Of Knights and the Portrait of the Young Slytherin

Prologue:

An Irony for Each

meus -a -um [my, mine]

Only the human being, absolved from kissing and strife

goes on and on and on, without wandering

fixed upon the hub of the ego

going, yet never wandering, fixed, yet in motion,

the kind of hell that is real, grey and awful

sinless and stainless going round and round

the kind of hell grey Dante never saw

but of which he had a bit inside him.

Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.

But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal:

a thing of kisses and strife

a lit-up shaft of rain

a calling column of blood

a rose tree bronzey with thorns

a mixture of yea and nay

a rainbow of love and hate

a wind that blows back and forth

a creature of beautiful peace, like a river

and a creature of conflict, like a cataract:

know thyself, in denial of all these things -

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene

ego

a grey void thing that goes without wandering

a machine that in itself is nothing

a centre of the evil world.

~Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical, D.H. Lawrence

August 11th 1995

He bends down, letting his long thin fingers, still recovering from the Azkaban ordeal after more than two years, trail the long red hair. It has been a good birthday celebration for her, he thinks, smiling to himself, so good that she has fallen asleep on the couch, again, from exhaustion. Even if it had to be subdued, because of Harry's trial the next day.

Abruptly, though, he draws back his hand. There is something about her that never quite allows himself to be fully comfortable around her, though he knows not why. But he is sure he is not the only one; he has seen Snape turn to snap at her as she makes a quick escape, her mischievous laughter ringing out, only to hesitate and stop, a shadow passing over his face. In fact, Sirius muses, Snape seems to be quite adept at never turning up in functions where he might come face-to-face with Ginny Weasley.

And he has seen Moony, nearing the full moon, stare at her for a full minute, with the most unreadable expression on his face.

It has not missed Sirius's attention, of course, that while on the one hand it might be worrying that the three within the Headquarters to react strangely (however carefully) towards Ginny Weasley are male and a good twenty years older than her, that on the other it is even more disturbing that all three are in some way esconced in some form of Dark magic.

The most disturbing to Sirius, though, had been Kreacher's reaction to Ginny Weasley the first time she had had the misfortune of meeting him. There had only been himself, Ginny and Ron around at that time other than Kreacher, yet Kreacher's eyes had widened, staring at her. And before Sirius could take the opportunity to say anything disparaging, the house-elf had scurried away like its ears were on fire. Ginny had said, dryly, that "well, some things are alive only because it's illegal to murder them", at which Ron had laughed and simply shrugged it off in that easy way he has.

He wonders what residue might have been left behind from her experience in her first year.

Silently, Sirius mutters a spell, and, not touching Ginny Weasley, levitates her back to her room.

~

6th June 1996

When her hand slips around the cut edge of the white marble, and she feels the sharp roughness of it, she is suddenly chillingly struck that all this is real.

Someone she knew, she thinks, and abruptly she is shocked by herself. Someone she knows, knows, not knew -- and that someone is Sirius -- is dead.

Somehow she can't quite get her half-severed lips to close fully. She knows she must resemble some kind of goldfish; she has been vaguely aware of going around like this for quite some time. Sure, she has been able to get along with the others, talking, laughing, glaring at Michael, smiling at her mother and her father and Luna and Colin and Ron and Hermione, but somehow...if she has a mirror now, she knows she will see wide brown eyes and a partially open mouth, not quite recovering from a horror of some sort. There is a faint tingling in her ears, like the soft, insidious note from a tuning fork.

She hasn't been able to cry yet.

She must surely be a cold person, because there has been somewhat a delayed reaction to What Had Happened, that is, Sirius's Death. She has to think it out in her head, in capitals, because even now she is somehow still wondering vaguely if all this is a very ridiculous joke gone sour. Somehow it feels as if Sirius's Death cannot have happened, not when she has eaten her breakfast -- cornflakes with milk, and sausages, and eggs, and orange juice -- this morning.

The image still strikes her with frightening clarity -- Sirius falling, just as Bellatrix Lestrange struck him with a spell.

He didn't know what hit him, Ginny suddenly thinks, and an irrational bubble of amusement escapes in her heart.

Her fingers feel very cold, although the air is stifling in the summer heat. Her skin is tight around her cheeks.

