Archive of Our Own

The clock held an inexorable beat, each second as resolute and unstoppable as the last. Draco Malfoy watched in the mirror as a vein under his right eye throbbed in double time. The twitch had been constant for the last two weeks. It flickered just below the surface, the tiny movement barely perceptible.

But Draco could feel it like a war drum, throbbing through his body. He felt the twitch in his finger and behind his knee. At night he could feel it pulsing in his jugular. It was a constant companion, and a horrible reminder that he was alive.

That awful tic was his heartbeat. It was his body’s refusal to lay down and die. It was the proof of his cowardice, the taunting reminder that he lacked the courage to end it all. It was his punishment. He wore the dreadful pulsating under his eye like a badge of shame. Let everyone see and know what he was.

He would never be the Dark Lord’s deadliest dagger like his Aunt. He would never be the Dark Lord’s preferred poisoner, like Severus. He would never be the Dark Lord’s closest confidante like his Father. He was a reluctant Death Eater, a nobody and a no one, an idiot swept away in the relentless push of fate and time. He had no agency, no power, no plans.

He did as he was bid. Draco, Scrub the blood from the floor.

He took his punishments meekly. Ickle cousin Draco, are you crying?

And when he had a moment to himself, he simply sat and watched himself in the mirror.

The mirror was a strange old thing, all heavy wrought goldwork around the outside. The filigree twisted and turned until Draco would find his eyes skating off it, unable to track the end or beginning. It wrapped around the mirror in ways that defied logic, and Draco could spend hours trying to trace the pattern only to find his finger blackened with dust and right back where he’d started.

He’d found it in the room of lost things, where he’d stored the vanishing cabinet. He moved it to the side when he’d needed more room to work, and then a few days later he’d moved in front of a chair where he could look into it, and he’d taken to sitting in front of it. In the end, he couldn’t leave it there. The cabinet was finished, and the plan was complete, and he’d taken it to the Manor and placed it in his bedroom.

The mirror wasn’t even beautiful, but then again neither was his reflection.

His cheeks were sunken, and he had the disconcerting feeling that he was looking at the contours of his skull at his temples. The pale skin stretched too tightly over his forehead, showing the webbing of blue veins underneath. His nose looked too big for his face, pointed and long. His jaw was sharp, and his neck thin.

The baby fat had long since disappeared from his face, but the muscles of manhood had yet to develop. It left him emaciated and disproportionate. He was wasted potential, a rising star that faltered on its way and froze, lost forever to inertia and ineptitude.

But he wasn’t bothered that his handsome charm had faded before age twenty. He was unconcerned with the changes that had crept in and aged him before his time. He was out of time and alone, suspended in a state of listless uselessness. What need did he have for looks? What good would charisma do him now?

He had no desires.

He was not Draco, the Dragon. He had no treasures, no hoard, no lust. He was not the dragon at all. He was the damsel, defined only by waiting.

But Draco, if he could feel something, if it was still possible for his soul to soar, might have been heartened to realize that because he desired nothing, it was also true that he did not desire death. But then again, he might have been aware of that fact already.

He didn’t jump from the Astronomy Tower. He didn’t slit his wrists or slash his throat. He didn’t hang from the neck until dead in his bedsheets or belt. He did not take Dreamless Sleep until the effects became permanent. Draco knew that he didn’t take any of these actions.

And he knew that he had the tic under his eye. The haunting lub-dub of life coursing through him. So, it is possible that Draco Malfoy already knew that he desired nothing, not even death. In that case, perhaps his soul had truly forgotten to yearn, had lost its ability to rise and fall with his breath. Because Draco Malfoy found no comfort in the notion that he didn’t want to die.

He merely stared at his reflection.

And when he bored of that, he turned his attention again to the words engraved on the mirror, the strange language that made no sense:

Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi

“Crucio!”

The pain never became more tolerable. The sharp sting never dulled, the sensation of every nerve ending on fire was never doused. There was no rush of adrenaline or shock that would subdue the experience and make it possible to withstand. That was the beauty of magic, or the horror.

