Entry tags:

100quills, fanfiction, fic: far away as moonshine, writing

FIC: Far Away as Moonshine (3/28)
Title: Far Away as Moonshine, Part I: Malfoy Manor
Author: zephre
Rating: PG-13 (R for whole fic)
Prompt: 100quills table 50.2: Image
Word Count: 1,464
Summary: For Draco Malfoy, the war was one endless nightmare. Until Luna Lovegood gave him a reason to hope. Can he find his courage, make his luck, and become more than a pawn to those in power?
Warnings: (for whole fic, highlight to view) *mature themes, imprisonment, mention of rape, abuse, battlefield violence, various canon and other character deaths, sexual situations*
Notes: The story has three parts, each broken into chapters. The title is from the song, "Street of Dreams" by Oysterband.

Chapter Index:
Part I:   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part II:  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Part III: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ||
Epilogue

Chapter 3: In which Draco does not care and cares too much.


The previous spring he had often come upon Luna in the halls before breakfast, or during free periods, sketchbook in hand. When the corridors had been empty save the two of them, Draco had even let himself sit with her. She never asked anything of him; he had stared at his hands, or at the wall, and let his thoughts run in more and more frantic circles. Poisons, curses, plans, plots. His life that term had begun the terrible nightmare from which he could not wake.

Most of the time in those corridors he and Luna had never spoken.  He simply sat beside her, close enough that if he had stretched out his arm he could have touched her knee. She drew, looking at suits of armor, portraits, worn or broken stones, and sometimes at Draco himself. At times, she hummed softly as her hands moved.  Draco was almost certain that she never realized she was doing it. 

In early November, when Luna still wore the hex mark on her face from her last detention with Alecto and Crabbe, Draco had not thought to find her up before dawn with charcoal on her fingers and paper clipped to a board on her lap. He rounded the corner and stopped dead when he saw her sitting on a bench halfway down. She turned her head, and moved a few inches to the side. It was as clear an invitation as Draco could expect; there was no shortage of empty benches along that wall. She watched solemnly as he closed the distance between them, and when he sat down beside her she turned her eyes back to her paper.

She had drawn the Head Table, but the Head Table from a memory. Dumbledore was alive in Luna's sketch, McGonagall had fewer lines around her mouth, Slughorn smiled benevolently, and even Snape managed to look softer somehow. Draco's breath hissed between his teeth as he watched Luna's pencil add detail to the candelabra on the table.

Luna did not look up, but her free hand moved between them, gracefully curling over Draco's. Her fingers slid easily between his, and then they were palm-to-palm, holding hands in an empty corridor as the first hints of dawn lit the windows. He did not even mind, for a moment, that she was holding his wand hand.

Draco stared at the image of Dumbledore on the paper, and finally whispered, "Can't you draw something else?" 

Luna silently let the paper slide from her drawing board to the floor. Its edges curled up, obscuring McGonagall's hat and Slughorn's robes.  Dumbledore still stared from the center of the page, right into Draco's head and heart, as the old man had done on the tower.  "Like what?" Luna asked in a normal tone of voice.

"Anything else," Draco said. 

She took up the charcoal from her lap, and her strokes were swift and dark on the new page, and at first Draco did not realize what she was doing.  Then his eyes refocused, seeing the white spaces left by the thick strokes of black, and he realized she had depicted a blank, skull-like mask in shadow.

Draco pulled his hand free of hers to push the paper to the floor.  The mask curled up on itself beside Luna's ankle.  "Not that," he said, hearing with disgust the unsteadiness in his voice.

Her charcoal did not even stop moving, simply picked up the arc of her stroke on the next sheet of paper.  She turned it into the curve of a thestral's wing.  Draco was only slightly less disturbed by that subject.

"That's quite morbid, you know."  He ran a fingertip around the outside of the thestral's head, smudging the lines. 

"So is learning fourteen ways to kill a man with legal hexes," Luna murmured, taking hold of his wrist and moving his hand off the paper once more. "Why do you care what I draw?"

Draco looked away from the papers, staring hard at the ledge of the window across the hallway. "I don't." 

Luna made a noise that may have been suppressed laughter. She must not believe him.

"I don't care," Draco said again. It sounded no more convincing this time. "Caring just gives you something to lose. Something that can be taken away."

Luna's fingers tightened on his wrist. "Some of us figured that out as First Years." 

"But still have so much to lose."

"Yes."

Draco shook off her hand and stood up. "I don't care. Do what you want." His shadow fell across her face, across those pale, unnatural eyes. Those eyes understood more than she ever said out loud. They knew he was no longer talking about drawing.

"Malfoy -"

He shook his head. "No. I don't care." He leaned forward, a pose that would be menacing to anyone but Luna, who stared up at him with undisturbed serenity. "I can't care." 

She nodded, once, and picked up her charcoal once more. "Good morning, then, Malfoy."

Draco would never be used to the way she reacted. Peaceful, unflappable Luna. She never used tears the way Pansy did, never cried at all except in detentions. But everyone cried under Amycus's Cruciatus, no matter how strong they were in other things. 

Draco watched Luna add a thestral calf to her paper in a few quick lines, and stopped himself from saying anything else. He could not be here, could not know what he knew and still sit in a corridor as if he were any other student. He could not let Luna do this to him.

He turned and walked away.


The rooms in the cellar had once been for cold storage, but a few charms had rendered them minimally habitable.  The doors each had a sliding panel set at adult eye level now, and a lock that only a chosen few could open. Lucius had that much control over what went on in his home, that random Death Eaters, especially those without the Mark, could not run rampant and over-enthusiastic with his prisoners. 

Draco opened the panel in the third door. Just enough illumination poured in from the hallway for him to make out the huddled figure in the corner. She lifted her head and blinked, staring at the door.

Oh, Merlin, her eyes. Huge in her face, bloodshot and pale, ringed with shadows like bruises on her skin. Her lips were split and swollen, her jaw dark with an actual bruise. Someone had hit her, or hexed her from the door. Draco's rage was as sudden as it was impotent. He could not prevent her from being hurt. All he offered was too little, too late, and she would be right to spit his help back in his face.

He pressed his palm to the wall beside the door handle, and the lock opened with an echoing thunk. Taking a deep breath, he let himself inside Luna's cell, and held both hands up, wandless, before her. "Luna," he said clearly.

She shrank from him, pressing herself into the wall, and shook her head. Her lips were moving, re-opening the cuts, but he could not hear her. 

He moved closer, kneeling beside her, and carefully reached for her hand. "Luna."

She pulled back so quickly Draco heard her head crack against the wall. He immediately slid his fingers into her hair, buffering her and checking for bleeding. The moment he actually touched her she went completely still, staring. 

"Draco?"

The first time she had ever called him by his given name, and it was a terrified whisper in a prison cell. Draco eased her away from the wall and wrapped his other arm around her. "Let me help you," he whispered into her hair.

Her fingertips skimmed over the fabric on his chest and shoulders, touched his jaw, his nose, his hair. "You're real," she said, her voice full of wonder. 

Draco did not want to imagine who or what she had been hallucinating while alone down here. The Cruciatus did that sometimes; disconnected people from their logical brain. Some would say Luna was already too far removed from hers for a Crucio to make a difference. Draco knew better. 

"I'm taking you out of here," he said, smoothing her hair down the back of her neck. "All right? We're leaving." 

She smiled at him, and for a moment it could have been any morning of the term, just the two of them in a Hogwarts corridor. "Of course."

Draco lifted her in his arms - trying not to think of how little she weighed in them, how small she was, how much he didn't want to let go ever again - and summoned a house elf to take them the back way to his suite.

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