Warnings: Mentions of torture, blood, and character death
It was ironic that the final i's dotted and t's crossed on his life story would be being done in by a hippogriph.
The same hippogriph, he suspected, that had escaped his grasp just minutes before he was to carry out the execution orders.
The job of ministry executioner for the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures had been a perfect placement for Macnair. After the Dark Lord's suspected death from his original rise, he had escaped Azkaban by claiming, like many, that he'd been placed under the Imperious curse.
That, like most others testimonies, was a blatant lie.
Macnair, a pureblood with a sadistic streak, had relished in the chaos and torture that the Dark Lord and his disciples brought upon the mudbloods and muggle filth. As devoted to the cause as he was, he would have been decidedly less interested if he were unable to payback their crime of existing in blood. A pureblood he may be, but a politician he was not.
After the Dark Lord's fall and his subsequent avoidance of Azkaban, Macnair sulked. With no Dark Lord to follow and with the Ministry keeping a sharp eye on him, he had no outlet for his anger and violence.
After nearly 4 months of self-imposed solitude, doing nothing but pacing the halls of his home restlessly, he finally found an outlet.
One of his several contacts at the ministry set him up with the job. And it was, truly, perfect. The ministry sent a handler with him on all his outings, but they were often desensitized after decades of witnessing death. So long as the creatures were dead and they returned to the ministry within a timely manner, they hardly seemed to care how he killed them or how they suffered. As long as it was, technically, legal. An added bonus was that if someone attempted to stage a rescue attempt for the despicable creatures, he often times was allowed to hurt them in their pursuit. Just a little.
The creations under Macnair's 'care' rarely escaped. Of those that did, none enraged him more than that blasted hippogriph that the half-giant Hagrid seemed to care so much for. It wasn't so much that he cared for the creature, only the reaction of the caretaker. The gamekeepers blubbering had made his day before the realization that the flying chicken had managed to slip free of its bonds.
He had thrown essentially a tantrum, acting rather like a child as he raged and beat on the pumpkin's in the patch, Hagrid beaming through tears next to him.
Now, lying on the cobblestones of Hogwarts with a broken neck and gurgling on blood after the half-giant had thrown him against the wall and the hippogriph had caved in his chest, he had a moment of self-doubt.
He'd never doubted his course in life before. Raised by a muggle hating father who all but worshipped the Dark Lord and a mother whose spirit who'd be crushed long before his birth, he'd been gifted cruelty and taught to harness it as more than a weapon, but as a way of life. Those mudbloods, his father always insisted, deserved divine retribution for having been born and polluting the name of magic, and his son would be the one to dole out death and punishment. Anything unworthy deserved death.
For the first, and last, time in his life, Macnair considered the vague possibility that his father could have maybe, just maybe, been wrong.