Fic: Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Arrow
Title: Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Arrow
Author: Text by metacheese; art by essouffle
Team: Angst
Prompt: Devotion, Defeat, Fall
Word count: 3036
Rating: R
Warnings: Major character death; mentions of torture, violence and prejudice; generally, very bad life choices
Summary: Eames is a Death Eater, but he is fighting for something other than Voldemort's cause at the Battle of Hogwarts. All he wants now is for him and Arthur both to survive so that they can live together in peace, without fear or surveillance or the threat of war. Arthur, ever-loyal, is still determined to serve the Dark Lord to his last breath.
Note: Title from "Shampoo" by Elvis Perkins in Dearland. Betaed by five-of-five and krytella; special thanks to immoral-crow for inspiration and allowing me to ask a lot of stupid questions about HP canon.
Eames didn’t know why he felt unsettled. This was the culmination of everything they’d worked for. The air was thick with dark magic, bilious green swirls of it choking off what little there was of grass and heather and clean air. The castle beneath them looked like a prison, surrounded by a jagged waterless moat. This was what it looked like to reshape the world in your own image, he thought. Nature produced weeds, poisons, lazy and undisciplined children. It was only with careful attention and will that things became beautiful.
At the moment, though, he could think of nothing more beautiful or more willful than Arthur. Arthur, standing between Orestes Yaxley and Antonin Dolohov, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on their leader as the Dark Lord outlined their plan of attack on Hogwarts. The black cloak and tunic looked like it had been designed with him in mind. He was all dark hollows and sharp edges, whittled and shaped by losing all things that he deemed unnecessary. Things like Eames.
We will not spill more magical blood than is absolutely necessary, the Dark Lord hissed. Do not kill any wizard unless your life is directly threatened.
Even in the mostly-darkness he saw Arthur’s hand twitch to his wand. As if he were not a man but a curse, a stream of merciless power that followed inevitably when a certain word was uttered, a word like kill.
§
They’d met when Hogwarts was a bright place, despite or perhaps because of the danger always nipping at its edges. Eames was a Slytherin like his parents and grandparents and all of his ancestors before him. But he disliked the petty infighting, the arrogance disproportionate to skill, the willingness to rest on the accomplishments and names of one’s forebears rather than doing something for oneself. He wanted more.
And more came, in his third year, in the form of a Ravenclaw boy in his Divination class, whom he watched taking furious notes, sharp little shoulders hunched over his quill and parchment in an attempt to keep anyone from reading what he wrote.
“You can’t really be taking notes on this tripe, can you?” Eames chuckled under his breath.
“Mr. Eames. Ten points from Slytherin,” Professor Trelawney called out. Arthur just ignored her. But Eames caught the words obliviate and legilimens and stupefy, and dream.
“So, what was so interesting that you felt the need to focus on it instead of on Trelawney’s fascinating lecture, hmm?” he’d asked, trotting up to Arthur after class.
Arthur had hugged his books to his chest and looked at him imperiously.
“I don’t feel the need to tell you.”
“Oh?” Eames leaned in. “Then you won’t care at all if I tell Professor Flitwick that you’re working on something involving legilimency and dreams. And last I checked, practicing legilimency on the unwilling is strictly forbidden at Hogwarts…Oh, don’t look so bloody surprised. I have picked up a book or two on dark magic.”
Arthur glared at him and mumbled something.
“What was that?”
“I asked,” he repeated, “if you want to help me.”
§
Eames had just barely escaped a Petrificus Totalus from a baby-faced Hufflepuff and even evaded an Expelliarmus by erecting a Protego charm. He hoped silently that none of his fellow Death Eaters could tell that he was dueling only half-heartedly. Not caring much about anyone’s death or destruction or immobilization. Not trying to engage who didn’t engage him first. Just trying to stay out of the way. Alive.
There was Arthur, meanwhile, giving everything he had. Eames caught a glimpse of him only briefly, dueling one of the older Weasley boys (Eames never could tell any of them apart). He deflected all of the kid’s curses until a Locomotor Mortis curse hit him. His attention commandeered by the pain of his frozen legs, he almost failed to deflect the Expelliarmus that followed.
