Both Go Down (today i'll be your virginia)

Both Go Down

(today i'll be your virginia)

Another day, another fuck. Another touch, another moan, another groan in her ear harsh like a bite, like a rough lick of dirty tongue in dirty mouth.

It's another meal, a way to keep eating, keep feeling, keep breathing (rough and heavy), keep living.

This hour's man brushes caked dirt off her nose (a possessive affection like her mother used to do, after she ran into the garden after the twins and the gnomes). He kisses her like a claimant, draws his fingers down her white-freckled-soot-stained throat, under the ragged fabric of her robes, then pulls the threadbare cloth away.

She lays back and thinks of nothing as he fucks her, smiling only when he walks away, a glistening smuggled galleon left on the ground beside the mattress.

__

It's a glorious world, Draco, Lucius says as the servant (no cloying, persistent house-elves in this new world order, but low-bred humans trained in silent obedience, cut to measure for their new-found roles) brings another glass of mint-sprigged iced tea, laced with a dash of firewhisky in the mid-afternoon.

It is, Draco repeats, with a just-for-practise sneer. It is, he is sure, for the mudbloods are in their place, and he is in his, high above the Dover cliffs, the land the Muggles took with their flashing blinding neon lights and dirty progress pavement.

The world is pure now, pure and magic, and he sits in quiet thought as he contemplates the view downwards.

__

Afternoon are quiet, and Ginny tells the other girls (Luna and the mudbloods and the pretty Muggle girls who got mixed in amidst the rubble) that she likes it, but she hates it.

At least when she's fucking, she forgets.

Forgets the last flashes of green light, the falling sinking back against the table where they once ate porridge and practiced charms on the first years. Forgets the shock, the bang, the waking up hours later in chains, Cruel Laughter Woman shoving her in with Vicky Frobisher and a half-dead Hannah Abbott (she'd watched her die, screams against the backdrop of groaning moaning torture. She said there was nothing to be done, but Ginny didn't really try).

Forgets the long summer days, the winter nights by the fire, brothers complaining about jumpers maroon or - merlin forbid - chartreuse. She was the only girl, the only one, pampered and left out and a little bit of dirt on her nose because she'd tried to be a boy.

She'd tried to be a lot of things, and now she wasn't trying, not really.

It was easier than dying, at least now that her wand was gone.

__

The sunlight streams in Draco's window beneath the white-lace curtain (he always thought it was girly, but his mother chose it before she disappeared, and he doesn't have the heart to change it).

There's nothing to do; he goes back to sleep.

__

Ginny walks in the woods while the boys are off building, building the pristine cottages for the purebloods of modest means, taking down the desolate gaudy muggle artifacts that lurk still just out of sight. It's a long day's walk, but Ginny walks, too, by green plants that itch at her ankles and brown branches that tear at her robe. The fabric is nearly sheer now, pressing up against what curves she still has when it rains (which is often, as dust turns to mud and only slowly cakes back dry again). Some of the girls like to dream, like to talk, about finding, making, stealing a wand and charming a new one, glittery like a fairy tale rescue but only a pretty dress.

Ginny says the words, tells the stories. They think she has a nice laugh, so she giggles now and then.

__

Lucius closes the French door behind him and moves to Draco, a soft sudden hand on his shoulder. Draco might have jumped, might have listed towards the only-for-decoration railing at the edge. But the sudden steps behind him echo on the high suspended wood of the veranda and his blood doesn't seem to ever run desperate against his veins in this ever-same glorious world. He could have dropped his vodka tonic (twist of lime in the hot summer sun, to match the buzzing dullness in the humid late afternoon), if he hadn't been clutching the glass so tightly.

You're in your place, son, Lucius says. In your place in this world that we have made for you.

Draco looks up at him and wants to say that if this is truly his place, truly so high up, so close to the clouds and the glare and the sun, why is there nowhere to go but down.

__

Sometimes they don't leave her tent. Sometimes they stop breathing between thrusts, still hard inside her, just a few drops of precome, unfinished, unmoving, un-alive. She breathes on, pushes the weight off of her and waits for the next one.

Death is normal here; no one asks questions, no one cares. They don't really have names anymore, not here, not now.

__

The Manor is huge and airy, but Draco feels like he can't breathe. For once he is glad that his father has had the servant's tongues taken away. As he sneaks out the cellar door (the word has an air of salvation, even down in the basement), he can imagine Katie or Lissie or whatever her name is, whoever it is following him around with drinks and fans and flowers this time, coughing up her voice through her throat and trying, vainly, ever-so-vainly to alert his father.

