Rain again; how blasted predictable.

It had been a slick, slimy, soggy sort of summer, the likes of which had felt interminably feverish and eternal to Draco Lucius Malfoy - a spindly, pale boy who preferred the cold, but certainly not a constant, bone-soaking, monstrosity of an environmental deluge. 

There is nothing more frustrating than ruining a good pair of Oxford's in mucosal muck.

Yes, a good dry cold would do just splendidly now that autumn had reared it's leafy head, however such a delight had apparently bypassed the seasonal docket.

It seemed that nothing had fully dried for months within the insidious superstructure known to the snoopy public as the prestigious Malfoy Manor, and this reality was only aggravated by widespread, festering rot which had been already worsening on the premises for decades. 

The drapes now clung to their antediluvian wooden poles for dear life; suddenly twice as weighty, they were causing a noticeable bowing in the centre of the rods, which meant daring to open them for but a sprig of freshness risked an undesirable collapse. 

So it was, the darkness had won.

Compendiums occupying the atheneum were thoroughly spotted with obsidian freckles of mildew, the china had to be wiped down constantly for fear of what invisible antagonists might be brewing on the surface of the porcelain, and seeing as the sunshine had taken itself off on a permanent vacation, all manner of pricey attire simply refused to parch.

The stench was positively revolting, and it was a true shame. 

Laundering anything was on par with tossing one's trousers onto the washboard and scrubbing them clean with foul dog water. If any clothing did miraculously manage to dry out entirely, it was tempting not to wash it for at least a full moon in dread.

Worst of all, sleep was wholly impossible under such conditions. 

It was not that unusual to awake in a frightening start to a gunshot crack slicing through the air, characterized by expanding and contracting furniture which chose to protest against the vile atmosphere in the only way possible for inanimate objects. 

Why, it was a miracle that his finger pads hadn't evolved into prunes from mere exposure to the swampy oxygen within his depressing private suite. 

Typically, Draco would find that rain brought with it peace and calm, a cleansing sensation, however too much of anything stands to result in a souring experience, and a disdain towards a once celebrated concept.

Of course the damp is a hardy characteristic of the United Kingdom and it's multifaceted territories, however this particular relentless bout of thunderstorms had registered as an ominous forewarning of certain decay to come.

Any time such a furious waterlogging occurs, best to expect happening upon a secret patch of spreading mold many months later, likely when it is already too late. By then, one has inhaled enough spores to secure a pathological illness, and all along, it was right there but an inch away, hiding itself within the walls of the homestead...

This was the analogy Draco had come to repeatedly narrate in his head each time he considered how unprepared the wizarding world was for the reappearance of the dark lord, who much like a concealed cancer within the system, had been radiating outwards without detection, aiming for a stage four diagnosis upon a perfectly timed discovery.

Reiterating this mortifying nightmare, he'd flattened his platinum locks firmly against the scratched glass pane of an aperture within the sticky Hogwarts Express, watching in isolation as the hyper-saturated, verdant landscape slid by.

He was without a doubt in an aggravated mood, moreso than all of his previous years at the institution combined, and that was saying quite a bit. 

The caravan was clumsy, ancient, and arguably violent; rocking on the tracks with such mismanaged stability and geriatric intention that it made a wooden rollercoaster look like a graceful slip-n-slide. 

It was grinding down onto the tracks below it with such an angry rhythm, spitting rocks like a hillbilly with chewing seeds, that the noise of rusted metal was unbelievably v o c i f e r o u s, forcing students to shout obnoxiously and add to the discordant orchestra. 

And while some students like Draco hoped to rest in reticence, it was a damnable endeavor to avoid a concussion from forming against the rickety interior. 

And the speed...if one might foolishly constitute practically moving backwards by such a metric...

He was convinced that if a turtle had begun a race with the elderly locomotive back at King's Cross Station, it would be bored clean out of it's shell by the time they pulled up at the base of the school well after dark, wheezing steam pathetically.

Indeed, it was raining again that morning, but the heat of the stubborn summer still clung to the air, causing the windows to fog with precipitation and the scent of everyone's vaccuum-sealed breath to accentuate. 

Inside of the cabins where rough housing was running rampant, students with magical abilities were excitedly preparing for another year at a unique academy which trained them for the use of witchcraft and wizardry. 

The back of the train - a regrettable open-concept caboose - was traditionally inhabited by the most uncouth of them all. 

Those twisted and sinister individuals with trouble glinting in their eyes and pride dancing on their tongues belonged to the brooding, and quite nefarious, House of Salazar Slytherin.

Green and silver cloaks alike typically clustered in this disaster zone - a section that the trolley lady had long ago learned the hard way not to step a slipper into - where they might send resentful sneers floating through the air similar to the leaves drifting from dying trees outside. 