Selywn hit Weasley from behind with a Stupefy, but it was close, Eames thought. Too close. Eames was beginning to understand why the Dark Lord, when told of Arthur’s and Eames’ history together, had warned them to stay away from each other.
All his attention taken up watching Arthur, he went down easy when a Stupefy rebounded from a duel between Rowle and Pomona Sprout.
The next thing he was aware of was Arthur crouching over him, wand in hand.
“You idiot,” he whispered harshly. “You should have been paying attention to what was going on around you, rather than to me. Let’s defeat these schoolchildren first, hm? Then we can moon over each other.”
“Is it mooning to look after a fellow soldier?” Eames demanded, tongue heavy as the curse dissolved. “I don’t give a fuck if I never kiss you again. But I owe you something. As a brother in arms. As a friend.”
“Didn’t you get the memo?” Arthur laughed bitterly. “We aren’t friends. Friendship is for people who are mature enough to accept that the cause comes first.”
“As if I needed a reminder that you’re the most loyal little Death Eater who ever lived,” Eames grinned. “But you and I both know your secret.” He tugged at Arthur’s cloak and pulled him down to whisper in his ear. “Half-blood.”
“Petrif-“ Arthur growled, but Eames was ready for it.
“Expelliarmus.” Arthur’s wand drifted easily into his hand. “You know, Arthur, you have to really mean a curse when you say it. And loyalty to the cause? You should be off looking for the action right now. We had orders, Arthur. To stop them from fighting us by any means necessary. To destroy Hogwarts bit by bit until they couldn’t take it anymore and gave Potter to us.” He handed Arthur’s wand back to him. “Let’s go. Or haven’t you noticed? The mark is burning.”
§
When Arthur wanted something, generally, he got it.
When he wanted Eames, he fixed him with his gaze, until Eames’ own words trailed off and he was powerless to do anything but touch his lips to Arthur’s.
When he wanted to be able to enter people’s minds through their dreams, he studied for hours. Practiced first on Eames, who learned how to perform Occlumency in his sleep, to keep Arthur out. Sometimes he didn’t want to keep Arthur out. Sometimes he kept his defenses down, and Arthur saw what he dreamed, the winding mazes and dark forests and people changing form like chimeras.
Once he took Arthur down a maze made of shifting mirrors, where it was almost impossible to tell what was a real passageway and what was just the mirrors reflecting into infinity. Arthur’s eyebrows were creased in frustration as he slammed into one false door after the other.
“Use your wand,” Eames suggested. “You do have one.”
“It won’t work,” Arthur snapped. “This is a dream.”
“Try it, you stubborn idiot.”
“Aguamenti,” Arthur sighed, and pointed his wand at the ground. A stream of water flowed out of it steadily until water filled the bottom of the chamber. It moved off in the direction of an opening.
They waded toward it together.
They walked through portals and saw Eames’ childhood home and his parents, who worshiped his older brother and had few hopes for Eames himself. His mother, Sophonisba, nee Yaxley, clad in a tight dragon-skin gown and enormous color-shifting gems, ordering the elves to prepare his brother’s favorite meal, looking over Eames’ school marks with a shrug, telling his father curtly that “Athanasius has done exactly as expected, once again.” His father, Lacertus, absent-minded and generally silent, paying attention only when something was either unusually good or unusually bad.
When his brother Pythias had died, aged fifteen, thrown from a wild hippogriff he’d snuck onto on a late-night dare, his mother had wept and wept, and Eames had overheard her saying that she wished it had been him, Athanasius, and not Pythias that had died.
After they entered the door to this memory, which Eames recognized by the wailing black flowers and the strange visitors around the house, he had tried to shove Arthur out of his mind, mortified. But Arthur had fought back, and heard what Eames had heard. And he put his arms around Eames, though Eames struggled feebly against him, and he kissed his hair and forehead, and whispered, “You’re a great wizard, Eames. You’re cunning, strong, and fearless. Unafraid of power. You’ll be greater than any of them, someday. You’ll see.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be great,” he muttered. “It’s just not going to happen.”
“Don’t think that way,” Arthur said fiercely. “I don’t. And no one’s given me any reason to believe I’m ever going to amount to anything either. No one in this school even knows who I am. No one listens to anything I ever say.” There was a bitter, frightening edge to his voice.
