The Hypocrisy of the Rainbow
Disclaimer: Er, pretty much everything belongs to JK Rowling, except my OC, Madeline Clara Browning. (Very Mary-Sue-ish name, unfortunately.)
Author's Note: This short story is more of an experiment than anything else. Basically, I wanted to create an original character and see if I could make her likeable/believable/not a classic Mary-Sue. Hence the astonishing lack of plot. Ahem. Okay, so it's pointless, but I was just playing about with my characterisation. Please don't sue. : ) Any feedback would be greatly appreciated (hint, hint).
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There were many things in life that Madeline Clara Browning hated. The unbearably shallow dross that was Witch Weekly magazine, for a start. That smug git, Gilderoy Lockhart, whom so many of her friends insisted on swooning over. The coffee mugs that her grandmother had given her for Christmas. They were lime green, adorned with unsightly, salmon pink blotches that seemed to resemble either flowers or heart shapes – she couldn't be sure. Hideously tacky, she found them, although she'd never been fond of her grandmother, anyway.
It wasn't really that she saw her as the bane of her life – as long as the two women were several kilometres apart, Madeline Clara held no grudge whatsoever towards her. She could even recall the old woman's frail voice, the papery cheek that she was called upon to kiss, and the way that she clutched her rickety hip whenever she was losing an argument, and feel a degree of sympathy for her.
It was only when they were forced to spend time together that Madeline Clara found herself wishing Unforgivable Curses on her grandmother.
Mrs. Browning, her father's mother, was now her only living relative. It pained Madeline Clara to think this way; it was depressing enough to know that she only had one member of her family alive and well. The fact that this member was a mentally-abusive, sporadically maniacal elderly woman was nothing more than a cruel joke on behalf of the Fates, she thought.
During the infrequent visits to her grandmother in Manchester, Madeline Clara would find herself embroiled in an ugly cycle of hatred for Mrs. Browning and hatred for herself. She would fiercely disagree with every dogmatic word that left her grandmother's lips, words about filthy half-bloods and shiftless part-humans, and yet she would remain silent, unable to vocalise her feelings. Contradicting Mrs. Browning's views on the wizarding world was never, ever a good idea.
Not unless you valued the use of your limbs, at any rate.
Mrs. Browning fancied herself as a patron of the Ministry, one of its most dedicated followers – she proudly displayed a gold-framed portrait of Cornelius Fudge in the centre of her mantle-piece and claimed that she was always 'willing to help the Ministry out with fund-raising and such like, but my hip's been causing me dreadful havoc lately'. Her views on Muggle-borns, goblins and any creature whom she believed to be inferior to herself were predictably dated, but Madeline Clara preferred to put this down to environment rather than pure nastiness on her grandmother's part. What she really detested about those meetings was the way that she found herself constantly biting her tongue and concealing her own beliefs. Madeline Clara owned elaborate, liberal, obsessively-formulated opinions on just about everything, and had a habit of boring her friends and colleagues to tears by outlining these opinions in detail. And yet when she was with her grandmother, she found herself obediently nodding and feigning agreement to notions that were so far from her own ideals that it wasn't even funny.
She allowed herself to become a hypocrite around Mrs. Browning, and she despised herself for it.
The only man that Madeline Clara had ever loved had been a Muggle-born, and she remained convinced that her grandmother only threw in the derogatory references to 'Mudbloods' in order to spite her for falling in love with one of them and very nearly bringing shame on the family name.
She'd never got the chance to complete that feat of disgrace by marrying him, of course. He was gone now, just like the others. Her mother had died while Madeline Clara was in infancy and her father had been dead for two years now. Thinking of her father caused her unbearable agony, far more than any bout of Cruciatus could ever inflict; he'd understood her better than anyone else ever had and cherished her with unabashed openness. To be left without him still felt like being abandoned in the middle of a ghostly, deserted playground. Even when she'd found a new home in Hogwarts they'd remained close.
Another thing that Madeline Clara hated was her name. Madeline Clara Browning. It was a complete oddity of a title, as far as she was concerned. Two French names followed by a strait-laced, English surname that sounded laughably unromantic in contrast. And it was never shortened. She was never Madeline and she was never Clara. She was always Madeline Clara.
The encumbrance of such a long-winded name had always run far deeper than the simple matter of phonetics. She'd been christened Laura at birth, under the wishes of her English father. However, after Mr. Browning had lost his French wife while their daughter was still a baby, he'd renamed her to coincide with her mother's earlier suggestions. In his grief, he'd somehow got the rather eccentric idea that this would help to keep his late wife's memory alive in the mind of their child. In the early stages of her pregnancy she'd toyed with the names Madeline and Clara, and so, just to be on the safe side, he'd given the baby both names.
Madeline Clara couldn't help feeling that to change a child's name – and thus her identity – after she'd already been in the world for several months was really very unnatural. With hindsight, she conceded that some of her father's parenting techniques had been slightly unorthodox and even damaging. She'd adored him beyond words and knew that she would never stop missing him, but in the aftermath of his death she'd grown to realise that his tools of emotional blackmail – 'Mummy would have wanted you to do this, Mummy would have wanted you to do that' – had been the signs of a man trapped in perpetual mourning for his wife.
