To Hell and Halfway Back

"I feel like a fucking Christmas tree," she said. If you looked on her drivers' license, it would say Fanchon S. Klein, which was not a real name, except that nobody called her by the one that was real. Her face was bleached out and re-saturated in the mirror, not beautiful but blank, a study in contrast. Her color chart labeled her a "true exuberant spring," but in the mirror she was pure winter, winter dark on light, winter with all the sounds magnified over new-fallen snow.

Like a movie in slow motion two gold earrings dropped into the sink and her breathing was hitching and heavy as she wiped the paint from her mouth. It was blood red - and there was always so much blood, running through her veins and every single one else's, just waiting to be spilt, and not one drop calling for Fanchon - it was a different name they wanted, another person, another time - they wanted the girl who sat in a hotel bathroom and stared at the ceiling. They wanted the grunge and the mold in the cracks of the tile, the imperfections, the whiteness that couldn't hide the dirt - something not right, something she had sworn off -

Her eyes snapped open and met themselves in the mirror. She fought back the memories pressing at her vision and padded away, in sage green evening gown and bare feet, back to her book. There was only one book she studied, one word, one syllable at a time.

Belial.

It was a Muggle word - not a Muggle word, but a word in a Muggle book, an object of obsession, something more frenzied than frightening. It intruded: she had begun her story only to find the words that she wrote came out belial, belial, belial, a name, something she did not want to cross out. Finally, she wrote it on the last page, the only word on the page: BELIAL, all in capitals. It did not change. She stood, looked - and then in a rush of noise and fury and envy scratched it out with a ballpoint pen, wickedly sharp in the way quills could never be. The page screamed against her hand, the grain gripping as if to yell MURDER!

(She was back on the Quidditch field, there was a dark figure coming, it was so huge, so - so - but where was Harry, in the hospital wing, not even here, not even in the stands, not on the wing, no Ron either, Ron gone, no Harry, no hope, none!)

There were chills all over her body. Belial revealed nothing, no revelation from her earlier memories of that hour. She wrote carefully, over the torn and inky page:
F A N C H O N

(a small girl - Just in front of you, stand up straight and you can see over her head, the Slytherins gathering like baby owls around their mother, so high up in the stands, the panic is beginning, how will all these people get out?)

F A N C H O N
H E R M I O N E

(That white sleek head so close, so close to touch the hands that bring and run from death, kiss his robes. Malfoy - not a git, not quite, if only he could have not been so standoffish, if only he had listened to the world for a moment, maybe he could...

(The death crumples! Breathing is so loud over the Death Eater frenzy - too many people running and screaming for your breath to be this loud, Hermione, too many, you're crazy. Still Harry's gone - must leave, run, one menace gone but whom else will come up here?)

She rests her head on the book where her name is. In the end, it had been as simple as Avada Kedavra, said by the person Lord Voldemort refused to suspect. No, not Voldemort - Tom Riddle, the boy who used children, the boy who took Ginny into his hands like putty and shaped her wrongly. She breathed the too-thin air, felt the monochromatic light against her, resisted its sepia tone. She couldn't smell the room any more, couldn't feel the generations of Muggles here: she had been there too long, felt the goosebumps of love and family too often. Curling over the book her spine felt like a hedgehog's, a protective curl, a spiky bundle.

And then there was a razor blade at the small of her back, a kiss on her neck, the danger that she knew would come. She hissed, straightened up, felt every stretched-out inch of her turn hard and cold; the evening gown moved satin against her skin, and she felt the warmth of his hand on her hip through it. "You finally scratched it out," the voice came, saying just what was expected in a slow drawl, damningly indifferent, perfectly British: "You always took the hardest possible route."

It seems the moment to kiss him, to turn this film noir into a happy ending, to make it all go away for just a second until it fades to black and they are enemies again. She feels she could do it, even with his razor blade in one hand, poised to perform the ritual that removes all magic - but Percy Weasley is not a person she wants to kiss, and his shock of red hair spoils the effect. He should be tall, dark, and handsome. "You knew I would," she says instead, tired, resigned. "You always knew I would."

-----

Draco was meant for this café at ten in the morning on a Friday, watching people pass in the California sunlight, hooded eyes scanning for a wizard he might recognize. It was unlikely that he would find someone, though, so he was relatively relaxed: the picture of a lazy young executive, taking a morning off. The boom economy hadn't worn off here: men were still sipping overpriced lattes with their mistresses, spoiled teenagers still playing it cool among topiaries, an artsy type or two playing banjo at everyone who passed by. It was trendy, it was small, and it was utterly downtown. It was also a continent away from anything he missed.

His mind wandered - that day, thinking just desserts for you, not thinking about Harry Potter and the world and how he would be viewed - only the seconds ticking by, soft on his expensive watch, reminded him of the world he was living in.

