Thirteenth Heart

I could be you

Or someone you used to know

-naked, red

Ron trips on the hard stone leading down to the dungeons and he hits the corner with a slam, the cold unforgiving and trying its hardest to bruise. Malfoy Manor, old and vindictive, and Lupin would probably be able to tell him just how old, ensconced as he has been of late in the depths of the library.

Ron misses the screaming. It took him a long time to admit this, and he's still not entirely sure he's comfortable with it, but he misses the screaming. The crying and the screaming and how quickly words were lost to a person once work had begun upon them. It should all be here, and Ron mourns its absence as he picks himself up, each little scuffle and shift of his clothing muffling loudly in the stairway. The newly developed strengthening of the silencing charms isn't so new any more; it's been around for months and he's still not used to it. The noise used to make him sick, sick to his stomach with an angry migraine in his head, but it was better than the emptiness that replaced it. He clamped down on the nausea at the time and went to the MediWitch over the migraines and, after a month and a half of every potion she could come up with, he gave up and shaved his head, his skull still in pieces.

Snape found him folded up small one day in one of the countless corners of the Manor. Snape had proved himself, but the war was ended and he was no longer trusted, wasn't useful, wasn't allowed to leave the Manor, and seemed to be the only person the estate would cooperate with. Ron's cold damp niche probably had some purpose in some long lost age of architecture, and he's sure Snape would have been able to tell him all about it just as well as Lupin. But, when Ron raised his face that day to see who was there, Snape saw the half-moon nail marks he'd dug into his stubbled scalp, and Snape's silence fell from him as he told Ron to pull himself together. But the noise was still in his head and Ron was about to open his mouth, thinking he was crazy to even consider asking Snape. He was cut off before he even attempted to meet his old teacher's eyes.

"There is no potion, Mr. Weasley. I suggest you do your best to get on with your life." And Snape's robes never swirled these days as he walked away, they draggled and clung close to him, dripping dead or just restrained.

When he failed to check the bitter nausea as they began to take Millicent Bulstrode to pieces and the stench of his vomit merged with the malodour of her ruptured colon, Hermione directed him out of her unit until he found himself in a management position, taking over direction of the entire operation, in fact. An aboveground stage manager or glorified housekeeper, distanced, and he knows how vital he is because.

...

Silence. The Manor house-elves all terminated themselves when what was left of the Order moved in, and without them to keep the house in repair the steps the stone become uneven. Small naked bodies in piles on the floor, now in one mass grave beneath the ruined ornamental gardens, and Ron's unsure as to whether the bodies of house-elves rot or not. None of them made it onto a wall of heads, that's for sure, and Hermione muttered about intrinsically destructive socio-economic workforces as she apparated to the local village for take-out.

Ron trips increasingly when the house knows nobody is looking, and sometimes he half wonders if the rumbling of the keystones is the consideration of the steps, old enough to be cold relatives of Hogwart's, trying to move and shift but not quite potent enough yet. He thinks it's a good thing that the Manor is outside the domain of Health and Safety.

Because.

Because this has to be done, and as well as all the Muggles and Mudbloods he's protecting there's also Harry, as large a target as ever, and Harry has the biggest job of them all. He feels a long way away, implementing government in far more central buildings. In public view as always, far away from Ron.

His head still hurt. On the ground floor, on the first floor, up towers and in the gardens, far away from the Manor on the odd official meeting; his cranium permanently felt like it would peel away if he could scrape sharply enough. Hermione made him keep his nails even more stunted than they had always naturally been once he started breaking the skin in long relieving and futile scratches. The advanced silencing charms were put in place for everyone's benefit, because the noise had been interfering with staff sleeping patterns. That wasn't what had been keeping Ron up, but he implemented the scheme in any case and it seemed appreciated by most. Hermione certainly slept better, Ron watched her beside him in his ongoing insomnia.

Now, Ron knows, he would rather have the screaming. Even with the continual migraine that would entail because, yes, the head-splitter did stop once the silencing charm was cast. In its place is silent emptiness, a continual dull ache and a stabbing down his spine. So sudden, a change so sudden, and he began to really panic when that happened, because it couldn't be unconnected and he'd never heard voices but now they weren't there and oh God, what if they'd been in his head and what if they still were. Grasping at straws, asking Snape about Occlumency, and Snape seemed to think they were lost straws too, told him no, told him to learn to live with it, and about to slam the door in his face when Ron. Stopped. Him.

He got Snape to fuck him and that hurt like he hadn't imagined possible yet still didn't seem as bad as more familiar pain. And then, when Hermione (practically inevitably) found out and ended things between them, Ron breathed a sigh of relief. Snape didn't talk to him and Ron felt almost Slytherin in his cunning, not like much likeof a Gryffindor at all. But he's never entirely sure of any of the house characters now and nobody understands that when he skirts around the topic in search of an opening. Of course he's Gryffindor, one of the good guys, and nothing he does feels like him anymore. So an ugly gesture to Hermione to get her to leave him feels like nothing out of the ordinary, better than facing her and far more darkly rewarding.

