Slower

Apparently he had been promoted all the way up to the inner circle, but he wouldn't have known it anymore: he never went on raids, into battle, even for most meetings he was confined to his Lord's quarters, to stay safe. And stay safe he did, though he missed the blood, the tang of magic on his tongue as he ripped something indefinite out of the body of some mudblood, a creature that should never have even lived, there were enough pure wizarding families in the whole world to avoid incest if they married out into other countries. When he knew that the others were doing a particularly big raid, a battle, a war he would stand under the shower and imagine that every drop that hit him was warm sanguine and his spirits would rise. When they came back he would note who didn't and spend hours visualising how he would have seen them die, how he could have saved them, how he could have avenged them. He was built to fight and not dream so when it all built up in him he would destroy some of those elegant, but somehow hollow, rooms and his Lord would fix them with a flick of his hand, forgive him and then push him into the bedroom once again. Like a toy. His abstract imagination had never been up to scratch and so the enemies in his head that he smote were always people he knew, people from school, from parties, form the newspaper or who he had known from his fathers work. And that odd feeling he had gotten when he saw Cho Chang became second nature to his mind and everyone he had known that he no longer could know of became an enemy in his head and he didn't know what would happen when they won and he was let out into the safe world because he wouldn't be able to quell the desire to tear them all apart.

Some days he would be honoured by it all and feel touched and loved and cared for and all those things he was told about when they were together in that over done room that had had no spirit from the first time he had walked into it. When he had no idea what it would lead to and his only thought was of that very moment and that made it hard to think back but he had to. Some days he would feel like that raven had plucked out his eyes and left him to wander the earth blindly groping his way though, relying in its wings on his hands to stop him stumbling down and trying not to buckle underneath from the pain of his bleeding sockets because if he did he would have lost the contact with the feathers for sure. Some days he felt like it killed him. Some days, some of the better days although not the best, the best were those days when he thought that maybe this was what it was like, maybe this was a loving relationship and he should be thankful. But in those days that were simply better he felt like he was some kind of model in a glorified extended shoot: he wore the best robes that any money could buy, displaying them to nobody but lounging elegantly across chairs and over the bed with a bored haughty expression. He would take careful attention to ensure that his outfit complimented nicely everything in the room he had chosen to pose in that day and would spend hours choosing the right pose fro his Lord to find him in. For a moment he had taken the flitting fancy to take up smoking and had procured a packet, they gave him a certain flair, he thought, but he didn't dare light them, if his teeth turned yellow he would have to have changed his whole wardrobe. And, of course, his Lord wouldn't like it, he liked him ghost-like, didn't want him out in the sun too much, getting dirty, the only colour he could bring to himself was the pink of exertion playing across his bones and if his Lord didn't like it then there would be trouble. And yet through all of the protection and longing to be involved in something, some kind of mass spell casting where he can live the crackling magic, the bloodshed where it is thick and cloyed in his hair instead of slipping though, he was still technically in the inner circle and he had the Dark Lord's ear and his trust and even his father had not been in a position as close as he was. None of the other Death Eaters, trapped in their power games and desperate bids for higher positions and more power, would dare to touch him as they stabbed each other in closeted corners, threatened each others secrets and held old marriage contracts in ransom, the thought of the loss of possible heirs proving to be a stronger driving force than the suggestion of the loss of existing lives. But he would not lose his opportunity for an heir because even the Dark Lord could accept that, being the last of his line, he had a duty to provide at least one male heir. Especially because he was the Dark Lord he understood the importance of carrying on such pure blood because if his line died out then any line could die out and if they all died out one day then there would be nothing left on their earth worth existing for and it would all crumble to dust. Even his Lord's own line would be continued eventually; homosexuality was no excuse for not producing an heir. It had always been common among their community but it was acceptable as long as they had a wife and a child and they stayed in the dark corners of night. And maybe that was why his Lord insisted on keeping him alone in his private chambers; underground despite the fact that they had procured plenty of safe ground above land where he could have gazed out of windows and remembered what colour looked like. He could only dream of his flower in the grey scale now but she had always had such pale skin and dark detail that it barely mattered and the fading had begun before this other relationship had anyway because he had begun to only ever see her one night had fallen and they had things to discuss that kept the candles cold and stark. But he should never dream or think of her because his Lord could read it in his mind and he would always know and his jealousy would flare so terribly that he would lose hope of ever seeing his home again because it bore the print of her upon the walls and folded into the heavy curtains and sheets. Nagini eventually became the creature that was there, the thing that would allow him to keep up the idea that he was alive, as long as she moved and responded to his petting and murmuring of a man driven half mad then he had to still be all there. Purgatory would contain no life, no insect vainly trying to suck a little more life by throwing itself into flames of white monks, becoming an ideal that could never die, it could contain no creature that held a soul and a shard. Her scales were as dark as the walls that he would throw water onto after each battle was reported, he was slowly allowed to less and less of the meetings in case anyone were to try to assassinate him but he would be told later by the Lord himself and once he was left alone he would so desperately try to make that wallpaper peel and stain and tear and look as devastated as that middle class house should have. War zones should never be allowed to be neat and tidy.

