Prologue
The one thing Seneca knew for sure was that ugly people had ugly souls. This she considered to be true in both of the diametrically opposed worlds she fluctuated between. Seneca was transparently beautiful with the habits of a pervert, the mind of a slob and a synthetic personality. Seventeen, austere and lean at five-foot-eleven, she was blessed with the toned yet wiry body of a far more zealous athlete. To her, the longevity of her body was infinite, continuous. In reality, she was expending her mind and body's remaining half-life, waiting to come undone. Balkanising under the weight of narcotics abuse and hubris. She was naïve of the symbols of vanitas and how Seneca's long-toothed, distant relations would have enviously condescended to her—had any still lived. But they'd croaked: the vieille garde of soothsaying witches of her mother's line had all been killed and the elderly wise-women of her father's had been banished to various institution until their deaths. Only she and her father remained of those two intersecting sets of genetic precepts, shut away in their sepulchral residence like Persephone and Hades.
Her appearance was dictated by a series of polarisations. Regulated black hair just passed her jaw. White, marbleised skin membraned her neat physiognomy. She was very pale, almost unnaturally so. A faint, humanising warmth showed in her features like a candle far behind delicate porcelain. She was one of Breker's fräuleins made taut and tight, her body like a dancer's, a collection of idealised ratios flushed with the heat of a hormonal narcissism.
Apart from blue eyes she held no real ethnic attributes; Seneca was, to some extent, an oddity. The pure-blooded magical community was interbred and she exhibited no real classifying genetic tropes of their group. Her hair was black but her eyes were not dark or green as so many pure-blooded students were. Nor was she Aryan like the rest, and she lacked even the noses or brows that defined the genetics of Muggles. Gaunt and nuanced features gave her away as well-bred and upper-class. Although, she did well to not be so clichéd as to carry the brattish opinion of superior pedigree that many other students of her house displayed—at least not ostensibly. There were hinterlands of repressed synchronicity in her aura that people often mistook for sexual magnetism. She did not successfully shroud the interesting susurrations of her personality in the mystique of her glamorously glacial façade; there was no personality to shroud, she merely reflected emptiness.
She was carrying herself in a dour, watchful way. She seemed agitated, saturnine and misanthropic. Her posture was wrong and determinedly so; she seemed silently demur yet diminutive in presence as if attempting to conceal a privation or difficulty. She almost overcompensated with poorly feigned nonchalance.
There was subtle pride in her mannerisms: an unconscious habit of affectionately touching the sharp ledge of her jawbone in supine self-reverence. The expression of her coldly attractive features were set completely neutrally. Yet she maintained a certain image of irritability. There was a certain aesthetic to her, one unconsciously morbid. It was in the clothes she wore, nothing laughably gothic but Muggle in design and post-ironically inelegant; only just markedly aberrational in taste. She wore black tank-top and drab trousers; a hairband on her wrist and combat boots on her feet. Seneca had once read and quickly forgotten a paper on the Freudian concept of externalising self-image, in which it was written that a person dresses in accordance to how they wish others to perceive them. The paper offered the examples of transvestites, who wished to be viewed as women; and white-collar workers who wished to appear as professionals. Seneca had no personality to express and no way she wished to be perceived. She dressed blankly, an unused billboard: no brands, no statements, no slogans. Seneca was not prosaic, only muted, uncomfortable. Snape had capitalised on that. To him, she was a blind, spastic flickering in the vast network of his comprehensive influence. A defective locus on the orthogonal grid of information he saw. Mondrian's mistake.
Seneca drummed scab-red fingernails on the leather armrest of the black Common Room sofa. She sat, managing to recline without looking relaxed. Adjacent to her, a long-haired Siamese cat slept foetally, purring loudly to the tapping metronome of her anxious habit.
