Slow

That was what had been missing from those empty years at Hogwarts; so desperate for entertainment he had to bait the ever-temperamental Gryffindors for something to actually happen. But it was all happening there and magic had never been so beautiful to him and destruction truly was another form of creation. Break a body into a million pieces with a simple curse in an ancient heavy tongue, weighing down and you have created hundreds of fragments of flesh, a jigsaw. And of course the thought that if he excelled in this raid of one of the 'safe houses' that the supposed good side had set up then his Dark Lord would be very pleased with him, he had asked him specially to destroy this place, had nothing to do with the aching beauty of the scene of dying enemies. Curses sounded like music and it was so cliché because it was true and it was all an elaborate show with strobe lighting (cutting and slicing and blood dripped from his eyelashes and finally gave them colour which was good because sometimes being so pale irritated him, it was like he were a ghost, but ghosts can do no damage) and backing singers and it was beautiful acting when one of the others fell to the floor over a dead loved one, they allowed themselves to become so emotional. He had been better prepared for this kind of thing; once he knew he was doing a raid he knew what it would entail so he chose his attire appropriately. Obviously he had to wear the regular black to set off the mask that had been eerily reminiscent of his own face until it was knocked off and smashed against the ground, a reparo would have worked but before he could focus on it another of the dirty ones insisted on being killed and when he looked down again the pieces were gone. But he would be given a new one and the robes he was wearing was nicely cut to give him an intimidating stance and an impressive shadow (a nice thing to have when one must suffer a slight frame) and it was durable enough not to have ripped at silly things like being hit against a wall by a Protegeo or such like, they used such juvenile curses.

And this had been what it had been all building up to, it hadn't been much of a fight when it was just those filthy ones that needed protected, but how the fun had begun when the whole Order had turned up, apparently the people in the house were even more important that they had known. And this was what his father had been teaching him for when he was stood, aching cold in the middle of the ball room, tiny at his fathers side (he never had a problem with being slight and it was the one thing he hated his mother for, damn her fragile bones, did they snap when her coffin hit the ground?). Being taught to withstand any conditions with spells for burning, spells for freezing, the ripping winds and the cloying rain and having to duel in those conditions. With noise raring in his ear and images flashing before his eyes until he completely forgot where he really was and who he was really duelling and was so overcome by fear and pain he would drop to the floor and sink into it and his mothers coddling embrace and healing spells as his father. It was strange how an aristocratic single heir pureblood could have felt so very much like a wounded mudblood, a dying muggle when he was lying in his mother's arms. And he would hear the speech about the history and prestige of the Malfoy line, in the flawless French that was wrung from his tongue the instant English had penetrated his mind, before being pushed out and set upon again until he could live up to his ancestors. Then one day he learnt that being lean wasn't always a bad thing and he figured out why his father had allowed his mother to teach him ballet when he was too young for dead languages and dark magic and he began to scorn the warmth of his mothers bony, fragile arms.

He had thought that there was no one there that he had known in that first raid, until he came across Cho Chang's body being clung to desperately by some older man that he only just recognised, he had never taken much notice of the Ravenclaws that he had not been friends with before school and that hadn't been on the Quidditch team. The man had been no threat but it was better to kill him anyway, the more survivors there were the more people to identify him definably as a Death Eater (stupid mask) and he would rather not have to ward off any raids of the Manor. It was a shame though, the girl had been pretty before her face was twisted into something ugly and splattered in the waste blood of others and those silly order always had problems with letting their emotions, their pain show. And yet it was liberating, to be able to see his old life in his new and make links with it all to the real world, to life progressing in stages and the person he was then was still there inside him but it had matured and improved and if no one ever did that then it would not have been worth it. You still had to have a past that was real and some people were far more liquid than human. And when he looked across the dead horizons of what had just a few hours ago been a perfectly bourgeois house with a square garden in the back and a rectangle in the front and he would have rather died in such a house, wealth had spoiled him for the real world but now it was being made into a place he could feel comfortable and the sun in the west was the Dark Lord and he was a mere dragon snap.