He's conducted everything from upstairs ever since he discovered the sealed-off quiet of the dungeons, and he hears nothing but his own voice and the house as he enters again. Fourth time this week makes that the fourth time this year, and he fumbles as he unlocks the compartment he wants, third down on his left. They modernised everything, Hermione's innovations hastily approved, and the prisoner in front of him is tied with thinthin string, thin enough to slice, and he sits on the floor next to a metal bar bench, a sick joke of a bed. Ron feels his stomach turn again and fights the bile down with the expertise bourn of practice, still stubbornly thinking himself unable to afford to leave his vomit as evidence of his visit.

Ron takes the bag off Draco Malfoy's head, also shaved, and tries to remember what blond hair used to look like. He thinks maybe the house moans a little in its foundations, and he sits down cross-legged in front of Malfoy's bunched knees and skinny frame, remembering every reason he hates the man in front of him. Malfoy meets his eyes because he hasn't been broken quite yet, although they both know it's coming. Ron's sat here three nights already without anyone else being any the wiser, and he thinks he might almost be finished confessing to his prisoner. Detainee. Captive. Whatever it is they're supposed to be referring to them as nowadays.

And this wasn't what was supposed to happen at all. Malfoy was supposed to ease his mind, get rid of the ache, because he's everything Ron stands against, and he really does hate him. Viscerally hates him, with anger, and loss, and injury on his side. But, when he gets here and he sits here, Ron feels as ill as ever.

Malfoy broke the silencing charms last week. All chaotic hell broke loose, even if none of the prisoners did, and for a blissful couple of hours Ron couldn't hear anything but the screaming in his head. He'd known Malfoy was there, of course, had supervised his reception and shuffled the paperwork of his incarceration, and watched Hermione carefully. No mere potential threat to state security, but an established one, aged old from the war like so many of them, and one of the few Death Eaters to evade and survive them for this long.

They had made a pack of playing cards with the faces of public enemies on, but the portraits would never stay cooperative for long and exploding snap became something of an extreme sport, banned from public venues nationally. Draco Malfoy was the King of Hearts, Ron remembers, and the last picture card available to be added to his collection. Captured outside of Manchester, Ron knows he recalls the file correctly. A day and a night's walk away from the slum headquarters the Purebloods had set up in a high-rise in Salford.

He has the cards pinned to the wall in his office because they're less abusive than the official posters. Every time one of them gets brought in he takes the card down and throws it in a drawer, trying to ignore the way he knows the picture struggles and will ever after belong to Hermione.

Power is rate of energy transfer, and Ron supposes he always knew Draco Malfoy had a bit extra to him. Not even the same league as Harry, of course, but he certainly always had force behind his curses. It's something survivors learned to recognise instinctively: when better to dodge a curse than ineffectually attempt to block it. Ron has enough experience training and fighting next to Harry that he knows better than most how truly devastating a raw barrage of magical power can be. People seem to forget that taking away the wand doesn't take away the power, and sometimes when subjects start to crack there's a fizzle in the air. Malfoy went three days before Hermione felt they were starting to get somewhere, and then there was the beginnings of a break and the surge that broke the silencing charms.

Everyone heard Malfoy screaming, the epicentre of the cacophony, and they all stopped in shock to pause before launching into panic. Only, what happened was, Hermione stepped in with her clinical self-possession, and then there wasn't any panic after all. When Ron recovered awareness he was bound and hoarse, and the least junior of his assistants watched him suspiciously as he told him what had happened. Ron waited until he'd left before stumbling into his en suite, missing the toilet bowl and having to clean his acid from the tiling.

He went and dug up the King of Hearts that evening in the silence and solitude of his office as he attempted to catch up on the handful of hours' work he'd missed. He got enough done that it didn't matter that he hadn't done it all, and the card watched him quietly from where he'd propped it up against the lamp. He levitated Malfoy's file back to the auto-file cabinet and contemplated the card for a little while before folding it up small, vertex to vertex until the rectangle was a square and it was no larger than a very large thumbnail. It nestled tightly between the joints of his fingers and he felt the ridges of his spine sweat, still painful and cold, on the walk back to his rooms.

He crawled under the covers with it and worked without lumos, pulling down the waist of his boxers and gluing the card there, watching it fade into the skin in the hollow of his hip like so many wartime mission briefings before it.

No stumbling on the stairs the first time he came to see Malfoy. Malfoy was supposed to save him, right his mind and restore all that was Gryffindor in him. Because if anybody deserved what was coming to him then it was Malfoy, and, if ever there was a house to evoke and define all that was Gryffindor, it was Slytherin. But Malfoy just sat there, glared a little but not very well, and Ron made allowances for the extreme exhaustion and basic sense of physical trauma.

Ron sat down and started talking, and of course Malfoy couldn't answer, but for the first half of the night it didn't matter, Ron just needed to talk. Not about anything very much, nothing that had been weighing on him particularly, and nothing that would get him into trouble once Malfoy was broken and given the opportunity to talk, nothing significant enough to get caught in a pensieve flush. Just small things that he didn't have anyone to tell, and a mention of Snape as a peace offering.

By the time Ron worked out that maybe it would be better to have a two-sided conversation Malfoy was looking at him a little strangely and Ron thought maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea after all. But what the hell. Coming down here in the first place was so far wide of being a good idea that his little high was insisting he roll with it, and he poked at the silencing charm for an hour or so before he worked out how to create a bubble for the two of them.

And then Malfoy couldn't speak anyway, because nobody had bothered to mend his voice box from all the screaming that he must have been doing for weeks now, with nobody to hear. No point really, if a subject wasn't yet expected to be talking, and Ron's medical field training didn't extend to the specifics needed to heal a voice box.

