Incoherence, parentheses, and Draco. Season ficlet in parts. Mild slash, in later parts, but rather twisted. Because Christy is a wondrous Christy indeed, all fun dedications go to her. So, to Chriz and her wonderful (albeit odd) HP couple ideas. ~cheers~ Lots of love, rainbow girl. ^-^
Note: Just a by-product
of Untouchable Face boredom. That should take precedence, so don't
expect regularity with the next eight parts. So yeah, without further
ado, here 'tis.
Part One : Fire
Dead leaves scatter from the bare skeleton trees, scraping and collecting in the gutter like the flickering remnants of a bonfire. (Purgation.) Laughter trickles through the crowd: a communicable disease, a drug seeping about through one shared needle. (I do not care to partake.) Who is the brunt of their laughter, I wonder? Well, for once they are not the receivers of mine, so it does not much matter.
A solitary puddle remains, sole evidence of the tempestuous deluge last night. The sky is now cloudless and aquamarine, reflected in the quicksilver depths of that last watery refuge.
Her last words: He is your son, Lucius.
Her breath was barely a whisper on the sterilized air (but what wasn't sterilized in that accursed place?) and her bony fingers were still adorned with half the family fortune. Gaze fixed, unseeing, on the incompetent Muggle nurse - Father, curse him, demanding the use of a Muggle institution. (Afraid of the secrets she might disclose in her delirium, are you? You hate Muggles.)
The door is polished oak, one crack running down the center. It brushes as the fiery leaves do, scraping across the floorboards in a whisper. While there is a table of teachers and several locals, most of the tavern is a sea of black. Above this darkened mire I catch a glimpse of autumn leaf locks - yes, there they are, those inseparable three. Lovely.
She had been but a shadow; ivory complexion turned sallow, prominent cheekbones jutting and makeup brushed unnaturally (she looked like a child's scribbled drawing, reduced to sprawling lines and too-bright colors) over her gaunt face. And he, he, had not even been there.
"No, thanks. Nothing."
The coins weigh heavy in my pockets, their cool and slippery surfaces comfort to my fingertips. But I am not thirsty, and now is no time to get drunk. Tucked between the metal disks (all money was, really) and the pliant handle of my wand is a scrap of parchment. I pull at it, curious-
"How's dear mum doing, Malfoy?" His freckles - yes, I can concentrate on those. Pale skin, shocking mass of fiery hair, tattered robes… Expression expectant, waiting hopefully. (Infuriated by my silence and probably my lack thereof on previous days.) "What's the matter, eh? She write you out of her will for being a slimy little bastard?"
"Ron." Granger tugs at his sleeve and there's Potter, hovering at his shoulder. "Leave it, will you?"
Too late. "Weasley, your family doesn't even have a will, there's nothing left to give away." Lame. What, had all my insults wilted with the flowers on her windowsill? Once a vivid canary yellow, they had turned brown and drooping, slowly perishing.
"I hope she dies," he bursts out, not looking remorseful in the least (even when Hermione gasps and drags him away). It takes a moment before I meet the remaining pair of eyes, narrowed at me behind those crooked glasses. Tousled hair and ebony gaze as starkly black as his robes, near white complexion…is that how it goes, Potter? Black and white, solid lines? (Her skin was tinged gray, and the sharply etched lines of pain blurred in my stinging vision.)
"Er - don't mind Ron. He didn't mean it."
Crumpled parchment sweaty between my fingers. Face suddenly burning. There are no words, no flippant insults that-
"He's still mad about what you, er - what happened last week, which - well-"
Don't know how to be nice to a Slytherin, do you, Potter? Well, it won't stop you from trying. A pity, that. The look on his face is the hesitant concern of the Muggle nurses, scurrying through the halls with their too-white uniforms and clutched clipboards. They always stopped me, put a motherly hand on my shoulder, asked if I was all right. Most gave up when I shook them off and growled to be left alone.
