The Noble and most Ancient House of Black.

[toujours_nigel]

a.k.a what I wrote in class while my prof. thought I was taking notes. The Draco fromlolly_says, in his new habitation.

There are long shadows in his eyes of the women who look nothing like the photographs of his memories—pale cherubic children and doting mothers like angels with water-logged wings and fathers with the Lightbringer’s hollow arrogance—but glare out beneath hooded eyes from dark, rich oils in dark, rich robes, and smile like hunting hounds and, behind heavy, velvet curtains, mate like bitches in heat with canine men.

A woman went mad in this house alone and terrified, terrifying, stifling her screams in brocade gowns till her stiff upper lip collapsed in hysteric agony that she still shrieks from a canvas throat while her bones moulder in a crypt, phalanges locked around a wedding band with racing hounds, and her eyes watch all goings and hold the nightmare eyes open in childhood memory of that desperate insanity reflected and held in them.

Lives lived well and worse move around him in the halls and shoulder past him on the stairs and speak to him in his coldly opulent bed and touch his skin with rotting fingers and kiss him with mouths of dark burgundy blood and press him with their dead strength into the mattress in trembling surrender and the savage hunger of it wakes him in time to meet eyes closing in satiation and breathe, his gasping pants the cold breeze rustling the curtains through sealed casements.

The rooms drink up the sunlight they have so long thirsted for till he can barely see in the noon’s hot light and the drapes stage life in little tableaux of movement he creeps slowly past, like a tardy student hoping to avoid a teacher’s stern attention, and feels like a trespasser in a tomb while loud voices beat against his ears and her stumbles to turn them into speech and force his long silent, long acquiescent mouth to banter and his spine so easily bent to uncurl, and the dark house gathers at his back and pulls his puppet-strings taut.

The house is easily master of him so easy a slave and his mother’s blood boils past his father’s ice in him in it and his skin darkens in the son and his bleached hair pulls dust against it in a settling cloak and his bones change beneath his skin so his face is subtly different still enough the same that other eyes think it late growth though his own eyes have changed and how he looks through them till he himself is unfamiliar through those eyes, like a portrait drawn over, and its colours scraped away, like a sketch new drawn with expert hands, awaiting the hundred tints of unrelieved black.

The portraits smile as he walks past them.