every day a little sting
in the heart and in the head
every move and every breath
and you hardly feel a thing.

When Draco was very small he used to like crushing bugs for fun. They had hard shells, and he enjoyed the crunch they made as the skeletons split under his heel. He liked the way, sometimes, the gelatinous insides would glitter as they spilled out onto the dirt, as if he had broken open a chest full of diamonds. Other times they would be made of something rusty-looking and chalky, or thin and yellow like mucous. You could never tell with bugs.

The first time his mother caught him at it she laughed, lifted her wand, and said, �Here, darling, let me show you an easier way.� She murmured a word through her pursed pink lips, and the caterpillar Draco had just cut in half began to writhe around on the ground uncontrollably. Before it had been twisting, but now it was positively dancing in agony, and the pale light that emanated in a stream from his mother�s wand matched the shade of its liquid insides as they oozed from one end of each half. Balancing her forefinger on the tip of her wand, the nail curving out over her fingertip to just touch the wood, Draco�s mother kept the wand trained on the two halves until one of them burst open as if all its seams had just split apart. The image was unforgettable, and imprinted itself onto Draco�s mind, a sudden explosion of green and yellow against the dry grass.

When he looked up at his mother she had put the wand away and was smiling down at him. �Someday you�ll be able to do that too,� she said. Her voice was full of affection. Her tone did not change for a decade, and when it finally did, it became dry, dull, edged with faint but unmistakable disappointment--because she, too, had learned Draco's limits.

The summer before Draco turned 16, his father was sent to Azkaban, and when he returned to school in the fall, it was as if his mind suddenly burst apart like the caterpillar had done. He could not escape the whispering that followed him, or the brand-new contempt, twice as intense and obvious as ever, that stared back at him in the faces of the members of Potter�s precious �army.� And more importantly, he could not avoid the way he flinched at every word of his texts, every �truth� that issued from the mouths of his teachers. Suddenly his doubt was everywhere, and it plagued him.

He tried at first to dispel it by writing letters to his father, letters that told of all the things he would do to avenge his father�s good name; he wrote of all the new curses he had been studying and practicing secretly on the insects that invaded the Slytherin dungeons. He wrote of all the things he would do to hurt Harry Potter. He sent the first few, but when his father failed to reply, he hid them away, and they became harder and harder to write.

He tried, next, taking his doubt out on Mudbloods, cornering them and hurting them in various ways, any way he felt like, until his patience or his spare time was used up and he memory charmed them back to normal. But he was a coward, and he could not make himself split any of them open, as much as he wanted to.

Finally, he tried, one night, gripping Potter by the hair and kissing him, hard and open-mouthed, until Potter�s lips bled and Draco came in his trousers. He was sure that afterwards in his nervousness he had completely messed up the memory charm, but over the next few days his close scrutiny of Potter led to nothing but a pair of questionless eyes lidded over with blank contempt.

Having the mark burned onto his skin was the most painful experience of his life. For days he was in silent agony, but he consoled himself by imagining the look on Potter�s face when he �accidentally� discovered the scorch marks. He felt a greater sense of satisfaction after he had done it than he had felt in a long time.

The inevitable moment came; Potter passed him in the hallway, purposely roughhousing against Draco, and Draco gasped deliberately, at just the right moment, as Potter jammed an elbow into his arm. Potter stopped and turned and raked his eyes from Draco�s heavily cloaked forearm to his face, and barely had time to make it a full glance before he turned and walked away again without so much as a change of expression. He might as well have never noticed at all. But he had noticed. He had noticed, all right.

It just hadn�t mattered.

The day came that open war was declared, and Draco found himself running for a place to hide, deep in the bowels of the castle with the other Slytherins. He finally made a crawlspace by tearing chunks of rotting caulk from the walls, and wedged himself so tightly in among the stones he was sure he would never be budged. There he waited and grew thinner, his wand rubbing his skin raw as he lay on it, pressed between his arm and the wall.

When he heard voices at last it took him a moment to be able to understand them�but he heard the unmistakable tone of dry disappointment in Potter�s voice as he said flatly, �Oh. It�s just Malfoy,� and lifted his wand.

Draco�s membrane was not nearly as thick as a bug�s. When he was crushed he did not make a sound.