Fragments of Copper

To him, intimacy smells of tarnished copper and tastes like tears. It is not something you parade, but something concealed by the decent of society, like elimination and bodily maintenance rituals. His parents do not hold hands in public. They do not kiss their son.



HIs mother is crouched over the toilet, all elegance gone, painfully retching. His father is in prison, and they are alone in the house. He can see the discarded bottles of sleeping potion there, far too many, as he kneels beside her and holds her head, lays a cold cloth across the back of her neck, and listens as she chokes out words of loneliness and pain, facade broken. He is fifteen and helpless. It takes all his strength to carry her to her bed, and he watches her until she falls asleep, exhausted. There are great bruises under her eyes, and her cheek, when he kisses it, tastes like tears.


Two months later, his father comes home. He is gaunt rather than thin, and he cuts off his hair and strips naked and burns it all in the study fire. It makes the elegant room smell like an auto-da-fe, like blood on dress robes. They had been dress robes, once. And then he bathes for a long long time, and no one says anything at dinner. They ignore the obvious restraint in his father\'s gestures. After dinner, he gets drunk. He does not talk, just pours it down as if the alcohol will burn Azkaban from his soul. Draco drinks with him, in silence, and his father shares the hangover potion with him the next morning. But there is still silence. Draco leaves for school, hoping he gets the chance to take a shot at Potter, just once, no matter the consequences.

On holiday, he learns. His father\'s hair is regrowing. He smiles as Draco carefully flays the skin from the grindylow, and Draco feels warm, there in the cold dank of the workroom with the copper scent surrounding them. Draco moves on. His father will not take him to the meetings, but he takes him out, nonetheless, to teach him about the tenderness you feel when it is you they beg, their bright God for a moment, and the sheer power in it. He falls in love a little every time with the beauty and the drama and the feeling of the transition hovering so near, and love for him smells like bile and blood and back alleys and the scent of cheap whores.

When he returns to school for his seventh year, he can see the thestrals. The unicorns will not come near him. Neither, he notices, will they come near the Weasley girl. She is the only one in her year in Gryffindor who cannot comb their manes, and she hugs herself and turns away, in an accustomed motion of self-comfort in exile.




. Five years have passed. The war is over, ending in a surprised flurry after a misaimed spell, and a long slow grinding of the wheels of the law. Draco is the last of the Malfoys. There is money, but he\'d rather make his own. His face smiles coldly from the Daily Prophet\'s financial section on a weekly basis, and the Ministry invites him to come take an advisory position, and he is invited to many parties, where the pureblooded women bloom like flowers, waiting to be plucked.


And he goes home at night to the ancestral house and his dreams are lit with the acid purple of curses. He wakes, and his cheeks are stiff with dried salt and he tastes blood in his mouth and how can he do his duty to his name if every night he betrays himself, crying for the past and the dead.


The dead are past. The past is dead.


He gets drunk and tries to mourn, but it only gives him a hangover. So he ignores the howling in his heart, and keeps a drink by his bed to rinse the taste of intimacy from his mouth, and he sleeps alone.



And this worked, until the day he went to the bookstore and a thin, spare woman with long red hair turned and met his gaze with eyes like rivers in flood. He is one of the most eligible bachelors, but he gave her a card with an address written on it, and he has done that for no one before. They don\'t pay her enough there. He can see it in her eyes and in the way she has patched her robe because it has worn through again there where she kneels to look under the counter for the spare quills. He watches her. She wears a smooth and helpful facade but she is not there underneath it, nothing but the churning turbulence in her eyes.


He is waiting there when she gets off work. And they go together because they knew each other, and nothing the other could do compared to what had been done to them before.


She does not eat much, and talks in a monotone about her life, when asked. And she stretches out a hand to her wine glass and the sleeve rides up and he sees restraint marks on her wrists, and he knows how she exorcises her demons. He knows those games, those pointless little games, and maybe they aren\'t so pointless any more. Perhaps it is like making a potion...you collar her, stir four times clockwise and count to ten before adding the adder\'s tears and having her kiss the coiled whip. Perhaps it might work.


After dinner he takes her home. It is good to be a wizard, for it is possible to do so much more without leaving permanent marks. He longs to see in her eyes that he is her world, to hear her sob his name. But although she cries out in the end and weeps, he is crying too with the force of his own release, and salt and blood mingle again and it is wrong and it is right and they feel, together. And it doesn\'t matter that she is calling for a dead man, since he\'s crying for the dead too.


She would let him flay her to the bone, he realizes, and wonders that he does not want to. He used to hate that red hair, a symbol of all the \"decent\" people in the world, who substitute hypocricy for the honest understanding of self that really is the foundation of being a skilled wizard. Now, as he washes the blood off her back, the only tenderness she\'ll allow him to give her, he considers offering her something else. Perhaps two wrongs make a right. He has enough money for both of them.



And he remembers that it is not his name she sobs when she cries, and so all he says is, \"Two weeks?\"


\"Two weeks,\" she says. Her mask is back in place. And so he lets her turn, and walk out the door, robes disguising just how thin she really is, and he counts the days until she comes again.



This story is the sequel to A Safe Darkness and is followed by A Gracious Silence.