Disclaimer: Why do we need disclaimers? Does anyone actually need to
be clued in on the fact that Harry Potter is not owned by fanfiction
writers? :-P For the record, I wish I own these characters, but I
don't, just these out-of-focus versions from the recesses of my own
mind. Um, first HD attempt. Very very mild slash, nothing the least
bit graphic (entertaining).
Bottle Green
I had a figurine doll with eyes like yours once, Potter. It was Chinese craftwork, one of the little mementos of some distant Malfoy's ventures into the Orient that I found at the bottom of a moth-eaten chest. Like everything else in that attic it was coated with a gauze of patina, all but the eyes. Those shone - not with the glitz of cheap birthstones that littered mum's dresser, but with some inner fire. Jade or emerald, probably, as I consider it now, but back then I only knew that it was beautiful.
So reminiscent of yours, or is it the other way around? I knew that if I put it back in the drawer, come back decades later and brush away the dust, I'll still find it glowing. But I didn't, I dug it out and kept it on my nightstand, and one tumultuous night I knocked it over and it was gone. The brittle russet copper crumbled, to be swept away by the maid.
Like you, Potter, dissipating in the rust and copper of dried blood. You went just as quickly, a flash of movement, and nothing more. Maybe I thought that if it happened faster than I could see than I wouldn't see, or care, or hurt. But it didn't work like that; the mind is capable of capturing movement the way no camera ever could, filling in with its own mould where there are blank spaces.
Who said it first? Avada Kedavra, Avada Kedavra, did you even say the words at all? Did I? Perhaps this is all a dream and I never uttered a sound, never curved my tongue around those useful words. Maybe it was just you, shooting spears of green flame into my heart, and I never countered it with my own.
Lead us not into damnation. Temptation. It was what we had lived by, the family insignia. No matter how many times I chanted it as a mantra, it hadn't managed to work its charm. Maybe it had been worn out too much. And the question, one of the questions, was this: was I the asteroid, bringer of destruction, plummeting towards the anchored star, or did you respond in kind to the magnetic lure? For how long did we dance, poised on the brink of doom, before survival yielded to gravitation?
Maybe the story has an alternate ending, like the Lady and the Tiger. Maybe there would be a happily-ever-after, or a miserably-ever-after, anything but senseless endless quenchless pain. Maybe the world is flat and a horse-drawn chariot is the sun, and the vessel of immortality is immortal itself, never to surrender its insides to the ambush of time. Maybe.
Avada Kedavra. I thought of the childhood toy when I had you in my grip. In a way it's a choice like the one I made all those years ago, poised between putting you back to your box to shine away to the end of eternity or taking you out, transcending you. I chose the second. I only wish I had done it better. That I hadn't messed up the second time around.
Avada Kedavra. You opened your mouth to say something, I'm fairly sure, and I never gave you the chance. Death is what happens when you give your opponent the chance. Death is what happens otherwise. Could I have chosen differently? Your eyes, the memory of your eyes, don't scream yes but refuse to let me settle for no. I just wanted to show you that the world is different from the way you saw it, out of brazen kaleidoscope lens. I wanted to smash through the mirrors and confetti. Not out some lame desire for empathy, just a twisted urge to screw up your life with my world. Did I know the shards of glass were going to shut your eyes forever?
Or maybe I'd just wanted to see what it was like in yours. Springtime glory and palest jade tranquility, tempered by some eternal inner flame. But at the end your eyes were bottle green frosted glass. In them I could see everything I was, everything I wasn't, every ugly blemish, every shameful desire. I would go insane, faced indefinitely with that merciless crystal mirror. Better to smash it.
What denies my peace, robs me of sleep? The way the sun laces threads of bronze through your hair, brushes ephemeral translucence across your eyelashes? Flying across a sky of diamond flecks like some exquisite centerpiece gem, billowing robes and hair darker than the shroud of night? Or the single word that had escaped your lips as a last breath, a last breath when it was much too late? Not a curse, a spell, a plea. No.
Malfoy.
It could go anywhere, but not in the way he said it, only just discernable under the silky hiss of breath.
