Clair de Lune, Zacharias/Daphne, Rated R, Part 2/2
Author's Notes: This completes Clair de Lune, a dark z/d ficlet written for _____faith.
Part II
Lost
A week after the war ends, when his part in the interrogation and torture tactics at the outpost comes to light, Zacharias is placed in shackles and thrown into Azkaban on charges of war crimes.
At the start of the War, he and a handful of others were tasked with perfecting several dark methods of altering basic aphrodisiac potions until they produced horrific waking nightmares of torture and abuse, indistinguishable from reality. These potions could be laced with a touch of time distortion, turning two days into two months, or spiked with physical manifestations, such as bruises, broken bones, hunger and weight loss. By the end of the two-year War, they had created an apothecary of horror potent enough to break any prisoner, including Daphne.
Zacharias' original repulsion and reluctance at such a scheme evaporated in the face of the unethical methods Voldemort's Death Eaters were using on their captives to gain a tactical advantage. Zacharias threw all of his energy into the project, believing it was essential to the outcome of the War. All was fair in a war with no fair play. It was imperative that the Order win the War for the greater good of wizardkind's future.
While in Azkaban, Zacharias experiences the haunting pleasure of a lifetime's worth of tormenting reflection, and he finds his culpability knows no boundaries. He not only helped create the dark potions, but he also hand selected the prisoners who would be most vulnerable to their manipulation. He chose Daphne. Yes, he was the one who determined her fate. He decided to torture her long before he decided to save her.
But the beginning of her torture was also the beginning of his awakening, the realization that what he and the Order were doing was wrong regardless of Voldemort's tactics. It is a realization that will lead to a lifetime of imprisonment in guilt and shame and remorse. Zacharias helped win the War by creating unethical potions but at what price to his soul and to that of wizardkind? Had she been Voldemort's favourite consort, he would have protected her and let her keep her secrets. That had nothing to do with the greater good of anything but his own selfish wants.
After eighteen months in Azkaban, the Wizengamot grants a general amnesty to all prisoners held on war-related charges in an attempt to heal the badly fractured wizarding community and to allow them to go forward as one.
Zacharias stumbles out of Azkaban and sets out for an isolated stretch of Northern Ireland, to a small wizarding community his uncle had taken him to as a child en route to Belfast. Once there, his brief stay turns into a new life, one of anonymity and desperate loneliness. He works in isolation making brews for the local apothecary. The War and Azkaban have left him unfit company for everyone, including himself.
----- ----- -----
"Zacharias?"
He looks up from his tumbler of Firewhisky and begins coughing and choking and spewing the golden liquid when he sees her.
"Daphne?" he croaks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"May I join you?"
Zacharias rises and looks around the crumbling pub with its questionable clientele before glancing at the elegantly dressed witch.
"Here?"
"Yes, of course."
He brushes off the rickety, wooden table and pulls out a chair for her.
"May I order something for you?" he asks.
"I'll have whatever you're having."
"Firewhisky?"
"Firewhisky."
Zacharias motions to the bartender. "Frank, one for the lady, please." Then he sits down across from her.
Daphne takes off her cashmere scarf and her fur lined gloves, setting them aside. "You called me Daphne," she says. "It's been a long time. I wasn't sure you'd remember me."
How could he forget her? She's emblazoned across his heart and soul like a crucifix in motion.
"Of course, I remember you," he mutters into his glass, taking a sip.
"Thank you," she says as Frank places her drink before her. She waits until the curious bartender takes his leave before leaning over and speaking again. "You're a hard wizard to find." When Zacharias doesn't respond, when he takes to staring at the remains of his Firewhisky instead, she says, "What are you doing here?"
"Drinking," he says, continuing to swirl the golden liquid around in his tumbler.
"No, how did you end up living here?"
Zacharias sighs and looks over Daphne's shoulder, out the window and into the night beyond. He wants to crawl into that darkness and be lost to the world, invisible to her and her inquiring eyes.
"What are you doing here?" he snaps. Wasn't that the real question? He turns and stares at her, a beautiful, misplaced creature amongst a sea of rats and scavengers and drifters.
"I've come looking for you," she says, her hand gripping the tumbler of Firewhisky.
Zacharias pushes his unfinished drink aside, throws a Galleon on the table and stands. He's too drunk to have this conversation. If he weren't too drunk, then he would be too sober to have this conversation. He isn't capable of having this conversation.
"Congratulations, you've found me."