Eames, who’d listened to Arthur and seen others listen to him, riveted, thought he might be exaggerating a little.
§
This is it, Eames thought, looking around the smoking ruin of Hogwarts. Potter’s dead. They have nothing to fight for anymore. The world is ours. He grinned, seeking out Arthur in their diminished ranks. Arthur wasn’t looking at him, but he had hope again, that after the necessary cleaning-up had been done and any foolish flickerings of rebellion quashed, they’d live normal lives. As normal as one could get when one runs the world, at least.
They’d be like lords. Wizards would bow to them in the streets. Children would say, When I grow up I want to be like Athanasius Eames, like Arthur Hollander. Except that the lives and actions of wizards like Athanasius Eames and Arthur Hollander had negated the possibility of anyone ever being like them again. Or so went his foolish hope.
Best of all, there would be no need for surveillance anymore, since they weren’t at war. He and Arthur could live in peace. A huge manor, with elves and fireplaces and magical artifacts taken from the plunder of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley. A bed they could, at last, share. They hadn’t fucked or even kissed in over a year, not since Arthur decided that it was a liability, what they were to each other; not since the Dark Lord agreed and made it an official pronouncement. To be broken on pain of torture or death.
Eames still remembered the night before their graduation from Hogwarts. Casting a Muffliato charm on his housemates. Sneaking out of Slytherin Dungeon under an invisibility charm. Watching for the tiny light hovering above Arthur, like a single frozen firefly, in the darkness. Pulling him down into the slippery grass, their hands kneading like cats for wet clothes and skin, shivering mouths seeking each other for warmth.
I love you, Eames had whispered. Or maybe he only thought he had said it.
§
He worked for the Ministry for a few years. Department of Magical Transportation, repairing and confiscating brooms. Hated his job. Arthur worked for Wizengamot Administration Services, and he hated his too.
“You should quit,” Eames told him one night, conjuring a bird with absurdly long tailfeathers to cheer Arthur up after a grueling day.
“You have no idea the things I get to read, though,” Arthur had said, reclining into a shabby chair. “They trust me. I’ve learned things about magic that I doubt most of the professors at Hogwarts even know. Things most people don’t even believe are possible.”
“But you’re bored, Arthur,” Eames argued. “Remember what we swore to each other? That night before graduation? We swore we’d never be ordinary. “
“We’re not ordinary,” Arthur said, squeezing the fingers Eames had slipped onto his shoulder. “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity.”
The bird struggled to fly, dragging heavy feathers along the ground, beating its pink-edged wings. Arthur pointed his wand at it and it disappeared in a puff of down.
A few weeks later, Eames was sitting at his desk waving his wand absently over a broom with a Freezing Hex on it when a black moth unfolded into a piece of paper on his hand. He recognized the sigil, a tiny top, from his school days: it was from a coworker, a former Slytherin classmate named Cobb.
I have an adventure befitting a man of your cunning and skills, it said. Apparate to these coordinates, and come alone.
§
As it turned out, the battle was not so easily won.
After that sniveling kid had attacked Nagini, the centaurs charged them, and he lost Arthur once again in the chaos. He managed to shield himself and play dead, letting himself get dragged into the castle by a centaur whose hoof he purposely tangled into his cloak. The shield left him unharmed, and he Stupefied the centaur once he was inside, untangling himself and leaping forward to join the fray. At this point he was more concerned with ending the battle quickly, and he hurled curses indiscriminately, at backs and fronts, with little regard for the rules of dueling.
He’d always been a skilled duelist, and he’d gotten better, quicker, from practicing with Arthur. Arthur had little regard for his own pain or discomfort. Do Cruciatus on me, he urged. You need to practice against someone who’s good at dueling. Just do it, Eames. Always Eames swallowed down his own nausea, his hatred of seeing Arthur hurt, and lifted his wand.
A full-body numbing curse nearly caused him to drop his wand, and he lifted his arm only with great effort to deliver a Levicorpus. The curse hit at an opportune time, when he'd calculated that his opponent’s shield spell would have worn off, given her approximate skill level, and the young woman was jerked upwards into the air.