She feels the cold touch of metal and stone against her chest, and is suddenly very afraid of her own humanity.

"Ginny," a voice calls to her. It sounds like it is on a knife's edge; it is close to breaking. Harry. "It's just about time to go back."

She turns around. It is Harry, and he is standing just a bit in front of the others, swimming into her technicolour vision, like a character in a movie whose colours have been adjusted to be overly bright. His green eyes are overbright. Ginny blinks.

"Gin." His voice is breaking now, and even as he reaches a hand towards her she watches him with an almost numb horror. "Let's go, okay?"

Her voice just manages to come through her throat.

"Yes, okay, yes."

~

For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

- Vergissmeinnicht, Keith Douglas (1943)

14th July 1995

He watches as his father deals with Borgins, once in a while turning just the slightest to raise an amused eyebrow in his direction, and he stifles his own laughter, knowing that Father, of course, fully intended to use Borgins, despite the latter's efforts for it to be the other way around.

"I'm sure you do know, Borgins," Father intimates, and Borgins laughs, sycophantic as always, and he hears Father's cane drop dully in its easy, understandable rhythm. "But surely you would not imply I know less?"

He himself now bends down, as the laughter abruptly stops like a book slammed shut, and the voices melt away with further distance. He examines the soft velvety material that has been laid carefully across the counter, folded and ready to be wrapped, its colour flowing freely between dark green and mottled silver. An Invisbility cloak, for his birthday on the thirty-first. His heart content and settled, at least for the moment, for he is, after all, getting something befitting of himself -- and it is, of course, something that he wants. Father always made sure to tell him of his birthday presents, watching his expression to see if he wants it. All he has to do was to lift his eyebrows in doubt, and Father will nod, and the present will be dismissed immediately. They have an understanding in that. Whenever Father is displeased with him, all he needs to do was to turn away from him, just the slightest of motions, and Draco will know, instantly, his transgression.

This understanding hasn't always been in place, of course. It has only begun around his twelfth birthday, and both father and son are suitably satisfied with it, though in common company they voice some things aloud for the better comfort of their associates. Draco knows that his mother does not feel entirely pleased with this arrangement, and he has seen her more and more so temperamental, indulging in fits of violence, both verbal and physical. Though sometimes she still reaches towards him over tea, gesturing for him to have more cake and chocolate, smile wide and welcoming and foreign. But -- strangely, he cares not. Not really. The woman hasn't dared touch him.

And Father hasn't made any move to placate his mother, and so Draco's heart is content and settled.

~

6th June 1996

His breath coming short and hurried, belaboured, he lowers himself and his broom slightly, letting it glide just a few feet above the thick undergrowth of the deceptively quiet Malfoy forest, too low for any aerial attack, too high for any ground attack.

We have a warrant issued...

Draco is always cautious, even when his skin is smarting violet and bleeding red and black, even when the Manor he has known all his life has just been taken over by overgrown Aurors and even when his mother has conveniently escaped the country (and for all he knows, which he now knows accounts for nothing, the continent).

And to fully raid the abode of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy...

But of course. It is a Malfoy thing to do, if not entirely thoughtful enough for a Black; Father will be most proud.

As well as question any of the Malfoy household deemed useful to the investigation...

Father. A wet mist takes over Draco's silver eyes, clouding his vision. Foreign.

In the interest and safety of the British Wizarding community...

His fine-boned hands shake slightly; his head is starting to pulsate with the weight of his tears, the loss, or should he say the losses...of what? He is not sure anymore.

Did it feel like this, when one started going insane? To be sane enough to think of protecting your physical body, but to lose whatever semblance of what you thought you knew? What you thought you believed in?

What did I think?

Or did I ever think?

Or was I just told, and I never thought, and now I've forgotten?

Mr. Draco Malfoy, I'm afraid the Minister of Magic no longer holds the Malfoy name in any great esteem.

Draco retches suddenly, a horrid revulsion overtaking his previous tangle of emotions, whatever they were. Then abruptly all he wants to do was laugh, and he does.

It is not a pleasant laugh, but Draco does not ever remember any pleasant laughter ever issuing from his lips, not without Father; it is a bitter laugh. Or a laugh that is filled with bitterness. Is there a difference?

Draco doesn't know.

But then that might just have something to do with the fact that he obviously knows nothing.