He had looked up the spell he needed the next night, and when his everyday exhaustion allowed him a night to sneak down, he did. Paranoia teased at the edge of his consciousness, and he figured he'd lost his mental health in enough other ways that this shouldn't really feel like anything new. But his assistant eyed him warily the next morning and Ron dared him with new found fierce in his glint to challenge him. But he didn't. Ron misses sleep constantly enough there should be nothing of a new look about him.

That second night they talked. Slowly at first, because Malfoy didn't trust him and still believed in trickery. Then at the end of the first conversation Malfoy still didn't trust him, but Ron thought maybe the idea of trickery had been put aside for a while. It was a little embarrassing after having talked for so long the previous night, but when the words stopped the silence was just as relieving, and Malfoy never quite managed to tell him to fuck off.

They talked about what Hermione was up to and what Malfoy had already received, what was yet to come. Ron wasn't too sure of that part as Hermione liked to tailor and develop combination work for individuals, and he couldn't tell if Malfoy was being perceptive or simply awkward when he failed to call Ron on his lack of knowledgeable detail. They went deeper in and Ron had to break off to hurl down the stainless steel braced hole in the corner, and after a while Malfoy got bored and came over to rub his back, whisper in his ear more details, more horror, and by the end Ron was forgetting to breathe.

It stopped. They stopped. They talked about how many other people without bags on their head would have been able to get away with having their heads shaved. Ron mentioned Neville's mohawk, and they both agreed that didn't quite count.

He looked up the daily proposal sheets Hermione was filing the next morning, just so he could know, and the third night Ron and Malfoy argued. Ron went through every reason he hated Malfoy, and, even without dragging up the wartime atrocities he knew in propagandised detail, there was hate to fill the night and months and years and forever. Malfoy answered back and gave Ron all the simple unadulterated personal reasons to hate him, and Ron hated him even more because even with all that it still wasn't enough.

He sat in silent defeat in the same place he'd sat the first night, and the stone yawned as dawn approached. Opposite sides of the room and never enough space between them. Ron felt his foot go dead and resisted the urge to scratch at his hip. "This war will never be over, will it?"

Ron cringed at the sound of his own voice and waited for Malfoy's scathing blast. For a moment Malfoy looked very old and wise, and Ron tried to work out if that was the effect of the ice cold food he was having to live on and the wear of the cell, or if it was simply because he was very, very tired. Ron's seen a lot of very tired people, and in his experience the visage either looks old and wise or small and childlike. Neither of them will ever wear childlike again - inconceivable for people that have seen and done and known as much as they.

Malfoy was silent for a moment that wanted to stay locked forever, and eventually there was nothing in his voice, because hatred will only go so far. "We won't see the end until we're dead, that's for sure." That was Malfoy’s answer, and neither of them voiced the question of what happens then, because not even wise wizard-war veterans such as themselves have the answer to that.

Ron looked up and tried to see the honesty that was too clear to be believed in. He needed to stand up and get out of here, but that moment, there, he didn't want to be anywhere but at peace and burn out point, and Malfoy met his eyes and said no. Malfoy walked to him, and Ron forgot for a moment that he was the one with the wand. Pulled to his feet, too finished with the world to still have the shakes, and Malfoy sent him on his way. Held out his hands for binding and held the door open for him. The bag as a hood to be placed back over his face.

"A word of advice, Weasley," he said before Ron could completely leave. "Don't get in any more fights with anybody. You're an insult to the nature of the interaction."

And Ron stared at Malfoy's bitter voice, the talk that wasn't there to hurt and the words that couldn't help twisting out like that. He leant against the doorframe and felt the tip of the wand up his sleeve rub against his sweating palms. "I'm not an insult, I -" and then he couldn't look Malfoy in the eyes because the cloth of the hood was in the way, and even if it hadn't been he couldn't have, he can tell by the way his gaze flitted around where Malfoy’s eyes would have been. He has a sudden stutter from nowhere, and he finds more out about himself everyday. "I'm," he swallows, "I'm a Gryffindor."

He could feel Malfoy's hands then, not sweaty, just cold and sharp and cruelly calloused, and they ran over the back of his scalp and nicked at the fading former scabs waiting to see if they would scar. "You're a defeat, and you've already lost to everybody there is out there. A fight with you is insulting. You were the last person to see it and as imbecilic as you've always been you still saw it long ago."

A whimper of pleasure because Ron didn't want to leave. Malfoy, just close enough that there was nothing left to confess, and Ron kissed Malfoy like he used to kiss Ginny, the smallest goodnight nip to a greying cheek. But through cloth.

Such a defeat. Malfoy pushed him away with a snort and as close to a laugh as could be remembered. The door slammed between them and Ron thought he heard mutterings, such a fucking Gryffindor. He put the silencing charm back up, remembering just in time, and as he tried not to break his neck on the stairs he thought he didn't feel like much of a Gryffindor, unsure whether that made him more or less of an insult.

He crawled into bed because he didn't have anything else to do before breakfast. He tried licking his hipbone and wasn't quite flexible enough. That day went quickly when it finally arrived. As did the next. The realisation of suspended time, and Ron was either impatient or dead.

...

