Precedent

Precedent

Evil never wins.

Most people believe it's because the universe is ultimately good. They're wrong. The battle between good and evil is not lost through some fundamental bias of nature. It is lost because darkness is attracted to light with a power quite impossible to resist. Just as good people find themselves drawn toward the rewards of a selfish lifestyle, so are their opposites seduced by their very nemeses. It is a passion so fervent that it replaces all other thought and it is such pure, crippling emotion – lust, love, whatever you would call it – that loses arguments, wars and empires.

So it has been throughout history, ever since the suicide of Judas. The villain becomes domesticated through the seductive magnetism of the hero and casts aside all chances of victory. And the words of revenge that follow each unsurprising defeat are made all the more pathetic as they ring like children's stories in the speaker's ears. He knows—they both know—that as sweet as revenge might be, it can never be as gratifying as the fire in a mortal enemy's kiss.

I have been obsessed with Harry Potter since the very moment he first snubbed me in front of every other first year at Hogwarts. Such insolent treatment would have affronted any Malfoy—especially coming from a do-gooder like Potter—but there was something almost akin to respect mixed in amongst my anger. If another had dared to do the same, I am quite sure I would have found a way to have the culprit expelled immediately. But there was something about that eleven-year-old celebrity, something that went further than my father's mutterings and intrigued me enough to endure his presence. It was almost a form of masochism on my behalf, the constant torment of his dubious achievements tainting my every day.

It is obvious that Harry also suffers from a similar curse. When his little friends and sycophants express their hatred for me, the truth of their words is evident in every gesture and expression. For my greatest enemy, however, Harry seems remarkably unable to carry his verbal loathing as far as his eyes. I am not foolish enough to suggest that he likes me. We are too different from each other, both in nature and in alignment, for him to foster an emotion as benign as that. And yet Harry is so blindly good that if it were at all possible for a mortal to truly love his enemy, he would be the one to achieve the feat.

But love is another thing entirely. Hate and love are so maddeningly similar that at times the boundary becomes near invisible. That's when we villains falter.

Some people believe that evil and love are mutually exclusive. The truth is that the villains in any situation, whether historical or fictional, are actually those who feel emotion at its greatest extremes. Lust for power and domination of those around you is not so far removed from lust for another human being. Such emotions are only heightened when combined—thus the attraction of the pristine nemesis. The seduction of one so innocent into the depths of our own corruption is a drug greater than any Muggle could manufacture.

Obsession. Passion. Hatred. Love. They're all just different words for the same state of being.

It took us five years to do anything more than exchange glances that weren't the glares we intended them to be. Part of it was youth and uncertainty, but the greater part was the denial of an aspect of ourselves that neither of us wished to acknowledge. But self-control always falters in the end. Harry repeatedly tells me that I was the first to succumb, but I believe another few seconds would have seen him do the same. Because our meeting had surely not been an accident, but rather a fulfilment of cruel destiny itself.

We met in one of the halls, just before midnight, both alone and both unworried by the school rules that bound us to our dormitories at such an hour. My reasons for being there are unimportant and Harry's merely laughable. His constant efforts to thwart the powers of darkness would be a source of pure amusement if only luck did not render him so often successful.

For a while, we did not speak, Harry undoubtedly waiting for my reaction as I awaited his. He has a way of looking out from beneath that hopeless fringe of his, the strands of hair doing little to conceal the depth and emotion of his gaze. Even in the half-light of the night-darkened corridor, I could feel the curiosity and expectation with which he regarded me. It was not so much a question as a challenge.

So I kissed him. Roughly and passionately and with absolutely no thought of what I was doing. And he kissed me back.

Even as a fifteen-year-old, Harry didn't kiss like a good guy. I guess he'd been feeling the tension for as long as I had. In a way, that was my ultimate downfall. Had the initial kiss been nothing out of the ordinary, I might still have managed to extract myself from the grip of Harry's questionable charms. As it was, by the time I returned to my dormitory that night, my fate—our fate—had been sealed.

Our intimacy—despised as it is by both of us—has always remained secret. If those around us suspect that Harry and I are more than enemies to each other, then they've given no indication. The person most likely to realise, Ron Weasley, is too caught up in his own desperate crush on his best friend to notice Harry's occasional unexplained disappearances.

While no Malfoy could ever truly feel threatened by a Weasley, I do not mind the odd twitch of a negative emotion such as jealousy. It's so much more in keeping with the type of person I wish to be than many of the other emotions that infiltrate my defences whenever Harry and I are together—whether we're glaring at each other across a classroom or hidden in a disused storeroom, draped in dust and each other's arms.

As long as it remains hidden, it's almost as though my weakness is not quite complete. And while the traitorous part of my psyche aches to declare such weaknesses to the world, I am growing increasingly adept at quelling those impulses.

The secrecy is double-edged. It contradicts Harry's nature, works deep within him as a further affirmation that our actions are wrong, that I am wrong. He speaks of it sometimes, made mellow by lovemaking, trusting in the curve of my bare arm around him. He worries that his feelings for me are an indication of some deeply buried yearning for darkness.

His words warm me.

When we are together, I can almost glimpse it. It's as though he loses a little of the goodness in my presence, as though something of the light is clouded by the darkness of my own ambitions. And sometimes I can almost fool myself that this time will be the exception. This time the villain will win after all, corrupting the hero completely, and rendering himself indestructible.

But beneath such moments of bravado, I know that this occasion will be the same as any other in the long history of literature and the world. Regardless of my influence, Harry will forever remain the hero. And, one day, I'll be forced to choose between him and my ambition.

Evil never wins.

~fin~
© Augustus, 01-12-2001