Intermission: Love Grows Bitter With Treason
Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
The title of this Intermission comes from lines in Swinburne’s “Hymn to Prosperine”: “Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;/ But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.”
Intermission: Love Grows Bitter With Treason
Owen shut the door behind him with a click so faint that he thought no one could have heard it save one who was listening for it. So, of course, Michael jerked his head up and fastened his eyes on his brother with a hunted, fervent look in them. His fingers, which had moved together in front of him like a nest of blind, burrowing worms, intertwined and interlocked, and then froze.
They had told him what his brother had done.
Owen moved a step forward, slowly. This room was a bare stone chamber, one of the many in Silver-Mirror that had been used for storing treasure. Then Harry had removed the artifacts in search of one that could help him fight Voldemort, and shifted treasures around so his guests could be comfortable, and it had become a mere construct of four walls and a floor. It made a perfect prison. Michael could find no weapons here, and he could not dig through the walls, and he could not charm the door open or the walls to weaken without his wand.
The question he asked then was predictable, but because he had to know, he had to ask it.
“Why?” His voice was quiet.
Michael laughed rackingly, as if he had contracted some fatal disease. Then he stopped, and said, “You know why, brother.”
“I want to hear you say it.” Owen’s hand curled around his wand, deep in one robe pocket. Frustration shifted past his eyes like dark weed caught in the maze of a flowing river. It drifted on and was forgotten. He stood with his gaze locked on Michael, and waited for confirmation.
Michael tossed up a hand airily, and spoke the same way. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because our mother and sister died, and still you didn’t let that change your attitude towards me. Maybe because Harry made all these promises that he couldn’t keep. Maybe because he’s the center of the world, or thinks he is, the admired, the adored, the self-centered vates, and he never looked beyond himself in the way I needed him to. Maybe because-“
And then he was on his feet, and had Owen not been prepared for that, he might have overcome him and wrested his wand from him. As it was, Owen turned slightly, neatly, to the side, and Michael sprawled on the floor. Owen put a foot in the middle of his back. He had always been stronger than his brother, he thought, with the detachment necessary to this. In all things.
Michael struggled to rise. Owen ground down until he heard the crack of bone, and Michael cried out and went still.
“Tell me,” he whispered.
“I wanted Draco,” Michael whispered back, alone in this place before him. “And he rejected me. And neither of them even cared to look at me again, to ask me what I thought or how I felt or acknowledge that I was dangerous. I wanted to hurt Harry. I wanted to be part of something that hurt him. He deserved it. Draco doesn’t-that’s just the way he is, glittering, beautiful, selfish-but Harry sold himself differently. And then it turned out he wasn’t different. I had to show him that.”
Owen nodded. It was what he had expected, but it had to be done. The condemned was allowed a confession.
He drew his wand.
Michael, twisting to look up at him, saw it. For a moment, he went still, and then he snorted. “Going to torture me, then? Your Lord allows that?” His voice was twisted, mocking, and he stared at Owen’s covered left arm as if he could see the lightning bolt scar there. “I knew he was just a Lord after all, not a vates. Did he tell you that he tried to kill me, when I first told him what I’d done?”
“Draco told me.” Harry had been in no shape to tell Owen anything. Besides, he was motionless just then, under the influence of Dreamless Sleep. Snape had forced it down his throat when Harry saw the first vision of his brother’s torture and began to scream. Draco had fed Michael the healing potions, and told Owen the truth, and then sat back and looked at him in silence for a long time.
They were both the heirs of Dark families. They understood each other.
“That was good of him,” said Michael, and his face softened with some hint of an unnameable emotion. “Did he say-anything else about me?”
Owen moved back and lifted his boot, letting his brother scramble to his feet. “To tell you that he hopes the wild Dark makes you its plaything for eternity,” he answered, leveling his wand, “for hurting his partner, and kidnapping his brother-in-law.” Draco disliked Connor, but Connor was still connected to the Malfoys, unavoidably, and one did not do that kind of thing to a Malfoy relative.