He's not used to running, and his lungs are bursting as he hurries to the shade of the trees. The air is thick and hot and wet, and it's not much cooler there, not until it starts to rain, and his stiff white collar sticks to his neck, his white blond hair sticking to his forehead like when he was a little and his mother would take him for a haircut.

__

Ginny sees him, pristine robes getting dirty in the summer-rain mud, the falling leaves that can't hold up to the heavy downpour, and she grins.

Something different, maybe a day worth breathing, worth waking as the sun bears down straight over her head, this time.

She saunters up to him, and pretends that his untorn robes are not out of place beneath the hemlock and berries she picks when alone in the afternoon and stashes away before the boys come back.

He calls her Virginia and she wants to tell him that that's not her name. But he likes it, as he pulls the ragged fabric from her bony skin and watches as the rainwater washes the dirt off her breasts, running streams down her legs as he touches the water, touches her wetness, touches her cunt, like something new and different and miraculous, not just a few-knut diversion on a lazy afternoon.

She smiles and tells him she'll be his Virginia, that yes she's pure.

She is, in a way, and if she thought it was a way that mattered, it's somehow not anymore.

But whatever she says, as the robes are thrown to the ground, hers barely-lasting and his, spotless back in the cellar and stiff and starched even now as the mud stains the bottom, the rain pelts the topside wetting them heavy, it doesn't matter anymore.

Who he was and she was don't matter even if maybe they knew each other years ago in another world where people bothered with books and letters, where progress and knowledge weren't things to be torn down by dirty-blooded boys in labour camps who came home to tired fucks and another bottle of filthy-tasting sleep.

Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus, she remembers from some time ago, as she remembers the face, remembers the sneering smile now gone soft with satisfaction. And she reaches her fingers out against his bare white chest, dancing subtly softer than usual, just a little tickle, a tease of an edge of a fingernail as she giggles and plays the innocent and kisses him once on the cheek before she lets him lower her down into the mud.

The rain washes them off as they run naked back to the cellar, Ginny running after him, eager to see what she's missed, eager to wonder what another word in another place in another world might have brought her, but it's all chance anyway and she's here now. Padding up the hardwood stairs, she pretends she cares about him, pretends she's watching the way his wet-slick hair sticks to the pale, vulnerable skin of the back of his neck and not the crystal chandeliers, the gold and silver sconces, fine wax candlefire lighting the way up the hall as he slams the door shut behind her and smiles.

He feels alive for the first time as he takes her to his bed, white lace and satin, and fucks her, once, twice, again until he's exhausted and spent and sure his father's heard by now.

Bliss and exhaustion take over pure, blind need as he looks at her, kisses last lingering dirt from her shoulder. He bunches up the stained sheets, telling himself the blood isn't from where the nettles dug into his back in the woods, but from her, her purity, her blood spilling over his bed even if they'd already fucked out in the rainstorm.

Come, my Virginia, he says as he walks her out onto the terrace overlooking the cliffs, the gray-blue water foaming white beneath them.

It's beautiful, she says. It is, if one cared for beauty.

He puts his arms around her, wondering whether his father's heard them by now, sure now as bliss fades to fatigue falls to weariness, that he has lost the place so clearly set out for him in the pure white light airy house on the cliffs.

The water looks intriguing and he wants to feel the fall, wants to clasp his Virginia's hand as the air whirls past them, as they feel alive and away from her dirty camps and his bright white walls. They're the same, he knows, pure and trapped.

Come with me. We'll both go down together, splash against gray-blue choppy seas.

She looks down and imagines herself gone. She looks over at him, edging out to the precipice, then sneaking back for another kiss and he knows that his life, his father, rests just inside.

Come, he beckons. Please. He's asking for her, asking for her approval, waiting for her to take the first step over, the first tumble down.

And his knuckles clasp white to the white-iron railing.

No, she says, suddenly, and he turns towards her, runs a finger in her dirty ratted hair, red beneath the mud as the rain washed it down her bare body again.

His hand reaches for her breast, reaches for her, lets go of the railing, lets go of the house, and she pushes. He stumbles over and she watches him fall the long way down.

She steps to the edge, between the gate posts, and curls her toes over the edge.

It was always so hard to stop breathing, even when the routine was so full of gasps and moans and screams and dying.

But it's easy to fall (even from such a height).