Tainted Love

Return

DRACO

Finally, finally, the air was cold again. There was a definite bite to it as he stepped out of the Ministry. The sun was still high in the sky, a couple hours away from setting.

He had just left work early and hadn't said a word to Iris or anyone else. He hadn't ever done something like that before, but for some reason he didn't think he could bear being around her for a moment longer.

Whatever had happened between them at the Siren on Saturday was unnerving. He hadn't meant to speak to Theodore like that, hadn't meant to let her rest on his shoulder, hadn't meant any of it.

But he had set it up. He was the one who told Iris to come to Siren - long before he was drunk, long before he was even there. He told her to come in the atrium of the Department of Mysteries, while she was surrounded by friends, while she was wearing that dress.

Something was wrong with him. Something had to be wrong with him to behave the way he was behaving. And whatever it was, he would fix it.

The problem began when Pansy left for Paris. Her absence had left a strange sort of cavity in his life that he had been desperate to fill. Nobody could ever give him what she could but he had to try. Anything was better than nothing.

It was nothing new. He had always done this, a sort of self-medication. Supplements. But other girls' hands were ghosts, soundless and black and white. Pansy was sharp nails and color so saturated that it looked like it was bleeding.

Iris had been black and white too. Just a body that happened to be near him. Just a way to take advantage of her, to embarrass her, to get one over on her in their perpetual argument.

But there were colors everywhere at the Siren with her. Not just the lights blinking their eternal pattern, temporary flashes fading into deep purple chasms. She was color too. He had gone home and lay down with his clothes still on and thought about the way she breathed.

Every time she inhaled he could see it moving through her body, a little wave crashing through her chest and into her stomach. When she closed her eyes the movement of her lashes formed earthquakes deep within him.

When he fucked her, her body felt familiar in an almost forbidden way. He shouldn't know the feeling of her but he did, every time he fucked her he knew the way her legs fell around his back. He knew the way her hand tangled into his hair.

And afterwards... afterwards. A breath between them, the way her leg brushed his, testing the waters. Their eyes met like reluctant magnets. He hated the inevitability that existed between them lately, but not as much as he hated the way her body had relaxed into his, the way her head had dipped against him.

But it was only after Pansy left that things had changed with Iris.

Draco knew once he had her again Iris would go back to black and white.

If you put a person underground, someday they would get used to the darkness. Their eyes would grow and their skin would pale. The sky would become such a distant memory that it would seem more like a rumor than a truth, and they'd resign themselves to the dirt.

Like Draco had resigned himself to Iris.

But there is nothing underground that can hope to compare to the sky.

And Pansy was home now, and she was like flying during a thunderstorm, rain whipping your back, soaring on erratic gusts of wind and dodging impulsive bolts of lightning. Touching down and wanting to go back up.

Those were the only times Draco could remember experiencing pure happiness, unfettered by his father's warnings, the ghosts of Voldemort around his life, the presence of Voldemort in his house.