All Or Nothing

Chapter Four. A Great and Terrible Beauty

Draco was seething. Other than the angry flashes of red, he was unseeing. He made his way blindly, by pure instinct only, up to the Astronomy Tower.

It was Friday night, not Sunday, but he knew she’d be there. And sure enough, when he went through the wall, she was there. She was pacing and in the first time since he had known her, she looked anxious.

Damn right she should! I could choke her right now and not feel an ounce of remorse.

Yes actually, he would.

“What’s wrong Luna, you look upset?” he asked sarcastically.

“Draco, I—”

“Draco what?” he spat. “What could you possibly have to say to me that would somehow make this all seem just a little bit better?”

Like that was going to happen. Luna had done the worst thing that best friends could do to each other – she had betrayed him. She went to the Department of Mysteries with Potter and his idiotic posse and had landed his father in Azkaban. Azkaban! Every time he thought about it his blood boiled in anger all over again.

“I did what I had to do,” she said quietly, throwing the words he had uttered not even a month ago in his face. It occurred to him just how much of a pompous hypocrite he sounded. He didn’t care.

“So you feel like you had to go, even though you know how much I hate Potter?”

“And what about you, Draco?” she asked suddenly, with a renewed vigor. “What about how you and your dumb cronies trapped us in Umbridge’s office?”

“What about it? We’ve had this conversation before, remember? Umbridge appointed us to take action, not just sit around on our asses.”

“Well, you did a really fine job of it,” she said sarcastically. For the first time he got a sense of how mad she was at him. She rarely ever used sarcasm or got angry. It usually amused him because when she mad, most of the time it had to do with Granger. But to have it directed at him was just a little more than unnerving.

“And just so you’re not living in a world covered by rose colored glasses, let me inform you of something; your father was hardly an innocent party. He would have killed me without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco sneered. “You’re a pureblood. He would not have killed you.”

Luna let out a humorless laugh. “Your father was the one that gave the orders to have us all killed except for Harry. In fact, the only person that was not a pureblood was Hermione.”

Draco shuddered. This news was certainly a surprise to him. He knew his father was cold (much as Draco despised muggles and mudbloods, he had to admit that killing them all probably wasn’t the best way to go about things), but it was always him who had promoted the importance having pure blood. And now he realized that he had made one of the worst mistake his father had always warned him about; he underestimated. His father had always told him to never under or over estimate people.

How perfectly ironic! Draco thought bitterly.

The more logical part of him admitted how wrong his father actually was. He really did deserve to be in Azkaban. But the other part of him, the part that felt angry and betrayed, argued that somehow, it was still Luna’s fault and she should not have been there.

He took a few steps closer to her, trying and failing to make her feel cowered in his presence. “Could you at least admit you were wrong?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Could you?”

“But I wasn’t!” he retorted back.

“Then neither was I,” she stated calmly.

Draco crossed his arms and stared at her coldly. So this is what it had come to. This was the thing that would keep them apart. It seemed pretty stupid to him, laughable even. And yet he still would not budge.

Ha ha.

“Your pride will be the death of you, Draco Malfoy,” she said with a soft finality, as if saying his name for the last time. And in essense, it was. They were over and they both knew it.

Tears slowly accumulating in her eyes. They would not fall, making her large eyes look glassy. He could barely stand to look at her because it made his heart ache too badly. He took comfort at least in that they had been doomed from the start. And this time their problems were too insurmountable, too irreconcilable, to be patched up with a kiss. Even if they did somehow manage to get passed this, something else was bound to come up. They were on opposite sides of the battlefield now, and the line could not be straddled.

And yet as angry and hurt as he was right now, thinking back on their life together, he would not go back and change a thing.

Draco tried not to let the emotion show in his face. He didn’t want her to know how hard this was for him, though as intuitive as she was, she probably already knew it.

He turned around abruptly and headed towards the wall that he would pass through for the last time. “Goodbye, Luna,” he said as if he were dismissing a servant.

And he left before she could say anything to melt his half-formed resolved, without even so much as a backward glance.

The last thing Luna saw before she fell to the ground on her knees was Draco’s stiff retreating back.

She felt the tears that had welled up in her eyes silently slip out and she did nothing to stop them. This was the first time she had cried since her mother died, mostly because she never had much reason to cry.

Draco’s gone.

That’s the one thought that raced through her head. He had gone and left her for good. She wasn’t sure how to make sense of that. She couldn’t quite make sense of how they had gotten to the point of no return.

Draco’s gone.

Eventually, Luna pulled herself off the floor and gathered her composure. She wiped her eyes and straightened her clothes. Not that her Housemates would really care, but she still didn’t want them to see her in such a state. They already had enough to make fun of her about.

Luna knew good and well that other people thought of her as weird. Of course, she wasn’t inclined to agree, but she knew that everyone was entitled to his or her opinions.

People tended to make judgments about her before they even got to know her. True, she realized that what she presented could possibly be interpreted as weird. But she still didn’t particularly like how people treated her. And up until now, she hadn’t cared. She had Draco, she had her father, she had her diversions, and that was all she needed.

But now… well, she still had her father. They were as close as ever. But she had lost Draco, probably forever, and the D.A. was gone. She felt a certain companionship with Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Neville, but they weren’t her friends. So after all that, the only thing she had left were her beliefs, which she firmly clung to.

Dusting herself off, she walked through the wall that Draco had walked out of just minutes ago. Luckily, she managed to get back down to her dorm unnoticed where a restless night followed for her.

Things had changed between them so drastically during the days following The Event, as Luna liked to think of it. When they passed each other in the halls, they would each look the other was. When Sunday night came, they treated it as if it were just another night. When the reached their homes for the summer, no letters were exchanged. When Luna left for Sweden with her father, he had no idea of it. When Draco received his assignment from the Dark Lord and was so afraid that he would fail everybody, she wasn’t there to comfort him.

Draco and Luna were no more.