HP fic: "Tracey Davis: A portrait."
Don't know what overcome me but I wrote a Harry Potter Fanfic, and a Genfic at that, which is pretty out of character for someone whose characters keep falling for each other no matter their sexes or their busy schedules doing important stuff like, you know, saving the world... Anyway, I will re-read it a few times and then post in some community or another, but I felt the need to post in RIGHT NOW here for my own and only satisfaction.
EDITED: I was just checking it, as it happens it's size has doubled.
EDITED AGAIN: After being betated. 3rd EDIT: May 2008, wow, and did it need a edit!
Title: Tracey Davis: A portrait.
Author:
evalangui
Thanks to rons_pigwidgeon for the beta. Any remaining errors are probably due to my stubborness.
*Concrit is welcome*
Tracey Davis: A Portrait.
Tracey Davis is the type of girl that gets what she wants by wanting things she can realistically get. She is a Slytherin, and in a house where everything is about where you come from, her family is low-ranged, not old or Pureblooded enough. She is ambitious but patient; she knows you need to wait for some things and doesn’t try to conquer the world like the Dark Lord, be the more popular girl at school while being part of the least popular house like Pansy, get better qualifications than Granger or beat the star Quidditch player like Draco.
Tracey is realistic and exploits her innate abilities at Charms and History, selling essays or making the right type of acquaintances. She uses her intellect to make herself a lot prettier than she actually is and her beauty to make people wish to do things for her. She uses her common sense and is polite to people that count on either side, and to reason that a cause that won’t allow her to be at the top anyway isn’t worth bloodying her hands for.
Tracey does not delude herself with useless friendships; she doesn’t ever call them that in her mind, though she repeats the word countlessly to others in endearing tones. She knows in this world nothing is for free and if others want to take something intangible as payment, good for them, she is not interested.
She convinces Helene, the Slytherin seventh year prefect, that she considers her a model to follow and gets overlooked if she needs to run out late.
She discretely flirts with Crabbe, who by sixth years hasn’t grown a brain and is still dead useful as a goon and by the end of the week she gets him to forget about Draco Malfoy’s order of crushing some idiot’s skull into a pulp just by laughing in his ear-range. The idiot looks grateful, Malfoy looks suspiciously at Crabbe, Vincent just shrugs and Tracey smiles to herself.
People believe all Slytherins are calculating, cold-blooded manipulators. The truth of the matter is that most Slytherins are just humans wanting too much and that if you find exactly what they want they are a lot easier to manipulate than most people, since they won’t so care much about how they get it.
Tracey has a mental list of Slytherin desires that she updates every year by sitting with the newcomers and explaining them nonsense in a sisterly way, sometimes they even want that and the job is done. Tracey knows that with some, just a little at a time will be enough to make them think they are the ones using you and giving you useless favours in return. Of course, some of them actually believe in friendship, Tracey doesn’t know which is worse.
What Slytherins as a whole want is to feel in power, because they are scared of everything they cannot control and manipulate. Of course, when they are finally in power they are even more scared of losing it.
As for personal tastes, Draco wants attention, his parents’, his teachers’, his friends’, his rivals’… Tracey doesn’t think it matters much and in her opinion being a spoiled brat with no real self-control makes Draco Malfoy pretty bad at getting what he wants. She doesn’t offer her own attention to Draco, not only he has a thing for crowds that contradicts Tracey‘s secrecy police, obsesses over stupid details like people mimicking his smirk but he’s been claimed by someone she doesn’t want to cross. Moreover, there’s nothing he can (and will) give her that is worth losing Pansy’s favour and the girl can be paranoid if it’s about “her Draco”.
And Pansy, Pansy wants Draco, of course, and wealth and all the things she is destined to have anyway, for Tracey to make anything useful out of her it has to be Draco-related and she finds the most popular girl of the house of serpents dreadfully boring and terribly useful.
Millicent wants beauty and popularity and acceptance, because people have this tendency to want what they don’t have and Millicent doesn’t want to be intelligent, and independent, to shine as a star; she wants to belong to a bloody clique and dress prettily and get invited to parties and be normal. All of that without anybody noticing because there’s nothing worse in Slytherin than someone who doesn’t think herself worthy. Anything that makes her look more girly (and not ridiculously transgendered) will get you anything from her. Tracey asks for her help in the subjects she excels at, which are more than popular opinion would give her credit for, and teaches her the preening charms she sometimes uses in herself.
Blaise Zabini was a difficult one to figure because he seems to want any type of power he can get. It took Tracey a year to understand he didn’t really know what he wanted the power for and just enjoyed holding it. Unfortunately, Blaise is in the same year as Draco and his great expectations ended at playing buddy to the son of the richest and most pureblooded.
That's in Slytherin, Tracey knows Blaise knows the right people in the other houses because she knows them too. And she keeps her distances with him, enough to know what he is up to without him noticing, and never trying to get anything out of him because Blaise is the type of Slytherin that will not stop until he has it all. She can tell Blaise will betray quite a lot of people and does not intend to be one of them.
Vincent Crabbe, the tug, the boy that is too big and too awkward and frankly, too dim, to be respected and tries to get that respect by being menacing or alternatively by letting others use him in exchange for respect, for (How utterly unslytherin of him!) love. Vincent is not picky: Draco’s despotic attitude, Pansy’s condescending petting or Tracey’s friendly flirting all seem to do. He is a little boy looking through the window at the things he is never going to do more than desire. Never get. And if he ever realised the truth he would crumble. If Tracey didn’t know pity only makes the pitier weaker, she would pity Vincent.