The lack of response is frustrating him, as it had Ron. Conversation, like many things (marriage, for example), takes two people. My life seems littered with the failures of such.
"Er - how is she?" He still seems conflicted between the gloating look Ron had worn and a sympathetic worry, eventually choosing a concerned middle ground.
"Oh, doing quite well." It's amazing the traces of sarcasm that are never picked up on, though fully meant. "That is to say, safe and warm six feet under."
The confusion is only augmented, flickering across his features like a breeze shivers in ripples over the glassy surface of a puddle. A solitary drop and the calm is disturbed. After she died, I had gone to the window, expecting a stormy night or at least rain - any bit of rain. (Teardrops I could not shed.) But the skies had been untainted, undisturbed. It was not until I returned to Hogwarts that the storm had arrived, and by that time the burning behind my eyes had subsided.
"I'm sorry…Draco," he finally manages. "Ron - I - we didn't realize."
Sincere people make me sick. Because their sincerity is sickly sweet: are flowers and magically conjured fruit baskets to chase away the grief you aren't supposed to feel? A pat on the back from the kindly doctor and he moves on to a new medical file. Dealings with him are over; time to call the morgue instead. (Goodbye, Mother - I'll remember you when I eat off your china, when I walk past your portraits, when I ask Father not to kill your friends -)
Life is cold. Can't people accept that?
Potter is clearly having a difficult time with my awkward silences. "Um. If there's anything I can do, you know, uh - I've been there, it's -"
"You can go away, for a start." I offer him a sardonic grin. "Oh, and you can kick Weasley for me. That would be a real favor, yeah, thanks."
He stares at me, blankly, face still shifting between pity and the routine abhorrence. (Too hard to place for you, Potter. Color me black; make me into a child's sketched figure with reaching spider hands like the empty tree branches, maybe even with a villain's leer. Then your world can be checkerboard balanced again.) "Oh - whatever. Malfoy." It is nothing but a muttered curse, and he stalks away.
At last solitude comes, though if I strain I can hear Ron still yelling expressively outside. His voice carries with the dry leaves, scattering over the streets of Hogsmeade. At the table near the window, Professor Sprout frowns as she reviews a paper with Professor McGonagall and shakes her head into the late autumn afternoon.
I unroll the tiny scroll of parchment, remembering how I tucked it into my pocket that night when her coughing rattled through the tiny hospital room and shook like the angry breeze plucking at the window. Superstitious, she'd grown, at least on her deathbed. Wouldn't anyone?
Save your last drops from the shadow. Dragon's blood may save but it also condemns.
Maybe a drink isn't such a bad idea. I shove the parchment back in my pocket, shaking the coins as I do so. They jingle like discordant church bells, chiming a funeral dirge. (There were none.) She was entombed without the watching gaze of my father and I. He was drunk. I was in Potions. We were both, I suppose, too busy to mourn. We still are.
"Something strong," I request, showing her the flashes of gold. "Please."
"Aren't you a bit young?" Eyebrow raises. (I had a dog with an expression like that, once. Father made me kill it when he found out.) "How about a Butterbeer?"
"No. Forget it."
I turn away. His eyes had been ice when I told him, his posture as rigid as the statues that littered our gardens. Porcelain white but as unyielding as iron. Expressions set in serene smiles, too frozen to mold into any other gaze. He had only smirked, nodding, as if he had expected it. Of course, he had, but he didn't seem to mind. Then again, all statues are hollow inside. They bake easily that way.
Later, angry, I took one of those statues and smashed it on the garden path. (A million shards, tiny doves falling to the ground.)
It gave me little satisfaction.
He is your son, Lucius.
He was not home that night or the next. The third, I returned to school; I heard later that he entertained friends. The house elves cooked an extra splendid dinner. It's a shame to have missed it. (Not really.)
