Rating:
PG-13
House:
The Dark Arts
Characters:
Lucius Malfoy
Genres:
Angst Romance
Era:
Multiple Eras
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire
Stats:
Published: 03/08/2003
Updated: 03/08/2003
Words: 551
Chapters: 1
Hits: 508

The Mirror of Ambition

Ishafel

Story Summary:
Two men with everything and nothing in common. Two pairs of eyes meeting across a crowded room. A dangerous, unvoiced desire that will, in the end, destroy one of them. Vernon Dursley and Lucius Malfoy, slash implied.

Posted:
03/08/2003
Hits:
508
Author's Note:
Lucius and Vernon--who knew, huh? Actually, repellent as the idea is, it sort of works.

The Mirror of Ambition

He calls them nasty names, and encourages his son, his wife, to do the same. He calls them nasty names but all the time he is thinking of the one, the other, the mirror; the man glimpsed only briefly across the crowded train station has captivated him. He thinks about him often, almost sympathetically--if what he wishes would happen happened, then the mirror would die as if he´d never been born, and he should want that but doesn´t.

He can´t help feeling, deep down, that if things were different they two could be friends. He is not a man much given to friendship, because after all he has his family, his business associates; he does not want friends who will do nothing but drag him down, hold him back. And yet--there is so much he could share with the mirror if he had the chance. They both of them are men of substance, powerful, ambitious, driven; they are strong, adaptable, sophisticated. They are both men of certain tastes, men of a certain class. They are practically brothers, twins, separated at birth, if not for that one great unbridgeable distance.

They both of them hate the boy. H-a-r-r-y P-o-t-t-e-r. Even the sound of his name makes them cringe. He knows without even a word spoken between them, that the mirror is his twin most of all in this. The very existence--this is the sort of thing he hates most--that purity and filth should have been mixed, so. It is an abomination. In the bathroom he looks down at himself, runs appreciative hands down his own body. But it is not himself he sees, though he dares not try this trick in front of a mirror. It is the other´s body, and it is different and the same at once. Every night he leaves a window open, as if in doing so he lets the other in.

It burns him like a fever and it pulls him like a magnet. He has heard it said that like calls to like. For the first time he understands what it is to want something he cannot have. His temper grows short, and he takes it out on his son, on his wife; all that hot long unfulfilling summer he rages. Everything comes down to the train, waiting for the train: every cruel word, every lazy slap is a consummation of sorts. He feels as if he has woken up from a long peaceful dream to discover that half his soul is missing.

Magic: such a small thing to stand between them, to be an insurmountable barrier, and yet it symbolizes everything he has stood for his whole life. As well forget the difference between right and wrong, as forget it but when their eyes unite across a crowded room he would forget everything; he would forget his own name if the other asked it of him. He has forgotten his name, and all for what? A word, a charmed word, a chance meeting of eyes that the other has long since forgotten. In that last terrible moment before destiny and the mirror strike him down, he approves of it all: the elegance the viciousness, the ruthless heartless control. The mirror has done what he would do had he been born another.