Author: Starhawk

Disclaimer: If I was JKR, I wouldn't need to write fanfiction.

Rating: PG (?)

Summary: "It was the first thing his father had ever told him; [feelings are weakness, use them in others, eradicate them in yourself.] Joy can break you, his father said. As high as you go up is also as far as you go down; the amplitude is the same either direction, and if one doesn't go up at all, then one can't come down and shatter."

Warning: The only beta is my computer spellcheck. This prologue thingy is written kinda weirdly, a little bit stream-of-consciousness-ish, and I know that the "wall" metaphor goes on waaaay too long. So sue me. Oh, and eventual slash. H/D. 'Nuff said.

Feedback: Makes my world go 'round, dear reader. In other words: please? insert Bambi eyes Pretty please?

[¤ Hiemalis ¤]

[Prologue: Exsibilo]

He had always hated the voice.

He remembered once, a very long time ago. It had come in the middle of dinner, right when Father was talking about Mudbloods and Mother was smiling that plastic smile and he was partway through his third chocolate snatched from the sweets bowl without anyone noticing. It had been very low, and very angry, and very like a hiss, and it had made Father wince and clutch his arm before Apparating away. That was the first time he could ever remember hearing it, this hateful serpent's voice.

It had come again, the next year, in his room. Father was tucking him in, and the voice had come from all around, and hissed and slithered how pleased it was with "the boy." He had tried not to whimper, though the voice terrified him, with its everywhere-at-once-ness and its cold, mocking ice. And the voice noticed his silence, and then there was a laugh like boiling oil on ice, like pain on slate, that made the small hairs on the back of his neck want to run up and hide in his eyebrows.

Of course, they couldn't; even though his hair was all the same bleached platinum shade as Father's, his eyebrows had to be slim and precise, little blades ready to twist up and deride, to slice through jokes and laughter and make everyone around him as cold as he felt inside. Naturally, they weren't supposed to know that he felt cold; they weren't supposed to know he felt at all.

It was the first thing his father had ever told him; [feelings are weakness, use them in others, eradicate them in yourself.] Joy can break you, his father said. As high as you go up is also as far as you go down; the amplitude is the same either direction, and if one doesn't go up at all, then one can't come down and shatter. His father told him that falling smashed things, and he'd gone up to his room and dropped a ball out the window, and it had bounced. That was the beginning, the very first moment he had stopped believing everything his father said. He learned that his father had left something out: falling shattered brittle things. He thought perhaps his father was brittle – that must be why he was never happy, because he though he'd fall and break, and why he never smiled; the expression would crack him apart.

Well, no, that was wrong. His father did smile, but it was a false good humor like an old rubber band: stretch it too far, and it snaps. It was not a real smile in the normal sense of the word. It was a smile that made him want to shiver. Except shivering meant one felt, and feelings made one hurt and weak and easy prey for people like Father. People like him, too, really. All he'd ever wanted was to be like Father, except for the day of the ball and the window. He didn't really know what else to want.

He had a sense of his mother's place in their house, and the vaguest feeling that other people's mothers were different. But the Manor took up a lot of ground, and their neighbors were too far away to be friendly with, in both the physical and the emotional sense of the words. His mother was a trinket. A mannequin, perhaps. A big, posable, talking doll that went on display. She talked to Father's acquaintances – none of them were close enough to be friend – and laughed in all the right places; she showed them around the Manor, and was coolly gracious and elegantly poised. Before every party, every banquet and ball, she would sit in her room in front of her vanity, combing and curling and twisting and pinning. [Should it cascade over the left shoulder, or be pinned up in braids in the back?] she would ask her mirror. She had little else to do but powder and brush, paint and gloss.

Father would certainly never leave her in charge of anything important. That simply wasn't the way it worked.

Mother was a very good wife, compared to some of the others he saw. And he grew up to notice the differences she showed him between matching dresses and shoes, and slightly clashing ones. She showed him that Madame Goyle had been foolish to leave her hair loosely curling over her right shoulder, because the brooch and pin at the shoulder of her gown was on that side, and that Monsieur Nott had obviously not been thinking when he had put the horseshoe geranium, symbolizing stupidity, in his boutonnière. She taught him to observe little mistakes; to examine appearances; to spread the sort of rumor where no one knows where it started; to pick up on small, subtle insults, and return some of his own.

