Lucius Malfoy.
Rich. Successful. Married. Father. Minister. Aesthetically flawless.
No one gets to where he is in life by being kind and friendly because business is simply not like that. Just look at Arthur Weasley; do gooder, honest, open to all… Poor… Lucius always had plans and plans on those plans. He has a list that's not very long of people he checks up on because they can be important to him. Not important like his wife or child… important like these few are in their own way special and original.
Quill… His lip twitches at the idiocy of the name. That couldn't have been her birth name... It's a personification of her half-ling animagus form that would impress that of even the famed transfiguration teacher, Minerva McGonagall. Quill was someone he kept off his radar up until now because he simply had no need for her. A punk rock witch with a city-sized proportioned rat familiar and blood never empty of drugs. She was loud and less than subtle. She stepped strong and with direction, she was a challenging and destructively rebellious. Worst of all, she didn't care about much at all which made her a more difficult person to control.
But tonight he has something for her. Something that she can't refuse. She had suddenly become of some use to him and she was the only one he knew that could do what he needed to be done. They hadn't spoken in about 5 years, but he had written her last week.
The click of his shoes were muffled by the carpet that lined the hall. A dark green floral pattern, the walls of the hallway are dimly lit and made of dark reds and woods. He passes a very dark room of some very expensive coffins that sat open and inviting like beds, there are a few open parlors and three dark windowed doors with the black print "Counseling" written in black block letters. Small tables hold flowers in vases, and frames hold old pictures of scenery. Eventually, he'll reach a set of two matching doors that sit ominously at the end of a hall, blocking his view but will open for him seamlessly, allowing him in once he got close enough to be welcomed. The opening of the room washed him in the sound of loud melodramatic punk rock music that would echo down the hall from which he came and into the darkness of the rest of the funeral parlor. It's after hours and they're the only ones here.. Well… only ones that are living... He turns away from where he came and entered the black walled, white tile floored embalming room where he'd find the woman by a slick metal table leaning over a very dead corpse.
"Quill." He greets quietly and she looked up suddenly.
She's dressed in black medical robes and from the way she pulled her sickly green colored gloved fingers from the gap in the throat of the dead, she's clearly surprised.
"Oh shit!" She says behind a dark red mask as she looks onto another wall where he will follow and see a cat faced clock with a wagging tail.
Less than cordial, she treats him like he's no one higher than Severus and those punks who stand around concerts in dilapidated buildings or outside train stops.
'Yeah… Umm.. Fuck." She sighed as she looks down at the body. "Just give me like…. A minute to get this artery and push some buttons."
Clearly, people watching her work was not something that she was used too but she didn't wait when she didn't see him turn away. Her fingers were back up into the neck of the dead and after a moment of feeling around, she uses another hand to cut an artery before dropping the surgical scissors and connecting a tube that's attached to a large machine. She looks up at him and smiles a successful smile before knocking a button on the machine with her elbow. A slight mechanical whirling picks up as lights began to flash and as Quill walked away to shed her gloves, Lucius stood by the body, watching the tube fill with thick pink goo. It's a naked man that lay on the table looking gangly and thin as well as quite grey and blue-lipped. The man's waist is covered by a grey towel but his legs and much of his stomach are exposed. The chest is already sewn to where she had debowled him earlier and the eyes were glued shut. The body begins to fill, almost inflate, and whoever he was started to look more like he's asleep.
Her unsettled chuckle brings him back and his neck will turn as she approaches, the handles of dark red mugs held in each hand. The water he notices is brown and the scent of chocolate fills his nose which is okay because hot chocolate is not tea, as tea is something Americans just can't make properly no matter how hard they tried. He stalls before taking his cup. It's not that he doesn't like hot chocolate or that he was someone so rude as to deny a warm welcome, it was just that those fingers were just in a dead man's throat and even though the gloves were taken away the image was still fresh in his mind.
"Yeah, that's my bad." She knows his thoughts probably because he hasn't been the only one to think these things. "Do you want to leave.. or…?"
He doesn't need to leave though, he isn't often as disturbed around death as much as he was at this moment. The care and lightness of her touch against the waxy skin, the cleanliness of the skin and wounds... This was a new type of death. A warmer death than that he wasn't accustomed too. He will follow her away from the body but not out of the room. Instead, she'll place his cup down and pull herself up on another slick morgue table once his back is placed towards the body.
"I totally lost track of time." She tries to sound like she cares but clearly he's just interrupting her midnight work.
Lost in death…. This was why Severus liked her. She was a vulture to the mans crow likeness. Lucius had heard him compared to a vulture before but that was just wasn't the case. Quill acted like a vulture because a vulture is always happy to have its claws around the dead. Severus was a crow because he watched from afar. Quill was loud and did the work of an Undertaker flawlessly.