“Well done, Mr. Eames,” said a cool, unmistakable voice behind him. He glanced quickly back at Arthur.
“I’m a bit busy right now, Arthur,” he said, but he couldn’t help but smile.
He was still smiling when he heard the words Avada Kedavra, and saw the flash of green light, and turned around in time to see Arthur stagger, shocked, and then fall.
§
When Eames announced to his mother, casually and cryptically yet with undisguised pride, that he had joined the Death Eaters, his mother had looked down, swatted a pixie from her soup tureen, and glowered up at him.
“So you’re a henchman, is that it?” She shook her head. “Hired magical muscle. I do hope you don’t have any illusions that you’re anything other than totally disposable.”
“I’m a Death Eater,” he’d pleaded. “He trusts me. He values my strength. It’s more than anyone’s done before.”
Anyone but Arthur, that is. And Arthur had taken to the cause far more quickly than Eames had expected. He was reluctant to tell Arthur about his alliance with the Death Eaters because of Arthur’s own half-blood status. But, without telling Arthur, he secretly presented the Dark Lord with forged papers declaring Arthur pure-blooded, son of Arthur’s real father and a made-up Russian witch from a real and quite large family. Arthur had always been tight-lipped about his family, so no one knew anything to the contrary. When the Dark Lord invited Arthur to the next meeting, Arthur was confused and afraid. Eames explained to him that the Dark Lord alone understood the value of people like them, people with ambition and strength, people unafraid to explore forbidden magic, to seek knowledge, to seize power.
“No more playing it safe,” he’d whispered, ecstatically, into Arthur’s shoulder the night after the first meeting they attended together. There had been hours of triumphant fucking; teeth bared, laughing, grasping. Feeling like they were seeing each other clearly after years of looking through the wrong end of a scratched pair of binoculars.
And at one point, while he was deep in Arthur, he reached for his wand. Whispered Lumos, willing a low-level beam, just so he could see Arthur's face lit softly in the dark. It was blissful. As if his mind and heart were finally at rest.
§
Eames lay still and squeezed his eyes shut, aware of the people attending to their dead and wounded; rocking limp bodies in their arms, stroking back their hair, closing their extinguished eyes. He couldn’t attend to his dead and wounded one, the only one of his compatriots he still cared about. The only one he ever really cared about to begin with. One by one the Death Eaters revealed themselves for who they really were. Shallow, arrogant, ambition-drunk, vengeful, insane. Maybe Arthur had been that way. Had become that way. And maybe Eames had too.
He thought of Arthur not an hour ago, alive with hope and violence, convinced of his invincibility. How just before they’d had to Apparate to Voldemort’s side, Arthur had leaned down and kissed him, hard. How he had thought, elated, I haven’t lost him. I haven’t lost him.
“Get up, you piece of shit. You’re coming to Azkaban, and even that’s too good for you.”
The words weren’t directed at him-he couldn’t quite tell over the dizziness and the buzzing in his ears. But they may as well have been.
Athanasius has done exactly what was expected of him.
He knew the second he lifted his head they’d be upon him. Let them, he thought. He had to see Arthur one last time.
It was best that Arthur hadn’t lived. He’d never have let himself be taken alive anyway. He’d fight to the death, scrabbling for a tiny, desperate chip of glory, like a last sliver of Muggle soap bound for the drain.
But what is the last thing I want to remember as a free man? Eames asked himself.
He thought of Arthur in his dream, running backward over the waves of a buckling landscape. A kid showing off, grinning at Eames and begging him to run faster.
He thought of Arthur torturing his first victim, Eames watching. Arthur looking anxiously for his reaction.
He thought of Arthur, weak and filthy, crawling between Eames' covers after an abortive day of tunnel-digging. Fifteen years old. (Had he ever actually told Arthur he loved him, in so many words? Arthur had said it, in fading ink, in the seeds of fruit, in phosphorescent lines traced by spells on Eames' very skin.) Arthur shucking off his dirt-smeared clothes and winding skinny arms around Eames’ neck. Eames scrubbing his pale body clean with magic, Arthur closing his eyes and smiling at the tickling sensation.
Eames smiled as a strange hand pried open his fingers.
