Abraxas stared at his graded essay. Professor Babbling had given him an Outstanding, the highest possible score. The blonde remembered the night he completed the assignment, how much of it was nonsense, slapped together at the last minute. He remembered the feeling of the ridges on his desk, thick mahogany. His slippers from Italy. His favorite hair oil was from Lebanon. He had discovered it several months ago, before the start of the new year. His family had gone on holiday in preparation for his final year at Hogwarts, or perhaps simply because his parents desired it. Abraxas remembered that his father had grumbled about the heat, the busy roads, the homeless, the long-distance portkey… he remembered being handed a tall glass of cool water when he stumbled into Beirut. His little sister had puked on the floor, to his mother’s horrified embarrassment.
Abraxas picked up the piece of parchment with the small purple “O” in the corner and lit it on fire with his wand. He wasn’t usually so lazy, more inclined to sell his essays to younger years or even his sister, but this one was just stupid. There was nothing valuable there. Flecks of ash clung to his fingers.
“What are you doing?” Laurent Lestrange popped his head in.
“How many times have I told you not to just barge in here?”
“What, did the bitch give you an Acceptable or something? Wanna go talk to Dippet?” Lestrange asked, shutting the door. He plopped unceremoniously onto Abraxas’ bed, heedless of the expensive silk, shipped from a small wizarding community in northern Yunnan. The bed was enchanted to ward off nightmares and prophecies. Nonsense, of course.
“No. My grade was fine,” Abraxas said. “Who are you taking to Rosier’s party?”
Lestrange blinked at the non-sequitur.
“Zeno is throwing a party? When? Was I not invited?”
“Not Zeno. Angela. And you are invited. This is me inviting you, moron.”
“I didn’t know you had the authority to start bringing people to Angela’s parties,” he muttered. “You’re sure she won’t mind?”
Abraxas looked out the window. It wasn’t a true window. The Slytherin dorm was in the dungeon, although in reality it was more like a basement and had been for many centuries. No one was tortured down here, there had been no wars, no prisoners, the suits of armor were little more than mannequins.
The window was charmed to appear as though it peered into the Black Lake. Occasionally a shadow would pass through, supposedly the giant squid. Privately, Abraxas doubted that such a squid existed, although if it did there was no better place to be than Hogwarts.
After a moment passed in silence, Lestrange spoke.
“Right, I guess she wouldn’t mind, huh? Sorry, Abraxas. I forgot.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s better than fine, it’s- it’s superb! It’s excellent, honestly, it could have been so much worse, just look at Orion. I mean, I actually think he’s thinking about changing his name and face and moving to Australia.”
Abraxas smiled slightly.
“Yes, he was always a bit of a rebel, that one. It’s a shame she has such nice tits or else he might really do it. At least until he ran out of money.”
“A shame?” Lestrange asked. “It’s a goddamn miracle. Who knows if we’d survive the fallout if he actually decided to- well. Let’s not tempt fate.” He clapped once. “Speaking of which, it’s almost lunch, and I’ve got it on good authority there’s going to be wellington on the table when we get there.”
“Astoria ‘seeing’ into your old goldfish bowl is not good authority, idiot.” Nevertheless, Abraxas holstered his wand and led his friend to the main hall for lunch.
It was not just beef wellington that was waiting for them upon their arrival. The Malfoy owl, Brandy, was perched on his usual seat. Seeing him, the owl swooped over and dropped a letter on the floor in front of him. Abraxas raised a brow. His father must be angry with him, if he was resorting to such measures as a passive aggressive owl.
Laurent bent down to pick up the letter, but Abraxas grabbed it before he could open it. He sliced the envelope open with a fingernail.
You have finally lost your mind.
I raised you to be a strong wizard, and instead I am left with a squealing squib, suckling at his mother’s breast. Did you think you could get away with this behavior? Your little rebellion wasn’t enough for you, now you threaten to undermine everything I have cultivated.