During the begrudging journey they would ping-pong snide remarks, cast cruel charms at the back of anyone foolish enough to drop their defenses for but a single second, and engineer new schemes to be unleashed upon unsuspecting society. 

To put it bluntly; they were a pack of ruthless, no good menaces.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - a fortification sat princely...yet somewhat crumbling...in a mountainous region of Scotland - had so conformed to the latest standards released by the Ministry of Magic, which bluntly required an extension of it's educative curriculums. 

The decision to distend the total length of necessary school years to nine, instead of the reasonable span of seven, had been unbelievably unfair. At least, that was the general opinion of those misfortunate scholars affected by it.

Draco had been but a unicorn hair's width from freedom of the contemptible nonsense that was Hogwarts, when the nation's Ministry of Morons had gone and announced this nauseating update halfway through his sixth year.

This meant that Draco - along with several other said ruthless menaces - were left without a choice but to remain at Hogwarts until they were nearly twenty. 

Ergo, tension in the caboose had never been so thick and dangerous, practically poisonous, as bitterness was undoubtedly the flavor of the mood.

Now he was there: contriving a concussion, scowling, damp and pruned, and barreling into his eighth year in utter disbelief. Correction; lumbering, at janky angles, over weedy tracks.

It had been a long and defeating summer at the formidably gloomy Malfoy Manor, which was facing an infestation of not only quaggy blight, but a second scourge of an even worse variety.

On his eighteenth birthday in June, he'd been greeted with anything but birthday cake and confetti. Being a conventionally spoiled brat, there was no argument that this had been the most depressing, most disappointing birthday of his life, for it now was a day stained by irreversible PTSD. 

Poor Draco had been dragged from his sheets in the dead of the night, brought before a panel of maleficent villains all congregating in the dining hall like lunatics at witching hour, and forced to join the group of anarchists that he viewed to be a mad cult who'd definably drunk too much of the coolaid.

The reason for this suffering, his mother had later told him, had been in order to protect the entire household and appease Lord Voldemort; a shadow of a creature, an evil entity, really, which came and went from their property as it pleased in a shroud of black smoke.

It was no wonder that everything felt demented and gnarled there now. 

Only a demon might genuinely summarize the Malfoy Manor as a homely place to spend time within, where instead, it was perhaps as cozy as a misty graveyard imprisoning the souls of the damned to wander without hope or heed.

The scalding dark mark which had been magically tattooed on his veiny arm that fateful morning at three a.m. never practiced forgiveness for it's host. 

Brandished by each member of the Death Eaters was this very wavering imagery of a skull purging a snake through unnaturally wide jaws. And while Draco could hardly bare to squint at the repugnant illustration he would carry forevermore, it was impossible to ignore it's agonizing presence.

PAIN.

Pain of unprecedented magnitude - that was the only manner in which to describe the dark mark's amaranthine company. It was a vicious parasite which fed off of it's victim without a care if it killed them. 

And no matter what extreme, absolutely unhinged experiments had been exacted to remove the perfidious ink, Draco remained limitlessly burdened with it, having scarred himself hideously up to his elbow without avail.

Now all there was left to do was scratch the area like a dog to fleas burrowing below the epidermis. It was ironically fitting, seeing as his clothing stunk like a soggy stray from the ridiculous damp, and his silky hair had grown long to hang before his eyes.

Draco was busy doing just this; attacking his forearm like a mangy mutt with his pointy nose pulled back in severe aggravation, when the unnerving sensation of eyes on him suddenly drew his blistering icy gaze elsewhere. 

In the booth directly across the aisle, there sat the meddling culprit responsible for this unwarranted horripilation.

It was a strange girl with long blond hair that flowed in sugary waves, all dotted with outrageous bows, although that was about as much that was evident seeing as she was inexpertly camouflaging her face. 

Honey gold eyes comprised of what could only be pure sunshine were fixated on him, causing his hair to stand on end. They were peering over the brim of a book which vaguely suggested how to translate common rhetoric from French to English, and vice versa. 

Draco hovered on this material aide for a judgmental moment before deciding to judge her even more harshly for the silly rainbow arcs of her obviously gleeful eyebrows. 

Despite what scarcity of her physiognomy he was partial to - given the literary blockade between them - Draco decided that he did not in the slightest recognize this beguiling witch. 

Perhaps it was a delusional Hufflepuff who'd downed one too many pumpkin lattes at the station, then decided to unwisely wander into the snake's den located at the hind end of the locomotive.

If this was the case then she had only herself to blame when someone inevitably lit that ravishing hair on fire, or worse.

When he narrowed his gaze threateningly, determined to thwart this bold invasion to his privacy, she dramatically blushed and vanished behind the text, and he simply dismissed it as arbitrary. 

He returned to lifelessly eroding his arm, finding the dribble of the unsympathetic rain on par with a soundtrack of long black nails abrading a chalkboard.