There was no point in trying not to scream or cry. It was visceral and involuntary. Besides, it would make no difference to the caster.

“Bella, please! He is loyal. He is my son.”

Draco couldn’t hear his mother’s pleading words. The words were nothing to him, not even background noise. The stinging of his fingertips, the struggle for breath, the spasms of his muscles were all that he could experience. His body was everything, all-consuming and all-being, his mind fled from the experience and yet present to dimly register the torture. Draco was nothing.

And then, there between the gritting and grinding of his teeth, the pop of his jaw dislocating from the force, the cramping of his thighs and clenching of his fingers, nails cracking as they dragged along the floor, the bursting of a capillary in his cheek and the warm trickle of urine down his thigh, there was a thought.

No, not a thought. Draco’s mind, cogito ergo sum, was on holiday in hell, retreated beyond the bounds of consciousness and cognition.

This was not a thought. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere realer, somewhere where Draco still existed. This was a desire.

I want this to end, forever.

The desire bloomed somewhere between his ribs and fascia. It pulled at his pleura and caught in his larynx. It pushed its way down his tendons and slipped around his spinal cord and imbued every cell within him.

The desire did nothing to displace the pain or distract Draco from his torment. If anything, the desire heightened the despair. Draco was helpless.

And then, what could have been fractions of a second or eons later, the curse disappeared. The cessation of pain was like plunging from an icy lake into a hot spring or leaping from a fire into a snowbank. That is to say, painful. Like waking up.

The pain was small enough in comparison to the Cruciatus, but it was felt nonetheless.

And when that pain subsided, slower, in waves, unlike the instant relief of the removal of the curse, Draco found that the desire did not disappear along with pain. It had wrapped itself around him, entwined within him, and took him over.

Draco was desire.

I want this to end, forever.

But there was no path forward. There was no way to realize the dream that now consumed him. Draco was unchanged, but for the desire. He was still the damsel in distress. He was in control of nothing. He was still nobody, just nobody with a desire.

He let his mother undress him. The humiliation that once came with this was months gone. His eyes were dull and slate as he watched his mother kneel before him, struggling to get the pant leg over his ankle, tears falling from her eyes to blotch her silk robes.

“My poor boy, my son, Draco, I am so sorry…”

Her words washed over him, background noise. The trembling of the once-proud Narcissa Malfoy’s shoulders barely registered with him. Her hands shook as she blotted at his urine-stained legs with a clean cloth and whispered healing spells under her breath as she found places where he’d torn the skin off his body as he thrashed. Draco was only dimly aware of these things.

But the desire that had found him snagged the edges of his memories, and pulled up the corners, tugging at his mind. His thoughts bubbled to the surface for the first time in who knows how long. They percolated to the surface and Draco began to take note of things he had not bothered to care about.

He paid attention to the way his mother’s hair was limp and unwashed when she bent down to spoon soup into his mouth. He let himself swallow, feeling the liquid soothe the raw skin in his throat where his screams had lasted so long they’d chafed his windpipe almost beyond repair. He nearly cringed at the way his mother’s fingers were wand-calloused from gripping her willow wand too tightly, feeling the rough skin catch on his hair as his mother brushed it back from his face.

“Draco, I don’t how we got here, I’m so sorry.”

“It will be alright, mother.”

The words slipped out, a mere breath or sigh, but they rasped across the chapped skin of his lip and filled the air like a hoarse yell. The words were a lie, but Draco was thinking again. He was thinking slowly, sluggishly, like a child on the first day of school, but he was thinking.

The desire was prompting him, reminding him. Draco, you are a wizard. You are a person. Feel. Think. Live.

And so Draco lied to his mother.

I want this to end, forever.

“It will be alright, mother.”

Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi

Draco traced the words with his finger, but his reflection did not trace them back.