When he thought about things like that it allowed him to continue on as though he wasn't bleeding heavily himself, as though all of the blood giving him colour was that of other people. At some point he had been hit with some kind of burning hex and that had been too much, for a humiliating moment he had to retreat to a safer room in order to take the time to heal that one, being bloody and wounded was acceptable and heroic and striking but being blackened and twisted and smelling of burnt flesh wasn't and he couldn't let his image be ruined. Because then, when the sun shone down on him, he would have been exposed as a failing mortal and it would have seemed as though his blood weren't strong enough and. And there were wounds on him and there was the blood of mudbloods' all over him and it could have been seeping into his blood and infecting him and sapping his power and he didn't care about it soiling his skin but if it got into his veins, diluting the magic, diluting the dust. He had to get his wounds closed and their blood inside him had to be expunged but he knew no spell for that and the raid had to be won soon because he had to close up his wounds but it was too much in the thick of it to spare the time now. And it could have brought him to his knees but the floor was covered and he had to kill frantically to make it all be over quicker and he could feel his brothers at his sides and he knew that they had become unstoppable because there was no way that they could ever accept the idea of themselves dying out and when you had ineffable faith you made it so. And he had to think back to his mother when he paced his feet delicately in the gaps, the safe areas, curling and twisting with her in the ballroom that had been light and happy then. Elegant music floating in the background that was always so much more interesting when he wasn't the one being made to play it. And dancing that had then seemed so innocent and simple but he couldn't quite grasp that anymore, it was too entwined with killing and fighting with him now. But it was still beautiful and it was still pure and the things that died at the end of his wand should have applauded their way to heaven because he created masterpieces in their loss. And horizons were the edges of gardens and they bust with flowers and it didn't matter where they were or how they had been created because it was all how it was supposed to be and the earth would feed on blood until there were only plants left. And the call for the others to retreat was the groaning of accelerated growth, an oak being pulled out of the floor, up and up, scattering leaves onto the branches as they all popped away, another location, another set of bulbs to be buried.

Had he been excellent at that raid? Had he stood out as someone more dedicated to the cause than the others? He didn't really know, he didn't remember any of the details and he hadn't even been paying attention when he was there, too focused on his own thoughts, and then getting it all finished when he realised he was tainting himself. (He had closed all the wounds thank fuck but he was still covered top to toe in rich blood that wasn't so liquid and fun anymore but had tuned sticky and cold but you didn't do that kind of magic in front of the Dark Lord, especially when he was being told of your particular prowess in battle). He wondered how many of the heavy dusty books (damn those elves for never doing their job properly) he would have to look through to find a spell that would first allow him to check his blood to his satisfaction and then to get rid of all of the dirty people's blood, he could feel it as a little strain running round him and it was in his fingers while he stood before his Lord He knew that if it stayed there too long he wouldn't be able to do magic anymore and then his Lord would know and he could probably see it right now and that was why he was looking at him like that. Another drop of blood fell from his eyelash. It as the same room now that he had been initiated in and that seemed like so long ago but it could not have been more than a week, they had been given to cause to move on and this was large enough to house them all, a luxury that not all of them had. It angered him that they had to hide away like this, in the old warfare people did not hide away, when it was country against country the only people they hid from were the muggles who bred so quickly he was surprised they could all still breathe the oxygen they had in their mire. But at least he could console himself with the fact that the other side were hiding just the same and they would have too much 'morality' to do some of the spells that they did to make themselves comfortable. But this main room seemed so much less cavernous and dark now, when he could stand freely and cast his eyes around and all it needed were some windows (despite the underground nature of this lower chamber) and some furnishings and it could be done up to fit a Lord.