Author: Text by metacheese; art by essouffle
Team: Angst
Prompt: Devotion, Defeat, Fall
Word count: 3036
Rating: R
Warnings: Major character death; mentions of torture, violence and prejudice; generally, very bad life choices
Summary: Eames is a Death Eater, but he is fighting for something other than Voldemort's cause at the Battle of Hogwarts. All he wants now is for him and Arthur both to survive so that they can live together in peace, without fear or surveillance or the threat of war. Arthur, ever-loyal, is still determined to serve the Dark Lord to his last breath.
Note: Title from "Shampoo" by Elvis Perkins in Dearland. Betaed by five-of-five and krytella; special thanks to immoral-crow for inspiration and allowing me to ask a lot of stupid questions about HP canon.
Eames didn’t know why he felt unsettled. This was the culmination of everything they’d worked for. The air was thick with dark magic, bilious green swirls of it choking off what little there was of grass and heather and clean air. The castle beneath them looked like a prison, surrounded by a jagged waterless moat. This was what it looked like to reshape the world in your own image, he thought. Nature produced weeds, poisons, lazy and undisciplined children. It was only with careful attention and will that things became beautiful.
At the moment, though, he could think of nothing more beautiful or more willful than Arthur. Arthur, standing between Orestes Yaxley and Antonin Dolohov, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on their leader as the Dark Lord outlined their plan of attack on Hogwarts. The black cloak and tunic looked like it had been designed with him in mind. He was all dark hollows and sharp edges, whittled and shaped by losing all things that he deemed unnecessary. Things like Eames.
We will not spill more magical blood than is absolutely necessary, the Dark Lord hissed. Do not kill any wizard unless your life is directly threatened.
Even in the mostly-darkness he saw Arthur’s hand twitch to his wand. As if he were not a man but a curse, a stream of merciless power that followed inevitably when a certain word was uttered, a word like kill.
§
They’d met when Hogwarts was a bright place, despite or perhaps because of the danger always nipping at its edges. Eames was a Slytherin like his parents and grandparents and all of his ancestors before him. But he disliked the petty infighting, the arrogance disproportionate to skill, the willingness to rest on the accomplishments and names of one’s forebears rather than doing something for oneself. He wanted more.
And more came, in his third year, in the form of a Ravenclaw boy in his Divination class, whom he watched taking furious notes, sharp little shoulders hunched over his quill and parchment in an attempt to keep anyone from reading what he wrote.
“You can’t really be taking notes on this tripe, can you?” Eames chuckled under his breath.
“Mr. Eames. Ten points from Slytherin,” Professor Trelawney called out. Arthur just ignored her. But Eames caught the words obliviate and legilimens and stupefy, and dream.
“So, what was so interesting that you felt the need to focus on it instead of on Trelawney’s fascinating lecture, hmm?” he’d asked, trotting up to Arthur after class.
Arthur had hugged his books to his chest and looked at him imperiously.
“I don’t feel the need to tell you.”
“Oh?” Eames leaned in. “Then you won’t care at all if I tell Professor Flitwick that you’re working on something involving legilimency and dreams. And last I checked, practicing legilimency on the unwilling is strictly forbidden at Hogwarts…Oh, don’t look so bloody surprised. I have picked up a book or two on dark magic.”
Arthur glared at him and mumbled something.
“What was that?”
“I asked,” he repeated, “if you want to help me.”
§
Eames had just barely escaped a Petrificus Totalus from a baby-faced Hufflepuff and even evaded an Expelliarmus by erecting a Protego charm. He hoped silently that none of his fellow Death Eaters could tell that he was dueling only half-heartedly. Not caring much about anyone’s death or destruction or immobilization. Not trying to engage who didn’t engage him first. Just trying to stay out of the way. Alive.
There was Arthur, meanwhile, giving everything he had. Eames caught a glimpse of him only briefly, dueling one of the older Weasley boys (Eames never could tell any of them apart). He deflected all of the kid’s curses until a Locomotor Mortis curse hit him. His attention commandeered by the pain of his frozen legs, he almost failed to deflect the Expelliarmus that followed.