Father taught him things too, of course. He was lucky that he was a quick student of French – he had noticed the ruler his father kept nearby on the first day, and took great pains to avoid letting it meet his palm or back. Semiannually, the voice would come, murmuring its serpentine pleasure at his progress, and eventually he learned how to keep his face and body still of the shivers that threatened to shake them. He learned how to make people feel stupid and humbled, how to seem imposing, and make his anger cold so that it rolled off him and lent his voice frozen steel, but didn't take him over like hot anger did.

That was the thing people misunderstood about his family. Everyone thought they were flashy showoffs, with nothing to do but spend money. He understood better, though, because he was on the inside, and his family was all about frost and slow chill working its way through one's bones. That was another thing he felt that other families weren't like, but there was no one for him to share it with, and so he hid it away like a book in the attic, and let the dust settle on the top.

His father also showed him how to make his face a wall, and he found he could hide a great many things behind that wall; his anger, his boredom, his pain, but especially his revulsion for the soft, hissing voice that visited so often. His anger was slow and cool, the flow of a glacier, at his father and his mother and the walls, the real ones, that held him inside and kept him away from the grass and the sun and the other things he was sure that other little boys had. It grew into a general loathing for those other little boys who had what he did not, but that was so slow over time that he hardly noticed it.

His boredom was worse. No matter whether a child has or has not played outside, their favorite activity will never be sitting around with their backs straight (of course) and their feet flat (of course). And he found at first that his boredom was so great it wouldn't fit behind the wall. It would slide out into his feet, and make them tap against the floor, and into his legs, and make them swing back and forth. So he lengthened and strengthened and worked on his wall, until even he wasn't sure there was anything behind it but anger and boredom and pain.

That was why he had hated the boy.

He met the boy in the robe shop, before the first school year started. He had seen the boy outside the shop, with his smiling and his laughter and his bright-eyed liking-life, and it had startled him. Here was a little boy who had played outside the walls, and gotten grass stains on his shirt, and dirt under his fingernails. Not that he knew what grass stains were. His fingernails (and his shirts, for that matter) were always very clean. He hadn't hated the boy at first. He thought that the boy's wall was perhaps not quite so wall-like, and he had wanted to ask how the boy could exist without a wall as big as his own.

Except he couldn't really ask that. He couldn't make the words fit into his question. So he asked different questions, and watched the boy's face, and saw [his mother] that the boy's clothes didn't match, and saw [his father] that the boy wasn't afraid of him. And then, suddenly, he saw a odd, odd thing. The boy's wall didn't have anger, or boredom, or pain behind it.

The boy didn't have a wall.

He had been rather rude after that, because it frightened and confused and startled him. How could anyone live without a proper wall? Wouldn't his father be angry? [He said his parents were dead.] Wouldn't he just feel silly, though, letting all those emotions run rampant over his face? A glance at the other boy's expression could certainly tell him everything. [But other little boys aren't like you,] something beyond the wall told him. [Other little boys laugh and cry and run around. You sit like stone, with your back straight (of course) and your feet flat (of course).]

He stopped listening to the beyond-the-wall. After all, it told him things, strange things, and he couldn't hide from it quite as well as he could hide from the hissing whisper that he hated.

So he'd left the shop, and waited out the days until school [sitting like stone (of course)] at the Manor. Finally, they had driven to the station, and he had passed through the barrier. That day was a blur of boredom in his mind – his wall was not so solid, with the confusion in him. That was what had led him to seek out the wall-less boy, and, without the careful thinking cautiousness his father had shown him, he had asked for this boy to be friend to him.

And the boy had turned him away with disgust in his face and the beginnings of hatred bitter in his voice. No one had ever spoken to him that way. Very few people had ever spoken to him at all. So he'd gone away, back to his own seat, to think and work through this confusion. Except then it had occurred to him that confusion meant feeling. Nothing had ever made him feel except the hiss. And so he panicked, and shoved the confusion away behind the wall, and never touched it again. He left it to gather dust with his suspicions and his angers, and when the time had come to be Sorted, he had twisted the wall into a smirk and left it there.

But then the Hat asked him what he wanted, and he thought it like a prayer: [I want to be like Father.] And the Hat had asked him why, and he'd said, [I want to be like Father.] because he didn't understand this "why," no one bothered to ask him why. The Hat had shouted [Slytherin!] and then he knew he was like Father.

But any pride he felt at that was caught behind the wall, and somewhere in his head, the hiss said, [Ah, such a good little boy, just like his father.] And the thing beyond-the-wall, the thing that he ignored, knew without a doubt that he'd never really wanted that at all.

Just like he'd never really wanted his wall.