Tainted Love

Gallery Opening

DRACO

Draco stood in a huge, open room. Half walls and giant doorways littered the space, paintings hung on swaths of white walls. The crowd drifted from room to room as if they were being herded by an invisible hand.

He felt claustrophobic. He was drowning under the miles of lace and tulle that the woman dragged behind them as they walked.

An art gallery outside Diagon was opening, and for some reason that constituted a high society event. Astoria hung off his arm in a sort of pink-orange dress that didn't go with his suit or her skin tone. It was probably very expensive.

These events had become weekly fixtures in his life. Astoria expected him to attend everything with her - he was her favorite accessory. They looked nice enough together, and Draco's name was still notorious enough that being seen with him wasn't a downgrade from the other men she had been associated with. It was more infamy than fame, but she didn't seem to mind.

Whether or not the press had good things to say about Astoria didn't matter much to her - as long as they were talking about her, she was content.

The Daily Prophet published a particularly scathing article about her apologizing for "the sins of Draco's past" last week, and all she had cared about was that the pictures they had included were flattering.

That was what Draco could always do for her. Drag her name through the mud and look good in pictures.

He pretended to stare at the painting in front of him to distract himself from how much he wanted to exchange the champagne flute in his hand for a flask. It was some red and white monstrosity that he supposed was probably meant to be a comment on the horrors of war.

His eyes flicked to the plaque. The Secret of Love. So the red was supposed to represent passion, not blood. Love and war were always difficult to distinguish in art.

He pulled at the collar of his suit. It felt a bit like he was suffocating.

Despite the fact that the Daily Prophet hadn't accepted him back into their good graces, Draco had the distinct impression that he was slowly assimilating to pureblood society. The door into the lives of his former classmates was slowly creaking open.

He had his foot in now, but he wasn't sure he wanted it in.

Every event he went to, less people stared, less people whispered. Most people simply ignored his presence now, but there were some who spoke to him directly when they were talking to Astoria.

They asked him how his job was, how his mother was, what he thought about the art or the food or the champagne or the new collection. He gave cold, polite answers.

For years, he had felt separate from the teenager he once was. The boy who had attended these events growing up, over winter break and summer holidays, seemed a distant figment of Draco's imagination.

But now he was constantly recalling him, constantly falling back on the posture and cadence and speech of his sixteen-year-old self. It was unnerving, skirting the most terrible memories of his life.

Astoria was delighted by it, though. She liked that he knew exactly how to handle himself. Narcissa was delighted by it, too. As far as she was concerned, he was taking their name back. He was doing exactly what he had promised her to do.

Part of him wanted to do it, too. For his mother, for himself. But the other part of him felt like he was sinking deeper and deeper under the water. He could still see the sun on the surface now. But soon it would be dark, and he would be drifting around on the ocean floor, his lungs filling with water, strange creatures moving around him.