Selywn hit Weasley from behind with a Stupefy, but it was close, Eames thought. Too close. Eames was beginning to understand why the Dark Lord, when told of Arthur’s and Eames’ history together, had warned them to stay away from each other.
All his attention taken up watching Arthur, he went down easy when a Stupefy rebounded from a duel between Rowle and Pomona Sprout.
The next thing he was aware of was Arthur crouching over him, wand in hand.
“You idiot,” he whispered harshly. “You should have been paying attention to what was going on around you, rather than to me. Let’s defeat these schoolchildren first, hm? Then we can moon over each other.”
“Is it mooning to look after a fellow soldier?” Eames demanded, tongue heavy as the curse dissolved. “I don’t give a fuck if I never kiss you again. But I owe you something. As a brother in arms. As a friend.”
“Didn’t you get the memo?” Arthur laughed bitterly. “We aren’t friends. Friendship is for people who are mature enough to accept that the cause comes first.”
“As if I needed a reminder that you’re the most loyal little Death Eater who ever lived,” Eames grinned. “But you and I both know your secret.” He tugged at Arthur’s cloak and pulled him down to whisper in his ear. “Half-blood.”
“Petrif-“ Arthur growled, but Eames was ready for it.
“Expelliarmus.” Arthur’s wand drifted easily into his hand. “You know, Arthur, you have to really mean a curse when you say it. And loyalty to the cause? You should be off looking for the action right now. We had orders, Arthur. To stop them from fighting us by any means necessary. To destroy Hogwarts bit by bit until they couldn’t take it anymore and gave Potter to us.” He handed Arthur’s wand back to him. “Let’s go. Or haven’t you noticed? The mark is burning.”
§
When Arthur wanted something, generally, he got it.
When he wanted Eames, he fixed him with his gaze, until Eames’ own words trailed off and he was powerless to do anything but touch his lips to Arthur’s.
When he wanted to be able to enter people’s minds through their dreams, he studied for hours. Practiced first on Eames, who learned how to perform Occlumency in his sleep, to keep Arthur out. Sometimes he didn’t want to keep Arthur out. Sometimes he kept his defenses down, and Arthur saw what he dreamed, the winding mazes and dark forests and people changing form like chimeras.
Once he took Arthur down a maze made of shifting mirrors, where it was almost impossible to tell what was a real passageway and what was just the mirrors reflecting into infinity. Arthur’s eyebrows were creased in frustration as he slammed into one false door after the other.
“Use your wand,” Eames suggested. “You do have one.”
“It won’t work,” Arthur snapped. “This is a dream.”
“Try it, you stubborn idiot.”
“Aguamenti,” Arthur sighed, and pointed his wand at the ground. A stream of water flowed out of it steadily until water filled the bottom of the chamber. It moved off in the direction of an opening.
They waded toward it together.
They walked through portals and saw Eames’ childhood home and his parents, who worshiped his older brother and had few hopes for Eames himself. His mother, Sophonisba, nee Yaxley, clad in a tight dragon-skin gown and enormous color-shifting gems, ordering the elves to prepare his brother’s favorite meal, looking over Eames’ school marks with a shrug, telling his father curtly that “Athanasius has done exactly as expected, once again.” His father, Lacertus, absent-minded and generally silent, paying attention only when something was either unusually good or unusually bad.
When his brother Pythias had died, aged fifteen, thrown from a wild hippogriff he’d snuck onto on a late-night dare, his mother had wept and wept, and Eames had overheard her saying that she wished it had been him, Athanasius, and not Pythias that had died.
After they entered the door to this memory, which Eames recognized by the wailing black flowers and the strange visitors around the house, he had tried to shove Arthur out of his mind, mortified. But Arthur had fought back, and heard what Eames had heard. And he put his arms around Eames, though Eames struggled feebly against him, and he kissed his hair and forehead, and whispered, “You’re a great wizard, Eames. You’re cunning, strong, and fearless. Unafraid of power. You’ll be greater than any of them, someday. You’ll see.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be great,” he muttered. “It’s just not going to happen.”
“Don’t think that way,” Arthur said fiercely. “I don’t. And no one’s given me any reason to believe I’m ever going to amount to anything either. No one in this school even knows who I am. No one listens to anything I ever say.” There was a bitter, frightening edge to his voice.