He grabs his cloak and strides out of the pub without looking back. He doesn't see Daphne scramble after him, forgetting her scarf and her gloves. Instead, he stands out in the biting winter gale, fumbling for his wand. Where was a graceful exit when you needed one?
"Zacharias?"
He looks up.
"I haven't come to harm you."
Seeing her is harming him. Doesn't she realize that? He continues rifling through his cloak, looking for his wand. Why didn't she come intent on killing him? He would have preferred that and the justice in such a twist of fate. To die at her wand would be a fitting end for him, and one that he would have gratefully succumbed to.
He isn't the same wizard she remembers.
"Let me help you," she offers, after watching him bumble through one side of his cloak and then the other before returning to start all over again.
Zacharias holds up both hands in defeat and watches her rifle through the pockets of his cloak and his robes until she finds his wand - nine pockets and one bottle of Firewhisky later. He snatches the bottle back and tucks it away again for safekeeping.
"You're too drunk to Apparate. Let me help you home."
He shakes his head. He's struggling enough as it is. The last thing he needs is this witch in his flat. He can barely look at her as he holds out his hand, waiting for his wand. When she places it in his palm, he notices her hand. It's a fine boned, aristocratic hand, the same hand he has dreamt about with its fingers intertwined in his. Only in his dreams, the tips of her fingers aren't turning blue from the cold.
"You're freezing," he says, the edge to his voice dissolving into concern. Despite his better judgement and the promises he's made, he can't help himself. He wants to take care of her. He needs to take care of her. He longs to fall down at her feet and selfishly beg for forgiveness. Instead, he conjures up a pair of mismatched mittens and slips them onto her frozen hands, one after another. Then he takes off his scarf, wraps it around her neck and pulls up the hood of her elegant cloak. Now she's nicely tucked in and unbelievably beautiful in the mid-December moonlight, the most exquisite creature he's ever seen.
"What are you doing here?" he whispers. "You shouldn't be here."
"I don't know."
She's spent years searching for him, hoping to find answers to the questions and the pain that have plagued her since she saw him last, but here he is as lost as she is.
"Is it true that you let me escape?" she blurts out.
"Escape? What makes you think I let you escape?"
She reaches into her cloak and pulls out his other wand, the one she Disapparated with the night she escaped from the outpost. "This isn't the kind of wand a wizard carries during a war, at least not as his primary wand."
He stares at the wand but doesn't reach for it.
"I read the Ministry transcript of your Veritaserum interrogation by the Order. It said you had planned my escape, that it wasn't an accident, that you had your other wand and didn't use it. It also said you tried to stop the use of the Dark potions for interrogation purposes."
She stares at him, wanting him to right her world, to make sense of the nonsensical reality they exist in.
Zacharias looks at his wand in her hand, the one he thought he'd never see again, and then stares up at her out of his dark and bitter drunken haze.
"You want the truth? I'll give you the truth. I selected you for torture by the potions that I created. I was responsible for your suffering. That, my dear Daphne, is the truth, the only truth that matters." He ends this announcement with a grand sweep of his arm.
"So it was the truth," she says, reaching out to steady him as he stumbles with his exaggerated gesture. She knows things, and what she doesn't know she's heard rumours about.
"The truth is that there is no truth," he says, disillusioned defeat in his voice and in the slump of his shoulders.
"I also found records detailing the Order's methodical torture of the victims you saw at the beginning of the War. Voldemort never tortured those victims. The Order lied to gain your support for their interrogation program. They had to convince you to create their potions. When the War was over, they let you take the fall for their dirty work. That was their plan from the beginning."
The puppeteer was a puppet.
"It doesn't matter," he sighs. "It doesn't change the lives that I've ruined or the minds that I've broken. It doesn't change my culpability."
Daphne falls silent.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Why didn't you undergo selective Obliviation?" The Ministry and St Mungo's, working together after the War, offered selective Obliviation treatments for victims of torture and those suffering from traumatic stress disorders due to their wartime activity, convicted war criminals excepted. Why choose to remember when one could forget?
"Because," she says, staring into his pained drunken eyes, "there was a certain wizard I didn't want to forget." Daphne slips Zacharias' old wand into his cloak, gingerly wraps her arms around him and lays her face on the rough fabric of his cloak.
"Daphne - " he begins. He is as undeserving a wizard as ever walked the earth. He has no right to whatever affection he may have manipulated out of her during their time together. It isn't real. Nothing in his world is real, even her affection is tainted.
"No, don't say it," she counters, cutting him off. She knows what he's going to say. She's heard it a dozen times before. She's insane, and what she's proposing is insane, even sick, and she's sick for wanting him. The precarious limb she's crawled onto begins to crack. "Not tonight."