And he was supposed to be paying attention to what was being said because it involved him intimately and they could have been discussing how his good job could have been over compensation to hide the fact he was a spy or it could have been saying he was trying too hard to become the second in command and then aim finally to kill the Lord himself and become the new Lord. After all, they were all very, very paranoid. And even if it wasn't anything like that it wouldn't have been the first time that he would have been Crucio'd for not paying attention, for being off with the ghosts, in the other world dreaming of tattered cloth and curving stone. Pulling himself into focus to the two people in front of him he was immediately struck by the difference between the sharp cut, handsome Dark Lord and the slightly podgy dappled ness of Adhara, a man he had not known until a week or so ago which clearly showed that he was a foreigner but he couldn't be sure where from, conversation between them had not quite gotten that intimate. He had clearly listened in to the conversation a little too late because his Lord just announced that whatever they had been discussing previously would be perfectly satisfactory and that Adhara should leave the two of them alone. He braced himself subtly, expecting the worst but not wanting his Lord to know he was, after all that was the same as yelling in his face that he had been ignoring him and that was something that he would never, could never do. The pause was the worst, it was as though this part of whatever was going to happen was a little segregated, trapped inside parentheses in order to stop it spilling into the rest of their lives, to stop it being categorised as an event but only a mildly amusing piece stuck to his day. Being looked up and down had become a mildly unpleasant feeling and that was odd because he loved it when peopled looked at him, this look had the air of someone choosing the best pace at which to aim the terrible spell they were about to throw at you. And it was only when his Lord finally opened his pink lips and asked him how it felt to be promoted to third circle in his first week that he finally allowed himself to relax. But he truly did not know, his father had been in the inner circle and his mother (so fragile she flew away) had never been a part of the system, preferring to be a woman of leisure and grace and women in the families were not usually pushed into these kinds of things. It was more than he expected, no one was promoted until his Lord was sure they could be trusted and it had never happened in one week before and though the third was not the inner it was still a very bid deal, he would be told more, he would have more of a say in what they did and he would be able to boss around anyone below him. And he would be in is Lord's company more often. The balloons from the organisation parties would becomes their moons because they lived underground and they would float up and up, only to be crushed against the ceiling and be held there, trying to become one with an unwilling mistress and there they would stay, giving their sky a focus point. He replied with some adequate kind of response and it seemed to please his Lord because the man seemed to become fascinated by the liquid that he could feel swelling in his eyelash, it was weighing it down more and more and it would drop soon and he would have to be careful not to flinch.

He made him think of a crow landed gently in a field of snow with his black, neat hair and skin that put his own to shame, the kind of skin that you could tell had died and been brought back and when he smiled at him like that he appeared to be only a few years older than him and so much less scary, like a raven chewing on pearls. But there were wolves in his eyes and he felt so much less safe than he had in that average house on the average road being lit up like a parade with death spells. His Lord stroked his cheek with a single cold hand, gently, almost tenderly and it was as though he wasn't quite seeing his own face beneath his hand, but a bleached skull that he was examining for clues about its previous owner, in another life and for a second he had to wonder about his Lords past relationship with his father. But any thoughts of that disappeared with the press of cold but cushioned lips against his won and the faint taste of smoke curling into his nose. The ravens circled cornfields and when they descended it was an arrow with the speed of a bullet round and round and round, plummeting beautifully in order to allow the white balloons to give their feather a satisfactory glow and it was a good thing that their he was still in his black robes because there was no other way he would have been able to pass for the right bird. But there was lace over his face but there was none because it was the cold silk of his all powerful Lord and his eyes were sewn shut with thick black wool in a cross over each lid and it didn't really matter that it made him bleed because he was still covered in the blood of the battle of the past (and it seemed a minor point but he was getting dirty mudblood blood on the face and lips of the Dark Lord). And when he was led away there was no option other than to follow him because he was only a weak pureblood in the hands of something greater than mortality itself.

AN: Please Review!