Eames, who’d listened to Arthur and seen others listen to him, riveted, thought he might be exaggerating a little.
§
This is it, Eames thought, looking around the smoking ruin of Hogwarts. Potter’s dead. They have nothing to fight for anymore. The world is ours. He grinned, seeking out Arthur in their diminished ranks. Arthur wasn’t looking at him, but he had hope again, that after the necessary cleaning-up had been done and any foolish flickerings of rebellion quashed, they’d live normal lives. As normal as one could get when one runs the world, at least.
They’d be like lords. Wizards would bow to them in the streets. Children would say, When I grow up I want to be like Athanasius Eames, like Arthur Hollander. Except that the lives and actions of wizards like Athanasius Eames and Arthur Hollander had negated the possibility of anyone ever being like them again. Or so went his foolish hope.
Best of all, there would be no need for surveillance anymore, since they weren’t at war. He and Arthur could live in peace. A huge manor, with elves and fireplaces and magical artifacts taken from the plunder of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley. A bed they could, at last, share. They hadn’t fucked or even kissed in over a year, not since Arthur decided that it was a liability, what they were to each other; not since the Dark Lord agreed and made it an official pronouncement. To be broken on pain of torture or death.
Eames still remembered the night before their graduation from Hogwarts. Casting a Muffliato charm on his housemates. Sneaking out of Slytherin Dungeon under an invisibility charm. Watching for the tiny light hovering above Arthur, like a single frozen firefly, in the darkness. Pulling him down into the slippery grass, their hands kneading like cats for wet clothes and skin, shivering mouths seeking each other for warmth.
I love you, Eames had whispered. Or maybe he only thought he had said it.
§
He worked for the Ministry for a few years. Department of Magical Transportation, repairing and confiscating brooms. Hated his job. Arthur worked for Wizengamot Administration Services, and he hated his too.
“You should quit,” Eames told him one night, conjuring a bird with absurdly long tailfeathers to cheer Arthur up after a grueling day.
“You have no idea the things I get to read, though,” Arthur had said, reclining into a shabby chair. “They trust me. I’ve learned things about magic that I doubt most of the professors at Hogwarts even know. Things most people don’t even believe are possible.”
“But you’re bored, Arthur,” Eames argued. “Remember what we swore to each other? That night before graduation? We swore we’d never be ordinary. “
“We’re not ordinary,” Arthur said, squeezing the fingers Eames had slipped onto his shoulder. “I’m just waiting for the right opportunity.”
The bird struggled to fly, dragging heavy feathers along the ground, beating its pink-edged wings. Arthur pointed his wand at it and it disappeared in a puff of down.
A few weeks later, Eames was sitting at his desk waving his wand absently over a broom with a Freezing Hex on it when a black moth unfolded into a piece of paper on his hand. He recognized the sigil, a tiny top, from his school days: it was from a coworker, a former Slytherin classmate named Cobb.
I have an adventure befitting a man of your cunning and skills, it said. Apparate to these coordinates, and come alone.
§
As it turned out, the battle was not so easily won.
After that sniveling kid had attacked Nagini, the centaurs charged them, and he lost Arthur once again in the chaos. He managed to shield himself and play dead, letting himself get dragged into the castle by a centaur whose hoof he purposely tangled into his cloak. The shield left him unharmed, and he Stupefied the centaur once he was inside, untangling himself and leaping forward to join the fray. At this point he was more concerned with ending the battle quickly, and he hurled curses indiscriminately, at backs and fronts, with little regard for the rules of dueling.
He’d always been a skilled duelist, and he’d gotten better, quicker, from practicing with Arthur. Arthur had little regard for his own pain or discomfort. Do Cruciatus on me, he urged. You need to practice against someone who’s good at dueling. Just do it, Eames. Always Eames swallowed down his own nausea, his hatred of seeing Arthur hurt, and lifted his wand.
A full-body numbing curse nearly caused him to drop his wand, and he lifted his arm only with great effort to deliver a Levicorpus. The curse hit at an opportune time, when he'd calculated that his opponent’s shield spell would have worn off, given her approximate skill level, and the young woman was jerked upwards into the air.
