Author: Amalin
Contact: rainpuddledancer@yahoo.com
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This fanfiction is based on characters and settings in the books of J. K. Rowling. No profit is being made. The song "Elaborate Lives" belongs to Tim Rice and Elton John from the musical Aida.
Summary: When your memory
is something that other people play with and your mind their discarded
playground, what else can you believe in besides your own reflection?
When no recollection is a pleasant one, is it better just to forget?
How many new lives are too many, before the past catches up to you?
And what do you do when the face in the mirror is no stranger than the
dreams you once cherished? What then?
e p i l o g u e -- e l a b o r a t e l i v e s
"…we all lead such elaborate lives…
…wild ambitions in our sights…
…how an affair of the heart survives…
…days apart and hurried nights…
…we all lead such elaborate lives…
…we don't know whose words are true…
…strangers, lovers, husbands, wives…
…hard to know who's loving who…"
It is afternoon and the sun is high, scattering its benevolent rays across the sky from its golden chariot. It flirts teasingly with the blowing curtains, its gentle rays flickering between gaps in the white linen. Outside the land is summer green, just beginning to bloom.
Despite the time, it is breakfast - a silent ritual, complete with china dishes and silver spoons, rustled newspapers and occasional sighs. Today, Narcissa is still sleeping - recovering from a friend's late night gala, yet again, most likely - and father and son eat in even more sullen silence.
Lucius' cereal tastes dry without milk, and he wonders if Draco's toast is heaped with jelly to be different from his father or if the boy actually likes it.
Either way, it doesn't matter, does it?
"Any news?"
Draco peers over his copy of the Daily Prophet in annoyed surprise. He might as well eat in his room for all the conversation that happens around the household, but since his father rarely speaks at the table, it makes no difference. "No. That rapist was caught in Belgium. And Hogwarts needs a new professor. But you knew that."
"Yes, nothing new there."
"In Quidditch news, the-"
Lucius frowns. "I don't care about Quidditch news. Viktor Krum this, the Chudley Cannons that…is there never any real news?"
Draco frowns his own reply: a contest of sorts. Lucius has played longer. "You ought to care," he says bitterly. "It's what normal wizards do care about."
"Well, I don't. And the Malfoys, Draco, are not normal wizards." And he wonders silently, yet again, why his son likes Quidditch so. Because his father never showed much of an interest? Why is he so insistent upon being the opposite; is Lucius the failure and his son to be the success? Or, no matter how he tries, is he still a Malfoy?
Draco gets up to leave. At that moment, a bit of text catches Lucius' eye. He reaches for the paper.
"I'm the one that pays for it," Draco grumbles, though he reluctantly relinquishes the newspaper to his father. "Whatever. Keep it."
Moments later, he is locked in his room. Lucius is oblivious, intent on the article. A whisper sounds softly on the summer's breeze, frisking darkly beneath the birdsong and the lazy hum of insects.
"I loved…you…"
"Damn it," Lucius continues, a shade
louder. "Damn it, damn it, damn!" Without bothering
to alert his wife and son to his whereabouts, he pulls out his wand and
disappears.
-=-=-=-
It was late afternoon when the man arrived, though hours have passed since then. Hours of contemplation, of senseless confession, of silence.
The wind shivers across his path, tugging with it a few prematurely fallen leaves.
A newspaper article flutters by, having slipped carelessly from inattentive fingers. One cannot simultaneously clutch a newspaper clipping and sob into one's hands, which Lucius Malfoy now knows.
In any case, the picture is not the picture of a lonely eleven-year-old boy whose parents have been taken by a Dark Lord's curse, nor is it the beaming countenance of a celebrity's fake pose. It is the gory example of just what can happen when you try to Apparate and fail - splinching at its most unpleasant. Not that the Daily Prophet shies from unpleasantries.
The world might mourn for this charming man, the type reads, its black-on-gray finality chilling. A well known author, professor, this famous wizard went out in a most unsurprising way. Life's ironies did not pass him by.
It spirals onward, our newspaper scrap, eventually but another piece of trash in the gutter. Sunken deep in the melancholy process of remembering, the tall man wipes too late tears from his cheeks.