"Not tonight what?"
"Don't send me away tonight," she says, tightening her hold. "Send me away in the morning."
He wants to laugh at her ridiculous words, but he doesn't. Instead, he leans over and whispers, "Let's continue this someplace a bit more private, shall we?"
He turns her until she's facing the pub where half of the town's male population is standing with their noses pressed up against the front window, watching.
"Unless you'd like to continue this public performance," he says, throwing his arm around her.
"Oh," she says, horrified, but he's already Disapparating them.
Late that night, long after he's passed out on the sofa in his workroom, leaving his bedroom for her, she sneaks out to steal a look at him. She's never seen him asleep. Even in his deepest slumber, there's a furrow marring his brow. She runs her hand over his forehead, trying to soothe his worries away, but it doesn't work. A tentative kiss to his brow does nothing to lighten his load, either. The burdens and the scars he carries won't be scurried away by even the most passionate kisses.
His bright blue eyes open and lock on her. She startles and flushes pink with embarrassment, but she's more beautiful than his mind remembers, standing barefoot in one of his oversized flannel nightshirts with the silver moonlight nipping her shoulders and splashing a freckled sheen on the floor between them. He's sober now, and his previously sluggish brain is active.
"It wasn't a dream," he says, unable to take his eyes off of her. "You're not a dream."
"No," she says, kneeling beside his sofa so they are eye-to eye, and she feels his penetrating gaze again for the first time in years, "it wasn't and I'm not. Would you rather it was all a dream?"
He shakes his head. But he's dreamt about her many times over the years, and it always ends the same way.
"Will you be gone in the morning?"
"Not if you ask me to stay," she whispers, her heart pounding loud enough to wake the gods.
When he opens his arms, she stifles a cry and falls into them. His warmth envelops her, shattering the fear and the pain and the longing. They hold each other to the point of suffocation, too afraid to let go for fear everything will vanish and be as it was before.
Daphne has found the wizard she's been looking for. He's not the wizard she remembers nor the one she expected. His words didn't right her world or explain away the insanity that overtook their past, but she doesn't care. All she sees is the hope in his eyes when he looks at her. Perhaps that hope can heal his broken soul and fill the cavernous ruins in hers. Perhaps they can find a way forward together.
----- fin -----
[Index Page]
Part II
Lost
A week after the war ends, when his part in the interrogation and torture tactics at the outpost comes to light, Zacharias is placed in shackles and thrown into Azkaban on charges of war crimes.
At the start of the War, he and a handful of others were tasked with perfecting several dark methods of altering basic aphrodisiac potions until they produced horrific waking nightmares of torture and abuse, indistinguishable from reality. These potions could be laced with a touch of time distortion, turning two days into two months, or spiked with physical manifestations, such as bruises, broken bones, hunger and weight loss. By the end of the two-year War, they had created an apothecary of horror potent enough to break any prisoner, including Daphne.
Zacharias' original repulsion and reluctance at such a scheme evaporated in the face of the unethical methods Voldemort's Death Eaters were using on their captives to gain a tactical advantage. Zacharias threw all of his energy into the project, believing it was essential to the outcome of the War. All was fair in a war with no fair play. It was imperative that the Order win the War for the greater good of wizardkind's future.
While in Azkaban, Zacharias experiences the haunting pleasure of a lifetime's worth of tormenting reflection, and he finds his culpability knows no boundaries. He not only helped create the dark potions, but he also hand selected the prisoners who would be most vulnerable to their manipulation. He chose Daphne. Yes, he was the one who determined her fate. He decided to torture her long before he decided to save her.
But the beginning of her torture was also the beginning of his awakening, the realization that what he and the Order were doing was wrong regardless of Voldemort's tactics. It is a realization that will lead to a lifetime of imprisonment in guilt and shame and remorse. Zacharias helped win the War by creating unethical potions but at what price to his soul and to that of wizardkind? Had she been Voldemort's favourite consort, he would have protected her and let her keep her secrets. That had nothing to do with the greater good of anything but his own selfish wants.
After eighteen months in Azkaban, the Wizengamot grants a general amnesty to all prisoners held on war-related charges in an attempt to heal the badly fractured wizarding community and to allow them to go forward as one.
Zacharias stumbles out of Azkaban and sets out for an isolated stretch of Northern Ireland, to a small wizarding community his uncle had taken him to as a child en route to Belfast. Once there, his brief stay turns into a new life, one of anonymity and desperate loneliness. He works in isolation making brews for the local apothecary. The War and Azkaban have left him unfit company for everyone, including himself.