Down the stairs. Trip. The silencing charm and the bag. Sitting cross-legged in front of Malfoy, waiting for him to say something. It's the fourth night he's been here and Ron's not sure what he's expecting to happen. He knows what he planned for, but he has questions first.

Neither of them smile, and Ron wonders if the floor is always this cold. He thinks his arse is about to go numb before he starts thinking maybe he should ask, and then Malfoy interrupts his mundane thoughts.

"I thought I was supposed to be on the Sleep Adjustment rotation rather than Sleep Deprivation."

Ron isn't sure whether Malfoy's joking or not and decides to go along with serious because it shouldn't matter either way. He frowns, thinking, certain that he's missing something. "I thought you'd been designated isolation treatment."

Malfoy quirks a thin and badly coiffed eyebrow. "That too. Seems like your technicians are learning to multi-task."

"I should give them a raise."

"Yeah, well, you're undermining all their fine work by being here. I'm not scheduled to be kept awake by annoying Gryffindors for another few hours at least." Malfoy seems to wince a little and Ron thinks maybe he should have brought a six-pack down with him. At least Malfoy's current treatment has meant he hasn't needed to keep rehealing Malfoy's throat. Malfoy shoves out his wrists and Ron stares at them dumbly. Malfoy rolls his eyes and his left one twitches involuntarily, and Ron thinks, that's new.

"Are you going to unbind me or not?" Malfoy is demanding in a way Ron has forgotten how to be. He slips out his wand and sets his enemy free, lingering to absent-mindedly heal the seared skin of Malfoy's wrists.

"It won't make any difference, anyway," Ron says wondering why the confession feels like deception. "They'll break you next week." He moves back, retrieving his space and leaning against the opposite wall, not far enough away for him to be able to stretch his legs out fully without crashing into Malfoy's.

Then Malfoy snorts and laughs again, and that is fast becoming something Ron hates most about him. "Give me some credit, please," he sneers, and his face doesn't look ugly when it twists anymore, it lacks the necessary flesh. "Three months, at least. I've been in training my whole life for this."

Ron tries to convince himself he's not going to be ill this evening. "I was there when we cracked your father, Malfoy." They had been clumsy back then, but they got the job done. "We learned a lot."

There's a tear of crimson down Malfoy's left thumb knuckle and Ron watches the blood sting, ignoring the compulsive clenching that's beyond Malfoy's control.

"And I was there when we tore Padme to pieces and helped her bleed to death." Malfoy holds his eyes, and Ron hasn't a clue where the man's reserves of contained nervous energy come from. "Voldemort watched," Malfoy points out, as if that makes it any better. "We didn't learn anything new at all."

Ron sits very still and tries not to wish he were Hermione. He swallows and wonders why his throat hurts. "Will we learn anything from you? Is any of this actually worth it?"

Malfoy sees too much and Ron shifts uncomfortably, another confession, how much power he doesn’t have to stop these things. Malfoy studies him again and seems to have been spending an inordinate amount of time doing that during their brief period of re-acquaintance. "You'll learn," he grunts finally. "There's a lot I know that your side would like to know. But by the time you get what you want it'll be useless." He pauses again and Ron feels like a spectator. "Not like there's really all that many of us out there left to betray, now, is there?"

Ron shrugs and feels how his shoulders have cramped, hanging from his spine, which, in bizarre counterpoint to the rest of him, seems to have decided to stopped pinching. "Hermione's extracted and synthesised a boggart enzyme, something to do with a flux-receptive endocrine system. She's promised me she'll have you by the end of next week at the latest."

Malfoy sits very still in his turn, and Ron can't watch him anymore. They sit like that for too long and it's never long enough, and eventually Malfoy laughs and Ron feels sick again. "Do you ever get the feeling we both ended up on the wrong sides?" Malfoy asks him.

Ron looks up as sharply as he can without feeling his neck snap. Those aren't his thoughts but the words fit, and he can't make up his mind whether he should be suspicious of Malfoy or feel an odd connection.

"Too bad you guys killed off all the dementors," Malfoy continues on blithely. "Your girl would have had a field day with their innards. My side was never this innovative."

"That would be why you lost," Ron comments helpfully, mind still wandering.

"One of many reasons, yes," Malfoy blandly adds, and Ron thinks he looks far too surreptitiously curious to be a mentally stable captive.

But then his own judgement of late could obviously be considered within reproach.

His decision comes quick and his hip burns like it has the whole evening. He clears his throat, trying not to shuffle closer. "We had Harry. That was a reason." Ron pauses. "He was almost a Slytherin, you know. Nobody's supposed to know that."

Malfoy tries to laugh again and breaks out into coughing instead. "And I'm a loving Hufflepuff. Potter was never almost a Slytherin. He -"

"He said the hat talked for ages at Sorting, and it never even hesitated with you or me, and -"

"Let me finish, Weasley; you'd be surprised what will get around your enemy's camps."

Ron thinks he might hear more offensive references to his parentage and how that relates to interrupting people, but he keeps quiet and refrains from pointing out that he's head of the most expansive intelligence network the wizarding world has ever known. And maybe he wouldn't be so surprised after all.

"Potter was never almost a Slytherin. He maybe could have been a Slytherin, or perhaps he came close to being a Slytherin, but that's not how these things work, is it? Either you're one thing or the other, and if Sorting Hats were Every Flavour beans... not in a fractal infinitude would you find one that would put Potter into Slytherin." Malfoy breaks off and Ron fails to understand how he hasn't simply dropped conveniently dead in this small hole. "But that's not what you want to talk about at all, is it?"

