FIC for: hecticity
Title: Organic Shrapnel
Recipient: hecticity
Fic or Art: Fic
Rating: G
Characters: Luna Lovegood, Draco Malfoy & Dean Thomas
Warnings: Character deaths
Summary: Her hair's not the way it was in the Summer of the War, in the months when Ron would shove Luna clumsily into the maple banister leading to the wine cellar, when the soggy wood would splinter the skin on her back and she'd shut her eyes, knuckles cold against the glass bottles of merlot that Sirius' mother diluted with house-elf blood.
Notes: Not quite what I wanted, but I hope that you enjoy this, hecticity!
"You're very much like the stone prince," Luna announces to Draco, a smile at the edge of her mouth.
Draco drums his fingers on his knees. His wrists are soft and wide like boulders made of flour. Draco's nails graze against his flesh to ignite a layer of goosebumps, milky ridges that ripple up and down his arms. He's still too skinny, and he doesn't like to look at Luna; Draco was gifted with neither courage nor good fortune. His spine is stiff and his skin grayish in the creased midday light. Luna sits plaiting her hair, for the June wind grips and spills the bright piles of it over her shoulders in a way she isn't yet used to.
Her hair's not the way it was in the Summer of the War, in the months when Ron would shove Luna clumsily into the maple banister leading to the wine cellar, when the soggy wood would splinter the skin on her back and she'd shut her eyes, knuckles cold against the glass bottles of merlot that Sirius' mother diluted with house-elf blood. That was when Luna sheared her hair almost all off, so that it stuck behind her ears, whitish and knotted.
Twelve months have barreled right through her, propelled her into a world where her hair grows heavy in its braid and Draco Malfoy is not so bleak anymore.
"Voldemort was a half-blood, too, you know. And a half-misanthropist. And a seventh of himself, which made him an entirely different fraction," Luna says, contemplative.
"I never really liked Arithmancy," Draco answers dryly. His voice is tar-stiff, the way Harry's was in August. Luna liked the hardness of Harry's voice in summertime, the way he spoke futures into each aftermath. They were so much alike, in the summer, Draco and Harry: men rigid and blazing, great lanterns of men. Families born of spite, too, Luna added to her mental list. So incredibly, incredibly alike, fates braided to form inevitability.
It's June again, and everything is the same. The air is crisp with grief for the decay of spring, and the sky sails flat over England. Luna adores June - though she adores every month evenly, because she's an orphan now, and that is the duty of her independence, to quarter her affections - and today marks her return to England. She's missed living on an island, where the ocean rolls beneath her and around her. It's wonderful to have returned to the honeyed greys of England, the warm June rains that barrage the red walls of her father's cottage.
There is a pause in which Draco is uncomfortable. Draco has no composure; even now, he is restless and uncertain. His guilt is tangible, it envelopes him like smog. He was the same in the war, always fidgeting, wanting to lead but only willing to obey. Luna smiles at the flurry of his fingers and the cadaverous rings of his throat.
He gathers his aplomb to him and meets her eyes to ask: "Why am I like the stone prince, Lovegood?"
"You're so still now. Do you know, in muggle history they called still life nature morte? Dead nature."
"That's it?"
"No: you'll never understand that being bloodless is immortality."
Draco laughs, a sound purged of mirth, because even though he never wanted immortality, it was mortality that he didn't understand.
+ + +
Luna never touched Draco, not ever.
She had always found his possibilities too palpable. He was a man with lungs tempered by destiny, fate colored his every breath. The trouble with Draco was his inability to accept, to suppress his optimisms. He was the ultimate victim of weltschmerz, repulsed by his realities and unable to admit (and consequently shelve) his discontents. The frustrations possessed him completely, in pillars of fervor and tenuous eagerness.
To Luna, it was as if the plucking of Draco's heartstrings would cause syzygies. She wasn't even an eighth in love with him, but his destinies contorted the spaces around him. There were nights in which Luna's thoughts ran to Draco, to the Malfoy heir whose legs gleamed like bones in starlight, who seemed, in those last months of the autumn and war, to be a life in a tunnel of death, a life dissipating, welcoming its own end.