----- ----- -----
"Zacharias?"
He looks up from his tumbler of Firewhisky and begins coughing and choking and spewing the golden liquid when he sees her.
"Daphne?" he croaks, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"May I join you?"
Zacharias rises and looks around the crumbling pub with its questionable clientele before glancing at the elegantly dressed witch.
"Here?"
"Yes, of course."
He brushes off the rickety, wooden table and pulls out a chair for her.
"May I order something for you?" he asks.
"I'll have whatever you're having."
"Firewhisky?"
"Firewhisky."
Zacharias motions to the bartender. "Frank, one for the lady, please." Then he sits down across from her.
Daphne takes off her cashmere scarf and her fur lined gloves, setting them aside. "You called me Daphne," she says. "It's been a long time. I wasn't sure you'd remember me."
How could he forget her? She's emblazoned across his heart and soul like a crucifix in motion.
"Of course, I remember you," he mutters into his glass, taking a sip.
"Thank you," she says as Frank places her drink before her. She waits until the curious bartender takes his leave before leaning over and speaking again. "You're a hard wizard to find." When Zacharias doesn't respond, when he takes to staring at the remains of his Firewhisky instead, she says, "What are you doing here?"
"Drinking," he says, continuing to swirl the golden liquid around in his tumbler.
"No, how did you end up living here?"
Zacharias sighs and looks over Daphne's shoulder, out the window and into the night beyond. He wants to crawl into that darkness and be lost to the world, invisible to her and her inquiring eyes.
"What are you doing here?" he snaps. Wasn't that the real question? He turns and stares at her, a beautiful, misplaced creature amongst a sea of rats and scavengers and drifters.
"I've come looking for you," she says, her hand gripping the tumbler of Firewhisky.
Zacharias pushes his unfinished drink aside, throws a Galleon on the table and stands. He's too drunk to have this conversation. If he weren't too drunk, then he would be too sober to have this conversation. He isn't capable of having this conversation.
"Congratulations, you've found me."
He grabs his cloak and strides out of the pub without looking back. He doesn't see Daphne scramble after him, forgetting her scarf and her gloves. Instead, he stands out in the biting winter gale, fumbling for his wand. Where was a graceful exit when you needed one?
"Zacharias?"
He looks up.
"I haven't come to harm you."
Seeing her is harming him. Doesn't she realize that? He continues rifling through his cloak, looking for his wand. Why didn't she come intent on killing him? He would have preferred that and the justice in such a twist of fate. To die at her wand would be a fitting end for him, and one that he would have gratefully succumbed to.
He isn't the same wizard she remembers.
"Let me help you," she offers, after watching him bumble through one side of his cloak and then the other before returning to start all over again.
Zacharias holds up both hands in defeat and watches her rifle through the pockets of his cloak and his robes until she finds his wand - nine pockets and one bottle of Firewhisky later. He snatches the bottle back and tucks it away again for safekeeping.
"You're too drunk to Apparate. Let me help you home."
He shakes his head. He's struggling enough as it is. The last thing he needs is this witch in his flat. He can barely look at her as he holds out his hand, waiting for his wand. When she places it in his palm, he notices her hand. It's a fine boned, aristocratic hand, the same hand he has dreamt about with its fingers intertwined in his. Only in his dreams, the tips of her fingers aren't turning blue from the cold.
"You're freezing," he says, the edge to his voice dissolving into concern. Despite his better judgement and the promises he's made, he can't help himself. He wants to take care of her. He needs to take care of her. He longs to fall down at her feet and selfishly beg for forgiveness. Instead, he conjures up a pair of mismatched mittens and slips them onto her frozen hands, one after another. Then he takes off his scarf, wraps it around her neck and pulls up the hood of her elegant cloak. Now she's nicely tucked in and unbelievably beautiful in the mid-December moonlight, the most exquisite creature he's ever seen.
"What are you doing here?" he whispers. "You shouldn't be here."
"I don't know."
She's spent years searching for him, hoping to find answers to the questions and the pain that have plagued her since she saw him last, but here he is as lost as she is.
"Is it true that you let me escape?" she blurts out.
"Escape? What makes you think I let you escape?"
She reaches into her cloak and pulls out his other wand, the one she Disapparated with the night she escaped from the outpost. "This isn't the kind of wand a wizard carries during a war, at least not as his primary wand."
He stares at the wand but doesn't reach for it.
