"Desperate Kingdoms"
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or anything involved with Harry Potter. I just pretend I do.
Dedication: This is to Rachel and Sam.
--
"Oh love, you were a sickly child. And how the wind knocked you down.
Put on your spurs, swagger around. In the desperate kingdom of love."
--PJ Harvey, "In the Desperate Kingdom of Love"
--
There is a shaft of evening light in the corner of the room, spawned from the sun and shining on the floor, illuminating a body. The shivering figure hides her face behind a fallen curtain of hair and she smells of dust even through her sweat.
(No matter how long Draco looks at her, he only sees a buck-toothed girl with a nest of snarled curls. Maybe it is his inability to see her as the young woman she is that makes him hate her even more.)
Draco still sees tinges of blood all through her face; whether it is simply her scrapes and bruises or the flush of anger still lingering from the first time she saw him, he does not know.
"You'll pay for this," she spits, her shackled arms shaking in their confines. Granger's face is contorted with anger and—what is that? Fear? Is Granger scared? In Granger's lined face Draco sees another lined face, this one genial. At one time he had been afraid of it, yet the owner of the face had promised him a kind of safety. But had he come through with said promise? The last news Draco had heard somberly heralded that the man was dead.
Dead meant no safety.
"Pay, Granger? Pay? Where are Potty and Weasel now? You don't really think they're going to come in here on their white horses to save you, do you?" Draco hates himself for the tremor of panic in his tone—the mudblood's little friends had a nasty habit of coming in at just the right time to save her, even though Granger was never much of a damsel in distress. It was usually her brains getting the "Golden Trio" out of trouble.
"They're coming." Granger's body tenses.
"Think that while you can," whispers Draco. "I bet both of them haven't even noticed that their precious little Hermione is even gone. You did do most of the thinking, Granger." This doesn't seem to faze Granger, who is holding her head high and hardly wincing at the soreness that must cause in her neck.
"Tease me all you want, Malfoy. You'll never get anywhere. You are not a killer."
Come over to the right side, Draco… you are not a killer…
Draco pulls his wand from inside his robes (the billowing ones of jet-black velvet, so like those he would wear to affairs in place of this father). Hours seem to pass in the time it takes him to point the wand at her face, and the stature of the girl seems to weaken. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is a set, straight line, and Draco (his own heart pounding rapidly in his throat) is sure that her thoughts are darting; trying to remember the words from every book she had read since she was eleven.
But Granger doesn't have a wand.
Dumbledore cornered! Dumbledore wandless, Dumbledore alone! Well done, Draco, well done!
Draco cannot speak for the life of him, but Granger is looking so injured and timorous that he feels he must say something.
"Mudblood bitch. Your friends are never going to come, and you're going to go where all of your kind belongs." Draco's voice is shaking obscenely, and his arm shudders like the tail of a cat about to viciously attack its prey.
"Do it," says the girl through her teeth, as tears steep her eyes.
"A—" he stops because he thinks he hears a noise, maybe a 'pop' of someone Apparating, and it isn't en vogue to be interrupted when you're about to murder someone, mudblood slut or not.
"Always the same, aren't you, Malfoy? Always talking, but never doing a thing."
For a moment, she thinks she has won, that maybe the same sun that bred her a bit of light has sent her a cure, yet in a flash of lucid emptiness (a moment that will always remain but a vague impression to Draco) her eyes dim and she knows that even if her white-stallioned saviors arrive, she will not be able to be saved.
Now, Draco, quickly!
His mouth forms into the familiar shape, yet utters ineffable words.
"Avada Kedavra!"
Then Granger, despite years of knowledge and numerous paper cuts from old books, is a limp doll in shackles.
--
There is a creaking from behind Draco, sending the young man barreling towards the door (the seconds of fear here are forever forgotten by his brain) and leisurely, sickeningly slow, the silhouette of a woman approaches, and the woman is his mother, smelling of powder and perfume and magic.
It is only one look at Draco's eyes and one look to Granger that makes her lower lip quiver, and Draco is afraid that his mother may be torn apart from her insides out at the sight.
"Oh, Draco, what have you done?"
--
The moon is an eyes, cupreous from smog and dust, and it is the summer pressing down on Draco and Narcissa that makes them hurry, perspiration dripping down the faces of mother and son as they work to bury the girl.
It is with hesitance that Narcissa allows Granger to be buried in her cherished rose garden, and when the last of the ugly mudblood is buried, she and her son begin the walk to the manor (now empty and full of shadows that extend far and tall).
"Alohamora," murmurs Narcissa, and slowly, an ornate door opens from the darkness of a wall. Footsteps click through the vacant foyer and up the marble staircase, and everything bleeds loneliness in the saddest sense.
--
Draco cannot sleep even after he is lying in bed, and he does what eh has done since he was a child: he retreats to his mother's quarters, and finds she is not sleeping either. Narcissa is counting the strokes it takes to brush the sin from her hair, a curious silver brush traveling from root to tip. Spellbound, Draco stands and observes her careful pale hand. He holds his own before him, and it is the same color as hers, and he knows both are the same texture: so like silk and ivory.
"Mother." Narcissa turns at her son's ebullition. It is this moment (gray on blue, eyes locked) that begins the vicissitude of Draco's growing, and everything before this has no meaning any longer.
"Draco," begins Narcissa in a tone that borders on being subliminal, "have you ever seen a woman before?"
Draco needs not answer. He has seen women before, lewd women with bald cunts and pendulum-swinging breasts, leering at him from the photographs his father keeps. He has seen the fumbling and boyish figure of Pansy Parkinson, but never before has Draco seen a real woman in the flesh.
--
It is with lethargic motions that Narcissa removes her dressing gown of glimmering silver, Draco waiting with bated breath, a cautious anxiety stealing over him. When she is undressed, he is left to gape at her perfection (the long limbs and desolate landscape of her stomach). She is willowy and bony and a mirror of Draco's own thin body.
Narcissa's breasts are swollen and Draco asks not for permission to advance, but does anyway, his lips pressed hard against his mother's skin, the mingled scent of sweat and bath powder meeting his nostrils. Narcissa's fingers ensnare themselves in Draco's blond tresses, and she combs out the tangles the way she used to do when he was a young boy.
Then, idly, Narcissa removes her son's robes and silks until he is as unclothed as when he was borne from her body.
She leads him to her bed (which is where he was conceived years and years before) and Draco examines her with due vigilance, tracing the bruises on her inner thighs, and the faint dusting of freckles on the fair skin of her chest. Everything is connect-the-dots.
Narcissa turns on her stomach and Draco's hand is splayed on her back, his mouth suckling at the prominent bumps of her spine, his lips moist and fluttering like newly transformed mothwings. It is this desperate motion that causes Narcissa to become still (without reaction; testaceous) and to readjust slowly to face her son.
Her mouth is full and sensuous and thrust to Draco's ear.
"Ecce homo," murmurs she, even though the two of them stopped believing in the bible a long time ago.
(It is the forsaken look in his eyes that tells Narcissa that Draco desperately needs something to cleave to, and, wrapping her long limbs around him, she becomes that, her lips of velvet on his lips of silk.)
--
Draco curls himself in the arch of his mother's body, pressed to her stomach, once again in her womb, fetal and innocent, stainless as a baby in her arms.
It was a victimless crime.
FIN.