Gregory Goyle, the exemplary son; sometime in third year Tracey got hold of a few of his parents letters and discovered that the fact that their son almost couldn't pass elementary subjects didn’t worry them in the least because he was following in his father’s footsteps. And that’s why Tracey doesn’t like Gregory, because Gregory is not a real Slytherin and is only there because he was ordered to be. A bloody Hufflepuff, she supposes, with that blind loyalty, not a Ravenclaw certainly, and while Tracey isn’t sure he can actually think before he acts (or after or even when), she doesn’t consider him rash enough to be a Gryffindor. Since his loyalty isn’t to her, Tracey leaves him alone. He is not dangerous, he is not useful, he doesn’t exist.
Theodore Nott, the boy who sees beyond and not far enough. Theodore, the Slytherin that could easily have been a Ravenclaw if not for his limitless ambition and his familial background. Tracey likes him; he is not attractive or popular, he is terrible secretive, and Tracey hardly knows which of his countless projects he is working on at the moment. But most of her classmates bore her with their shallowness, so easy to read, so vulnerable. Tracey does not want to control Nott, doing so would be an absolute disappointment, and since he has less political ambition than a tablecloth, she doesn’t consider him risky to her interests. Tracey does not know him and does not want to, that would be risky. This…this is just a game.
And she is not offended or hurt or even remorseful when he asks Daphne Greengrass to the Yule Ball in fourth year. And that is definitely not the reason she turns down a real Ravenclaw who has been nice to her in class. No, if she does, it’s because there’s nothing to win and she doesn’t believe in relationships that don’t involve ulterior motives.
If Tracey does not take the opportunity of using Nott when he is down after his father is publicly announced as a Death Eater it’s because she wouldn’t know what to ask of him, not because she wants something freely given.
Daphne Greengrass, the girl that thinks too much of herself even as a first year and dares reject Pansy Pankinson, making a fearsome enemy that could and would ruin her reputation even before she does it herself. It’s Pansy who in a cop of brilliance gives her the nickname of Queenie, one she will be stuck with indefinitely.
Queenie Greengrass, the girl who is a notch in everybody’s bed. She is so easy to manipulate it’s laughable that she is a Slytherin, but she can do little else apart from being pretty and surviving by giving sexual favours away.
Tracey proves she is easy and a total loser by asking for things without offering anything in return, not even a semblance of friendship. If she wanted to experiment she might go to Daphne because she has reliable information that she is at least very good in bed, except, that would pose the same problem as making her do the dirty work; Greengrass is not even good at keeping her trap shut.
Sexual favours are highly rated and if Tracey looked naturally like her, she could magically improve herself to the level of a Veela. Tracey hates waste, therefore, Tracey hates Daphne. Not with any passion, mind you, Tracey‘s passion is solely for her project and in the same way that she doesn’t believe in real love or friendship, she doesn’t believe in real hatred.
Tracey does not hate Queenie Greengrass. She does not pity Vincent Crabbe. She does not deeply want to make Millicent Bulstrode value herself. She is not afraid of Blaise Zabini. She is not annoyed by Draco Malfoy’s childishness. She does not envy Pansy Parkinson's luck in not wanting anything she cannot have. She does not care for Gregory Goyle’s loyalty or his betrayal to her house. Tracey is not in love with Theodore Nott.
Tracey Davis has a project, a family she almost doesn’t know, an only a bit above average school performance, magic, and, above all, the ambition and the patience to triumph.
The now seventh years are, and have been since Tracey can remember, in a constant and tiring battle of powers within themselves that leaves them with little time for the rest of the world. They maintain a strange equilibrium and change alliances at daring speeds. Tracey ingratiates herself with some of them using gossip about the others, with Clarissa Strage she even gets gossip back she can use and reuse.
The lower years have a few interesting people but most of them are hindered by hormones, or bloodlines or money or inanity to get anywhere and Tracey lets them be, lets them wish. She has the few that could be useful or a problem under control with different techniques that go from playing the big sister for girls who will have a tendency to think she cares for them and confide secrets to plain old blackmail.
All they think Tracey Davis is a nobody, just a random Slytherin student, and by seventh year Tracey is ready to show them they are wrong.
Blaise is distracted by his raging hormones and his dramatic break-ups. Draco’s still acting like a ten-year-old in a grown-up body that throws tantrums because the world is not at his feet. Queenie is still Queenie and Pansy is still in love with Draco and herself, her popularity and her future. Millicent is still practically an outcast only with the added comfort of an admirer: Crabbe. Vincent, Tracey reckons, might finally get something. And Goyle is still being loyal and slow and totally disrupting Slytherin purity with his lack of ambition. Theodore is still secretive and still has the dark circles under his eyes he acquired with the loss of his father.
And it is now when Tracey discovers Draco’s secret and holds in her hand the key to Slytherin. Pansy likes to call herself the Queen of Slytherin, in that fashion of hers of being a parallel to whatever Draco is, but looking at Draco’s horrified expression, at the terror and then the realisation slowly seeping in, Tracey knows the only monarch Slytherin is going to have from now on is herself. And smirks.
Later, she looks at the moving picture in her hand wondering why anybody would think women were the weak sex when men can‘t resist the simplest of temptations and can throw away years of cunning plans just to get laid. She keeps smirking, remembering the proud prince of Slytherin begging for her silence and actually believing her when she promised it. Now, will Blaise, and especially Draco, survive long enough to make this secret worth keeping?
Se Fini.