The Trial ; D.M

26

16th March 2003

Geneva and Theodore have barely uttered a word to each other in the weeks that have passed.

From the day their damning argument took place he removed himself from their bedroom, relocating to one of the guest suites on the other side of the manor. He'd left her alone that very night with a regretful gaze, sighing in understanding that he knew she needed her space and he was pleasant enough to respect that.

About two weeks it's been, and she's beginning to feel out of her depths. A benign discomfort as if he's preparing to leave her. Because if that be the case, she hasn't a clue where she will end up.

She's not as worrisome to believe that he would leave her with nothing— there was a time when she thought he would never even dream of such a thing. Perhaps he wasn't and it was all just a corruptible illusion of anxiety, manifesting itself from the fears she had possessed before she found him.

While before it may have seemed that he was the apologetic one, crippling over the discomfort of her distance towards him, it suddenly seems as if she is the one exhausting herself over the same thing. Except now he's the one being distant. And she's not even attempting to pull him back to her. Potentially marching him directly into the seductive embrace of the woman she can not even bring herself to think the name of anymore.

Something has shifted in her over the past few weeks. While she has been spending most of her time behind closed doors and silencing spells with Malfoy, she has simultaneously been grieving the corruption of her marriage— more so the version of herself she had so longed to be within that marriage. The ideal model of perfection she's masqueraded as for the past four years, meanwhile enduring the gutting wrath of the falsity of it all. Because it's not what she wants. Any of it.

In what seems like a strange sort of paradoxical universe where she now finds herself falling into the deathly embrace of Draco Malfoy, she's felt more content in those stolen moments of a lustrous affair with him than she has ever felt with Theodore. The second she leaves Draco's side and must perform her part as Lady of the Manor again, and again, and again, she longs to be back in those idle hours.

And nothing meaningful ever happens. They talk for a while, they fuck, they consume every inch of each other and it feels right. Each illicit moment feels as if its playing a small rhythmic beat within her chest; through her veins. A buzzing electric sensation vibrating through her entire body. She's not sure what it is because there's certainly not any attachment involved. So she thinks. So she tells herself.

There can't be. They both know this. And both force themselves to adhere to that.

It just feels like a game, their entire charade. A game that they're both enjoying immensely. And as far as Geneva is aware, Theodore is clueless. They do well to hide it in front of him when all three of them happen to be in the same room. After all, in Theodore's eyes, Geneva still abhors Draco. There would be no reason at all for something to have changed between them. He's far too concerned with himself to even notice a shift in the air around them.

But she feels it far too consciously. Each time Draco even glances in her direction she can't help buzz with a peculiar, but ecstatic adrenaline. Just like the feeling she had experienced when the same had happened in school. And it had just been an innocent little crush. Before he had ever killed a soul. The whole ordeal was insatiable, but pushed her to want him even more, because she shouldn't want him at all.

And that same darkness which had cloaked him before— all the remnants of that dark magic used a few years prior to now draws her in like a moth to the blaring light of a matchstick and burns her with the thrill of it all each time.