"No," Ron mumbles, feeling unsuddenly childlike and trying to work out the last time Every Flavour beans were available to the general populace. He begins to become aware of quite how long he talked for that first night and quite how long Malfoy listened. He's embarrassed and nervous and Malfoy settles him with just a look.

"You want to play what-if." Malfoy answers himself with resolve as Ron continues to look up at him uncomfortably. "Don't look so stupid and don't look so surprised; it's anachronistic."

Ron looks a little startled and mumbles some more, about nobody else ever even considering how different their worlds could be.

Malfoy waves him off with a bony hand still straining for elegance. "Fortunately for you I am well-practised in the game of what-if, having had to become accustomed to this particular exercise being imposed upon me by weak and inferior minds." Ron stares and Malfoy wears a mask of poorly disguised impatience. "What?" he continues. "As far as I am aware, nobody else of your acquaintance is the leader of a downtrodden people. Now get on with it."

"What," Ron begins, rediscovering his stutter, "what if, if... what if we'd lost at Ely?" Ron finishes lamely, but feeling a flash of pride regardless.

"The Death Eaters would still have lost at Sheringham Beach, but we might possibly have held onto Tintagel for a week or so longer."

Ron scrabbles for his words, but all he can come up with is "Why?"

Malfoy is surprisingly patient. But very condescending. "Because a win at Ely would have lifted morale, and when Bella sent word that she would appear to back us up more of the troops would have been gullible enough to believe her. They'd have stayed in place at Tintagel for a little while longer, but not more than a few days. The Sheringham Beach fray was lost because we'd been kept up all night supervising ritual slaughter and you were all freshly rested. It had nothing to do with Ely, whatever your pamphlets say. Anything else?"

"Um." Ron looks for Malfoy's contempt, and it's sort of there, it simply feels less personal than he'd thought was customary. "What if we hadn't managed to retrieve Snape in time?"

"We'd have been decimated at Beltane anyway, information leak or no." There's something in Malfoy's detachment that Ron fails to understand, and his educator continues. "You had the superior numbers. And Potter was unstoppable that night. You're remarkably negative about all this."

Ron closes his eyes and wonders if the world spins more or less in the dark. He has nothing but platitudes, and his questions are lost. "Am I?"

When did Malfoy get this talkative? Ron can't follow him, thinks things were easier when Malfoy was less cooperative, and that's so Slytherin because this is just the time when being uncooperative would fit in better with Ron, makes cooperative exactly not what he wants, makes it uncooperative and bloody annoying.

"Yes. You're all about losing. Death Eaters normally ask all their questions about winning, which actually means your what-ifs are the exactly the same as their what-ifs, and..."

"What if we'd lost completely?" Ron blurts out, and he doesn't know if he's asking because it matters or because he just can't stand to listen anymore. He tries to recover his ground, recapture, anything. "Everything, I mean... And you'd won." He fades out to thoughts of pathetic, because, how much further is there really there for him to fall, and, who'd have known there was this, even, sat on a floor with a numb arse talking to a monster.

Malfoy sighs softly and Ron tries not to look at him. "Wizarding utopia," he breathes out, and it's odd, because Ron always thought they were the idealists, not the Death Eaters. Malfoy looks like he's about to say something else, but then he gets lost a little, shoulders tightening, breath catching. Ron thinks, blimey, he's finally found a way to shut Malfoy up, and then he inadvertently follows Malfoy wherever it is he's gone, tries to work out what 'wizarding utopia' means coming from the likes of Malfoy.

He comes up short and doesn't understand it. Malfoy looks like he might start to sway any moment now, and Ron doesn't want that right now. Fits of concentration, he understands, but Malfoy can hold it together a bit longer, he thinks.

"Where would I be?" Ron clears his throat. "Who'd be left alive? What would be your job?"

"Hmm?" Malfoy returns. "I don't know what you mean."

Ron watches him uncertainly.

"Oh. My job? Would depend on who else was left alive. I doubt I'd be supervising such a mundane operation as this, though." The glazed look hasn't entirely left Malfoy, and Ron watches it with all the fascination he can muster. "Something with prestige. That'd be me."

"And me?" Ron intercedes, once it's clear Malfoy's not detouring from his self-obsession anytime soon without being prompted.

"You?" Malfoy sneers. "What about you? You wouldn't be anybody. You think you'd be doing better than I am now? You wouldn't. You'd be dead, or getting the Dementor's Kiss, or rotting in some dungeon somewhere..."

This very dungeon, Ron thinks, leaving Malfoy to continue on for a few more non-stop minutes, time filled with fantasy and the vindictive horror Ron would always have expected.

"You could never be me," Ron pronounces suddenly, unsure whether he's studying the Draco Malfoy in front of him or the idea of one in his head. For a moment Malfoy doesn't look like he's going to stop, that just because he could go on like this all day means he will, and in that moment Ron thinks he's lost him. The quickening slide from sanity that a place like this will do to a person, Ron has read the studies and observed himself, and the stop-start slip is nothing that can be controlled, he knows this.

Malfoy is doubtless close, as anyone always is, close to skidding, close to falling without footing, and whilst Ron has patience he doubts there's any real point.

