The Kill

"What if I wanted to break
Laugh it all off in your face
What would you do?
What if I fell to the floor
Couldn't take all this anymore
What would you do, do, do?

"Kill
Break me down
Bury me, bury me
I am finished with you

"What if I wanted to fight
Beg for the rest of my life
What would you do?
You say you wanted more
What are you waiting for
I'm not running from you

"Kill
Break me down
Bury me, bury me
I am finished with you
Look in my eyes
You're killing me, killing me
All I wanted was you

"I tried to be someone else
But nothing seemed to change
I know now, this is who I really am inside
Falling from myself
Falling for a chance
I know now, this is who I really am

"Kill
Break me down
Bury me, bury me
I am finished with you, you, you
Look in my eyes
You're killing me, killing me
All I wanted was you
Come, break me down
Break me down
Break me down

"What if I wanted to break...?"

30 Seconds to Mars singing...

The Kill

The girl enters the room, and she is instantly cold. Of course, she is always cold. Her hair is glossy and healthy--a beautiful brown. Her eyes are the same exact shade of brown, although they are dull and not nearly as healthy as her hair. Eyes require a soul behind them. Hair does not. She is thin but buxom. Many young women would kill to have her figure, or perhaps kill themselves. Her diet is that of the bare minimum by which she can survive.

The room is grey and modern. The windows are tall and rectangular. A blue light shines through, illuminating the room in a light that somehow gives the illusion that there is no such thing as day, there is no such thing as night. There is only grey. Her existence has long been devoid of color. In this place, everything is colorless. There is no good. There is no bad. There is no anger, no hatred, no happiness, no contentedness. It is a place of quiet reflection or screaming insanity. And most often it is both.

A man sits at the table, files neatly splayed before him, presenting information and notes--her diet, her behavior, her symptoms, her diagnosis, her political affiliations, her birthplace, her I.D. number, and her living quarters. Her entire identity is sitting before him. She is not a body and mind; she is a few sheets of paper with a morbidly expressionless picture that stares out at him. He does not like her withering gaze, so he glances one last time at her information, already having memorized it weeks before, and then gathers all the papers into one stack, taps them smartly into order along their bottoms, then puts them down right before him. Their bottoms are precisely parallel with the edge of the table, and the table is precisely parallel with the lines drawn across the world.

The man himself is remarkable. Others in his field, and still others in the social hierarchy of life, see him and they know him instantly. They either nod their heads and say, "Doctor," in tones that suggest a healthy respect for his name, his title, his wealth, and his job; or they avoid eye contact altogether and walk a bit faster until they can no longer see him over their shoulder. He cannot tell which one he hates more. The leper-treatment...or the unquestioning respect.

The man's eyes are coldly blue. At one time, someone may have remarked that there was a place for kindness in them. Now, they would not dare, either because they are afraid or because that place for kindness is no longer existent. His hair is white and entirely colorless. He is like the establishment he created--grey, but young and dazzling.

He watches the girl walk down the hall then sit in the chair beside diagonal from him. She does all this very slowly, as if every step was heavier, as if she knew she was selling her soul. She wasn't, really. She was selling his, but he had lost count of the cases won.

"Miss Granger," he says, looking down at his sheet of paper. "Your week seems to have been going poorly. Would you like to tell me why?" His voice is clipped and perfect, his American accent strange with its perfect accuracy. He is an educated man. He has traveled many places and seen many things, but he finally decided to come home to his true passion.

She stares straight ahead, her lips pursed. He cannot tell what she thinks, or if she even truly thinks anymore. She is a one-person tragedy. She is Caesar and Oedipus and Othello and Hamlet all convoluted into the biggest sob story the world would never hear. If it could hear, it would weep even harder.

She then looks down at her hands in her lap, twisting them one over another. She seems fascinated by the movement, following her fingernails with her dull eyes. "They are all dramas," she says aloud.

"I'm sorry, Miss Granger, I didn't catch that," the man says clearly.

