I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
-Billy Collins.
Before.
Dear Celeste.
It's not often you get such a clear cut sign that your life is about to take another path – or perhaps it's the fact you only know so when you look back on an event & say 'that's the moment, that was when nothing would ever be the same again'. I knew though, I wasn't aware which path I was truly on or where I'd end up after the long arduous journey, but I knew.
That moment in the bathroom was harrowing, Potter was fanatic. All year he'd been dogging me obsessively, which was at first entirely satisfying. I'd spent so much of my time neurotically mapping his movements, desperately trying to knock him from the golden boy perch he ruled from – infuriated at how he could slip through the school rules & come out top every year; getting a chance to feel him at my heels for once, let him taste the bitter realisation that people behaved outside of your control, no matter how hard you pressed in on their lives – but this was different. Potter was furious, desperate to catch me in my plans. At some point our age old school rivalry, stemming from years of tradition and the friendship circles our parents dominated, had materialised into war. I didn't stand for those sly Slytherins anymore, I didn't look like another boy in the halls – I was the enemy & it was tangible the want Potter had for my destruction... It was as if, if he could somehow dismantle me, stop me in my carefully lain tracks, then he was stopping the war. I was the closest he could get to, the stain on my skin & the pride in my name, it was what he could touch and act on. I'll never know if this compulsive analysing of the events are to degrade him or forgive him – but I do know one thing, that I day I knew he was a killer, and perhaps if I think more closely about those glorious moments where my blood ran to mingle with the soiled sodden tiles, I knew that I wasn't. The idea of death never came easy to me, the perishing of others never raised an eyebrow in my life – but no one that vulnerable was allowed near me, I think it was the weight of the Malfoy name and the painfully in vogue style to on have one child to inherit all, that kept the idea of inclement ends out of my peripheral vision.
If I knew you were one for sweet nothings and would accept anything but the truth I'd rearrange these events – I'd put your face and wild mannerism, encased in the mildest of temperaments, at the centre of revelations. It was indeed the sheer magnitude of your quiet gravitational pull that rewrote the history books, but at the axis of any great war & battle against evil: is hatred. That day it was Potter's and even though you were there to see these events unfold, I'll let the past catch up with the present & explain myself and these rash letters.
Sincerely Wyvern
A.N. Unfortunately this is one of those stories where you start in the middle & then half of the book you're catching up with it and then the rest you're going on to unchartered territory.
If I didn't make it clear enough, this is a letter from Draco to Luna. I hate it when people change character's name, so please don't assume I am – just remember there is a war about & being to blazé about identity would be foolish. I may tamper with this a little, but I'm trying to show that the next chapters are still in letters & he's telling Luna what happened to him/them.