A lifetime of training and of preparation for the moment when the Malfoy family takes its place among the great families of Britain and you wish to knock it all down? For some fanciful nonsense about joy in solitude?
My son- you must trust me, for once in your life. You are young still. You will grow to appreciate her. She is beautiful, and she is kind. I have seen to it. You are aware that your mother would never permit me to foist some unknown woman onto you. Vinda Rosier is an old friend. Her daughter is woman of sophistication, intelligence, and gentleness.
A young man is lucky to make such a match, especially when his family holds no seat in the Wizengamot, no sway with the current Minister of Magic, no connection to the budding power on the mainland, and boasts only a pompous, arrogant, thoughtless heir!
I will hear no more of this. You will return home at once.
Abraxas smiled at his father’s letter. He was truly desperate if he had resorted to this. Lord Malfoy preferred others to speak for him, believing it protected his reputation and gave him a certain mystique. If he had bothered to write out a letter himself, it meant that he didn’t trust anyone else to faze the Malfoy heir.
Unfortunately, it also meant his seemingly infinite patience was running thin. Soon a letter would become a summons, and Abraxas would have no choice but to bend to his father’s will. It was only a matter of time before he saw him again. When he closed his eyes, he imagined it. Walking up to the house, past the garden, seeing his mother, seeing her helplessness. Shuffling into his father’s study and waiting behind his desk. Abraxas’s own desk was a pale imitation but he still felt his father in it.
Similarly, sometimes Abraxas thought about the cottage where he spent summers as a little boy. He remembered walking down to the creek, hiding from his nanny, whom he loved. Her name was Jezebel. A squib from a good family. She was nice to him.
Because there was no House Elf in the cottage, she cooked for him. She liked to cut his sandwiches into the shape of a witches’ hat. She would play with him, and entertain his wildest delusions: that he would become an adventurer, that he would become an archeologist, that he would learn to fly without a broom, that he would be a tiger animagus and chase squirrels in some jungle in India. She liked to play with him, especially when his father was so serious he was scary and his mother was locked in her room. Abraxas had been eleven years old and lonely.
When Abraxas was a kid, all he’d wanted was to feel like his family was together. He had wanted everyone to exist in the same room, in the same conversation, everyone excited and happy and nothing missing. He wanted to be desired in the base way every teenager did. He wanted to be important to people. He wanted an impossible room full of people chatting, sitting around, having fun, thinking, ‘I’m glad Abraxas is here with us. I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.’
And now, at the age of seventeen, Abraxas would be getting married to a girl he barely knew. He felt his vision of a cozy room in a cottage in France fall away from him, which was silly, because it hadn’t been real in the first place. Jezebel was dead and so was Abraxas when he was eleven.
“Hey, Malfoy! Lestrange!”
Abraxas was yanked back into the room when he heard someone call his name. Richard Travers was waving from across the room. He was holding a plate of mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. Abraxas raised an eyebrow, his lip curling. Richie was such a brute.
“Hey, pretty boy! How is my favorite Malfoy today?”
“I’m the only one you know, Travers.” He answered.
“You’re going to change that soon enough, though. After all, you couldn’t possibly resist the chance to make beautiful blonde babies with Angela.” Travers leered. “I wouldn’t.”
“You know, Travers, you could be less rude.”
The annoying boy was interrupted before Abraxas could answer.
“Angela,” he said, not even turning, “Ignore Travers. He’s upset because he knows his father will marry him to a centaur. It’s to dilute his blood; half human is still more than the elder Travers can hope for, I’m afraid. He’ll have to make do with a quarter.”
“You don’t have to be an asshole, Malfoy, I’ll leave. I’ll be seeing you Saturday anyway.” With that, he left.
“You invited him?” Abraxas asked. “Is there some reason you felt the need to do that?” They started walking away from the rest of the Slytherin table.
“I know you don’t like him, but his name is still on everyone’s Yule list. You can’t just ignore him and hope he goes away.”
Abraxas sighed.
