From Grey to Red

FROM GREY TO RED

Too many of her memories were filled with images of those hands, soft and deathly white yet strong and authoritative, demanding, and that voice, rich and low and deep, sinister, sharp as ice, but never more dangerous than his eyes.

Those hands, flipping pages in a book across the table from her in the library, that smirk of knowing blasting all confidence and composure from her when she snuck glances at him from behind her own book, an old copy of Hogwarts, A History.

Those hands, gripping his wand with a tightness and anger that denied the soft smirk that twisted those lips as he stood across the room, his eyes, those shards of ice, were the only things unable to be burned by the fire of a furious bespectacled Gryffindor. She never could understand why he let go of it all. After a while of a pretense of normalcy and of empty threats, he let go, and she knew then it was impossible to understand him, even more so that before. She couldn't make sense of why it broke him so to see the man he had lived for be caged, because she knew he was intelligent enough to know that that man, his father, was doomed from the beginning, cursed to live hell once his discoveries and dark magic experiments were found out, right?

At first, it was all threats, seeing him whirl around the corner, give her the coldest glare, and then stride away, no more in a swagger, but in a frenzied tapping of boots against cold, merciless brick floor. Then, it was self-isolation, never being able to spot him in a crowd anymore because he was never there, never seeing him in the Great Hall, and often unable to detect his presence in the shadowed corners of classrooms.

Gradually, it became as if Draco Malfoy had never even existed.

But then, one cold winter's evening, she stepped out to take a breath of fresh air after the excitement of dinner, reveling in the peace that came from seeing her breath frost, from being able to gaze upon the serenity of the frozen lake. It was when, turning away to break such peace and merge to be amidst the chaos, frivolity, and never-ending weariness and vexations of life, that she saw him.

He stood, swathed in a cloak more black than his hopeless, empty heart, clothed in hues of grey. Everything about him was grey. The desolation that trailed behind him with every step, the grim way his gaze swept over her, over everything, without a single tear shed, although she knew deep down such sadness and wretchedness as he knew he was and lived surrounded by would break any normal person, all were grey. Not a single splash of color, even the black of night, or the muddy brown of illness, or the mournful drips of blue, was part of him.

Standing still as a statue, his hands at his sides, he looked up to the heavens, snowflakes falling all around him, as if the sky grieved in a way that he could not. Every imprint of a step forward of his was soon covered by pure white, as if the world, wanting to compensate for his life and his being, wished to color something connected to him a godly white purer than anything, or to erase any trace of his existence entirely.

Turning around to follow his journey forward, she watched with gaping mouth, as, finally, he stopped, kneeling on the ground at the very edge of the lake. It was a heartbreaking sight, to see a boy who once thought he had everything lose the person he held in high esteem, and realize the man who had been his idol was nothing but a worthless wretch, bowing before a powerful wickedness, thinking he would benefit from deeds of hellish debauchery and felony. Having lost the only person he looked up to and realized he had taken the path of the wrong, the boy wandered hopeless, hiding the truth of his broken heart. His plight was only known to those like she, those who dared to look past the surface and see what was real and how his feeble soul learned to think thoughts that could almost be called caring, however dark and twisted.

Trembling, though unable to think whether it was from cold or from the intense pulse of purpose and vulnerability that came from a boy who had once been carved of stone. Still colored grey, the boy was slowly melting, and although this was a spark of light amongst his darkness, she knew that if he melted too much, and lost his strength, he would melt entirely away and fade to nothing.

She watched, breath held, as he did the unbelievable thing. Head down, those silk like strands of golden-white hair tucked neatly behind his ears, the boy moved his hands flat together, a silver cross on a chain clasped between them, and began to pray. His words were carried away with the frosty wind, and yet she thought his murmuring a pleasant sound, for with it bloomed inside her heart a flower of hope, and it was as if a flame of tenacious belief in himself and higher, guiding powers that had ignited inside him was carried with his murmured prayers and slid itself inside her heart as well.

Turning away to enter the door of the castle for the last time before she left it, the girl smiled, and wondered if Draco's shades of grey would ever have the chance of being painted rainbow colors.

~*~

Head held high, chin pointed in defiance, a woman renowned for her knowledge and her stubbornness strode down the long corridor, the click of her shoes flat against the polished marble tiles. Suddenly, she stopped, distracted from her mission. A sound, sweet yet simultaneously melancholy, met her eager ears. It had been so long since she had heard any welcome noise besides rushed, furious voices of scholars debating against her on various political issues. Pressing herself against the door, ear against it, she wondered who it was that poured their heart so deeply into the music created by the black and white keys of a piano.

Daring, she slid past the door, and closing it quietly, witnessed, once again, the unthinkable, a scene she would never have imagined she would see with her waking eyes.

