The Colour of July (July!)

The Colour of July (July!)

You walk the lanes where colours have faded to grey, where the grass whistles an empty tune in the wind, which you cannot feel on your arms curled softly towards your shoulders, as you walk, as you float (footsteps three half-inches over the dirt and grime), as you remember.

The grounds have long since crumbled to dirt; the barn and the master's house have flamed to cinders. It's all dead and gone by now, and you cannot recall what everyone was fighting for.

You only know it meant something; you can feel the memory and the ache of purpose in your bones, though you feel nothing else now, not even the sun as it beats down on the bare flesh of your shoulder-blades.

_

You can hear the sounds of battles and crumbling cities, and it all filters out to the countryside, where business can be done in quiet and solitude.

You like it here. Things are in their place, and you can forge chaos in the peace, bloodletting and cutting through to the truth of things.

Some days, when the summer breeze blows lightly on the meadow, you fancy yourself a simple farm girl, charms to slaughter the cattle and potions to grow the grass green. Some days, your skirts blow up in the wind, and you can see him watching, and, shyly, with a husky, whispered promise of later, you return.

With Him, there is no promise of later. But that's not a surprise. It's not a game with him, it's a whispered word, to see the anger rise in the greying white of his scaly skin, to feel his cold hands flex tight against your scarred wrists, and to feel.

The games slide away, and you're here now, beneath him, on your knees in tattered robes as the prisoners, the infidels and scum-of-the-earth, look on.

You watch, as the others return to his favour, stories and smiles and little gifts on bended knee. You bend your knee, too, deeper and more scarred in the dirt of the rotting-down barn, but he brushes you aside. Falling to the ground, dirt caked into ancient wounds, and you glare.

You can feel their gaze upon you and you can feel the same tears burning hot against your eyes, the same tears cursed away (to two weeks of blindness) when you were fourteen and Narcissa called you ugly.

But your magic is stronger now, and you will them down, will them dry, and clench your wand in your fingers. A shout, a light, a hollow thud, a clatter of chains loosened against the internal struggle (which you have ended, now).

Your gift, a little Mudblood girl, one or the other, and you present her to your Lord.

Lucius laughs, says you're losing it, and you don't know what he's talking about.

So like a simple country girl, a milkmaid in the sun, you go outside and wait.

The sun shines, the wind blows, the grass dances a silvery green just before the lights shifts, the sun behind a cloud with a chill (and you shudder, arms-to-chest). The clatter does not stop, does not end. There's the rustle of maple leaves and the clang of metal, the grind of rust, and you can hear them.

How simple it is, to struggle-struggle, feel the binds and know they're there.

Not that you would ever try to leave. It's cold, even in July, when the sun goes down. Cold and desolate, all green-blue and bald-grey and you shiver out of his presence.

He walks outside after you and Lucius follows. You rise, you glare, you unfurl.

"Do not bring mercy," he says. The Dark Lord's lips are moving, but the voice is all Lucius, mechanically split, and it echoes in your head and it pains you.

"No, make it stop, make it stop," you say, the echo of the voices, the cold and the hiss, it's unreal and it breaks you at the edges.

"You made it stop."

Your Lord flicks his wand and the body drops down beside you. It splays in the dirt and you look at her face. It's familiar somewhere, as if in a distant dream when maybe you were still awake. Her red hair is all wrong, her face dead without bleeding, a colour that doesn't belong in the green and blue of July.

"We needed her," says Voldemort, and you know now, and you fall towards him. You lick your lips and begin to pray.

"Such rashness," says Lucius, and his voice cuts. "Such carelessness," and his wand cuts.

And you're standing, and you're bleeding, and it's hot against your fingers (his fingers were always so cold, as his eyes are now as he turns away).

The tin cups clamber on the iron bars, the chains rust and rattle, there's the low moan of dirty men, the wail of the women broken. You walk tall and proud, for you are not chickenfeed, you are not cattle-to-prod, you are better.

The blood drips, once, twice, thrice, to mark your trail as you return to the house.

You hold your fingers taut against your stomach, pushing your insides back where they belong. They fit poorly, they scatter and squish and the blood drips, staining your fingers, curling outline against your fingernails. You can feel the pain now, seeping through the haze, the red through the summer blues and greens as the sun slips back out again, the wind dies down, and it is so very hot.

It's one, two, ten steps to the washroom, to the little basin where the water is cold against your feverish heat that won't go away (only gets hotter). The water is a rusty-cold, and it screams in your wounds, washes red down the drain, red as rust and red as blood, and you think, that, yes, you've done it in your life. You've known brutality.

Perhaps, with his cold fingers, and looks away, he was not your Lord after all.

You get dizzy, and contemplate this, as you stare at the blood, little crimson drops, and watered-down rust as they swirl down the drain.

And you think, as you lean back against the mouldy tiling, that you could so easily be a simple farm-girl, skirts swirling in the wind, showering for a night of dancing, some hazy evening in July.

_

You do not remember a moment of change, when the colours left the world, when the wind whipped the trees but your skirts stayed limp down to your ankles. All you know is that you like this place, or did, and that you stay here. So you walk the grounds with your memories, and on breezy summer days, can hear the chicken chains that long ago rusted as they clatter wrist to iron, pulling and tugging towards freedom.