“You’re correct. I will have to deal with him until I die, upon which point my children will have to deal with his probably definitely stupid children, and so on.”
Angela was frustrated now, grinding her teeth together.
“Yes, Abraxas, that is how this all works. Can I assume your father taught you that one? The concept of lineage?”
“Lineage,” he answered, “is just a word. Forever is forever.”
For a moment, she just stared at him, as if memorizing the lines of his face. Then she softened.
“For now, why don’t we handle this weekend, hmm? Some drinks, some music, and then we make the announcement. Easy. Everyone important knows already, obviously,” she said. “It’s my first opportunity to play hostess to these people. I just want it to go well.”
“I have complete confidence in you,” he answered without hesitation.
“Good!” Angela beamed. “That’s a good start.”
“I agree. Might as well get married after all of that.”
—/—
Hours later, Abraxas was wandering the upper levels of Hogwarts alone. He preferred to be alone these days. On some level, Abraxas felt that he was about to be trapped in an unwelcome situation, and privacy gave him the illusion of control.
He walked the abandoned hallways with trepidation. Almost no one came up here because it was so difficult to find your way back. The stairs didn’t stay in the same place for very long and there were no signs, teachers, or prefects to help. When Abraxas was a first year, he’d gotten lost so many times he had been forced to ask the portraits for directions, but many of them had gone crazy over the years and were unreliable.
Abraxas walked without thinking about where he was going. Therefore, it was a complete surprise when he happened upon Tom Riddle. He was sitting with his feet spread out in front of him on the cusp of a classroom whose floor was just a little bit higher than the floor in the hall. He was smoking a cigarette.
“Are you smoking?” Abraxas asked without thinking.
Tom Riddle took a long drag.
“You caught me in a vulnerable moment. It won’t happen again.”
“You’re right,” he said, “it won’t. I’m marrying Angela Rosier in a month. You know that already, obviously.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Your father called me to tell me you were engaged. You’ll be having purple freesias on the table because they were cheap and none of your guests are smart enough to notice.”
“You think this is funny? I’m getting married, Riddle.”
The hand holding the cigarette wavered back in forth, as if to say ‘so so.’ He didn’t turn to Abraxas.
“What?”
“I took a test today. That test, believe it or not.”
“…what?”
“That is to say, I have 1% less blood than I started with this morning. And it’s not because I got a paper cut.”
Understanding was slow coming for Abraxas.
“I’ll take pity on you and just tell you: I am now the officially recognized completely legitimate Heir of Slytherin.”
Finally he turned his dead eyes on Abraxas.
“And yes. I heard you were getting married.”
Abraxas paused for a moment before rushing forward.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me? Actually, I can congratulate you, Tom, this is huge. This is everything you ever thought about yourself and it came true. Aren’t you excited?”
“Excited?” He muttered. “Oh, yes. Very. I’m thrilled.”
Abraxas slid down so that he was sitting with his back to the wall. He nudged Tom’s foot with his own.
“I don’t get it. Why are you upset? This is what you’ve always wanted. It’s what you’ve always known,” he smiled. “You always know.”
“Exactly.” Tom stroked Abraxas’ knee with two fingers, almost pinching it. “I’ve always known everything important, Malfoy. Even when my blood was trash.”
Abraxas shivered.
“But- Tom, that’s just it, your blood was always powerful. Maybe more pure than mine.”
“Really? Is it more pure? More powerful? More interesting?” Tom asked rhetorically, hand still on his knee. “Am I smarter now that I have such an important name?”
“A better question,” he continued, “would be to wonder if I’ve always had it. Or, better still, if I have it at all. I could be lying. The goblins could have gotten fit wrong. A million things could be wrong here.”
Against his will, Abraxas became angry.
“Don’t mock our traditions because you can’t understand them,” he said. He regretted it immediately, because really there was very little Tom didn’t understand. Sometimes Tom acted like he understood morethan everyone else. Abraxas felt that he was fumbling around in the dark, Tom watching him, laughing, knowing what he was looking for but unwilling to help. It was why Abraxas kept coming back to him.