(So close - a little closer, bend to kiss his robe, your wand to his leg, now now now now now whisper it softly avadakedavra and don't stand up until he's fallen down, say AN AUROR! and run, ignore the power drain, you don't feel heavy, you aren't slowing down one bit, not one bit, run run now run -)

He almost didn't see the dark-and-light heads moving through the crowd. Wizard, though, the sixth sense he relied on cried: wizard, witch, powerful. They moved on, and the woman looked back, and Draco was no longer sludgy and sleepy and trapped in memory. It was her: Hermione Granger, the one who stood up for him, then disappeared, the one who he had never expected to see in Sacramento, California on a Friday morning. And next to her Percy Weasley, his hand on the small of her back why? He recognized that spot. It was not a place for a wizard to be touching, it was not a place that he should be seeing a glint of metal in Percy's hand - that was dark -

She saw him as he stood, leaving his coffee, beginning to run. In a second she was turning, running away from Weasley, throwing a leather-bound book at him, and pacing farther and farther and farther away. Weasley: a look in his eye Draco had never seen, not murderous but quietly determined, something that said he cared only about his family's reputation. Draco knew what he was about. It was a look he had seen many times in his own father, and Hermione was dangerous. She knew too much: she had seen Draco bow next to Lord Voldemort with her own eyes, seen that there were no Aurors in the area, seen that nobody could have killed him but Draco.

He felt an irrational love for her, in that moment, running in the warm sunlight and trying to clear his name, trying to prove the Ministry wrong. She was moving so quickly, now, through the street - they must have been headed for an Apparation point - she was running faster and faster, towards more Muggle sectors, trying to get to a policeman, trying to get to a place where Percy would cause an Incident if he tried to harm her.

The mistake was seen before she made it. An alley - not a public place; even if she could get through it and into the Capitol Mall she would have been hidden for long enough for a curse to go through. Percy glanced at him, at her, and back, and gave chase, his wand at the ready. Draco followed, running, pelting on the sidewalk, seeing the flash of light and praying it was not too late, that it was not Unforgivable -

-----

The blood was soft and red. Instead of tawny she was pale, now, a black shirt against the redness and whiteness and chestnut of hair. Her milky eyes clouded over with the cream of Avada Kedavra. She was almost gone. Draco's heart leapt, then, and he put her fingers on the book, hoped for her blessing: she could not save him, now.

There could be no burial. He took her knapsack and ran - it was far too public, far too easy for a policeman to come and assume, far too easy to break his cover. The sun burnt, now, into his back: it was becoming late morning, noon. The old quarter of town was coming: the sidewalks were wooden here, and the buildings quaint, and the wharf beyond the railroad just as it had been a hundred and fifty years before.

(Bossy little girl mudblood buck teeth mudblood far too smart for her own good - never had a hard day's work in her life

(Gorgeous "Wouldn't you just love to fuck her" father saying that thinking not really but never disobey your father nod and smile and say When the revolution comes, I get her first, she's all mine and smile that smile that he likes you to use because it's him, all him, nothing like your mother but only his own Veela reflection)

There is a wand and an evening gown in the knapsack. Evening gown - sage green, deep backed, what for? The book she carried and threw at him is there too: tan leather, nut-brown and hard and smooth, stamped with JOURNAL, a set of identification with Fanchon S. Klein stamped on it, a funny name, even funnier than Draco Malfoy - whatever possessed her to choose it? -

(Her-my-own-nee, not Hermy-own, she said, he laughed behind his hand. Later, the blue gown, smooth hair. She doesn't care about you - it's the truth, the Gryffindor, the need for justice. Less Slytherin than even the great Harry Potter)

There is nothing left. The leather book's words are shifting: belial to real words, but he cannot use them: belief is a thing he has never inspired. I looked down and I saw the white-gold head, the kiss to the robe, the flash of a chestnut and ebony wand, but then the words too are gone, all gone. The curse Percy must have put on it is strong and stronger. The book falls from his hands and into the water of the river, the deep strong current pulling it into the paddlewheel of a steamer that still runs up and down the waters of the American.

He cannot give her a funeral. He cannot pray for her soul - if it was there, if it wasn't lost somewhere back in England with the Ministry of Magic hounding it to the ground. Harry Potter might care about Hermione Granger, but he doesn't even know Fanchon Klein, and he wouldn't care to. He would not like her, now, following the truth at the expense of him.

Splash, and the knapsack drops into the river as well. He looks around - nobody watches him as he turns, saunters away, ignoring the fines for littering, ignoring the waterlogged parcel's descent to the bottom of the river. He ignores, walking back to the café. Perhaps his coffee is still there.

(they're after him - not right after, but soon they'll be close enough to home in. Galleons are easy to change on the black market. Pawnshops like gold and jewelry. His new name is David L. Miller; he doesn't even need to get rid of his monogrammed things, not nearly.

(The run suits him. Being thought a liar is not a new thing. He does not scrabble to search for truth or meaning. He is not lying dead drowning in anger sorry pain in a hotel bathroom. He is far away from Fanhermionechon and her bleached self, her bleached bones that want truth and shy from blood. He is blood, never wrong or right. He is his father's son.

(The death of Lord Voldemort was a mistake. But he is in no pain now.)