His posture ramrod straight, eyes burning with intent, no more the shards of icy regret and severity, his fingers glided across the keys. The music he created was melancholy, haunting, and yet echoing of heart, of trust and gratuitous love and pleasure for the serene peace he achieved from every single note that floated into the air. Yet, to Hermione's grave disappointment, everything about him was still grey, internally and externally, his clothes, the piano, the floor, the walls, but his heart and his musical notes as well. How could it be that such heartfelt music, however sad, could be painted such a miserable color?

Underneath his fingers, caressed and pounded and destroyed by the sounds and movements he made upon and from it, the piano became an ugly creature, despicable in its sickliness, in how easily and in such tormented fashion the piano had fallen from grace and beauty. The pain of the piano and the glee with which Draco transformed and killed the piano hurt as a dryness and bile in Hermione's throat, unable to be swallowed and disappear, but unwilling to be banished from her, coughed out.

Those fingers moved in strong strokes across the keys, unsure whether to become the dark ebony of flats and sharps or the white of sweeter notes. And so they became, just as did Draco's stormy, smoldering eyes, even darker a grey.

Forever he painted his world in shades of grey, that color even more bleak and haunting that the sound of his beautiful, horrible music. Forever this grey surrounded him, so wretched, so despairing, and yet so wholly, horrifyingly, breathtakingly him. Draco was grey, in every sense of the word, from his mood, to his physicality, deep in his soul. The color could not be uprooted, so deeply was it entrenched in the muddy soil of his past life, thriving in the darkness that had, and maybe still now, consumed him, and growing to be a creeper so large and thorny that he was caged inside of it, perhaps inescapably.

Finally, the vile music notes, echoing around the cold, empty room, hitting the walls to only bounce back and lunge to attack her ears even more, became too much. Clenching her hands into tight fists, squeezing shut her eyes to try and stop seeing the sight before her, only to realize it remained underneath her eyelids, Hermione screamed. It was a scream like a banshee, pained and hopeless, crackling with anger and terror and all other such negative emotions, high and loud enough to crack glass, except for the fact that there was not a single window in the room, so isolated, immersed in his music, and caged by his grey was Draco Malfoy.

Hermione found herself unable to control her body, stumbling forward even as the hot tears, their warmth comforting, slid quickly down her face. Falling, gasping, to land with an awful thud and crunch of many notes together, her torso on the piano, Hermione found herself staring up into the very grey, flat, and now emotionless, unforgiving eyes of a man that she had grown to know as, not her childhood enemy, but a man so harsh and changed by regret and sadness that she knew it was worth trying to save him.

For he was not, and had not been ever since that evening he prayed, standing on the brink anymore, the cliff dividing a life of hell and a death that was not his destiny. He had risen higher than that point, stood up and made himself a ladder so he could advance. Yet, as Hermione now saw, he had not reached the second rung of that ladder.

Stuck in a world of grey, of the fog that hung over the cliff, he had let that hopelessness swarm him again, and was considered climbing back down to the cliff and jumping off. However, he instead stewed in indecision, playing his musical mix of beauty and ugliness to pass the time, so that eventually it would be too late for him to make a decision, and trapped in a cocoon of thorns made by the grey that fed on his despair, he would fall to the death off the edge of the cliff in the end.

Standing up, Draco lifted up the seat of the piano, which, its top able to be lifted, made a little box for storage. Eyes glowing victoriously, he slid from inside it a dagger, and, finally using that rich, low voice, and those gentle, strong hands, slowly slid the blade into her stomach, whispering her name as he did so. The memory of a time when she had wished he would say such a thing came to Hermione with bitterness. Now, when she no more wanted anything from him but the chance to save him, when she cared not for his voice, his hands, or any aspect of him other than the grey that ate him up, he used them on her, twisting her world cruelly, knowing what she had wanted then and wanted now.

She watched as the piano transformed into an entirely different creature than the one he had twisted in order to create his musical notes colored grey. His fingers were now around her throat in a tight grasp, but that soft skin against hers is so real, so strong, the closest she had ever come to effecting him, that she reveled in the breathlessness his grasp gave her. The metal of the blade piercing her, that he twisted again and again inside her gut, was cold, yet it gave her no pain. His voice, so soft, so rich, whispered her name again. Yet it was not that that made her feel like she could spread wings and soar high into the sky. Closing her eyes, for the last time, her eyes that from then on would be closed forever, she smiled, goal achieved. Her blood would seep into his memories and his soul, causing him to grasp at freedom and climb that ladder high up into the light of the welcoming golden arms of the sun-filled heavens. Blood staining the black and white keys of the piano, his instrument of pain, she knew that he had finally allowed her to make her imprint upon him, splashing beauteous red color upon his grey soul. All ended satisfactorily. He was grey no more. Standing up, Draco smiled, bathed in her blood.

He was red.