His father looks down at him, and he looks cold and disappointed, and Draco is shivering like he's going to tremble apart at the seams, and he is tears and snot and horrified terror because it's really going to happen and he can't understand it. Draco cannot comprehend how it is that he is lying on the floor of the room where he used to play Hide and Seek with his mother, waiting for his father to mutilate him. He licks his lips, and manages to croak out with thin, strained tatters of composure: "Mother. Go, please. Don't watch. Don't –" And then he stutters to a halt halfway through and presses his lips together, because if he keeps speaking his whimpering, shameful tears will turn into a heaving, sobbing wreck of panic and fear. And he doesn't want them to see that. He doesn't want them to take that from him.