Absently, I wonder who these friends were. Death Eaters, perhaps, offering their condolences - or congratulations? Or they could have been my mother's pretended friends, offering their sugary sympathy molded into flowers and fruit baskets, smug smiles that conceal the fangs and greedy tastebuds beneath. (Power never satiates.)
Maybe he'll find one to sleep with. But then, he lusts only for power, and that is a mistress that is never content.
As they say, the apple never falls far from the tree. Is that the life I look forward to, the two-dimensional picture I will reenact? They often talk of a brick wall that is only painted to look like an endless stretch of road. Will I be the fool to blunder into it? (Brains spread across the pavement like a forgotten piece of roadkill.) Fool? Or suicidal wise man?
Maybe the question isn't if the apple always falls beside the tree, but if it still would fall were Newton not there to observe? I cannot offer an answer, but I know someone who knows.
She is dead, and her voice whispers to me in dreams.
He is your son…
And her dying breath wasted on a Muggle nurse she deluded herself into thinking her husband. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
A shadow falls across my table, cool and refreshingly oppressive at the same moment. I do not have to glance up; something in me predicted his return. Maybe her ghost grants me some power of divination. Or maybe I just know him too well; know him from furtive glances in Potions, know him from trying too hard to hate, know him from knowing myself.
"Now what?"
"I did it," he says, voice as cool as his shadow. He truly is black and white, a faded photograph the masses still cling to as their hero. Two dimensional, of course. Perhaps, I think, everything is nowadays.
"Did what, Potter?" Do I care? That, probably, should have been the question. Still, the hesitantly proud expression flitting over his features made me wonder.
"I - I kicked Weasley - I mean, Ron," he answers, grinning as he sees my surprise. (Startled, for once, into true emotion.) Before I can protest, he catches the chair with his foot and slides into it with the ease of a predator, dark emeralds watching me.
"What, did he feel it?"
"Er. Probably?" Potter's grin turns sheepish. "He's being an ass about it all, though, really."
"And this is your business because?"
"I - I just -"
Words fail, once again. They usually do. A picture is worth a thousand words, a feeling worth a thousand pictures, and what becomes of all those unexpressed feelings? I can feel them breaking inside like the waves of the ocean on the slippery rocks. (Barnacles of littered memories and tiny tidepool sanctuaries lingering hopelessly on the surface.)
The remnants of his grin make me want to reach over and slap him. So meaninglessly smug. Tousled hair, lanky limbs, skin like porcelain, ocean gaze that swallows you. And that damn scar, mocking me.
It occurs to me how ugly the human body is. (You appreciate that, don't you, Mother? You, who spent the last days of your life trying to cover the decay. Fake.) There are lines crisscrossing over even the smoothest flower-petal skin. I can look at anyone now and imagine him on his deathbed: skin sagging and spotted, sallow and transparent. (So much excess clothing. I would long to rip it off, dispose of the repulsive blood and bile building inside, and fly free. Whisper of smoke and then nothing.)
And he's looking at me. Grin faded, now, just puzzlement returning to spread its foolish wings across his features.
"What?" I snap.
He shrugs - a nonchalant little toss of his shoulder. I watch the robe flutter and think that, at the same time, everything must be as beautiful as it is ugly. The shadows, the light, the black and white and yes, yes, Potter, the gray.
"Nothing. Just wondering what you're thinking."
"Will you give me a Galleon if I tell you?"
He laughs, albeit reluctantly, at my sarcastic retort. I frown. To make him laugh was certainly not the intent. "Like you need more money, Malfoy. All right." A gold piece is shoved across the table. "Galleon for your thoughts, then."
"I seem to have expensive thoughts." He grins, again, and I frown more deeply. What is his problem? The point was never to get along.
"So? I paid you."
This conjures another idea and I have to chuckle, softly. He raises an eyebrow, quizzically, and his expression is almost comical. (That's you, Potter. Their hope, their laughter, their joy. Their hero. What am I, the quintessential archenemy? Or do I not even deserve that title, instead relegated to the list of Slytherin nemeses after Voldemort?)
