Tainted Love

Paris, II

DRACO

At the Louvre because Iris insisted. They had spent a good couple of hours wandering through the exhibits, a labyrinth of portraits spaced out between white walls. Draco kept waiting for them to move and felt odd when they didn't.

He wondered if they ever moved, these paintings. Did they heave a great sigh of relief at the end of the day when the lights went out? Did they have to freeze every time a security guard swept through their wing with a tinny flashlight?

Or maybe they never moved at all. Maybe they were just portraits, just lines and shading. Iris didn't seem to be considering it either way. She was easily fascinated and had spent multiple minutes staring at a painting of a melon teetering at the edge of a table.

Draco had read the plaque beneath it backwards and forwards while he waited for her to become disillusioned with the brushstrokes.

"You can just picture it falling," she murmured, and got close enough to it that the security guard at the edge of the room stopped twirling a keychain around his fingers to shoot Draco a meaningful look.

He put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her back gently. "Too close."

She rolled her eyes, glancing towards the guard herself. He was looking at the ceiling now.

"What does he think I'm going to do?" She wondered aloud.

Draco shrugged, taking a step away from the painting in an attempt to convince her to do the same. "I don't think he cares. He's just doing his job."

Iris hummed in acceptance the way one does when a rule seems foolish but not unfair enough to truly rebel against. She turned heel and walked purposefully down the edge of the room towards the next painting - another study of fruit.

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, strands straightened out. It would look quite high-society if she hadn't tied it with a green hair band. Iris always had that sort of juxtaposition in her, politeness and wildness.

She had nice posture when she wanted to, when she was in a gallery looking at art or standing next to him in the foyer of the Greengrass House. Other times she threw her body around casually, leaning over books and stacks of parchment, shoulders bent forward towards the object of her attention.

She could keep up with any conversation, easily picking up subtexts and hidden barbs. But she rarely chose to speak that way. Her words weren't usually chosen at all, and instead were expelled from her head in simple, if subtle, expressions of emotion.

Mostly she was just an expression of life. Sometimes you watch yourself, most of the time you don't even think to.

Draco had been the same way, once. He had always had more class in him than rebellion, but there was a time where he had spoken and acted without predicting and analyzing his every move. Before the war - before failing to do so meant failing to survive.

Fucking Iris has always been unthinking, a pure expression of want and, at first, disdain. Perhaps that's why he had always come back to her, why he could never seem to bar himself off.

Now he caught himself unthinking in other moments, unrelated to his hands on her body. He said things nowadays, did things, without fully thinking them through. Like telling Iris that Nicholas Flamel line in bed.

He felt a bit delirious after he did it, like he had just forced something out of himself that he had been wanting to say for a while, something that he had, for some reason, held himself back from. After he said it he couldn't remember why he hadn't before.

It was something he never could have understood on his own - the bliss in reflex action, the honesty in undisguised speech.

And the goodness, real goodness, that that honesty and action had given him.