La Vie En Rose

A cold, sharp knife possesses just the right momentum. No wand or machete holds that kind of thrill for the taking. Not in his opinion.

Taking a life like this – it’s what her lives for. Because this guy, -this fucking guy, deserves all the brittle exposure of vengeance his own two hands can dispense.

But first, he likes to talk to them. Tell them why they’re scum, why he takes such pleasure in the sweet seduction they’re lingering last breathe gives.

He tells them--

'A story. Would you like that?'

The scum is barely hanging on, but Draco has to give him credit.

‘Security is mostly superstition. I used to be a hero. A people’s hero. A real do-gooder. Can you imagine that? And before that, I was the mindless son of a deatheater, determined to make his father proud. Turned my life around. And for what?'

Taste the iron on the filter, flick the ash, choke on the thick phlegm, marvel that your mucus - membrane still functions.

‘So is mercy. Mercy doesn’t exist in nature. And you know what I think? I think that means that God doesn’t find it half as monumental as we human beings like to think.

‘But Justice … Justice is the way of the world, old sport.’

‘What do you know of mercy?’ The man asks. His voice is still flat, and he doesn’t choke on his own blood like Draco perhaps hoped he would. Just spits it out through broken teeth. Cold hard floor meets destruction by humanity. Such subtle creatures of demolition we are.

It’s soundless in that room.

‘I knew her.’

Perhaps he doesn’t know how his grip tightens around the gaping throat. Applying pressure, ironically prolonging life.

‘It was a job.’

And just like that he’s sick of it all.

‘So is saving the world from filth like you. Now shut the fuck up and listen.’

But he doesn’t really give the guy a choice, anyway. His thumb is pressing down hard, deep deep hard on his larynx and he doesn’t give a shit.

He feels righteous attacking him, and so groundlessly certain of victory. The urge ran deeper than any cheap male foolishness. It is a terrible act of faith waiting to happen. And you can haul all personal experience onto the evidence table when you declare that there is nothing more rotten than encountering an enemy that feels no doubt. Even when you win it's a nightmare, it stays with you and poisons you and sickens your coming days.

‘What if I took all the things you love in the world and destroyed them? Tell me. What do you love?’

But Draco knows. He can see it in the Scum’s eyes. He doesn’t know of love, or mercy, or justice. And he momentarily suspects there might be no way of getting through. But no. He’ll get there.

‘I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s all about the aftermath. There you are. Trapped in an inescapable prison of stagnancy, until your screams and moans become so compounded and tremendous that that fucking bubble bursts and as you gasp for your first breath of fresh air, it poisons you with self-loathing and ambition. The bubble bursts and you stand naked in the elements, choking on your own self-pollution.

‘It’s like that. Because the moment you realise you can still breathe. Well … fuck. That’s the moment everything is over for you. Then acceleration begins.’

'You … loved her….' He smiles through his broken teeth, bold and mocking, and Draco can’t stand the scum’s audacity. He’s going to enjoy killing this one, he’s going to take his sweet fucking time--

‘That’s enough Draco’

And he’d almost forgotten about that one.

'No, it won’t ever be enough,' as a matter of fact.

‘Kill the bastard and let’s go.’

Her voice is just hard enough to shatter the moment.

‘Fuck, Granger, who’s doing lookout,' he hisses. She steps closer from the shadow.

‘Theo. But no one’s around for miles.’

‘What’s the problem then,’ he growls, letting go of the man who slumps so much further down Draco must have been holding a good deal of weight by that throat.

‘Late for a manicure?’

Her eyes cast hate and judgment and pity, but her voice is just as empty as ever.

‘Avada Kedavra.’

…

'You’re a complete bitch.'
'And you’re a sadistic psychopath.'

It’s all very deadpan, and Draco almost likes that moment between them. But then what she’s done really hits him. And suddenly, his air is starting to leave and it’s quickly being replaced by rage. His teeth are clenching and his jaw is beginning to hurt.

'That was my kill.’

She huffs a little breath of air and he knows it taste stale and sour on her tongue by the way her features pucker.

‘So I’m supposed to stand by and watch your sick display of cat and mouse?’

‘HE KILLED PANSY!’

He is glad to see her flinch.

But he hates what she says next. Hates the honest way it’s whispered.

'Is that what she would have wanted?’

Hates it so fucking much—because, as if she fucking cares. As if she cares who Pansy was –what she stood for. Spawn of the devil, lover of the deatheater , bestfriend stealer, the bitch without a soul, and now Miss fucking Purity and lightness is asking him--

“Hey, mate – Jesus Christ, what happened in here? …Draco, you sick sumabitch!”

His shoes are stuck to the drying blood beneath them. He smirks when she winces at the quiet suction his movement creates.

'Theo, clean up for me would you. I can’t look at this another second.'

And he hopes she knows it isn’t the carnage he’s referring to. He apparates. Away from her. Away from it. That last chance. That taste of justice. He won’t wash the blood from his hands for many hours.

When he gets to the hovel they share, Luna is carving strange symbols into potatoes. There are six numbers written in black on her hand. He’s promised to help use a telephone when they can find one, if he can figure it out himself. Yesterday there were four.