"I read the Ministry transcript of your Veritaserum interrogation by the Order. It said you had planned my escape, that it wasn't an accident, that you had your other wand and didn't use it. It also said you tried to stop the use of the Dark potions for interrogation purposes."
She stares at him, wanting him to right her world, to make sense of the nonsensical reality they exist in.
Zacharias looks at his wand in her hand, the one he thought he'd never see again, and then stares up at her out of his dark and bitter drunken haze.
"You want the truth? I'll give you the truth. I selected you for torture by the potions that I created. I was responsible for your suffering. That, my dear Daphne, is the truth, the only truth that matters." He ends this announcement with a grand sweep of his arm.
"So it was the truth," she says, reaching out to steady him as he stumbles with his exaggerated gesture. She knows things, and what she doesn't know she's heard rumours about.
"The truth is that there is no truth," he says, disillusioned defeat in his voice and in the slump of his shoulders.
"I also found records detailing the Order's methodical torture of the victims you saw at the beginning of the War. Voldemort never tortured those victims. The Order lied to gain your support for their interrogation program. They had to convince you to create their potions. When the War was over, they let you take the fall for their dirty work. That was their plan from the beginning."
The puppeteer was a puppet.
"It doesn't matter," he sighs. "It doesn't change the lives that I've ruined or the minds that I've broken. It doesn't change my culpability."
Daphne falls silent.
"What are you doing?" he asks. "Why didn't you undergo selective Obliviation?" The Ministry and St Mungo's, working together after the War, offered selective Obliviation treatments for victims of torture and those suffering from traumatic stress disorders due to their wartime activity, convicted war criminals excepted. Why choose to remember when one could forget?
"Because," she says, staring into his pained drunken eyes, "there was a certain wizard I didn't want to forget." Daphne slips Zacharias' old wand into his cloak, gingerly wraps her arms around him and lays her face on the rough fabric of his cloak.
"Daphne - " he begins. He is as undeserving a wizard as ever walked the earth. He has no right to whatever affection he may have manipulated out of her during their time together. It isn't real. Nothing in his world is real, even her affection is tainted.
"No, don't say it," she counters, cutting him off. She knows what he's going to say. She's heard it a dozen times before. She's insane, and what she's proposing is insane, even sick, and she's sick for wanting him. The precarious limb she's crawled onto begins to crack. "Not tonight."
"Not tonight what?"
"Don't send me away tonight," she says, tightening her hold. "Send me away in the morning."
He wants to laugh at her ridiculous words, but he doesn't. Instead, he leans over and whispers, "Let's continue this someplace a bit more private, shall we?"
He turns her until she's facing the pub where half of the town's male population is standing with their noses pressed up against the front window, watching.
"Unless you'd like to continue this public performance," he says, throwing his arm around her.
"Oh," she says, horrified, but he's already Disapparating them.
Late that night, long after he's passed out on the sofa in his workroom, leaving his bedroom for her, she sneaks out to steal a look at him. She's never seen him asleep. Even in his deepest slumber, there's a furrow marring his brow. She runs her hand over his forehead, trying to soothe his worries away, but it doesn't work. A tentative kiss to his brow does nothing to lighten his load, either. The burdens and the scars he carries won't be scurried away by even the most passionate kisses.
His bright blue eyes open and lock on her. She startles and flushes pink with embarrassment, but she's more beautiful than his mind remembers, standing barefoot in one of his oversized flannel nightshirts with the silver moonlight nipping her shoulders and splashing a freckled sheen on the floor between them. He's sober now, and his previously sluggish brain is active.
"It wasn't a dream," he says, unable to take his eyes off of her. "You're not a dream."
"No," she says, kneeling beside his sofa so they are eye-to eye, and she feels his penetrating gaze again for the first time in years, "it wasn't and I'm not. Would you rather it was all a dream?"
He shakes his head. But he's dreamt about her many times over the years, and it always ends the same way.
"Will you be gone in the morning?"
"Not if you ask me to stay," she whispers, her heart pounding loud enough to wake the gods.
When he opens his arms, she stifles a cry and falls into them. His warmth envelops her, shattering the fear and the pain and the longing. They hold each other to the point of suffocation, too afraid to let go for fear everything will vanish and be as it was before.
Daphne has found the wizard she's been looking for. He's not the wizard she remembers nor the one she expected. His words didn't right her world or explain away the insanity that overtook their past, but she doesn't care. All she sees is the hope in his eyes when he looks at her. Perhaps that hope can heal his broken soul and fill the cavernous ruins in hers. Perhaps they can find a way forward together.
----- fin -----
[Index Page]