(no subject)

[purityconquered]

You stand stiffly as the expensively-tailored velvet robes are stripped from you and replaced with a shapeless, rough grey prison gown. It is accomplished magically, so as not to require the removal of the heavy manacles binding your wrists and ankles.

It is much more symbolic than it is necessary, with the goal being your degradation. Chin tilted up defiantly, you endure. Your insufferable pride is more difficult to strip away.

You are contemptuous under questioning—full of scorn and arrogance; your lip curling as you sneer into grim determined faces. The farce of a trial is in the past; the lies didn't work a second time and the mask of innocence you once maintained has been abandoned.

Veritaserum is produced and they are unable to force it down your throat. They stop trying, their patience wearing thin as you remain cavalier and uncooperative. You are an aristocrat and more importantly, you are a Malfoy and even if that's become a badge of shame, you are still better than they are.

You have more than one mask. Some of them keep you from quailing.


Hauteur. Bravado.

  Façade.


It becomes all too clear that they intend to break you by whatever means necessary as a wand is trained on you and the cry of Crucio! sends white fire tearing through every vein; shattering your nerve as you scream and sink to your knees—but not your resolve, not yet.

You are more afraid of your Master—should you ever come within his grasp again—than you are of this. That this will be temporary, you have little doubt and you've already earned too much of his wrath.

Through the haze of your pain, you become aware of something far more terrifying than tortuous curses or vengeful Dark Lords as scab-encrusted, rotted fingers close over your arms and lift you from the floor. Tall black-robed hooded figures on either side of you grip your shoulders with greyish slimy-looking hands and you are abruptly dragged out of the room.

You scarcely know or care whether or not you'd ended up giving your interrogators what they wanted, as that concern is now insignificant compared the choking, suffocating fear that engulfs you as the wraith-like creatures lean down towards you hungrily; their rattling putrid breath sucking the happy memories from you as they swathe your soul in ice and greedily feed on the fast-dwindling scraps of your composure.


Horror. Revulsion.

  Violation.


As you're locked away and the hours melt into days and the weeks into months, you learn the true meaning of misery and despair.

It's not so much the dark dankness of the squalid cell where you're chained to the wall, with nothing but a stone slab for a bed; the high narrow window scarcely letting in light, let alone air. It's the eternal, inescapable presence of the foul guards as they leech every vestige of light and warmth from this remote barren fortress; their foetid stench of decay permeating the very stones that wall you in.

No longer a glimmer in the darkness, any lingering hope is now a festering wound; slowly eaten away by the maggots that are the Dementors of Azkaban.


Entombment. Desolation.

  Outcast.


A bowl of cold unappetising porridge materialises on the floor of your cell. Dinner. You don't fight the vermin for it this time; remaining huddled in the shadows, your once steely grey eyes clouded over and hollow as you watch your chances of seeing another gloomy sunrise diminish.

Most days though, you are too much of a coward to choose death over eating.


Depression. Despondence.

  Broken.


Exhausted, you struggle to lift heavy eyelids, groggily bringing into focus crimson streaks of blood on the wall that (somehow) you've never noticed before; reminiscent of the marks of a beast raking its claws through flesh.

You shudder, imagining the poor bastard who'd occupied this cell before you: a rat scrabbling frantically against the bars of its cage, bereft of all reason, tearing his fingernails to shreds in a mindless, futile frenzy.

That will never be you, you think, as you idly contemplate your jagged blood-encrusted nails, absurdly noting in passing that it's really well beyond time you had a manicure.


Claustrophobia. Insanity.

  Denial.


One day, you are able to dredge up a flickering happy thought and you feel your wife combing elegant fingers through your pale shimmering mane. The memory is sucked out and corrupted as she suddenly screams out accusations and viciously yanks on your beautiful blond locks; incensed at the humiliation to which you've condemned your family.

Gasping with choked sobs, the only thing you can do as the pain subsides is stare incomprehensibly at the strands of filthy matted hair strewn on the floor beside you; bits of bloody skin clinging to the roots.


Heartache. Lamentation.

  Guilt.


Isolation in the midst of chaos; you become oblivious to the raucous shrieks and crazed, hysterical laughter of your fellow prisoners going mad all around you as you languish inside the dark recesses of your mind, piteously whispering to a wife and son who aren't there as you slowly turn from picking apart your failure as a disciple, a lieutenant and a societal dictator to face the agony of your failure as a husband, a father and a man.


Anguish. Wretchedness.

  Regret.