Once, during her time at Hogwarts, she'd stumbled upon a mirror, and had glimpsed in it a girl called Laura Browning, a girl who'd grown up with both parents, parents who were proud of her and had never uttered a word of reproach towards her. But she chose not to dwell on that.
Everyone knows that Erised is nothing more than illusion.
Other additions to the list: Chocolate Frogs (she was miserably allergic to them), the nation's obsession with Quidditch, and her unbelievably tedious job at Gringotts'. She was also rather adverse to young blond men who happened to go by the first name of 'Draco' and the second name of 'Malfoy', but that was a different story altogether.
The one thing that she really loathed above all else, the one thing that was guaranteed to make her want to vomit with indignant rage and disgust – was the sighting of a rainbow.
During her childhood, Madeline Clara had been positively captivated by rainbows. Streams of vivid colours merging together and soaring across the sky… Rainbows were promises, promises that something extraordinary could come from the stormy weather. These beautiful prisms of light could shine through the rain-heavy clouds, a gift from the heavens, a symbol of hope. To her, they were far more magical than anything that the wizarding world could produce.
And then, lamentably, she'd grown up. And as her limbs had lengthened and her mind had matured, she'd seen things. She'd suffered. She'd lost people close to her and she'd unearthed unfathomable prejudices. She'd learned things about the world that made her question why the Earth that we reside on is a sphere painted with brilliant blues and greens, when really it should be nothing more than a flaming fireball of hate. The childhood innocence had spilled out of her – or rather, it hadn't spilled, it had been squeezed painfully and deliberately out of her. The rose-coloured spectacles had dulled to grey before shattering completely. The beauty of the sky, the land and the ocean was nothing more than a deceptive veil cleverly placed to hide the dreary evil that was life.
Despite harbouring such a damning analysis of the way of the world, Madeline Clara did not think of herself as depressed. Denial, perhaps, but it didn't appear to be doing her much harm. Certainly, it did her less harm than curling up in bed and refusing to rise in the morning would.
In her eyes, all that happened to her since her dad had died was that she'd been given, if you will, an insight into how grim the spells that The Higher Powers cast can be. That didn't necessarily mean that she was living in a black hole of misery, or even that she was a particularly unhappy person by nature. She could smile, she could laugh and she could go to work in the mornings. She was merely under no illusions about how the world worked, and was confident that this could only be a good thing.
Rainbows, though, rainbows were what really riled her. The ground would still be muddily stained with water, the gutter clogged and the air coolly moist. And above it all, oblivious to the dankness that the rain had left in its wake, a gaudily-coloured arch shape would be plastered to the formerly grey sky, as if to say, 'Look! The sun's come out now, the rain doesn't matter anymore!'
The sun may indeed have come out, but the rain still mattered. Just because the pavements now glistened in the sunlight it didn't mean that they were no longer damp. People tend to assume all to readily that once life takes a turn for the (marginally) better, one must immediately change route and follow the path of optimism. Rubbish, in her opinion, rubbish, plain and simple. She was the first to admit that she was grateful to have a career of her own, a home of her own, but it could hardly be said that either of them automatically erased – or even significantly eased – any of the pain of what she'd lost over the years.
Madeline Clara didn't particularly want to wallow in self-pity, to revel in her sad memories – but she was acutely aware that that self-pity and those memories were there and didn't like the idea of people denying their existence. She'd met her fair share of rainbows throughout her life and hadn't really cared for any of them.
Maybe that was what had attracted her to him. If anybody had ever been in search of someone totally dissimilar to a rainbow in every single way, he would have been an unrivalled and somewhat proud candidate. Not only did he refuse to bear the awful, blind optimism that rainbows did, he was utterly colourless. His very skin, his very essence, was drained of anything that might suggest health or even life. A white face and white hair. Grey eyes. Black robes. Black heart, very probably, if it was scientifically possible. And, if he had his way, he would one day have a black mark on his forearm.
And now here he stood, in her doorway, smiling that elegant smile of his, waiting to step lightly into her home and infect the air with his glacial disease. She considered telling him that he wasn't welcome, that she wasn't in the mood for him today, but she knew that it would be pointless. She was seldom in the mood for him and yet he somehow always managed to find a way into her flat, much to her retrospective surprise.
"Hello, Madeline Clara," he addressed her, edging past her and into the kitchen.
"Hello, Draco," she echoed with a dull monotony as she closed the door behind him.
"Well, well, well," he said, as he grandly condescended to sit on her nasty, chipped, wooden chairs, "you're not in the greatest of moods today, are you?"
She sat down opposite him at the table and pushed her hair behind her ears. "No, Draco, I'm not. Do you want to know why?"
"Probably not."
She sighed, reminding herself that if she wanted courtesy then she really oughtn't befriend people who were happy to insult perfect strangers in the street purely because they happened to look like Muggles. "What did you come around here for, then?"
He shuffled in his seat – not because he was nervous, she was certain, but because he wanted to make a point about the discomfort the chair provided – and announced, "My mother is holding a dinner party on the twenty-eighth of November. I trust you'll want to attend?"