Draco practiced a smile. It had been a long time since he smiled. It was lopsided now, the left cheek pulling too far and the right not doing the same. A sore cracked and blood oozed from it at the corner of his mouth, bubbling with his breathing and smearing his teeth red. But Draco didn’t know, because his reflection didn’t smile back.

Instead it leaned in, closer and closer, until Draco had no choice but to understand that this was not his reflection, mirroring his actions. This was something else, someone else. This was a different Draco.

The reflection leaned toward the glass and Draco shifted with it. He leaned forward, intent on his strange counterpart. It smeared a fist across the glass, removing the thin layer of dust on both sides. Then he breathed across the glass, moisture fogging and beading on the wrong side. Reflection Draco’s long thin finger traced across, writing letters backward so that Draco could read them.

I want this to end, forever.

So, Draco was not alone. His desire had now manifested as a hallucination, a true break from reality. He felt like he’d known this was coming. It was too good to be true that dissociation could last forever. At some point, he knew that he would be permanently changed. He would be broken beyond repair, slipping into an insanity more akin to that of his Aunt’s victims than her own. He wasn’t sure which he would have preferred.

But in his madness, he had company for the first time in a long while. And so he smiled at the reflection again, and it nodded back to him. They were brothers. Twins. Doppelgangers.

It beckoned Draco, and Draco leaned in.

The Doppelganger stood and turned from Draco. It walked back into their bedroom and then turned to face Draco again. It unbuttoned the top button of its shirt and paused. It looked meaningfully at Draco, and Draco looked back dumbly. It unbuttoned the next, and the next, all the way down until the shirt hung untucked and Draco was looking at the bare navel of his doppelganger. He didn’t know what to make of this strange turn of events, but the Doppelganger approached the mirror again and pointed directly at Draco.

Draco unbuttoned his shirt. His own stomach was hollowed thin, the ribs protruding above it and the skin translucent, almost blue. His doppelganger looked healthier than he did. It also looked satisfied, nodding appreciatively when Draco mimicked its actions.

It walked toward their bedroom window, where a small table stood with a chair. It selected a green apple from the bowl on the table and bit into it. Draco glanced over his shoulder. The bowl by the window was full of fruit. When had that happened? Who placed the fruit there? Did he ever eat it? He couldn’t remember.

Draco leaned over and took an apple. It felt heavy and firm in his hand. He squeezed the firm flesh and it didn’t yield under his palm, but he felt the pressure on his bones as if he was sore and rotted from the inside out.

He bit into the apple and one of his teeth felt loose. A panic rose inside of him as he felt the sting of the malic acid on his bleeding gums and the way he wasn’t certain that the apple wouldn’t just swallow his teeth instead of the other way around. He masticated slowly, feeling the relief as the bite turned into pulp and he was able to choke it down.

The Doppelganger in the mirror gave him another approving nod and gestured for him to take another bite. Draco nodded, and brought the apple to the mirror watching and waiting for more instructions.

It was on the fifth bite that Draco lost the tooth and it embedded in the apple. He looked at it, and then dug it out with his fingers. They scrabbled weakly against the fruit, and he had to exert more force to pull it out. He was weak. Weaker than he’d realized. He would finish the apple and then take a nap.

The next day he ate another apple, and the day after that. The day that followed that one, he ate an apple and an orange. On the following morning, Draco ate two pieces of toast, one apple, and a slice of bacon.

A month later, Draco stood at the mirror, looking at his stomach. It was thin, but there was a slight curve underneath his navel, where a pale sprinkling of hair trailed to his waistband. His ribs didn’t stand out and his fingers felt strong. He tossed his apple up and caught it. His reflexes were faster than they had been before. He practiced a smile, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in real pleasure at the realization that his lips were moist and did not crack from the effort.

The Doppleganger smiled back and beckoned. It leaned forward and breathed on the glass. Quickly, as if his reflection had also gained strength and confidence, it wrote the letters backwards.

I want this to end, forever.