I don't particularly enjoy being second to the Dark Lord, no matter how terrible the Wizarding world may perceive him to be.
He is your son, Lucius.
"So?" Potter persists. I shrug.
"I was thinking how idiotic you are. Basically." I wave the girl back over and ask for a Butterbeer with the Galleon. She raises a questioning eyebrow at Potter and he nods also, giving her a handful of smaller coins.
Instead of flinging an insult back, he only shrugs. "I guess I was, giving you that Galleon and all. But I was wondering. I mean, I never knew my parents, so - it hurt a lot, but probably in a different way. You knew your mother. It had to-"
"Shut up, Potter." My voice isn't necessarily raised, but it slides from my lips much harder than I expected.
He stares at me for a moment, then only nods. "Yeah, what was I thinking? Trying to talk to the impenetrable wall here. Do you even have a heart somewhere in there?"
"Of course not," I reply. "Children of Death Eaters are born without hearts. Didn't you know that? Oh, I forgot, you grew up in the Muggle world."
We both sit quietly for a minute as I watch his face screw up. "You're - you're joking, right?" he finally resigns himself into asking.
I can't help the laughter that bubbles at his hesitant doubt. "The look…on your face…" When she returns with our drinks, I am still smirking at him. Taking a sip, I shake my head. "How dumb can you get, Potter? The heart is generally an organ necessary for life, you know."
"I - I know that! You just looked so serious."
I roll my eyes. "I can't believe you actually thought-"
"Oh, shut up! Who knows what weird rituals you go through."
Silence seeps, melted glass glowing amber in the setting sun of the afternoon. (What baubles will we form today with the tongs of our angry teeth and the silence we play catch with?) I watch him, the constant shift in that verdant gaze, and frown. "What did you just say?"
He is now uncomfortable; I can see it in his eyes and the way his elbows jut. I can see it in the way he pushes his chin forward - challenging, stubborn. "I said," he says, "who knows what weird rituals you go through."
I drink, letting that bottled sunlight slip through my compulsively clenched teeth. A drop lingers on my lip and I conscientiously wipe it away. "Don't call me," I tell him, cold as February mornings, "one of them. Ever."
Please, Lucius. Listen to me. The Muggle nurse looked to me, helpless, shrugging. I know you never thought of me as much at all, but I'm dying, and please -
Spare him. Please.
He is your son…
My chair scrapes, a shade louder than the leaves have, over the floorboards. He watches me and I hate knowing that, hate seeing his perplexed gaze on me. He hates mysteries, I know, and that is what I've become. No, not the word - he doesn't hate. Hate is apathetic, hate is blind, and before was hate.
Now is puzzlement, and it frightens me. It frightens me because I thought I knew him inside and out, simple, and he was predictable. (I hate surprises.) I suppose I don't know him well enough, because I don't know what comes next.
He catches my wrist as I brush past him. He looks up at me, dark eyes trying to silently work out the puzzle. I throw him off.
"Malfoy-"
I don't bother with words. What, in the end, do they truly accomplish?
The door swings shut with a satisfying click and I weave quickly into the crowd, feet passing over the dusty streets and their adornments of frisking leaves. I take one in my hand and crumple it, fingers carefully peeling the dry skin from the veins. I marvel at the flaming red orange of it. I remember its previous greenery.
I wish I could burn it all. Purgation.
But how many things can be easily absolved with licking flames and the lonesome soul of the fire spiraling into gray sky oblivion? Or how many spirals of smoke return to haunt the unburned leaves scattering, scraping, through the gutter?
Late afternoon burns down the back of my robes and the clouds streak like trailing ghosts across the sky. I follow the lonely path back to Hogwarts, noting how most others take the easier ways. I don't mind walking. I don't mind much, anymore.
The day passes on in silence as the sun trails its burning heat across the sky, blazing like the clusters of leaves below.
(Sometimes, I think, fire is not enough.)