He pulls from his pocket a folded note of wizards parchment and aimed it at her with a smooth flick of his wrist. She takes another sip before taking the note, relishing in the control she could take in unfamiliar instances. She puts him on edge just by being her, and it's why up until now he was comfortable just having no part of her.
Slowly she unfolds the note and drags her eyes along the lines, her expression becoming more serious the further they went.
"A job?" She asks him.
"I high paying job," He presses but she doesn't seem interested in the pay.
"Eh." She shrugged and handed it back to his surprise. "No thanks."
"But.." He almost chuckles, "It's a raise in… everything… There's a payout so that you can afford housing right away...-"
"Yeah, a rise alright," She interrupts without care. "Especially in water level. I hate all the rain over there... You should know that.." She finishes with a quirk of her eyebrow.
"But Severus-"
She didn't let him finish before she started laughing. Pushing herself off the table and taking her cup she starts back over to the body she was working on.
"You really ran out of reasons already?" She passes him. "I should move there because of money and Severus."
She was laughing now and he was switching feet uncomfortably.
She shrugged, "I honestly think why me and Severus do so well is because there's such a distance."
He gathers himself up and approaches the body her gloved hands were again touching. She was poking and prodding the filling body like testing a flank of meat on the grill.
"I have friends, a job, a happy boss and a home here. I even have a kinda-sorta fuck buddy across the pond who I never have to worry about bumping into," she flashed her eyes towards Lucius. "Anyway, I think Severus prefers the distance as well. "She finished in a finalizing tone, the music volume starting to rise.
They all like the distance. If Quill knew what the two men were she probably wouldn't ever speak to them again. She didn't have to know about that life... But Lucius had plans now and this was just a low part of a greater plan. Regardless, Severus needed to make things official with this girl that he'd been following around for over a decade…
"I won't speak for Severus but, Quill," She looked up at him as he addressed her. "You accepting this position in the Ministry morgue will greatly affect me in the most positive of ways. I am willing to put myself in your debt for this..."
Now, he's speaking in a language Quill knew quite well. A language of teeter-totter deals and under the table work. She had told him before that he was a strange man that echoed darkness but it was something that never pushed her away and perhaps that was a mistake on her part. He grins now that he sees he has her attention. Some people need money, others, more evil than even he, need debts.
"You tell me everything and I will think about it."
"I tell you everything and you take the job..."
That was fair and she nodded taking back the paper.
"What do you want from this?" She asks.
If she was a vulture and Severus was a crow, then he'd be the snake with the hypnotizing song.
"Simple. Names, causes…. This mark upon the skin."
As passively as he could, Lucius lands at the table across from her and drops the image of a very black mark against a very brown page. It looked like a snake through a skull, it was a long image with at the bottom the fanged snake face and at the top that creepy, mandible missing skull.
"Severus has this tattoo." She comments offhandedly and Lucius will almost smile a real smile.
So the man had let her under his clothes... Lucius hadn't actually known because they never spoke about her, but the only way he would have let someone like Quill see his brand that clearly, was when he was heated enough were it didn't matter what she saw. Lucius won't comment on this and would treat it like the "tattoo" he called it as.
"Yes." His voice darkens to the hiss of a hungry snake and he watches her pull the paper closer with damp, gloved fingers.
She thinks before she sighs and looks at him. "Me giving you names and information is against code."
"What do you want for it?"
She hardly thinks, her dreams already set. "Besides pay?"
He nods.
"I want you to take me to Hogsmeade… I want to see Hogwarts."
Perfect. His fangs would be dripping if he had any, but his smile must have been enough. The parchment is signed in magic and then by hand. With a wave of the sickly green glove a desk drawer slides open and another paper, her resume, floats through the air and folds itself, placing itself in an envelope that Lucius held before the lip was magically sealed.
"We stay open for further negotiations?" He asks as he hands her the envelope that she takes with a smile.
"Always."
His lip twitches, but not because of any reason she would understand.
…..
The sky is clear and cloudless which is odd for an English winter but there were moments where Severus would think that maybe Quill's hatred for the rain is what willed to be the weather it was. Like a bear from the state she lived in, Quill hardly had ever stepped foot in snow since she was able to leave from Ilvermorny to live among the palm trees and beaches. To think she would visit him in slushy English rain was something that not even Severus was foolish enough to believe. She had even canceled on Lucius before over the weather and upon meeting his wrath she told him with a shrug that he could come to her or just get over it and wait 24 hours. Quill was her own soul. Always had been and probably always would be. She was remarkable in her own right both in beauty and magic and Severus knew as much as Lucius and Narcissa why there was such a shroud of silence cast over her. Her own invisibility cloak of pleasant ignorance. She didn't need to know about the black marks on their arms or of plans over infants she knows nothing about.