Draco leaned in and let his own breath mist over the Doppelgangers message. He raised an index and wrote his own message.

.woh em lleT

The Doppelganger nodded, and Draco began his tutelage.

There was a twisted duality to the new life that Draco lived.

He served a master. Nothing about that had changed. He lived without power. He was tortured and beaten. He tortured others and beat more. Nothing about that had changed. He was a Malfoy of Malfoy Manor and Death Eater and a pathetic fool to boot. Nothing about that had changed.

But he was not alone. His new master was himself, in a strange way. He was the creature in the mirror as much as he was himself. The desire in the mirror was the walking manifestation of the pieces of Draco that had not been killed. If he had a soul, it was in the mirror and not in the broken body that Draco now tried to keep together. He repaired himself each night, eating a meal, bathing, crawling into the bed. He stretched in the mornings and went for short runs. He built up his time from a few seconds to a few minutes. He was keeping himself together with Spellotape, and it was working because the Doppelganger could look at him and tell him what was needed.

And it wasn’t just Draco’s body that had changed. His mind was awake as well. The Doppelganger played naughts and crosses with him in the dust of the mirror until he’d bored of the child’s game and they had graduated to checkers. The Doppelganger moved a piece on the one in the mirror, and Draco moved the corresponding piece on his side. Then Draco moved a piece and the Doppelganger mimicked him. When Draco got bored of the simplistic play, they brought out the wizard’s chess pieces, and would spend hours engaged in strategy, deadlocked against themselves. Every move that one would make was the same as the other, and was what they each felt was the best move in the moment. The Doppelganger put Draco in checkmate for weeks, until Draco’s mind was thinking about strategy and playing multiple moves into the future and diving into the past to remember their prior games. Draco became the Doppelganger’s equal, and their play became even slower, more even. They each won as much as they lost.

But the rules of the mirror didn’t seem to be exactly the same as the rules of Draco’s world. While the Doppelganger would fetch fruit and chess pieces from their corresponding places, there were times that it retrieved items with no equivalent in Draco’s world. There was a hideous golden cup, a chalice engraved with badgers, that the Doppelganger frequently took from the bedside table. Draco ransacked his own on the first occasion, but there was no corresponding cup. He’d dismantled the furniture to pieces with a charm, and then reassembled it when the cup couldn’t be found. He’d taken it apart with his hands, finding tools in the house-elf areas of the Manor, but the cup did not reveal itself. Finally he demolished the table to sawdust in a fit of rage, but the cup did not exist in his realm.

When Draco awoke in the night, the full moon illuminating his bedsheets, he would go and sit by the mirror. Half awake, his eyes still squinting, he slouched at the mirror and looked for his reflection. But it wasn’t his reflection that greeted him. Dark eyes, pools of brown that bordered black, and glinted dangerously in the half-light met his own. With a yelp, Draco leapt back, pushing away from the mirror. He swung his head wildly, looking for the counterpart in his own bedroom. His Aunt shouldn’t be here.

But Bellatrix was not there. Draco cast every revealing spell and ward into the shadows of his room and lit every candle and lamp. He criss-crossed his floor in a grid as he searched for her disillusioned form, and he re-cast every lock on his door and wedged a chair beneath the handle. Meanwhile the mirror Bellatrix watched him, her wild hair ruffled by a faint breeze that also did not exist. His own Doppelganger joined her and looked patient while Draco finished searching his room.

Finally satisfied that the real Bellatrix was somewhere far from there, Draco approached the mirror. His Doppelganger smiled reassuringly and showed him Bellatrix’s hand. She held it forward, palm extended up. In her palm, a small skeleton key emblazoned with a monogram. Draco leaned closer. One side bore an ‘L’. Lestrange. The other a ‘G’. Gringotts. The key to the Lestrange vault at Gringotts. But why? Why did Draco need to see the Lestrange vault at Gringotts?

His Doppelganger gestured to the cup, and to the key. The cup was in the Lestrange vault. But why? What did that matter?

