A/N: Inspired by a combination of watching Sin City and looking at some friggin' gorgeous artwork. A/M, but not HAPPY A/M by any means. Warnings for violence, angst, implied character death and other such unhappy things.
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He'd gotten very good at recognizing trouble at one hundred paces, and she raised his hackles at a thousand. Deadly beautiful. Beautiful and deadly. She radiated a proud, vicious sort of dignity even as the burly hit wizard escorted her away, her hands secured behind her back. Their eyes met for a moment, through memories and her inky bangs and his faintly tinted sunglasses, and time stood still.
The Muggle gun she'd used to kill the handsome young man lying motionless in the middle of the alley lay on the ground a few feet away after she'd been disarmed.
It wasn't the Angelina Johnson he remembered from school. No warm coffee eyes or bright milk-white smiles. Even the blood on her hands was too dark and sticky a red to emulate bright, scarlet Gryffindor. She walked away alongside Horatio Christensen as though he were escorting her to a ball rather than dragging her away to a prison cell, and Montague wondered why she of all people had to shatter and repair herself with the resilient resin of experience and harsh reality-- rigid and sharp now like a shard of smoky glass-- like all the others he'd seen. She'd never been like the others before the war.
But it wasn't truly his job to wonder. Five years ago he'd started out as a rookie investigator in the Ministry of Magic's Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and five years of war advanced (aged and shaped and bent) a man faster than twenty-five years of peace. The second day of work, he'd been forced to steel himself not to be sick when they were summoned to the scene of a Death Eater attack and the first thing he'd seen was a chubby-cheeked baby of no more than two with damning green light fading over its body, a stuffed rabbit still clutched in one of its hands.
These days, he simply tried to ignore the periodic staff turnovers from people who never came back, and went through forensic investigation protocols with automaton precision that came from countless cases of frozen repetition. Identify, sweep, brew a few diagnostic potions in lab, report, testify. One summons after another. Angelina Johnson was, technically speaking, just another hardened murderer in the bleak present. The interrogators would get her testimony through Veritaserum in time. His main concern was the still, bleeding corpse of Delano Moon on the ground.
She hadn't been careful to hide what she did. The alley was visible from the street, and the blood on her hands had been his. A gunshot would've rang out like a thunderclap in the quiet of a drizzly Saturday afternoon, and he knew, instinctively, that in the very least, she hadn't changed so much that she no longer knew what she was doing. It wasn't a cowardly killing or a moment of rage. It was hate so deep and poisonous that Moon's death was the only anticipation that kept her alive.
But why would she murder a man in cold blood in an alley like a rogue warlock from one of the many gangs that had formed after the death of Voldemort?
It was the hour of midnight when she was led to his office by two grim-faced hit wizards, the stern-looking interrogator at her heels. By rote, he handed over the vial of truth potion. He couldn't save her. He knew better than to try. She was never the type to lean.
Her name, check. Her age, check. Her House at Hogwarts, check. The truth potion was perfectly made, clear and glassy as her eyes. Did she know Delano Moon? How long? In what context?
Her replies were in a smooth voice that would have sounded satiny and sultry in its even syllables and mellifluous consonants had it not been so deadened. He wrote down her responses in the case file as Sophocles Morgan asked all the standard questions.
He killed my family five years ago. He told me that I'd like what he was going to do to me. I bled for three days, and on the fourth, I finally found my wand. Fidelius charm for three years, and then Alicia was hit from behind by Braeden Avery on her way home and the spell dissolved. I shot him the next day, and that was just practice. I found Delano Moon again a year ago. I was waiting for the perfect time.
It was all they needed to know for the case, and she was not sorry.
Montague looked at his report as he wrote down the last word, and it was almost as neat as always. A blot of ink marred the parchment like a dark blue tear, and when he looked up at her again, the Veritaserum was wearing off. A precise thirty minutes of honest, blind truth. Her eyes weren't much more alive and alert as it wore off, filled with a weariness that came from seeing too much and therefore no longer truly seeing anything. He stood up from behind his desk to hand the report to Sophocles Morgan, and for a moment, he stood right next to her as the interrogator looked over the notes.
Business and work and professionalism and objectivity. Her long, loose hair, still smelling like rain and smog, obscured and shadowed parts of her face, and brushed against his knuckles as he stayed motionless next to her chair.
She'd pay for her crime with her life, and she welcomed it. He knew that he'd go home at three in the morning and lie in bed jittery from too much coffee and wish that he could have saved her from her fate, a bit more than for all of the others just like her. She wasn't sorry in the least, but he was.
Odd how enemies come to this in the end.