Tainted Love

Maulace Hill House

DRACO

Draco was completely still, every muscle tensed in anticipation. His eyes drew to the potion he had been brewing, but he wasn't focused on the mixture. It bubbled, frothed on the sides. He should be listening intently to it. Instead, he had cast a silencing charm.

Iris was upstairs moving around and he thought he had heard her speak, could've sworn she said something. Maybe sending a Patronus to Tracey or Sebastian or Theodore, maybe murmuring some reminder to herself, maybe cursing at some inconvenience.

Either way, he wanted to know. But all he could hear now was the sound of her footsteps, the clacking of pans as she walked back and forth across the kitchen above him.

He looked to the ceiling as if he'd be able to see her through it and imagined her footprints emanating through the layer of stone, creating little warm spots above him.

There was only one window in the basement and it was overcast today, so the room was as dark as the dungeons had been back at school. He had a couple of candles hovering around him, their orange glow casting eerie shadows around the room.

"Hi," he heard Iris say, her voice muffled. So she was speaking to someone, then, or if she hadn't been before she was now. "Yeah, I know."

Draco closed his eyes in the vain hope that he'd be able to hear her better if he couldn't see anything else.

"I woke up late on Monday and that's still throwing me off. All my papers are - oh, okay. I wasn't really planning on it."

There was no reasoning behind her words, at least none that he could find only hearing one side of the conversation. He exhaled and looked back down.

This was fucking ridiculous. He brought his hand to his waist, letting his hand draw over his wand. He had intended to lift the silencing charm, but Iris murmured something else from upstairs so he didn't.

If he wanted to, he could hear her voice firsthand - louder and clearer. He could know both sides of the conversation, be one side of it. He could see her, too, really see her, watch her feet move across the ground instead of inventing her motions in his head.

But that would involve going upstairs and watching her face do that thing. The thing it had done when he had talked to her on Monday.

The problem was that he had fucked up immediately, as soon as he had read the letter. He wasn't sure how he could recover now and had the impression that there was really nothing he could do at all.

Reading Pansy's letter, in short, had uncovered a fucking mess. He had spent the past three days in the basement under the guise of working. He had brewed a couple of things, worthless potions he could have made without instructions. Most of his time had been spent by candlelight, thinking.

Draco doubted he had ever made such a sustained effort to think. The effort was more from the need to occupy his time than a supreme desire to figure himself out, but it was there all the same.

It had occurred to him that he no longer loved Pansy. That particular fact had actually occurred to him some time ago, somewhere between December and January. The difficulty was figuring out what exactly was still there.

There had to be something there if reading 'Mrs. Zabini '  had made him feel that ill.

Pansy had trained him well. He was her pet, always waiting by the door for her to get home, and even once she had shoved him off to the shelter he hoped in his foolish way that she would someday come and collect him, walk him out the door.

He thought of the dog he had heard of once who went to wait for his dead owner at the train station every day. Most people found that story sweet. Draco had always found it pitiful and tragic. Someone ought to have found a way to tell the dog that nobody was coming. Save him the constant disappointment.