The surreal Bellatrix leaned in and let her breath fog the glass. She wrote her letters backwards.

I want this to end, forever.

Draco accepted his mission.

Bellatrix offered him legilimency lessons. Draco surprised her by accepting, if the sharp bark that stood in for a cackle could be interpreted correctly. He would meet her in the gardens, the winter air nipping at him through his robes and she would point her wand at his temple.

"Legilimens!"

Her mind was like a set of knives slicing through the grey matter, shredding his memories to ribbons. But it didn’t bother Draco. His memories were stored in the creature in the mirror. It knew him, and therefore must know his history. It was him, as much or more as his corporeal self. If he lost his mother singing him lullabies, it would not matter. The creature could write them in the mirror. If he lost his first kiss, no matter. The creature could draw him a portrait of the girl. If he lost his mind, what did it matter? He was already mad, and the creature was the last of his sanity.

As Bellatrix showed him the harm that mind-reading can cause, Draco soaked up his lessons with her like a sponge. She did not know that he was a master of mimicry. He had spent months observing and then following the lead of the creature in the mirror. It was even easier to do the same in reality. He took to the Legilimency like a fish to water and mirrored every action and every thought of his aunt. He lashed his mind to hers and delved into the private horrors of her life. He saw her naked and with her husband and with others. He saw her childhood, playing hopscotch in the street. He saw her crying at a sunset, and he saw her laying uselessly in Azkaban, the Dementors caressing her soul just beyond the opening of her lips.

Best of all, Draco saw the key to the Lestrange vault in the cabinet where Rodolphus kept it. He saw the protective enchantments upon it, and he saw the countercharms play in her mind. He filed the information away, and he shared it with the creature in the mirror. He learned that the cup held a shard of Lord Voldemort’s soul.

He was a pathetic fool. Nothing about that had changed. His Doppelganger was trying to have him kill the Dark Lord. There was no other explanation for it: Draco was damned. He was being led by the devils within him straight to the depths of damnation and he would die there. Nobody crossed the Dark Lord and lived to tell the tale. Well, other than Potter.

But Draco was not the chosen boy who lived. He was simply a younger, stupider, paler version. The boy who was sent to die by his own shadow. But Draco did not turn back from his task. He had only one desire and it fueled him. If damnation was the price, it was worth paying.

I want this to end, forever.

When he next went out with snatchers, he suggested Diagon Alley. The school holiday, he told the other death eaters. Higher chance of Potter making an appearance, trying to get in touch with an old school chum.

It was nothing to slip away, to pull out the stolen key, to ask to see his aunt’s vault. There were no questions asked, he was the corporeal scion of House Malfoy. He was a member of the trusted inner circle. He was the faithful servant of the Dark Lord. And as such, it was easy to serve the creature in the mirror, and play the part, and retrieve the cup.

He would never be found out, as he replaced the cup with a duplicate. It had been a rather obvious idea. A one-to-one replica, no visible difference between them. And then he replaced the protective enchantments, the duplication spells that would multiply the cups on contact. And he left, with the one true cup clutched against his chest.

It sat in front of the mirror for five days, and Draco and his Doppelganger did nothing. They simply looked at it. Now that they had a piece of the Dark Lord’s soul, what were they to do with it?

On the sixth day, Draco was beckoned to the mirror. The Doppelganger held out their hawthorn wand and pointed it at Draco. Its mouth moved soundlessly but the flash of emerald light was unmistakable. An unforgivable curse that can only be uttered if the loathing is pure and dark. Draco smiled grimly. His doppelganger loathed him because he loathed himself. It was no feat to cast the curse, it was a mere matter of recitation. The same was true of his feelings toward the Dark Lord. It didn’t matter that this was the road to hell. It would be paved with Draco’s desires and his blood.