In that June last year, he'd walked into the house with skin that was draped over his bones all wrong, too wide, swinging around his elbows, pooling over his thighs. Months with Macnair was all he would say of it to them, because McGonagall poured chilled Veritaserum over his teeth in an empty dining room the first night, and even Harry was told that that was the end of it.
Draco liked to sit near the windows at night and by the doors during the day. There were mornings when he would bar himself in the cells of his own protection. There were nights when Luna could hear him humming.
"I thought he was a victim, when we were younger," Hermione had once said, when they were in a cave that was actually a gap in the rise of a mountain and babbling, because their words were trapped in the cage of altitude. "I thought he was the least lucky of us all. After all, I have morality and friendship and goodwill."
"You're on the side of the angels, huh?" piped in Harry, from beside the blue fire.
"He was the lucky one, though," Hermione continued, with the hot delirium that animated her. "He was so lucky, because I was the victim of responsibility, and it's the boys with inevitabilities that go to heaven."
That was the day Ron's body splattered over the cliffs somewhere east of the muggle compass, inevitably.
+ + +
"Eternal life would bore me," Draco says, warily, like he doesn't mean it.
Luna nods, not unkindly at him, and conjures a brass kettle. She pours him a cup of tea, stirring the bone china cup for him and sets the cup one beside the other, constellations of steam between them.
He doesn't mean it.
+ + +
It had been Luna who killed Lucius. His nails had been plunging into her collarbone, and suddenly magic had gushed out from her mouth, from the darknesses of her eyes and her ears to demolish him. It had soft, swift and noiseless, with Lucius being dissolved before her very eyes. Power had stayed in the air, erupting between her fingers and toes. It was wondrous, possessing magic; the lines of the battle fell differently, and there was power humming in nets and coils around her. It was sudden comprehension, like reading French novels in French.
Grim with enlightened youth, Luna walked into the symphonies of battle, where green light and fidelity fumbled around one another. Hermione worked like a hurricane, directing and simultaneously rising, elevated and tucking herself somewhere into the sky, so that only a downpour of narrow, sometimes neon, hexes betrayed her presence.
It had been Malfoy who killed Dean, accidentally. A stunner aimed at a Death Eater, the man beside him tumbling onto Malfoy with all the weight of his own death, twisting the spell so it shot Dean into the white birch tree, and in the moments his ribs squealed and his neck wobbled, one of the many beams reached him.
Malfoy had gone white and ran quickly to Dean, raising a shield around the both of them.
They'd never been friends, but the past was always shunned from battles, because war was always about the future, about projecting the past into the future and thus destroying it.
Luna had been nearby, and had come to sit beside Dean, to weave the healing spells she knew over him. That was her purpose in the war: easing death. She was good at it, too.
"I'm going to meet God, I'm sure of it," Dean had told her with a laugh.
"Tell him I said hello," Luna answered gravely, adding: "though he's heard it too often lately, I'd imagine. Tell him I said good morning instead."
"I had a friend-" Dean gasps, not listening, and his palms are cold where they slip on Luna's thighs, "I had a friend from America."
"And what did he say?" Luna murmurs. She's not sure how she's so well-schooled in this, but she is.
"He said to me: I was born and raised in America, and here's the problem with a young country. He said: the thing is in America they tell every kid they can change the world. He said they teach them the world needs changing, like we're, any of us, the ones who can do it. I said tell them the world is fucking wonderful."
"And has it been?"
"Mm?"
"Has it been wonderful?"
"Well, there's been trouble. But there's always going to be trouble. Conflict makes love a love story.1 The world's a ball of yarn and if you untangle it, we'll have lost everything."
"We'll be two-dimensional," Luna remarked, numbing his legs with a swish of her wand.
"See how good it all is?" Dean said, eyes shutting grotesquely, mouth still and open, the white tops of his teeth gleaming.
Luna turned to see Malfoy standing beside her, looking at her with some mixture of repulsion and wonder. She cocked her head towards the roar beyond them.
"Go," she said to him.
Malfoy attended one funeral, and it wasn't his father's.
+ + +
“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”
“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get fixed in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into her skin. They call this organic shrapnel."
1 - quoted from Milan Kundera's Immortality. I absolutely could not resist using that line.
