if she'd imagined it, permeating the image, but when she looked around, he was nowhere to be found.

Seven felt his taught muscles tense beneath her fingertips, coiling tightly like a spring about to explode. She could still feel everything, yet her eyes lied to her, when she looked around she wasn't in the infirmary. Far from it.

"After the war they said she was a traitor." The image before her shifted, no longer did the woman hang from the tree which now bore greenery, though tinted amber with sickness. Instead, she stood beneath it; alive, but not alone.

  He was also there; the Dark Lord, with ivory limbs swaddled in a black robe like some kind of hideous raven. Death Eaters surrounded him; playground children eager to witness a fight.

  "Is he alive?" Asked a feral-looking witch with a certain air of madness about her, her high voice cutting clearly above the rest.
  The woman, Draco's mother, broke from the crowd without a backwards glance, moving towards what looked like a disgruntled bundle of clothes, but in reality it was a body. The body of the saviour, the chosen one, the boy who lived. Harry Potter.

She looked like him. Seven could see it in the cruel glint of moonshine off milk skin. In the high cheek bones and the features so sharp they almost hurt to look at.

  Kneeling beside the body she held two fingers to his throat and for a few moments there was silence. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
  Then she stood, turning to face the Dark Lord, looking him fiercely in the eye as she lied, shielding her fear in the same way as her son, "Dead..."

  "She'd lied to save his life," Once again Draco's sullen voice carved its way through Seven's mind. " — But the lie was discovered and they killed him all the same."
  She felt his back flex with the weight of a greedy breath, shuddering with angst, "My father was one of them — the Dark Lord's most faithful Death Eater, and I his prodigal son. Only my father didn't do things quite the way the Dark Lord wanted... When he put him in a position of power, my father's pride clouded his judgement, and cost him — cost us, everything."

The world shifted once more, into one final, gruesome landscape. The same one she'd seen the first time she'd touched his tattoo. "There was no trial." There was no longer a crowd gathered at base of the willow and no leaves remained on the fading branches, inhuman in their angles. "One day when he grew tired of my father's insufferable ego he just decided that not only was she guiltily, but suddenly, all those months after the war — after her lie had been uncovered, that it was now time for her punishment."

Seven felt sick to her stomach, swallowing down the bitter bile that arose in the back of her throat at the sight that beheld her; infinitely worse now that she knew the story.

  The body. A mother. His mother. A traitor. Our saviour.

"In truth, it was never about the lie at all." Draco continued, unflinchingly, as if he weren't talking about the brutal murder of the woman who'd raised him. "If he had really cared about her betrayal he would've killed her where she stood that day. But he didn't. He let her live on borrowed time, just waiting for the moment in which her death would be of more use than her life.

"My mother had outlived her usefulness and my father had fallen out of favour. The Dark Lord ordered her dead as a way to hurt him — scare him. To remind him exactly what he was capable of, and that none of us were safe, no matter how high the rank."

Wind coiled like cold fingers around the willow, stirring the branches and causing the body hanging from the noose to slowly rotate. The breeze toyed with her lank hair. How long had she been there?

  A younger, far less feral looking Draco emerged from the corner of Seven's peripheral, stopping dead when he saw the body. He collapsed to his knees before his mother's corpse; broken. His whole world collapsing in around him, walls tumbling down and choking him in the ash.

  All the while his narration wove webs of woe around Seven's heart, transfixing her in place, unable to look away even if she had wanted to. In this tale she was his captive. "I found her there. Alone. Dead. Hanging from the willow." His voice was not so steady now.

Then suddenly Seven was torn away, ripped back to reality. Once again confronted with the sterile scents and blinding white decor of the infirmary, a stark contrast to the dark of the memory.

"He took everything from me — murdered everybody I'd ever loved." Draco turned to face her; eyes ablaze, and somehow, Seven got the feeling he was referring to more than the loss of his mother. "We weren't always like this, he ruined us, he made us this way. That's why I'm helping you."

***
QOTD - How's your day been so far?
Sorry for the short chapter, think of it as a necessary interlude between the previous and the next full length chapters!