A second person entered from the dormitories and approached from the far side of the room; male this time but a Slytherin the same as her. The name she knew him by was Saccharine. His clothes spoke more about his character than his quietly reserved nature would ever allow him to communicate in an utterance. He wore the magical equivalent of a buttoned-up Wehrmacht M40 feldblause of a deep, dark colour lost in the dim lighting. His standing, Fascist collar and silver embroidery on his shoulders and cuffs opulently ornamented him. Seneca noticed the circular monograph of his initials on his breast. One of many pretentious demonstrations of his affluence. He was properly apparelled as a proper wizard—a pure-blooded wizard—should be. Saccharine came from old money but seemed nouveau riche in his excessive decorativeness. He often resembled Bela Lugosi, occasionally Liberace. However, tonight he wore no fur: an androgynous Ernst Jünger.
The mascaraed, blue eyes set into Seneca's angular features flickered to him. Her posture stiffened to a more awkward pose of someone trying to maintain their carefully selected idiosyncrasies. As he approached, she felt a knot form in her stomach. The hard soles of his black brogues made an echoing sound, tapping the flagstones as he made his measured move across the damp stone of the Common Room's dungeon floor. Seneca could tell at a glance that they had been constructed with little skill but with pseudo-expensive materials. The craftsmanship and stitching looked florid; something her father would have sneered at.
Seneca had grown up wealthy, if not to the extent of Saccharine; the Muggle side of her family had worked in money—bankers, future dealers, stockbrokers—she'd seen what her father's clients wore, she knew what was distasteful and what appropriate. The wizarding world was based around similar principles, they weren't really malleable in any Western society of worth.
Saccharine slowly turned and sat down next to her on the leather sofa. She bridled uncomfortably, looking away to the unignited, cold hearth. The Siamese between them rose gracefully, stretched and arranged itself on Saccharine's lap immediately but without abnormal haste. It resumed purring loudly. Seneca cocked her head expectantly but didn't bring herself to look at him. He made her feel nauseous. His dark, rich and sweet-smelling cologne burned the inside of her nostrils, it radiated a sort of unread unctuousness.
Très cher, though. She thought with distaste. A bad habit of her father's. He would always switch to French when discussing money, oblivious to how inanely upper-class that may have seemed to anyone else. He'd done this in matters regarding clientele, who were themselves majoritively non-Europeans but acknowledged the unspoken procedure of concealing monetary convocation in the presence of the less linguistically educated: children, such as she; or wives, who they largely dismissed and of which her father often entertained but no longer possessed himself, his own having died in Seneca's birth.
Saccharine had always disgusted her, there was nothing else to his relation to her and as far as she was concerned, it was the only response his character's paradigm could evoke. He slowly turned his head to her and she felt her skin crawl. Underneath that clammy, white epidermis, her flesh tightened. He puckered wet lips to speak. The shape of him in her peripheral lent forward a little.
'Now, I am become Death…' He said, speaking in a quiet and rasping voice, like the sound of cicadas slowed down. His soft, un-calloused hands stroked the cat and gently squashed its ears down, much to its delight. His voice made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Her body produced hackneyed responses, the traditional and universal symptoms of discomfort. The phrase meant something to her, it was a call that demanded a response. She recollected the correct continuation.
'…The destroyer of worlds.' She finished the quotation in a murmur. It was a code, something from a Muggle religious scripture popularised by a scientist of some kind. It was a passphrase that the other side would never think to know. An unwanted concession made in the name of secrecy. She found it ironic to find security in the culture of those they conspired against.
'It's the Shrieking Shack at midnight tonight, that's the meet.' Saccharine croaked back, responding slowly, now that he was confirmed by her response. 'My handler bit so I guess you're in.'
The cat had rolled onto its back and he played with its paws as it affably bit his outstretched signet ring. His mouth twitched; he continued.
'You ought to bring a cloak. Unless you can conceal yourself with your wand… which I doubt.' His tone dripped with condescension. It's frequency felt malign. The cat, unconscious to his nature, gripped his wrist and playfully kicked its legs against his embroidered cuff. He indulged it without glancing down, stroking its stomach. Seneca's wand felt uncomfortable on her outer thigh. Saccharine turned his head as if he'd noticed and she met his hooded eyes this time. A sensation of danger overwhelmed her as she looked into the glass of his stare. They weren't even grey. Pale flecks swam in them like semen about to pierce the black gamete of his pupil.