"Harry's is called The Hero. He wrote it himself. He always liked to have control over his story. But Ron's, oh no. His is written by me and his sister. He always centered his life around the women that loved him most. His mother was gone before his tragedy could be written. His is called Trust Me For I Shall Not Forsake Thee. He never did. I have forsaken him." She could be telling anyone this story. Were she in the cafeteria with the other madmen and women, she would be saying the same things. But this man is her audience, and he is the recipient of the information.

Luckily for him, he is the first person she had spoken to of this.

"Ginny's is a little more complicated. She wrote hers, and then she rewrote it. She tried to erase the second version and recover the first, but once you've changed your first idea, it has evolved and is now tainted. Ginny, you can never come back, my love. No second chances for you!" She ends the last sentence in a scream, bringing her fists down so hard that the man hears the wood give a little.

"You know what I think?" she whispers. "I think that the year one thousand, nine hundred, ninety-four was cursed. I think someone closed their eyes on a map of time and picked a cursed year at random. You see, for me it started then. For me, it didn't even start with our people. No, it started with Rwanda." Her face takes on a faraway look. "What the hell did I care about eight-hundred thousand people dying for a cause that I didn't really understand? My best friends wanted to kill each other. I was going to the Yule Ball with Viktor Krum. THE Viktor Krum!" she laughs, shaking her head, staring ahead at the wall thirty feet away. "Then there was being noticed by boys for the first time. I wasn't just the smart girl from Gryffindor that should have been in Ravenclaw. I wasn't just Harry Potter's potential lover. I wasn't his best friend. I was that pretty girl that went with Viktor Krum, best seeker in the world, international Quidditch player, Bulgarian bon-bon, and Durmstrang champion. And I had fun! Oh god it was fun.

"Thousands of miles away, on the other side of mountains, seas, gulfs, rivers, countries...people were dying. They were the same people and they were killing each other. Let the Americans handle it, we all said. We Europeans had other things to do. Like attend balls with Quidditch players.

"Finally the Rwandans figured it out themselves. They could never really account for the deaths it had taken to get that far. But hey, it happened every few years, right? I mean, it was just a bit more modernized. The genocides in Rwanda weren't that big of a deal until they got coverage. But even then, who gave a damn about a few Africans countries away? The Americans sure as hell didn't. If I had known, I would have. But what could I have done?

"The point is, no one cared. No one helped them. They were alone, and they learned that you can never depend on the rest of the world because the rest of the world will fuck you over royally!"

The man blinks in surprise--there was anger in her voice. This should not be so. His programs were created to take the anger out. The participants are not supposed to feel. They are supposed to be observed, to be watched and understood. They are not supposed to observe, watch, or understand. They are not supposed to remember the emotions of their memories.

"And then He came back. You-Know-Who," she whispers. "Oh fuck, what's he going to do to me now? Voldemort. That's what his goddamn name was. If you Americans had any goddamn sense, you would know it and you would kill that bastard. You would have killed him before it was necessary for me to be here, before people began to die.

"They didn't start dying in the beginning, though. We thought he would start murdering left and right, make up for lost time. But no, not old Tom Riddle. Nah. He wanted to eliminate competition. Elongate the suffering by getting the problems out of the way. But Harry thwarted him again. Good ol' Harry. Harry the Tragedy." She shakes her head, looking down once more at her hands.

"When Dumbledore died, we were all terrified. Hogwarts? Impossible. Our homes? Impossible. The streets? Impossible. No, we went on a search for the Horcruxes. And we were successful. We just kept hitting and hitting and hitting, and there was no missing. But that's when we realized something was horribly wrong. And Harry died. Ron died, too, but that was later--when the genocide started.

"Left and right, people were dying! Mudbloods and Muggles were being stood in town squares and a row of wizards would casually flick their wands. Knives would spray into the fray. If you were lucky, you died right away. If not, you had to suffer through five hours of the Cruciatus. Just one of their simpler ways to scare the shit out of people, you know?