Twilight descends, breathing dusk into the pale sky. The stars slowly come out or, rather, appear, as they have always been there. The moon is but a sliver in the sky, a porcelain slit like a wry half-smile. Sideways.
Squinting into the darkening canvas of indigo, Lucius waits for the night to deepen. Eventually it grasps the horizon and cloaks the world in shadow, each tiny diamond sparkling in the sky. Lucius leans against the headstone, feeling the warmth of the sunlight seep out of the rock. He tries to push some of his own body warmth into the stone.
It doesn't work.
"The stars are out," he says softly, looking past the shadowed granite and into the distant sky. "We used to watch the stars, do you remember? And I would point them out to you…"
It is dark, and the stars provide little illumination, so any tears that the man might shed would be unseen. Of course, none walk such a graveyard tonight, and the cover of night is a cloak of darkness to shield him. He huddles beside the grave marker. Perhaps he cries; the night is dark, and we cannot see his tears.
"Look," he whispers into the lonely night, "there's Lyra. And over there, Ursa Major. And…" He trails off. "Is that Aquarius?" Aquarius appears in late summer and fall, as he well knows. In fact, most of the stars are off for the early summer season. Lucius frowns, scrutinizing the sky and its own unshed tears. "You know," his voice wavers quietly. "You know, Gil, I miss you sometimes."
The wind whispers, a melancholy hush, through the trees. Otherwise all is silent and cool, a summer night swinging past.
"I think about it," Lucius continues softly, "sometimes, in the middle of the night, and everything is quiet. And I can imagine that maybe we're back at Hogwarts, or at the Manor that summer. I think that maybe you're here, you're right beside me." His voice breaks. "And there are no mistakes, Gil, there are no mistakes, only lessons. I learned my lesson. I - I think that maybe, this time around, I would change things. Could I?"
The only answer is a lonesome owl, winging its way across the cemetery on its search for a meal. The stars blur in tiny orbs that pulse with the fluttering of his eyelids. Teardrop magnifying glasses. With which to see the stars.
"Did you know?" Lucius traces a wandering finger down the chilled granite marker, finger following the letters. G…I…L… "When I saw you at the masquerade, I would have thrown away every pretense in my life just to spend one summer day back then: spend it, over and over, forever, again. That would be perfection, I think."
A cloud shadows what sliver of moon there is; the stars are chiming gently in a melancholy song.
"And Ganymede," he chokes out, voice still softly lowered under the cover of the velvet sky, "the cupbearer, was given immortality. He was put in the - in the stars - so that he would never d-die…"
Aquarius looms, bright and beautiful, its stars pulsing with his tears.
"Of all his lovers, I think Zeus treasured his Ganymede the most. Of his wife, of his mistresses: it wasn't just the beauty, the lust, it was more, don't you think? When mortals believe - believe in gods, gods have to believe in - in love..."
The cemetery shivers, the wind brushing through the leaves and fluttering the lone man's dark robes. A nightingale cries dolefully in the distance. Flower petals swirl, pale and ghostly, through the shadows: dissected roses. He loves me. He loves me not. How ridiculous it all was, really… The night is silently mournful, its song an unheard melody of unshed tears and long forgotten strains of Bach woven into the night; the song of a wife whose eccentricities are forgotten along with her presence, the song of a whore whose life is better than she ever dreamt of it being, the song of a lover…
Maybe you're right about love not existing. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe there are just these things, these… moments…
In the midnight sky, the stars shine
on.
___________________________________________________________________
Belated A/N: Thanks to all
who read my measly Lockhart fic - I hope, pray, beg of you, that you love
him as well as I do, now! For bearing with me, tolerating and possibly
even loving the angst, reviewing and reading and supporting me: thank you,
thank you! ~kisses~
Oh, and the mythology goes like this: Ganymede was the son of Tros, king of Phrygia. Zeus saw him in the fields one day and was taken with his great beauty, so that Zeus took the form of an eagle and abducted Ganymede to Mount Olympus to be his cupbearer and lover.
It is said that Ganymede gained immortality as the constellation Aquarius.