Michael stared at him. “Owen. What are you going to do?” Puzzled, so puzzled, as if he did not know.
And perhaps he did not know, for he had always been deficient in education. Owen recited the words as his father had recited them to him, the day Charles sat him down and explained about the less pleasant duties of a family heir, a family head. “The head of a family is covered in glory, but the glory depends from responsibility. When a member of the family betrays his allies and dishonors his name, it is the family head’s responsibility to remove the dishonor. Otherwise, the chain of responsibility cracks, and the bauble of glory is revealed for the fool’s gold it is.”
“You and metaphors,” Michael said, and tried to laugh. It sounded rather hard with a dry throat.
“I am going to kill you,” Owen said.
And Michael’s face was white, all white. He didn’t think I would actually do this, Owen realized, meeting his twin’s eyes. Maybe he wasn’t deficient in education, this once, maybe he did know what his treason meant, but he never thought I would go through with it.
And that made Owen weary with a great weariness, because one thing Michael should have learned about him by now was how seriously he took his promises.
“And present my head to Harry, I suppose,” Michael said. He tried to drawl. It didn’t work.
“The heart used to be traditional,” said Owen, and began to summon all the force of his will. “In this case, since Harry would not want to subject me to having to cut apart my twin, I imagine your body will do.”
“No,” Michael whispered. “You can’t do this, Owen. You can’t. I’m your brother.”
“You are a disgrace to the Rosier-Henlin name.” Owen’s voice was as steady as his father’s would have been. And in that moment Owen was glad that Charles was dead, that he had not lived to see his son dishonor their name. “The family has always been more important than the individual.”
“I was controlled by Voldemort! I was-“
“The actions, and not the intentions, matter.” The magic filled him, welling towards the tip of his wand. “If Millicent Bulstrode had encountered her father on the field before he died, she would have been no less obligated to kill him. The laws are absolute.”
“Draco didn’t try to kill his father-“
“The Malfoys,” said Owen very precisely, “have not always been concerned with honor.” And then there it was, the moment when he must let his magic and his will fly or lose them all.
“Avada Kedavra.” He said the words tenderly, with love, granting his twin the dignity of a painless death, which Connor Potter would not have.
There was no shield against the Killing Curse.
Green light filled the room like a prayer.
When it was done, Owen stepped forward and gazed for a moment into the still eyes. He mourned, but distantly, gently. The brother he mourned was one he had lost already, drowned into the currents of jealousy and hatred.
Michael had, perhaps, not been meant for the strict life he found himself living, the life of a Dark pureblood, the life of a Rosier-Henlin. But he had been born into it. He should have lived it, or he should have rebelled utterly and utterly fled, separating himself from what was left so that no one would expect its obligations from him.
He had tried to choose neither, tried to have all the rewards and none of the laws, and so his glory lay on the ground in smashed pieces of gold.
Owen opened the door. Draco waited there. He looked past Owen, and his face changed in no particular except to grow colder.
“It is done?” he asked.
Owen inclined his head. “It is. The dishonor is avenged.”
He walked out of the room, up the stairs, and to the roof of Silver-Mirror. He stood there for a time, watching the stars as they turned in their courses.
The life he lived was a cruel one, in some respects. He wished he could have lived it beside his twin.
But it was the life he had, and he had never given himself-never known how to give himself-in a way that was less than full-hearted. He was no halfway wizard, no halfway companion, no halfway family head.
He could be no halfway brother.
He had failed Michael, and that failure would walk with him like the ghosts of his parents and his sister. But he would have failed him still further if he had excused this and let Michael go on living as a spoiled, indulged child, never understanding what he had done wrong.
Besides, he knew what Draco would have done, or Harry, if he had not taken up the task of executing his brother himself.
His mourning and his mind alike were one pane of black glass, and his spirit was a light, cold, crisp gray, like morning on the first day of spring.