He was almost as pale as her with thin platinum hair combed neatly into perfectly equal, oleaginous curtains. His face had a distorted quality: its lips were fat, wet and slightly too red; while his eyes were practically colourless and remained fixed forward, almost glazed over but overly doting. She looked at his lateral canthus' slight downward inflection and long eyelashes that accented them so sensitively. He smiled like red Plasticine being wrung, his fat lips split and elongated over his lower face. He was the same age as her, in their seventh year, and a Prefect for Slytherin, someone who was always absent, in the background and undesirable. She barely saw him but he repulsed her. Saccharine seemed to grow bored and brushed the playing Siamese off his lap phlegmatically and without breaking his eye contact with Seneca.
'I can perform the Disillusionment Charm, Saccharine.' She said coldly. 'I'll be there.' Her brain throbbed with distain. His grin was predatory and slightly anxious: a hyena's or a coyote's. A fear grimace.
'Then next time I see you,' He closed his right hand around his left arm and drew his sleeve up. 'You'll be marked with one of these.' On his upturned forearm an impossibly black serpent writhed through the eye socket and out of the mouth of a jet-black skull. As she looked, it mutely flickered its tongue and coiled into a figure of eight as if agitated, it twisted two-dimensionally on his skin. She glanced back at his pallid, smug face and looked away, pushing her hair out of her own. She'd been taken by surprise but she remembered what she was required to obtain: an assurance that Snape needed very badly. She feigned upset.
'I didn't think they'd be so fucking stupid—we're still at school, for God's sake.' She sneered and his mouth twitched in irritation, or maybe amusement, at her Muggle idiom. 'Or did you beg the Dark Lord for that... thing, Saccharine?' He opened his mouth to speak but caught himself and stood up measuredly, careful not to embarrass himself and rolling his sleeve back down. His thin, white face was tight.
He wasn't there for you. The sardonic thought surfaced to her. She was done here. Saccharine had given the game away; what she wanted to know. He wasn't there to mark you and he won't be there to mark me. In the midst of this absurdist, clandestine trek, her mind had almost separated from body; her thoughts would whisper. She had spent so long pretending various things and manipulating various people for Snape that she had almost forgotten herself. So her thoughts would speak to her. They would whisper truths and realisations, the fruits of her ambiguous labour. Toil for a classified endgame, she'd pieced together only so much: she was an informant on a group she was not yet a member of. The death-cult of You-Know-Who, the Knights of Walpurgis, the Death Eaters. The whispers she heard were meant for Snape, who possibly belonged to the group she was infiltrating or who maybe worked for someone else. The Ministry, maybe Dumbledore, she didn't know. She had heard rumours of a similar cult in seventies, during the first war, worshipers of Dumbledore called the Order. She wasn't even getting paid. Seneca was a kinaesthetic leaner—Snape had taught her more magic privately than she had ever been able to perform ordinarily. This seemed like the only logical direction her life could take.
'This is the highest honour.' Saccharine hissed, his face turning to an almost pained anger. His humiliation had solidified into a hatred. She returned to him, her mind turning to the matter at hand.
'Not being able to wear short sleeves?' Seneca jibed, she pretended to smile, knowing that facetiousness would incense him and she was not disappointed. Saccharine's face settled into a cold, discoloured seethe. He stood up, fully repairing his sleeve to its original position.
'Not everyone is as accepting of your kind within our order, half-blood.' He said quietly, pronouncing the last label in a drawn out manner, it was an insult. Turning from her, he left the way he'd come, back to the dormitories. Snape had told her that half of Saccharine's order were half-bloods.
After a moment, the Siamese cat followed him at a distance in slow-paced pursuit of affection, misjudging Saccharine's temperament for the second time and Seneca's shoulders settled and her tense body relaxed. Dealing with him was always difficult, his presence was abrasive, almost painful in its bringing on of anxiety. But she knew she was going to be seeing a lot more of him. Her immediate relaxation worsened and stagnated into an exhaustion, one she could not satiate as he knew she could not sleep, it was going to be a very long night.