Recipient: hecticity
Fic or Art: Fic
Rating: G
Characters: Luna Lovegood, Draco Malfoy & Dean Thomas
Warnings: Character deaths
Summary: Her hair's not the way it was in the Summer of the War, in the months when Ron would shove Luna clumsily into the maple banister leading to the wine cellar, when the soggy wood would splinter the skin on her back and she'd shut her eyes, knuckles cold against the glass bottles of merlot that Sirius' mother diluted with house-elf blood.
Notes: Not quite what I wanted, but I hope that you enjoy this, hecticity!
"You're very much like the stone prince," Luna announces to Draco, a smile at the edge of her mouth.
Draco drums his fingers on his knees. His wrists are soft and wide like boulders made of flour. Draco's nails graze against his flesh to ignite a layer of goosebumps, milky ridges that ripple up and down his arms. He's still too skinny, and he doesn't like to look at Luna; Draco was gifted with neither courage nor good fortune. His spine is stiff and his skin grayish in the creased midday light. Luna sits plaiting her hair, for the June wind grips and spills the bright piles of it over her shoulders in a way she isn't yet used to.
Her hair's not the way it was in the Summer of the War, in the months when Ron would shove Luna clumsily into the maple banister leading to the wine cellar, when the soggy wood would splinter the skin on her back and she'd shut her eyes, knuckles cold against the glass bottles of merlot that Sirius' mother diluted with house-elf blood. That was when Luna sheared her hair almost all off, so that it stuck behind her ears, whitish and knotted.
Twelve months have barreled right through her, propelled her into a world where her hair grows heavy in its braid and Draco Malfoy is not so bleak anymore.
"Voldemort was a half-blood, too, you know. And a half-misanthropist. And a seventh of himself, which made him an entirely different fraction," Luna says, contemplative.
"I never really liked Arithmancy," Draco answers dryly. His voice is tar-stiff, the way Harry's was in August. Luna liked the hardness of Harry's voice in summertime, the way he spoke futures into each aftermath. They were so much alike, in the summer, Draco and Harry: men rigid and blazing, great lanterns of men. Families born of spite, too, Luna added to her mental list. So incredibly, incredibly alike, fates braided to form inevitability.
It's June again, and everything is the same. The air is crisp with grief for the decay of spring, and the sky sails flat over England. Luna adores June - though she adores every month evenly, because she's an orphan now, and that is the duty of her independence, to quarter her affections - and today marks her return to England. She's missed living on an island, where the ocean rolls beneath her and around her. It's wonderful to have returned to the honeyed greys of England, the warm June rains that barrage the red walls of her father's cottage.
There is a pause in which Draco is uncomfortable. Draco has no composure; even now, he is restless and uncertain. His guilt is tangible, it envelopes him like smog. He was the same in the war, always fidgeting, wanting to lead but only willing to obey. Luna smiles at the flurry of his fingers and the cadaverous rings of his throat.
He gathers his aplomb to him and meets her eyes to ask: "Why am I like the stone prince, Lovegood?"
"You're so still now. Do you know, in muggle history they called still life nature morte? Dead nature."
"That's it?"
"No: you'll never understand that being bloodless is immortality."
Draco laughs, a sound purged of mirth, because even though he never wanted immortality, it was mortality that he didn't understand.
+ + +
Luna never touched Draco, not ever.
She had always found his possibilities too palpable. He was a man with lungs tempered by destiny, fate colored his every breath. The trouble with Draco was his inability to accept, to suppress his optimisms. He was the ultimate victim of weltschmerz, repulsed by his realities and unable to admit (and consequently shelve) his discontents. The frustrations possessed him completely, in pillars of fervor and tenuous eagerness.
To Luna, it was as if the plucking of Draco's heartstrings would cause syzygies. She wasn't even an eighth in love with him, but his destinies contorted the spaces around him. There were nights in which Luna's thoughts ran to Draco, to the Malfoy heir whose legs gleamed like bones in starlight, who seemed, in those last months of the autumn and war, to be a life in a tunnel of death, a life dissipating, welcoming its own end.
