Call Me Psyche - Dramione

3

Draco Malfoy didn't dare sleep in his own bed anymore. Not since the night he'd found her, the snake, coiled and hissing beneath his sheets, her tongue tasting him on the air.

"Calm down, darling. We'll try to keep her out of your room, but she doesn't know any better. She's a cold-blooded animal and you're so warm, I imagine she couldn't resist," his mother had said, forcing a laugh.

But Draco had seen the wide-eyed, horrified glance she'd given his father as she turned away. The Dark Lord's snake knew better, and far, far worse. By that afternoon, Professor Snape had arrived at the manor with the gift of the Deluminator and the dodgy promise of it taking him to safety.

Since then, Draco slept during the day, at the same time that the Dark Lord and his familiar slept. His bed disgusted him now, and half reclining on the chaise was as relaxed as Draco would allow himself to be while the Death Eaters and their creatures were inside the manor.

This morning, the house was still quiet, no sign of the chaos that came with spies and soldiers tramping in and out. As he came downstairs and passed the dining room, Draco shivered. That room, the place where – no, he would never eat there again. But he was hungry now, and he did slip into the kitchen to find the elves fretting. The last of the manor's peafowl had disappeared in the night. The elves were worried about what species would be next to be slowly, quietly exterminated from the manor.

Snape had told Draco not to let anyone know he had the Deluminator, not to attract attention by using it during the day. But if he couldn't escape right now in body, he could at least try to ignore the house of horrors his home had become. That meant hiding away in the library.

His mother might have been thinking the same thing, and maybe that was why Draco found her dozing in her green leather armchair with a book fallen open on her chest. She startled at the creak of the door, gasping his name. She was always slightly terrified now.

Draco stooped to kiss her cheek as he walked by, mounting the ladder and climbing toward a very old book he hadn't looked at since he was little. It was a history book about ancient Greece, old enough that Muggles knew it too, though they said it was mythology and called all its witches and wizards gods and goddesses.

"Ah, you're in the mood to read antiquities today, are you darling?" Narcissa said.

"Not so much reading," he said, jumping down from the ladder with the book in his arms. "It's a picture I'm after."

Narcissa joined him where he was spreading the massive leaves of the book open on a dark, walnut tabletop. "Very good," she said. "This volume is well-known for the accuracy of its likenesses. If it weren't for this book, they say, no one would have any idea what Hermes actually looked like. Can you imagine?" She trailed into her falsely light-hearted laugh again.

"Not Hermes," Draco said, flipping the old pages with just slightly more force than his mother would have liked. "Psyche is who I'm after. I want to see her face uncovered."

Narcissa took over the page turning. "You're mis-remembering," she said. "It's Cupid whose face must stay hidden. Psyche's beauty was well-known. You see? There she is."

As he bent over the page, Draco explained nothing about how he'd rearranged the roles of Cupid and Psyche in his own imagination. The book's illustrations were finely detailed, and he'd seen them so often as a child that each one was familiar.

But he'd never considered Psyche so closely. He'd forgotten that her hair was dark, billowing down her back with the fullness of its own curls. Her skin was clear, and tinted darker than Cupid's as if she'd grown up on the Mediterranean, in the sun, while he'd been a prince in a palace. Draco could see the difference in tones where Cupid's bare arm was bent languidly across Psyche's waist as he held her from behind, his face mostly hidden from view behind her head as they slept draped with wafting white curtains.