Blackness is surrounding him; he knows not what it is. But of course he knows not what it is. Maybe it is night. Maybe it is the broad leaves of the deciduous trees around him, now in full mocking glory. Maybe it is just death.

A fitting end to his ignorance.

A half-smile plays on Draco Malfoy's lips, and his last coherent thought is that, should he die, at least no one will find him looking like this.

~

6th June 1996

She lowers herself, carefully, into the small white bathtub, cramped, unflinching in its claustrophobic properties. She winces a little, because as usual the water is a little too hot. The water here is always a little too extreme, and she hates that it attacks her senses with such a wanton lack of mercy.

Too bright, too immediate, too real. Everything has been like this, since Sirius's Death.

She watches the white skin marred by freckles and cuts and bruises and scars and leftover insect bites from past days and years, sometimes reminders of past fun and always reminders of past pain. She doesn't like her skin, thinking it a map of too many words, a storyboard too eloquent, telling too much of how she has lived her past fifteen years, because for some reason she has never managed to heal properly. Even the scratches of four years ago are beige and silver on the side of her heels, twisting around the back of her ankles. She glances down, at the heavy black and silver pendant hanging from the silver chain around her neck, and a warmth, but not a comfortable one, develops from her cheeks. Once Michael had absentmindedly fingered the chain, and the reaction had been immediate.

She closes her eyes. She had had to Obliviate him, and after that, well, after that, everyone knows what can only possibly happen after that. She hasn't been able to look Michael truthfully in the eye, and she has only been able to act the hypocrite, hiding her guilt with resentment, and she watches as Michael wilts at her glare, in the belief that he has been untoward towards her, overtly forward, and that she had Obliviated him -- rightfully, too -- because of that. He now thinks he doesn't want to remember, because he is ashamed of himself for something he did not do.

Michael was -- is -- a good person.

Sometimes she hates herself.

Towards the end of the school year she had been looking at Michael when he was not looking at her, and she still imagined to see the light bruises across his face where she -- and Tom's pendant, too, please let it be Tom's pendant as well -- had hurt him.

If only to let her conscience rest -- sweet Ginerva sweet Ginerva sweet Ginerva sweet Ginerva sweet Ginerva...

She needs to reassure herself. She needs to reassure herself -- of what, she isn't quite sure, anymore. She doesn't want, doesn't dare to think what of.

When all this is over, she finally thinks, settling on ambiguous promises rather than a harsh truth without hope, when all this is over, she can finally be rid of Tom.

Come.

Yes, to be rid of Tom.

And, thinking that, she chokes back a lump which has risen, and scrubs herself roughly, handling the actions in large, definite strokes, until the pale skin slowly turns red, and she can almost forget about the scars.

~

6th June 1996

She strokes the light hair of her son, and in a vague memory she remembers how she had been most disappointed that it is exactly the same shade as his father's.

It is quiet here. He is still unconscious, and when he wakes up, she will not be around for him.

She pulls her hand back. She has never been able to touch him for long without the sensation of fear and power, the sensation of falling down into an abyss which glares back into her.

She never has been a follower or believer in destiny, but she cannot quell that sensation. She hates that she fears her own son. She hates that she cannot love her own son.

She remembers the perfunctory performances of motherhood, the polite speech employed towards him, the sweets she would send to him, the clothes she would choose for him, the introductions, the wide-smiling praises, the frosty pats on his shoulder before leaving him to fend for himself in Hogwarts...all the time teetering on the edge of a precipice, not understanding how this boy, of flesh and blood and youth and her upbringing, can be so estranged from her, even when she fights to keep him near to herself.

She hates it, she hates it, and it comes back at her in the nights because she cannot claw her way out of the labyrinth of her own confusion and muddled feelings, in her tears and curses which Lucius always ignored.

Why must my son, she thinks, not be my son?

There is nothing to him, she realises, that is like herself. His fair hair is lighter than her own, his features harsher and sharper, his eyes silver instead of blue, his skin white instead of fair. His speech is more volatile, his manner less definite, his attitude more dismissive and yet more cautious.

He looks at her, sometimes, but most of the time he looks at Lucius.

It is quiet here. She chokes back a sob.

Silently, Narcissa Black-Malfoy mutters a spell, and, without touching Draco Malfoy, leaves him.

~