In that June last year, he'd walked into the house with skin that was draped over his bones all wrong, too wide, swinging around his elbows, pooling over his thighs. Months with Macnair was all he would say of it to them, because McGonagall poured chilled Veritaserum over his teeth in an empty dining room the first night, and even Harry was told that that was the end of it.
Draco liked to sit near the windows at night and by the doors during the day. There were mornings when he would bar himself in the cells of his own protection. There were nights when Luna could hear him humming.
"I thought he was a victim, when we were younger," Hermione had once said, when they were in a cave that was actually a gap in the rise of a mountain and babbling, because their words were trapped in the cage of altitude. "I thought he was the least lucky of us all. After all, I have morality and friendship and goodwill."
"You're on the side of the angels, huh?" piped in Harry, from beside the blue fire.
"He was the lucky one, though," Hermione continued, with the hot delirium that animated her. "He was so lucky, because I was the victim of responsibility, and it's the boys with inevitabilities that go to heaven."
That was the day Ron's body splattered over the cliffs somewhere east of the muggle compass, inevitably.
+ + +
"Eternal life would bore me," Draco says, warily, like he doesn't mean it.
Luna nods, not unkindly at him, and conjures a brass kettle. She pours him a cup of tea, stirring the bone china cup for him and sets the cup one beside the other, constellations of steam between them.
He doesn't mean it.
+ + +
It had been Luna who killed Lucius. His nails had been plunging into her collarbone, and suddenly magic had gushed out from her mouth, from the darknesses of her eyes and her ears to demolish him. It had soft, swift and noiseless, with Lucius being dissolved before her very eyes. Power had stayed in the air, erupting between her fingers and toes. It was wondrous, possessing magic; the lines of the battle fell differently, and there was power humming in nets and coils around her. It was sudden comprehension, like reading French novels in French.
Grim with enlightened youth, Luna walked into the symphonies of battle, where green light and fidelity fumbled around one another. Hermione worked like a hurricane, directing and simultaneously rising, elevated and tucking herself somewhere into the sky, so that only a downpour of narrow, sometimes neon, hexes betrayed her presence.
It had been Malfoy who killed Dean, accidentally. A stunner aimed at a Death Eater, the man beside him tumbling onto Malfoy with all the weight of his own death, twisting the spell so it shot Dean into the white birch tree, and in the moments his ribs squealed and his neck wobbled, one of the many beams reached him.
Malfoy had gone white and ran quickly to Dean, raising a shield around the both of them.
They'd never been friends, but the past was always shunned from battles, because war was always about the future, about projecting the past into the future and thus destroying it.
Luna had been nearby, and had come to sit beside Dean, to weave the healing spells she knew over him. That was her purpose in the war: easing death. She was good at it, too.
"I'm going to meet God, I'm sure of it," Dean had told her with a laugh.
"Tell him I said hello," Luna answered gravely, adding: "though he's heard it too often lately, I'd imagine. Tell him I said good morning instead."
"I had a friend-" Dean gasps, not listening, and his palms are cold where they slip on Luna's thighs, "I had a friend from America."
"And what did he say?" Luna murmurs. She's not sure how she's so well-schooled in this, but she is.
"He said to me: I was born and raised in America, and here's the problem with a young country. He said: the thing is in America they tell every kid they can change the world. He said they teach them the world needs changing, like we're, any of us, the ones who can do it. I said tell them the world is fucking wonderful."
"And has it been?"
"Mm?"
"Has it been wonderful?"
"Well, there's been trouble. But there's always going to be trouble. Conflict makes love a love story.1 The world's a ball of yarn and if you untangle it, we'll have lost everything."
"We'll be two-dimensional," Luna remarked, numbing his legs with a swish of her wand.
"See how good it all is?" Dean said, eyes shutting grotesquely, mouth still and open, the white tops of his teeth gleaming.
Luna turned to see Malfoy standing beside her, looking at her with some mixture of repulsion and wonder. She cocked her head towards the roar beyond them.
"Go," she said to him.
Malfoy attended one funeral, and it wasn't his father's.
+ + +
“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”
“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get fixed in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into her skin. They call this organic shrapnel."
1 - quoted from Milan Kundera's Immortality. I absolutely could not resist using that line.