"I'm working," she declared, not without a sense of triumph. She knew that she wouldn't have been able to come up with a convincing lie, and that if she had he'd have found some method of extracting the truth from her. She genuinely was going to be working – out of the country, as it happened – on the twenty-eighth, and needed to feel no guilt about her declining of his invitation.
"Come on, Madeline Clara. I can tell that you're in one of your ridiculous mutinous moods where you like to contradict everything that I say, but my mother is planning to spend a lot of gold on this little soiree. It would be impolite of you not to come. You might even enjoy yourself, God forbid."
"Much as I hate to disappoint you, Draco, I'm telling the truth. I'm afraid I'm not that eager to spare your feelings. I wouldn't waste my time and energy lying to you – if I didn't want to come, I'd just tell you straight out, have no fear. What's with the desperation, anyway? You actually want me to come with you? You enjoy my company, is that it? I never thought I'd see the day…"
"Don't flatter yourself," he snapped, and I could see that I was beginning to grate upon the unsophisticated schoolboy within him. "I can't find anyone else on such short notice, that's all."
"You mean, you can't find anyone else who fulfils the necessary criteria, don't you?"
The silver eyes were still and unblinking. "Yes, that's it."
On any other day, she would have taken care to formulate some variety of sarcastic rejoinder, however lame. On any other day, this unremarkable arrogance from him would have no made no dent in her falsely unperturbed exterior.
Today, though, was not any other day. It was a day that Madeline Clara had come to dread over the years; a day on which the irreversible regret that she suffered when thinking of the past would mingle with the bleak hopelessness that she foresaw in the future, accentuating the tribulations of the present.
Basically, it was a thoroughly rubbish and less than enjoyable date in the calendar and she was waiting with impatient urgency for the sun to set on this bloody miserable day so that she could return to pretending that everything was okay.
Today, she found herself yelling, partly at him and partly at the rest of the world.
"Don't you ever wonder what life might be like if you weren't a disgustingly ignorant bastard, Draco? I mean, sure, you're happy to spend time with me, take me to parties with awful people who every bit as shallow as you, but not because of who I am. Oh, no. It's all because of what I am. Isn't it? And what I am is Ethel Browning's granddaughter, a pureblood. Someone you can have hanging inoffensively off your arm. Pathetic."
She detested the outburst, detested the way that she was behaving like a hysterical feminist, detested that he could see her vulnerability. Yet he remained silent, superior smirk still present on his face. God, he'd never been this controlled when he was at school. He was becoming more and more of a walking reflection of his father every day, she was sure of it.
"Ah," he sneered, his voice quietly mocking. "I remember now. Three years today, was it? Three years since your revered little fiancé, Patron Saint of Mudbloods, met his untimely end?"
He's pushing you, she told herself staunchly. He's pushing you, he's tormenting you, he wants a reaction, he wants to weaken you… don't give in, don't give in…
She lifted her eyes, the eyes which were neither heavy with tears nor bulging with rage. And she smiled at him, a smile of mingled pity and triumph. "Oh, yes, Draco. He was a Mudblood, wasn't he? I daresay he wasn't fit to kiss your obscenely expensive pureblood robes. But I'll tell you something. If I believed, if I believed for a single moment that by sacrificing you I could bring him back, you wouldn't be standing in front of me right now. You'd be on the floor, writhing in agony, with an Unforgivable or two to your chest."
"How intensely romantic of you. Madeline Clara, at the end of the day, you and I both know that you are incapable of a crime of passion. You just don't have the energy."
"It wouldn't be passion for you, Draco. I mean, it means ever such a lot to me that you're a pureblood, because a person's ancestry is just so crucial to how you should judge them as a person and all, but something tells me it wouldn't work out. Possibly because you are the most pretentious bastard I have ever met in my life, and I've been taught by Gilderoy Lockhart."
"There's really no point in talking to you when you're having this kind of idealistic fit, is there? Though you should really have grown out of them upon hitting puberty. Very well, I shall ask Parkinson, though it's really quite inconvenient, seeing as how last time she and Mother had that disagreement over the dessert…"
He rose to his feet, his robes swishing in a flurry of lethargic movement. As he headed for the door, she felt compelled to leave him with one last statement.
"One day, Draco," she said, imitating his lack of expression with startling accuracy. "One day, you'll realise that there are more important things than dating someone who doesn't find fault with Narcissa's desserts."
If he heard, he didn't respond.
The door closed with a maddeningly soft thud and Madeline Clara winced as she remembered. Remembered how it had closed three years ago, only for him never to return.
With a small shrug, she wandered towards the window, her arms folded comfortingly across her chest. Sunlight was cutting harshly into the ashen skies, and a colourful prism of light was stretching itself serenely over the clouds.
"Sod off," she muttered, and shut the window with a jarring clank. She was well aware that mouthing mild obscenities at rainbows wasn't a good sign, whichever way you loo at it, but she didn't really care.
What was a good sign, though, was turning down invitations to dinner parties with the Malfoys.
At least she could be satisfied that she hadn't quite lost all of her sanity.
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