And that's just the way it has to be….
Tonight it's cold enough where he wears a scarf and gloves, but clear enough to see the stars while out on the cobblestone streets of the less-than magic town that tries to mirror the stars with electric lit signs that blind most of the natural beauty. It's the winter of 1990 and Harry Potter will come to Hogwarts next year. This year though, the rareness of a blue moon has occurred and a woman has found warmth in his arms in a world that is hardly his own.
It's him against the brick wall, Quill within his cloak that shields her from the occasional brisk winter wind, and a group of friends who are just as inebriated as he. The track behind his nose burns and his irises are wide. His vision sways but he is in an element as opposite as he is to the one he holds to him with one arm. If he were to pass himself in any other time of his life, he can confidently say without a doubt he wouldn't recognize himself one bit.
He's wearing a black, sewn patched trench coat with a dark green sweater underneath. Its hood is drawn, his hair falls into view and from the under the middle of each eye and over the bridge of his nose is a single black line. A paint of magic ink that distorts his face in the memory of everyone who sees him. It's a simple trick, and a cheap one at that.
Intoxication didn't make him more social…. No, he had too thick of walls for that. Instead, what was broken down allowed this woman closer to him and those around him to feel something more than just sarcastic disinterest. In anonymity, he had found a rare spot of comfort in the city of party and drugs. He hadn't really been listening to what was being said, because he had been too enticed by the smell of raspberry shampoo that was coming up from the head of who stood below him. He was thinking about his pantry at home and what he'd eat when he got back. He was thinking about if a bird could fly without a tail and the implications of 'pigs with wings" in a muggle society. But he did hear one thing that brought him back with force.
"I can't believe your moving." Cara, a friend of Quills with bright pink hair and blue lipstick sighed.
"What?" He finally speaks up in a less than clear voice, adjusting his position and clearing his throat as he looks down at her.
Cara suddenly smiles a very dark knowing smile and he feels Quill deflate with a sigh.
"Oh… You didn't tell him..." She holds onto her longtime boyfriend Jarreth.
Cara was a dark one who would do well as a Death Eater if she believed in blood power. Cara was a half-blood, but Cara had an entire muggle life as a part of her day and that is something The Dark Lord wouldn't accept. Cara knew things about people, intuition like, that she'd regularly expose in dark and emotionally playing ways. This, was one of those times.
"Yeah.. I was going to tell you Severus but then we bumped coke and..." Quilllaughs and it's genuine but she's stepped away from the Professor and he notices this as a chill hits his chest. Slowly, his eyes narrow and Quill glares at Cara.
"I'm moving to England." She turns and faces him. "There have been a lot of deaths and awhile ago I filled out this application and I got a Magic pathologist position."
Severus knew things as well. He knew the tick of not just a lie, and as minute as not a full truth. There is something about what's going on that makes her nervous and so his hand will land on her shoulder like a vultures claw on prey.
"Excuse us."
He directs her away like a calf off a cliff and they'll hear a small burst of giggling from the surrounding girls who would also woo at them as they walked. He was very drunk, and with the damper of drink the short wicked temper those at school feared so much was doused. Once around the corner, he constricts his grip and pulls her out in front of him, his hand adjusting as he turns to face her. He standing closely, but his arm acts more like a bar than anything else that will keep her at a distance and him upright as much as he was.
"Do you want to tell me the other half of your move?" He gives her a chance, something he never gives his students.
She doesn't fight, mostly because she doesn't care enough too. "Because Lucius was the one that told me the position was open…. I think he may have rallied for my position."
She's not nervous and her speech only stumbles because she too is heavily under the influence. He cocks his head and drops his hand the in the same movement that swung his arms fluidly behind his back. "You don't think you earned it?"
Perhaps it was a very odd, very out of place question for him to ask because her work was never really a topic they spoke all that often about… Although, it seemed that had not been the truth for her.
"Well.. I guess. But… "She glances away. "He just really…. really wanted me to get that job…"
He realizes then he's too high for such a spiral of thought.. That the sentences can't form because he can't even hold enough concentration on something as small as this conversation. His eyes are drawn to the brick of the wall behind her as it appears the stone had turned to water and the white tips of her hair were the waves.
She knows him too well…. She smiles, coat grasped in one hand she leans in and kisses him, a sensation that flashes his view and brings him back to her. He kisses her back, a hand on the side of her neck in another flash of heat and will hold it for a moment before she breaks away. She takes his hand and leads him back to their waiting group who will jokingly insult them both before heading back inside to drink and party the night away in a world so strange from his own.
Unfortunately, the flashes he'd go on to believe were flashes of sexual heat and drug-driven passion was actually the flash of a very cold bulb belonging to a very real camera held by a woman with a moon-white smile that reflected the fangs of Najini.
…