But Malfoy breaks off, albeit a little shakily, and Ron shifts a sigh of relief. The pain in his spine melts into his arms, spreading and weighting, the sharpness hanging there. Ron watches Malfoy watching him watch him, and sees them both settle into the diversion of thoughts gone to places they don't even need or know to concern themselves with. They don't know how they get their thoughts there either, and that's another thing to not bother worrying about. The compulsion or addiction or habit, Ron can't make up his mind which to label it, works differently here, slipping between them next to the silence and space, and it feels a lot better than it does between a mattress and the blank black face of the ceiling in his bed chamber.

Coherence of self blurs with time, and Ron wonders if the moments usually flicker by as vapidly and immediately in the silence of a cell. He thinks it might be different to be here always, maybe nothing would work as a prisoner, and he suspects the only person he could ask is himself, and he doesn't dare.

Time; they don't have forever no matter how much Ron plans to take for himself. The light in the corner is flashing now, another annoyance carefully designed to aggravate the subject and achieve their ends. It is bright and artificial and very, very bright, and Ron thinks that would hurt his eyes along with everything else if he could still tell the difference between hurt and comfort. He stands by pulling himself up the wall and pushing his legs to work as he is accustomed to doing, and he falls to sit on the metal bar bed, the hurt of that a comfort where Malfoy will not take it.

He rucks up his shirt and sticks his hips out, shoving at his waistband. Malfoy watches either curious or alarmed, and Ron thinks that's interesting, he really does, but he's too tired of all this to really engage with just how interesting. He undoes his belt buckle and lifts his eager fingers to the buttons. Malfoy clears his throat and breaks the silence, because he seems to be good at breaking things. Ron's better at breaking people, he thinks abruptly, him and Hermione have a career of it, and their best ever job was Ron himself.

"Weasley, I don't know what you think you're doing, but I went through the sexual humiliation malarkey weeks ago. It didn't work then, it isn't going to work now, and you really did seem to have moved on to far more imaginative methods."

Ron pauses again and tries to work out how many times he can pause in a row. A pause in a pause, and he looks up to Malfoy's pursed and only slightly quivering lips. His eye still twitches. He's not sure which pause this is. "I know, I saw Colin's photos."

"Well then, what in the... ah." Ron has watched Malfoy go from curious to less comfortable to a more settled state possibly related to relief, although Ron wouldn’t like to say for sure, and Ron’s wand tickles at the skin pulled shallow over his hip as the card falls free.

Ron unfolds it and picks up the two tiny pills between his fingers, clumsily arranging them in the palm of his hand. They make his skinny digits seem fat and swollen, and he waits for Malfoy to come to him. He has to; he does.

"We have them for field operatives. Standard issue. They work..." Ron frowns and works out this is the one time in his life that recitation of drilled in information will add nothing. He shrugs it away nervously. "It dissolves on your tongue and you're dead before you can swallow."

Malfoy stares bewitched at the wafer thin death on Ron's palm, and Ron knows he understands when he hears lost murmurs bemoaning the loss of Snape's genius to the Death Eaters.

"We were to take them in the, in the case of capture, and." Ron swallows and feels his breath gather pace. "If we got... I had some from when... I had some spare."

Malfoy looks up to study Ron, closer than he studied the pair of pills, and he has returned to silence. Ron thinks it's a quieter kind of silence, and the degrees of it make no sense to him. He tries to meet Malfoy's eyes over and over, can't quite stick to looking away, and he doesn't have a clue what it means to be Gryffindor anymore. There's nothing left to betray. "I thought we could," he adds lamely.

Malfoy sits on the bed, and that's the first time Ron's ever seen him do that. He sits back down again next to him and thinks repetitively that this is uncomfortable enough as a bench but something truly awful as a place to sleep. He wonders if the person that designed it has ever brought Harry coffee.

The playing card must be dry and brittle by now and it flaps between Malfoy's fingers, having forced a stoop in order to pick it up. The cracks run too small and too many to do anything other than conglomerate, and now it is Ron's turn to watch every facet of Malfoy's expression, no possible doubt that he's more nervous than his captive. Ron thinks he might have more to lose but doesn't dare say it.

"I was the last picture card out there, wasn't I?" Malfoy says finally, and Ron sighs because he doesn't quite follow.

"We think so, yes. Our sources say MacMillan died in Reykjavik."

"It was monastery outside Novgorod, actually," Malfoy corrects absently. His portrait stares up at him fixedly, and if it wasn't for the occasional blink Ron would think the fold had deadened it. And then Malfoy leaves it, presses the card flat at his side and leaves it be. "You killed my father before the cards were made."

"Yeah," Ron agrees, because it's difficult to disagree with such simple facts when he was there at their occasion. He places the pills on a metal bar to give the palm of his hand a rest, and they blend in like they were designed to, dull dark green against the dull dark grey.

It takes Malfoy longer than he would have thought to come up with an answer, but time is a difficult thing to keep track of. The answer Ron gets is over his head, above him.

"I don't want to kill myself," Malfoy says, and Ron says behind jaw lock, oh shit, because Ron knows they're both dead now anyway, and Hermione will get Malfoy to talk and tell her this... sometime next week. "I don't want this poison," Malfoy says, "I don't want to die like this."