Somewhere out there twin jewels of green still exist, shining without caveat, risen from the charred ashes of its craft. But to us, to us that live and suffer without the velvet cloak of illusion, it is as good as gone.
Bottle Green
I had a figurine doll with eyes like yours once, Potter. It was Chinese craftwork, one of the little mementos of some distant Malfoy's ventures into the Orient that I found at the bottom of a moth-eaten chest. Like everything else in that attic it was coated with a gauze of patina, all but the eyes. Those shone - not with the glitz of cheap birthstones that littered mum's dresser, but with some inner fire. Jade or emerald, probably, as I consider it now, but back then I only knew that it was beautiful.
So reminiscent of yours, or is it the other way around? I knew that if I put it back in the drawer, come back decades later and brush away the dust, I'll still find it glowing. But I didn't, I dug it out and kept it on my nightstand, and one tumultuous night I knocked it over and it was gone. The brittle russet copper crumbled, to be swept away by the maid.
Like you, Potter, dissipating in the rust and copper of dried blood. You went just as quickly, a flash of movement, and nothing more. Maybe I thought that if it happened faster than I could see than I wouldn't see, or care, or hurt. But it didn't work like that; the mind is capable of capturing movement the way no camera ever could, filling in with its own mould where there are blank spaces.
Who said it first? Avada Kedavra, Avada Kedavra, did you even say the words at all? Did I? Perhaps this is all a dream and I never uttered a sound, never curved my tongue around those useful words. Maybe it was just you, shooting spears of green flame into my heart, and I never countered it with my own.
Lead us not into damnation. Temptation. It was what we had lived by, the family insignia. No matter how many times I chanted it as a mantra, it hadn't managed to work its charm. Maybe it had been worn out too much. And the question, one of the questions, was this: was I the asteroid, bringer of destruction, plummeting towards the anchored star, or did you respond in kind to the magnetic lure? For how long did we dance, poised on the brink of doom, before survival yielded to gravitation?
Maybe the story has an alternate ending, like the Lady and the Tiger. Maybe there would be a happily-ever-after, or a miserably-ever-after, anything but senseless endless quenchless pain. Maybe the world is flat and a horse-drawn chariot is the sun, and the vessel of immortality is immortal itself, never to surrender its insides to the ambush of time. Maybe.
Avada Kedavra. I thought of the childhood toy when I had you in my grip. In a way it's a choice like the one I made all those years ago, poised between putting you back to your box to shine away to the end of eternity or taking you out, transcending you. I chose the second. I only wish I had done it better. That I hadn't messed up the second time around.
Avada Kedavra. You opened your mouth to say something, I'm fairly sure, and I never gave you the chance. Death is what happens when you give your opponent the chance. Death is what happens otherwise. Could I have chosen differently? Your eyes, the memory of your eyes, don't scream yes but refuse to let me settle for no. I just wanted to show you that the world is different from the way you saw it, out of brazen kaleidoscope lens. I wanted to smash through the mirrors and confetti. Not out some lame desire for empathy, just a twisted urge to screw up your life with my world. Did I know the shards of glass were going to shut your eyes forever?
Or maybe I'd just wanted to see what it was like in yours. Springtime glory and palest jade tranquility, tempered by some eternal inner flame. But at the end your eyes were bottle green frosted glass. In them I could see everything I was, everything I wasn't, every ugly blemish, every shameful desire. I would go insane, faced indefinitely with that merciless crystal mirror. Better to smash it.
What denies my peace, robs me of sleep? The way the sun laces threads of bronze through your hair, brushes ephemeral translucence across your eyelashes? Flying across a sky of diamond flecks like some exquisite centerpiece gem, billowing robes and hair darker than the shroud of night? Or the single word that had escaped your lips as a last breath, a last breath when it was much too late? Not a curse, a spell, a plea. No.
Malfoy.
It could go anywhere, but not in the way he said it, only just discernable under the silky hiss of breath.
Somewhere out there twin jewels of green still exist, shining without caveat, risen from the charred ashes of its craft. But to us, to us that live and suffer without the velvet cloak of illusion, it is as good as gone.