"We fought like hell, I promise you, we did. And you know what? We did a good job. We exported over three THOUSAND Muggleborns. But it wasn't enough, really. We couldn't get the Muggles out. We couldn't get the Half-bloods or the blood traitors out. Oh no. They were gone to us. Too much indecision on how to do it, who had to go first. By the time we reached a decision, it didn't matter anymore. The choices were obsolete, irrelevant, and the most horrifying revelation hit me: No one was left to help us. We had not helped the wizards trying to sort out Rwanda, and now we, too, were being murdered for the same reasons. Maybe we looked the same and we sounded the same and we could pass for one another, but goddamn it, it was the same stupid prejudices." She laughs bitterly and wipes a hand over her dry eyes. No more tears.

"Have you ever heard that poem? The one about the Holocaust? 'First they came for the Jews, and I kept silent because I was not a Jew' or something like that?" The man shakes his head slowly. "Great poem, and it's so true. But even more, it's applicable. One day I came upon that in a book--that was one thing they couldn't take from me, books--and I fell on my knees, my face in the dirt. Oh god, the signs, we should have seen them. The hands of GOD were bearing down at us, screaming at us for our ignorance and our apathy. And we were drowning in our own sins and idiocy. How stupid!

"You're wrong, you know," she says, turning to him. Her eyes are alive. "I can still feel the pain, but more than the loss, I feel the stories. Yours--it's an expository script of how to be a success and still suck the souls from people's being. Voldemort's is one of an empty heart and a broken soul--literally. Dumbledore's is a story of a great man. He is the man that made me realize that one may only be good if one's good intentions and ideas becomes one's good actions. And my story, it's a chapter of shoulda coulda woulda's. Of Britain, it's the book from which my chapter comes. It's a story of hypocrisy and ignorance, of what we should have done, which was what we could have done and what we would have done if we had known what we were sacrificing. Of the world's? It's a library of books about good intentions, holocausts, genocides, bad ideas, good actions, love, hatred, ignorance, apathy, empathy, danger, lust, fornication, babies, children, life, beauty, ugly, tenderness, brutality, violence, and guilt. Mostly everything's bad. But sometimes, everything's good.

"So, I don't give a damn what your treatments are supposed to be. I say, fuck you." She stands up and stares down at him triumphantly, her eyes ablaze with maniacal glee.

"Granger, I see you are a failed case," the man says, writing one last note in his notepad and closing it. He takes out his wand, opens her file, points his wand at her picture, and mutters an incantation. Instantly, a large red FAILED appears on her picture. He turns to Hermione and cocks his head to the side. "And I was ready to bring you out into society," he says sadly. "You were so ready, I thought." Hermione realizes with a start that his accent is not American at all. It is British. That makes no sense. But the blonde hair? The blue eyes? She had seen those before. She hates those! She hates them! Her head screams, MURDERER!! MURDERER!! MURDERER!! MURDERER!!

He points his wand at her and says as calmly as possible, "Avada Kedavra." He has become such an accomplished executioner that it barely took any will whatsoever these days to destroy someone.

He picks up her files, steps over her body, and leaves. When he exits the hall, he motions to an assistant. The little man's shoes squeak irritatingly on the white tile. Everything is white in this hallway. They are bathed in the lack of color. "Yes, Dr. Malfoy?" the little man asks pleasantly. The Dark Lord has hired him personally, vouching for his utter responsibility and commitment to the work of making Mudbloods civilized slaves for society.

"Patient 103171 has failed and has been executed. Dispose of the body and please file her records." Dr. Malfoy hands the little man the records and then heads to his office, his whole being shaken by today's events. His system has not worked on one patient, which means that other patients could have slipped through. As he realizes the implications of this, all the blood drains from his face. The slaves he "cleanses" are nannies, maids, concubines, and occasionally wives. They live in homes all over Britain. If there are ones as strong as Granger....

The first thing Malfoy does when he enters his office is to pour himself a tall brandy.

And then he drinks himself into a stupor, knowing how much he's going to miss Patient 103171. She was beautiful. Truthfully, he had been in love with her every week she had told him her story. Every time, it was the same story, but every week, it changed formats. From her story-telling and her love for Potter and Weasley, Draco had fallen in love with the old Hermione. Until just a few minutes ago, he thought that woman was dead.

"Now she is," he mutters, throwing back another drink of brandy. And you are safe from her, he whispers to himself.

"Now she is..." And she is safe from us.