You'll wish you were dead long after you've forgotten how to count how many times you've wished it, Ron says, and it'll be the last thing you think before you forget everything else.

"I have to think of what this means," Malfoy says. "I have to think of what I stand for."

There's no going back once she takes you.

"I want to die a pureblood death."

Ron sits bewildered.

"I'm the last picture card left, but I have to believe, there are others that think and dream and will fight like I do still out there. More than you realise."

Ron doesn't think he knows anyone that thinks they still stand for something. Believing is a dream replaced by demand. He hopes Malfoy kisses him soon.

"And there will be more. Wizards won't stay blind forever..."

Will snarl and tear his trousers down, half the buttons already loose.

"The last they'll have to look at; I should be a pureblood death."

...fuck him through the knifehurt bed, with his stubborn pride and kill.

"I want to die by magic."

...

hard

...

"...avada kedavra."

...

Ron stops short. The snap back to actually happening is shockingly instant, and Ron hadn't thought his mind could still move that quickly. His back hurts again, the crack of bamboo or any broken wand, and it's something when he realises he didn't notice that the slice of hurt was gone for those few moments. "What?" he asks, lost in new ways.

"The Killing Curse. I think I'd prefer it."

Ron rocks forwards and is relieved when Malfoy doesn't move to catch him. He stares in disbelief and notices that one of the pills is gone and Malfoy's fist is clenched, that yes Malfoy always did know how to ask for too much but he obviously hasn't completely lost it.

Unlike Ron, who thinks the entire world has long been past barmy, and he's confused because he hadn't realised he still tried to think that there was somehow else it was supposed to be. He tries to work out where to begin and has nothing but stupid words. "But that's an Unforgivable."

For the first time in Malfoy's space, Ron's aware of things he's supposed to be hiding. Malfoy watches him more, a shade confused but Ron sees his acquired patience assert itself, and if Malfoy was Dumbledore - strange thought - Ron thinks now would be when he would be offered a sherbet lemon.

"Don't go soft on me now, Weasley; I don't know which war you were fighting in but the one I saw wasn't survived by staying soft." And that's what they did, of course, survive it. The ideas tease and insinuate, and Ron thinks, hands and knees, Malfoy would want him on his hands and knees.

"What difference does it make if you die from poison or a curse?" There's no difference, dead is dead, and Ron doesn't care how it ends now just as long as it does. He should have been dead long ago, he thinks, he should have died in the war, another name unremarkable to the masses, and he knows he's not supposed to think that, with all the wizards and witches who lost their lives and contributed to keeping him alive. It feels like that anyway, like he got left on stage for act after act because he missed his exit in the first or second scene.

Apparently there's a difference between potions and curses and Ron's grateful Malfoy doesn't appear to want to try to explain. "Slytherins don't like poison," Malfoy minimally informs, trying to get Ron to work this out but obviously not holding out much hope.

Ron almost laughs, clinging to the facts. "Slytherins are known for liking poison. The two are practically synonymous."

"I don't think..." Malfoy pauses, considering, and Ron thinks this is the closest to a thoughtless hesitation that he's seen from him. "That's killing other people with poison. Not ourselves. Slytherins," he expounds, "do not as a rule like dying at all, and poison," - the valves in the veins of Malfoy's wrists look like they might have failed - "is the worst there is. It'd be like playing quidditch for England and then plummeting to your death from your broom on a peaceful day in the country."

Ron grumbles and takes Malfoy's word for it. "I don't want to cast it," he complains.

Malfoy seems to be thinking very carefully. Ron can almost see him balancing scales. Finally, most deliberately, "Please?"

And then it is Ron's turn, because this wasn't in his scrabbling plan. He reaches over to the floor where Malfoy's hood got discarded, and the material is cold and lifeless between his fingers. Ron wonders how long ago the warmth from Malfoy's annoying face left the cloth, whether Malfoy will leave any trace on this room or wipe away clean like so many others. He lifts it to his own face and only just resists the urge to place it over his head. But it's close enough that Ron can tell it still smells of Malfoy.

He twirls it on his wand in clumsy circles because this is anything but a game.

"I don't know how," he admits eventually, thinking of battlefields and all the green flares he's seen. He tries to work out why the world was never blurry then, draws a blank and doesn't think he'd recognise his own hand in front of his face now, the way his vision is smeared.

Malfoy looks like he's about to say something but the words get bitten off. Ron thinks Malfoy looks surprised, thinks they need to stop surprising each other because it can hardly be appropriate to find the world full of surprises when they're about to kill themselves. "What do you mean, you don't know how?" Malfoy's voice is full of scorn but Ron can't care and doesn't think he means it, not really.

Ron shrugs. "It's an Unforgivable. We take that label rather literally on our side."

There's no point in getting defensive or sermonizing.

"Literally? You mean... you've never cast one?" Malfoy sounds either extremely vexed or like he's just discovered a sixty-year-old virgin life-long resident of a brothel. His incredulity is this time undoubtedly inappropriate.

"No," Ron confirms. "They're deeply prohibited curses. Nobody on our side uses them." Nobody with a name, at least. If Ron could see why to bother, he'd regurgitate words, he'd say something about the small things that he used to be so convinced made them the good guys.

"You're hilarious, you know that?" Ron knows that Malfoy would be laughing violently if Malfoy wasn't wise enough to know the breathing would hurt. "Un-fucking-believable. You fought an entire war without touching the three principle curses known to wizard kind. You, you..."