Alcohol allowed him too see clearly, to make a true friend of the snake, of the tribe of snakes and when he was sober he would watch them all devour each other and reach for the bottle, whispering secrets and listening devoutly for the footsteps of his master. Water to vodka, water to rum, water to absinthe and the last was the hardest because it had a colour change too and he used to forget that until he breathed it out in puffs of sleep when his Lord had not sucked it all out of him. He was staked as a pillar in the centre of an iced desert and the only way he could move was to melt the casing around him with a substance that froze much less easily than the traitorous water and one day it would let him run across that desert and hope to reach a precipice big enough to leap off and see if he couldn't fly. But it made his Lord hit him and bring colour to the field and the snow didn't like that so it would pile itself on thicker to hide the deplorable colour. And it made his Lord take away his wand and put odd spells that he couldn't quite hear onto him until he was so snowed under that his Lord couldn't see him anymore and even he was obliged to pour the fiery liquid into him to allow his crown to surface.

But it was a good thing, it was all a good thing because eventually his Lord decided that he should be able to go home for a little while, back to where he could see the sun and smell the air and see his flowers again. She was still there, she wouldn't have left as long as there was ever a chance that he would return because she would never abandon him and she was still there, waiting for him. He had been scared that he wouldn't recognise her because in the darkness he had stopped being able to picture her face (and had it been that long or had there been something else to it?) but he could see her clearly in the apparating room of his home and there was natural light and he hadn't been bothered to do that scale of magic for so long. And when they ate it had to be outside because none of the dining rooms were quite bright enough and it didn't matter that there was light drizzle in the air because it was softer than any shower and it helped keep the snow melting and it looked lilac in the sun. And it was the drizzle settling in his hair and the soft purple words of his flower that allowed him to drink real water and sweet red juices and what he saw was real and he could touch it and feel everything as it really was. But when he tried to touch Pansy she pulled away and for one moment everything spiralled down and down and he may not have even been there for real and it could have been all a dream until a house elf bumped into him and he was so relieved that he did not even punish it for its carelessness. And, carefully, the facts began to spill in and so many had died it had to be real because so many from both sides but they were winning, they were winning and almost no one he had known would have seen that, seen that in the end he had been right, he was always right. He had worn some of his lightest robes because even as a child he had always fooled himself that the summer months began long before they did, bypassing spring and he wanted to feel it all properly, feel the rain and the wind and the sun and he couldn't tell if he was shaking due to that wind or his previous drinking or his lack of drinking at that moment but it felt good to shake of something as natural as any of those. She was dressed conservatively and warmly and she had changed in the time he had gone because she would wear revealing robes even in winter and have that glint in her eyes that might had been just brushed away by wind that was playing with her hair. And if it had been longer, like it was before she went to Hogwarts, then it would have been touching him but he had seen strings like that before and they flicked round into little nooses in front of the ink painted, still bare trees of his wood and he had been told that going up into the real world was dangerous but he wouldn't listen.

Yet being in the open where his boundaries were set invisibly and life fluttered and died every moment and the trees and he grass and the plants and the dirt all knew him and the dirt that his parents' coffins were in could lie beneath his feet and reach up yearningly for him. Complete the set and make the ground whole again to it could resume its correct turning, lie in acceptance where he belonged but it was all out of shift because he should have married her already and he should have had two children, his heir and the spare, the one that would up the likeliness of getting the line continuity properly flowing again. He should have done it already and while he hid underground his lifeline was already being spanned out and he should have raided and won and won and there would have been glory when they laid him down because he was supposed to die young. But the coffin would eventually erode away and then the ground would get to his body and insects would thrive and he would have been filthy and if he had been above the ground the entire time he would have been filthy all the time and even the air outside was filled with dust and impurities that were sticking to his skin and infusing with it and tainting him and he had to get into a shower or a bath and then stay in isolated rooms because dust killed people eventually and mud crowed in glory every second it happened. And maybe his Lord did love him because those rooms were so sterile they made him weep sometimes, but it is better to weep than to die but better to kill than live and even up here for a few days he was not allowed to raid and it was even worse in the open air because he could smell the blood on the wind. He wondered if Harry Potter had seen this coming when flowers had seen him, sprung up, purple and pretty from the cracks in the cobbles along the side of the road to live for a few seconds before more sprung up further on and they died. His whole house was filled to the brim with solemn pansies and they grew from every crevice and he had to float so as not to step on them and he had to be silent so as for them not to hear him breathing. But the water falling out of his shower was not flowers and it was not purple, it was not lilac but nothing, no colour and it fell on him to steal away the dirt faster and faster because he needed it gone and he had to close his eyes to protect his eyes from the glare of the crushed flowers on the bathroom floor.

When he lay in the bed Pansy was lying beside him, silent and still but she was not asleep, looking almost faded in the lost light and when he tried to touch her she pulled away.

"I can smell him on you." And this floated across them before bouncing itself against the walls in an attempt to make it disappear but it was too late and everything had changed and all of those plans he knew she had lain out were destroyed and new ones had been made in its place and he wasn't sure what they were anymore. But he still loved her and she still loved him, he could tell and she didn't go out anymore, not onto the streets, it was dangerous and she could be killed by any passing mudblood and it was taking far to long to win this. He wished he could see her plans and understand how she was going to control this all but the grey scale did not include that shade of green and they lay there. He couldn't see the files of his mind anymore; it was just dust that wouldn't come out and lavender rain.

"I can't save you from this."