Tom’s face tightened with anger almost imperceptibly.
“You don’t need to try so hard to get my attention. My eyes are already on you.”
“I only meant- these things are important,” Abraxas swallowed. “You shouldn’t make fun.”
“But fun is what you like best about me, Malfoy.” Now he was almost smiling. “You want me to pay my respects? I’ll be sure to, at the wedding. Now…” Tom flung his legs over so that he was straddling the blonde. Abraxas’ eyes widened, feeling his closeness, the strength of him pressing down. “To be honest, there’s very little I respect about you.”
“I respect your cowardice. There aren’t many people in this building that know when to run away, let alone what it means to run when your chips are down and you have exactly no options. I like that about you. I like that you’re going to get married, even though you really shouldn’t. I like how embarrassed you are.” Without kindness, he continued. “It’s pathetic in the extreme.”
Now Abraxas was starting to get offended, although somewhere in there he realized that this wasn’t really about him. Riddle was behaving more oddly than usual.
“I like that you’re afraid,” he whispered. His breath tickled Abraxas’s cheek.
“Everyone is afraid of you, Riddle.”
“Not of me. No, of course you’re afraid of me, how could you not be? I meant of your little world.”
“Excuse me?”
“I used to think that fear was pathetic… a job for lesser creatures. There isn’t any reason for a wizard to be afraid unless he is incompetent. But now… now I see that there are so many reasons to be afraid, my dear. The world could end at any moment.” He giggled. “It could have ended already! You could be dead on the floor of the girl’s bathroom, already cold, not even a secretary or a housewife to some unimportant bureaucrat but instead an ugly corpse.”
Abraxas was breathing faster. There was a light in Tom Riddle’s eyes, different from the usually determination. Usually those pale eyes would glint menacingly. Hard and deep, they wouldn’t look into you so much as through you, as if they knew already that you were a waste of their time, a foregone conclusion. Now, though, they were flat. A little bit crazy, in his opinion.
“Three petrifications and not a single death, I was starting to wonder if the thing had it in itself to commit murder.”
“Tom? What are you talking about?”
“Slytherin’s real weapon: the desire to commit murder. And I don’t even have it,” he said. “I didn’t even want to kill her. It was an accident. Just an accident. Just like so many people.”
Riddle turned to stone.
“Her blood was garbage, and she died like garbage. Your blood is practically made of gold,” he said, taking his wand out from somewhere, “but you’d die exactly the same way.” The tip of it pressed against Abraxas’s neck. He felt the build up of powerful magic, not a spell but pure intention. It was difficult to do. To summon magic without the comfort and familiarity of a spell took a lot of self control. Abraxas knew that Tom didn’t even require the wand; he had seen him do it with his will alone, his magic everywhere, filling the common room, making the younger kids shake. Making everyone shake, honestly.
Abraxas was beyond that, but still there was the fear of the predator.
“That’s the curse of being muggleborn, I suppose.” He smiled. “It’s a funny word. Muggle-born - it suggests that we were born something and turned into something else. Born a muggle, made a wizard. The truth though is much worse. A muggleborn is never truly either of those things. An outcast in both worlds. A body on the floor of the girl’s bathroom no one even uses.”
—/—
Abraxas’ wedding was no small affair. His father was pleased, at least, and his mother wasn’t disappointed- not that she was much of anything these days. There was talk of having a portrait commissioned, but in the end it was decided that it could wait until Abraxas had become Lord of the House of Malfoy.
Angela was happy, and they got along well. The Ancient and Most Noble House of Rosier was bolstered by the Malfoy money, and the Malfoy name gained a solid foothold in Britain. Everyone was happy in the end.
Sometimes Abraxas remembered the look in Riddle’s eye that night, and he wondered what became of him. But it was easily pushed to the back of his mind, with Jezebel and the rest of the poor dead men.
—/—
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.