"And we won," Ron points out, once again seeing no reason to be other than helpful.

Malfoy doesn't seem to care and is, for once, unable to find a suitable simile. "I'm not sure whether to call you on hypocrisy or farce, Weasley. You completely disregard over a millennium of knowledge, the fundamentals of the wealth of culture and learning at your disposal, just so your little Mudblood friends can have their sadistic shot at producing their own. You have no idea of the heritage you're throwing away. Shit, you skipped right past Cruciatus without even considering, hesitating, and now you have the kind of institutionalised torture Death Eaters couldn't even invent in pure fantasy..."

Snap. Ron snaps up, trying to kindle. "It's not torture," he has that small protest left.

Malfoy's eyebrows shoot up and Ron had forgotten he could look like that.

"It's not."

Shuffle. What is it then, says the voice in his head.

"It's, it's judicial and strategic application of pressure as constituent to ongoing interrogation methods." Ron blushes and the words spew out. "It's known as counter-resistance strategies. There are... techniques."

"And that's not torture."

Ron doesn't know why he clings to this. "It's not. Torture has to be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." If there's one last thing he believes in.

"Quantifying pain never seems like such a good idea to me." Malfoy speaks far more calmly and impassively than Ron thinks he's ever heard him. It's a voice to fall into, smooth, the promise of peace. "I say you torture. I say it's systematic, and I can't decide whether I think that's 'worse' than malicious torture or not."

"That's not what we do," Ron says, deadened even more, and it's funny, he thinks, how he can be more than a little dead, very dead, exquisitely dead, and there are blacker shades of black than can be considered rational. "If causing severe pain is not our objective, we lack the requisite specific intent."

Malfoy isn't laughing at him anymore. "That's an entirely different argument, you know."

Ron tries again.

"We would be guilty of torture only if we acted with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within our control."

"Makes me feel so much better to know it wasn't anything personal."

"...as we have a good-faith belief that our actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, we lack the mental state necessary for our actions to constitute torture..."

Malfoy is still quiet, and Ron would carry on quoting, but he wants to kill himself sometime before sunrise and that isn't going to happen if he decides to recite the entire stack of memos. He doesn't think Malfoy could have anything to say, because their definition of the word is crafted and perfected.

"What you've been doing...the things you've..." Malfoy swallows, and it's one of the first times Ron's noticed Malfoy at all discomfited with his treatment. He clears his throat. "To me. The essence of boggart you've got planned. All the broken people. They don't count as mental harm?"

Ron shrugs a little lamely. "Our side thinks you're all bonkers anyway."

"Ah," Malfoy says, with sudden satisfaction, like that explains it. "My side just thinks you're inferior and incapable of making responsible decisions for yourselves."

They nod their heads in synchronicity as if in enlightened comprehension of an important truth, and it takes a while before Malfoy breaks the silence again. Ron hopes this will be the last time he gets the chance to.

"What do they call us, in these handbooks of yours?"

"Unlawful combatants," Ron replies, seeing no reason not to humour Malfoy, who nods again as if he's acquired yet another truth. "Do you want me to kill you or not?" Ron's finally doing this, and if he wasn't so bone-weary he'd feel like dancing.

"If you wouldn't mind," Malfoy replies placidly. "You have to shift your grip - like this - and remember not to roll your R too heavily."

Ron thinks Malfoy could have had a good career as an instructor. "That's it?"

Malfoy shrugs again and suppresses a wince when his shoulders grate. "Pretty much. You'll feel the Dark Magic reach through and do most of the work for you. Get the job done nicely. Stand, speak and point, Weasley, even you can't fuck this one up."

It's so much more convincing when Malfoy puts it like that, more so than when the voices in his head word the sentiment exactly the same way.

Ron checks his grip and feels the smallest tingle. He throws away the hood from where it still dangles off the end of his wand, new strength in his knees as he stands. Malfoy tells him this has great prestige, that some of the greatest wizards born cast their first Unforgivable in this dungeon. He says he was a second year and the house elves were chained up on the far wall.

Ron thinks he's forgotten something. "Don't you want to fuck me first?"

Malfoy looks at him like he's a scarred war veteran, which he is, and not yet past 25. If Ron had any doubts before, they're gone now, because he can see the pity and recognition swirled in with the contempt, a marbled mess of contrasts. He stands up to face Ron, close enough for it to be impossible to miss. "I can think of few things I'd like less," he spits out. "Now lets get this done."

Adjusting his stance, Ron thinks of confused mercy. He swallows. "I'm still not comfortable casting an Unforgivable," he says, unsure whether he's really stalling or not.

The patience goes nowhere, even though Ron's fairly sure Malfoy hates having to exercise it. "Bollocks, Weasley, it's just another spell. I forgive you. You're forgiven, you’re fine. Go -"

The light flashes green just as the light in the corner flashes white, and all through him all Ron can feel is dark. He folds his wand into his sleeve and Malfoy lies dead at his feet. Ron stoops to examine Malfoy's own feet, retrieving the old bag and folding it over them.

Strange.

The first body he hasn't felt sick around.

He takes the step over Malfoy to press both pills to a fingertip, and he cracks his head on the corner of the bench falling to the ground as he sucks on his fingers.