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  Dedicated to JessicaMatthews568

"SEVEN, WE NEED TO GO." Draco pleaded, pulling the girl behind him in an attempt to shield her from the eyes of the Sin he knew all too well.
After all, the same blood that ran through his veins, bitter and hateful as it was, also ran through those of both Pride and Sloth.
The thought made him hateful, he hated them — hated himself. Hated everything they'd done and everything he'd become. Everything they'd made him do.

His skin crawled, born of blasphemy, sinners and Sins, and he wanted to rip it off, to be free, clean.
He wanted to drain every last drop of the blood he shared and be reborn. Fresh and whole and entirely no one else but himself.

The genesis of Draco's spite had happened long before the creation of the Sins, eighteen years before the war; it was innately born, an irrefutable product of a broken home and a family shadowed in the darkness of the Dark Lord's favour.
Draco told himself that he could get the resurgence he so desperately craved; if only he could cleanse this new world of the Sins. Only then, when the last one fell could there be salvation. Only then could his Wrath be sated.

And Seven, the small, wide-eyed, sharp-tongued girl, that he'd somehow managed to get tangled up in all this; she had become the key to his redemption. The unknowing catalyst that made it all worthwhile, because if he could save her — then he could save everything he'd ever fought for.

It all hung in the balance now though, blurring that fragile line between loyalty and morality. A silent war was raging, deep inside the beating of Draco's chest, in that sacred place where he held that small and precious shard of the boy he once was — he held it tight, for it was his and his alone.

Blood bled into water, thicker, but finite.

But Draco was not his father. He was infinitely worse, and yet also, infinitely better. He was more, he was less. He was not the blood that ran through his veins.

And though he'd always felt he should — that something was wrong with him for it — Draco did not love his father, just as his father had never loved him. For whilst most fathers loved unconditionally, Draco's had only ever loved under condition.

He'd loved the son he should've had, and mourned the one he did.

  Draco threw his body weight into the gentry, pushing and shoving and not at all caring that their illusion of cover was long gone. He just needed to get away — to get Seven away.
  But whilst Draco fought against the crowd, they parted like the Red Sea for Sloth, as if she were someone worthy of worship. The female Sin's gaze was already locked and her path deadly set.

And then came the laugh, high and screeching, like the call of a bird of prey before the strike. "Going somewhere are we, Draco?" Sloth taunted, fast closing in.

He became frantic, a cornered animal as he thrashed into the crowd, dragging Seven behind him.

" — How rude to try and leave without saying goodbye! — Anyone would think we weren't family! — I always told your mother she'd raised a brat! No matters!"

And then the first curse was struck.

At first, Draco couldn't tell who it had come from — or who it had hit. All he saw was the wicked bolt of emerald light as it pierced the air. The second of the wine fountains exploded in a brilliant shower of bloody red.
And then he realised the curse had come from Seven, her face flush with ruddy anger at having missed.

Sloth looked shocked, wide-eyed and primally exposed as she staggered back a few steps. "She just tried to kill me!" She cried, shaking her head in disbelief, but only for a second, and then the Sins face morphed, feral and unhinged as she let loose a laugh to shake the stars, "Oh Draco, what a fun game this will be! Yes, yes, you and your little toy have come to play! — Lucius, come see your traitorous son! — Come witness what a spineless little worm he's become in your absence!"

A face he knew all too well emerged next to Sloth. It would've been his own after all, half-mirrored and marred with disappointment, if not for the soft grey of his mother's eyes, and the fullness of her lips.

"Draco," There was no familiarity in his father's voice. No recognition in his cold, dead gaze. There was no question in it either, for he knew his son even despite the mask. He'd know him anywhere, even at the ends of the earth, even a thousand years from now.

  There was no shock in the Sin's face at the betrayal of his son. "You always were a cowardly little thing." Pride sneered.

  Draco recoiled, stumbling back a step as if his father's words had manifested themselves into a physical blow. Seven's dagger to his chest had been less painful than this.
  And in that brief, agonising moment, he was a child again, scared and alone and desperate to be loved, even if only by the unloveable.

  "Yes, well," Draco struggled to compose himself, clearing his throat and doing his best to school his face into a countenance of austerity. He found hate far easier to conjure however, and so he let it work itself into every last part of him, revelling in that burning bitterness as he glared back at his father, "I wonder where I got that from."

  The reassuring squeeze Seven gave his hand helped ground him, to remember why he was there — and more importantly, why they had to get out of there.

  "Oh, my darling Draco," Pride cooed; sickly sweet and mocking, "If only you were more my son than you were your mothers, things could've ended so very differently..."

  Beside him, Sloth's face cracked into a grin, practically feverish at the thought of what was soon to follow.
  She waved her wand, a wide, sweeping arc of a motion, causing every entrance and exit to the ballroom to slam tightly shut. Locking Seven and Draco inside, along with the two Sins and the mortified crowd of gentry.

  Sloth cackled, "Let the games begin."

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QOTD- Who do you think Sloth and Pride are?