'Family of the muggle boy we found last night,' she whispers. Most of his conversations with Luna are whispered. He thinks it’s something about the dark of their shelter and maybe just something about Luna. He nods. It’s Luna’s job to make something up. Because the ministry long ago stopped covering this shit up, and someone’s got to do it.

And she comforts them. Tells them how brave their children were. How they did not die in vain. The muggles don’t know why they’re fighting this war –they believe it to be a mystery. Terrorists without a face.

The faint glow of her wand tells him she’s tired, probably from carving away at potatoes for endless hours.

‘We can’t eat them, now.’

‘They aren’t for eating anyway.’

She doesn’t say anything about the blood, but uses her wand to boil a pot of water. It’s been several months since they’ve had hot water. Longer since they’ve had electricity. London is one dark, black hole. The muggles have fled, what’s left of wizarding society gone into hiding. He sits beside her at the table, one of the three pieces of furniture they share, the two others currently occupied.

‘How was your day?’ she asks.

He laughs.

‘Take a guess’

Her eyes trail the clotted blood on his shirt, to the smear on his cheek, to the red of his eyes.

'At least it’s over,' she says quietly.

He nods. There are long silences between them, too. In them, Dracp settles in and imagines they both know where the others mind has gone. They have developed an easy friendship over the years, for as strange as they both are, and he likes to settle in the quiet normalcy between them

‘I had a dream.’ She smiles and her wand glows brighter for a moment.

‘About what?’

You. The war. There was a huge, magnificent battle at Hogwarts. Harry found all the Horcruxes. Pansy lived.'

‘Married Blaise?’

‘Had beautiful children. Saw them off to Hogwarts.’

He thinks for a while. About what that would have been like. What that would have changed.

'Sometimes I think that’s the way it should have gone. Was supposed to, I mean. But something went horribly wrong, and instead…’


'This.'

This.

Pansy dead, for betraying the Darklord. For loving that Rat-bastard. She should have loved Blaise. Because everything would have been different. And Draco has guilt. So much soul gripping, knife in the heart hilt-deep guilt that he chokes on it and can’t fucking see straight through it all.

But she couldn't love Blaise, because he wouldn't let her. And she loved that Rat-bastard to get the fuck away from him.

He nods.

‘Yeah. This.’

'But what if it had? Where would you be?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it would have been … different.’

Long ago, Luna would have spoken the truth. War has taught her subtly. But not much.

The water’s getting cold.’

She would have said “You never would have loved her like she needed. Nor Blaise. Nor anyone but him. Because that’s who he is, and what she wanted. And it had to be that way.”

And he would have been uncomfortable, and afraid, but he would have agreed.

If you could do it over--

I’d make the same mistakes.

Pansy smiled, in her own way. Her eyes softened, lips twitched

I think we all would.

Sometimes life does that. Your whole life can be one big huge suck-fest, but you have no way of knowing then of the bright, bright future that’s still possible. And the future comes and only then do you know that huge suck-fest was really just a cesspool of possibility. But you wouldn’t, couldn’t have known. Now you know, because that once bright future is a dark memory. Wrong move. Sharp turn too soon. It’s all too fucking late, and there’s a fleet of helicopters on the move … time to run, run like hell, run faster than you've ever run before, that is the only chance of survival, extinction is inevitable, time to join the ranks of society, and so it goes…. And it's not how interwoven all things are that's bothering him now, but that there's always something underneath that seems to know beforehand where you're headed and leads you there. As if, no matter how awful it might be, it's right where you belong.


They’re underground. He never thought, even after watching all those movies about it, that war really would run people in so many circles eventually they’d carve themselves right into the earth.

An hour stretches on and refuses to stop, and his eyes become heavy-lidded. His thoughts are a jumbled mess of nostalgic musings and sudden splashes of morbid images. He stands, rubs the toe of his boot on the floor where he spots dried blood, and yawns.

‘Have you seen the moon tonight?’

He hadn’t.

‘You should go have a look. It’s enchanting.’

‘Yeah. I might’

But right now, he has to sleep.

He lays on the hard cot and fixes his eyes to the ceiling, crawling with webs and life and dust. Luna begins whispering, as she often does, and just as his eyes begin to drift, he hears,

‘And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created….’

And he dreams.

He dreams he kills the man, he says, hey, old sport, Don’t look so alarmed. You’re only gonna die.

He stretches it on and on, until he makes him understand, but it’s useless. Because suddenly, he’s talking to corpse, and another moral’s lost.

No one ever said it would be easy. Finding a safe way to fall. But Draco Malfoy believes in Justice. And he loves it deeply. He loves it sharp and cold. It wants to be the sun in his sky, life-giver and all-devourer simultaneously. And whenever he preaches of the humility this occupation requires, it repeats the same thing tirelessly:

"You are going to die soon. Child, you are going to die. And do you want to live your life as upright and upstanding as possible with the intention of arriving in perfect condition, so that you can tuck yourself neatly and clean into your grave at the end of this?

”Or would you come unexpectedly walloping around the corner, body shattered and worn, wearing your favourite pair of shoes, violin in one hand and a balloon in the other before skidding to a halt and blowing up into a million smithereens at sunset?

“Because child, it will happen. You are going to die, you are going to die. And then what, child?“

And then what.


Which shuts him up, every time.