He pulled out his hawthorn wand and pointed it at the cup.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Draco dragged his broken foot across the ground. His trainer was too tight, telling him that the swelling and blood were being compressed by the shoe. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

The battle had dragged on too long. The Longbottom boy had destroyed the snake. That was something at least. Draco had been trying to find a way to get at it for months. Even his Doppelganger had never considered a historical silver sword. They had read every book on gutting snakes and butchering serpents and taming wyrms, but they had not used a sword. Instead Draco had a festering bite in his shoulder, an infected wound that he could not disclose to anyone where the snake had bit him.

His saving grace was that the snake had not seen him. His attempt to poison it a few weeks ago had been unsuccessful, but left it with clouded vision and a blind spot on the right-hand side. The Dark Lord had kept it in a cage and Draco was too weak to make another attempt.

The Doppelganger had not shown Draco what to do next.

It was the cup, then the snake, and those were both complete. Since the Longbottom boy had severed the snake’s head, Draco had meandered pointlessly through the school. Smoke rose around him and flashes of light showed that the battle continued. Curses ricocheted around him and the blood continued to pool in his foot.

He needed the creature. Without its direction he was lost. He was in the East Wing, on the second floor, by the staircase that shifted every seven minutes. He’d ridden the stair across the gap three times already, but he was lost. He needed to be told what to do. What would the creature do if it was here in place of Draco? What would the creature want?

Draco knelt at the top of the staircase and observed the rubble. There was a fine dusting across the flagstones, like breath fogging a mirror. He wrote his letters backwards with his index finger.

.reverof ,dne ot sight tnaw I

Forever.

That was the piece that had been missing. It wasn’t enough for this to end. It had to end forever.

Draco stood, testing his weight on the broken foot. It crumpled under him, and he used his arms to pull himself up the railing. Leaning heavily on the balustrade, he made his way back to the noises of the battle. He walked through the whirling figures and ignored the shouts. He passed through them like a spirit through the veil, present but untouchable, in the world but not of the world.

And there they were, the Dark Lord and the Chosen One. They were locked together in battle, and the younger was winning. His curse pushed along their conjoined wands, forcing down the magic of Lord Voldemort. Sparks hissed and sputtered as the Dark Lord faltered and the end became inevitable.

Lord Voldemort crumpled to the ground and the life was gone from his body. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, spun triumphantly around, the sweat and relief glistening in every pore of his body.

Draco knew what the Doppelganger would do. His wand was already in his hand, the curse already on his lips. He’d helped to kill the Dark Lord to prepare himself for this moment. This must end forever.

Neither can live while the other survives. But Draco would not live while either survived.

Draco could create a better world. One in which this was over. It would be like it never happened.

The green light burst from his wand and matched the emerald eyes of the Boy Who No Longer lived perfectly. In death, they stared wide and captured the hue of the curse that killed him. Draco lowered his wand and looked around.

The battle remained with him, if in a strange sort of suspended animation. The expressions on each face on both sides were mirror images of surprise and shock, and everyone was frozen with indecision.

But Draco could make a decision, because he was his Doppelganger today. He didn’t need to decide. He would just do what the desire prompted him to do. And the battle remained around him, so he knew that there was simply one choice left.

It hadn’t ended forever, and there was only one way to make sure that it did.

Draco turned and ran, the pain in his broken foot forgotten. He was as swift as a unicorn on a full moon night, surefooted and guided as if from beyond. The Vanishing Cabinet called him like a lover and he fell into her with all of the desperation of a child soldier gone to fight too early.

He reappeared in Malfoy Manor where his steps slowed and he made his way to his mirror like a reluctant bridegroom. His reflection was waiting for him, with a sheepish expression.

Draco gave a weary smile to his reflection. So it’s come to this, has it? And you knew all along that it would?

The reflection shrugged and pointed back at Draco. So did you.

They raised their fingers together and wrote the words that they’d said to each other a thousand times.

Forever.

Draco raised their wand. Draco pointed it at their temple. Draco said the words. The green light flashed and Draco crumpled. The boy before the mirror and his reflection one and the same. They were both dead.

Forever.