Nightmares and Nocturnes

The God Guise

Chapter 22: The God Guise

. . . . . . . .

2002

. . . . . . . .

The Ministry courtroom was even dimmer than usual, leaving them in near darkness where they stood around its perimeter. Below them, Luna Lovegood's hair was illuminated by the faintest of spelled lamplight, glowing like a reflective sliver in the dark. A strand fell into her eye and she slowly looked up, her eyes traveling to rest defiantly not on the Dark Lord, who stood before her, but on the eyes of every masked Death Eater in the room. Her pale gaze slid over Draco's for a moment, nearly passing him in apparent disinterest, but when she seemed to recognize him beneath the mask she paused for the span of a breath.

His breath, which was shallow and sharp, and then she looked away.

Part of Draco knew, instinctively, that Potter was coming. The battle-tested version of Loony Lovegood had shed its former dottiness, leaving her creature-like, ethereal, appraising them not as they were - men in a room, herself in chains, all of them the muted audience to her certain demise - but as though she were seeing them through a crystal ball, her head tilted slightly, the slightest smile on her lips as though she'd already seen what came next, and it was grim.

So yes, Draco thought. Part of him knew that Potter was coming.

He found he was anxious, nervous, unsettled; afraid. Not of Potter, of course. Draco still permitted himself the arrogance to believe he could best him handily if he tried. No, it was, if anything, a fear that Potter would not come. That in a moment, a hooded dementor would be free to consume a helpless woman's soul as a madman stood by watching, smiling, his thin lips hooked around his incisors as Draco was compelled to silently do his bidding. That Draco himself would stand by, his fingers stiff against his wand as he witnessed injustice, and that despite the gurgling of his sickened conscience he, too, would do nothing. That no hero or higher power would intervene; that the look of rebellion on Luna Lovegood's face would slip from her features along with the rest of her, and that no one would have stopped it.

Doesn't the Dark Lord suspect, Draco had started to say, but Lucius had cut him off.

Do your job, Draco, Lucius muttered, flicking his wand to secure the mask in place. You don't get to decide when or how.

The whole of the situation struck Draco as outrageously unwise - the dim light, the close quarters, the whole of a masked army in a single impossibly warded building, a taboo on the one spell that could save them from the more unapologetic demon in the room - but the Dark Lord was a theatrical being. He seemed to suffer from a hedonistic voyeurism; it wasn't enough to know someone was suffering. It wasn't enough to hear about it, or to simply trust that pain was pain.

He had to watch.

"Where is he?" the Dark Lord murmured to Lovegood, stepping forward to brush a finger against one of the magical shackles on her wrists. "Are you sure he wants to save you this time?"

"I highly doubt he wants to," Lovegood replied. "But some of us are born for pesky things, don't you think?"

The Dark Lord let out a quiet scoff, toying with her. "Ah, so you're one of those," he commented, bending to look her in the eye. "Tell me," he asked quietly, "why is it that people who believe themselves to be heroes seem to also consider themselves so unnaturally clever?"

She met his eye for a moment, unmoving, and then let her gaze wander around the room; when she eventually opened her mouth, it was difficult to tell who she was speaking to.