“Well done, Mr. Eames,” said a cool, unmistakable voice behind him. He glanced quickly back at Arthur.
“I’m a bit busy right now, Arthur,” he said, but he couldn’t help but smile.
He was still smiling when he heard the words Avada Kedavra, and saw the flash of green light, and turned around in time to see Arthur stagger, shocked, and then fall.
§
When Eames announced to his mother, casually and cryptically yet with undisguised pride, that he had joined the Death Eaters, his mother had looked down, swatted a pixie from her soup tureen, and glowered up at him.
“So you’re a henchman, is that it?” She shook her head. “Hired magical muscle. I do hope you don’t have any illusions that you’re anything other than totally disposable.”
“I’m a Death Eater,” he’d pleaded. “He trusts me. He values my strength. It’s more than anyone’s done before.”
Anyone but Arthur, that is. And Arthur had taken to the cause far more quickly than Eames had expected. He was reluctant to tell Arthur about his alliance with the Death Eaters because of Arthur’s own half-blood status. But, without telling Arthur, he secretly presented the Dark Lord with forged papers declaring Arthur pure-blooded, son of Arthur’s real father and a made-up Russian witch from a real and quite large family. Arthur had always been tight-lipped about his family, so no one knew anything to the contrary. When the Dark Lord invited Arthur to the next meeting, Arthur was confused and afraid. Eames explained to him that the Dark Lord alone understood the value of people like them, people with ambition and strength, people unafraid to explore forbidden magic, to seek knowledge, to seize power.
“No more playing it safe,” he’d whispered, ecstatically, into Arthur’s shoulder the night after the first meeting they attended together. There had been hours of triumphant fucking; teeth bared, laughing, grasping. Feeling like they were seeing each other clearly after years of looking through the wrong end of a scratched pair of binoculars.
And at one point, while he was deep in Arthur, he reached for his wand. Whispered Lumos, willing a low-level beam, just so he could see Arthur's face lit softly in the dark. It was blissful. As if his mind and heart were finally at rest.
§
Eames lay still and squeezed his eyes shut, aware of the people attending to their dead and wounded; rocking limp bodies in their arms, stroking back their hair, closing their extinguished eyes. He couldn’t attend to his dead and wounded one, the only one of his compatriots he still cared about. The only one he ever really cared about to begin with. One by one the Death Eaters revealed themselves for who they really were. Shallow, arrogant, ambition-drunk, vengeful, insane. Maybe Arthur had been that way. Had become that way. And maybe Eames had too.
He thought of Arthur not an hour ago, alive with hope and violence, convinced of his invincibility. How just before they’d had to Apparate to Voldemort’s side, Arthur had leaned down and kissed him, hard. How he had thought, elated, I haven’t lost him. I haven’t lost him.
“Get up, you piece of shit. You’re coming to Azkaban, and even that’s too good for you.”
The words weren’t directed at him-he couldn’t quite tell over the dizziness and the buzzing in his ears. But they may as well have been.
Athanasius has done exactly what was expected of him.
He knew the second he lifted his head they’d be upon him. Let them, he thought. He had to see Arthur one last time.
It was best that Arthur hadn’t lived. He’d never have let himself be taken alive anyway. He’d fight to the death, scrabbling for a tiny, desperate chip of glory, like a last sliver of Muggle soap bound for the drain.
But what is the last thing I want to remember as a free man? Eames asked himself.
He thought of Arthur in his dream, running backward over the waves of a buckling landscape. A kid showing off, grinning at Eames and begging him to run faster.
He thought of Arthur torturing his first victim, Eames watching. Arthur looking anxiously for his reaction.
He thought of Arthur, weak and filthy, crawling between Eames' covers after an abortive day of tunnel-digging. Fifteen years old. (Had he ever actually told Arthur he loved him, in so many words? Arthur had said it, in fading ink, in the seeds of fruit, in phosphorescent lines traced by spells on Eames' very skin.) Arthur shucking off his dirt-smeared clothes and winding skinny arms around Eames’ neck. Eames scrubbing his pale body clean with magic, Arthur closing his eyes and smiling at the tickling sensation.
Eames smiled as a strange hand pried open his fingers.