Nightmares and Nocturnes

The Skin in Sacrifice

a/n: TW for minor character death.

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Chapter 29: The Skin in Sacrifice

In 1997, the rumors would steadfastly claim that Luna Lovegood had been dragged off the Hogwarts Express on her way back for Christmas. After it happened, people would whisper about it, about how she'd been taken, but all the while Draco had known that what they said - the phrases they used, and the word 'dragged,' specifically - wasn't even close to accurate. He'd watched. He'd witnessed. He'd seen.

She wasn't dragged.

The Death Eaters who took her had worn masks, though Draco doubted they'd needed to; by that point, nobody was going to stop them, regardless of who they were. Maybe it was for intimidation or something, but it certainly wasn't for her benefit, because Luna wasn't afraid. Draco suspected she'd known that if she screamed they'd make an example of her - make certain nobody else ever felt any bubbling of mutiny because of her - so it seemed to him that she'd intentionally chosen not to fight them. She purposely didn't fight back; not even when they shook her, forced her around, the blonde of her hair bobbing against their black robes as they took almost no care in her removal. She didn't make a sound, and she seemed conscious of each step, each one placed deliberately in front of the other.

Luna Lovegood wasn't dragged. She went, and she looked Draco in the eye as she passed him. He stood on the train corridor, watching from an open compartment, and she looked directly at him, unnervingly holding his gaze for a moment that felt too significant to have been as brief as it was. He remembered thinking that it was as if she had wanted him to memorialize the moment; to burn it into his brain, plaster it into the backs of his eyelids. As if she wanted him to see what he had done.

He did.

He saw.

He didn't expect to find her at his home, though he supposed that wasn't actually surprising. They didn't ask him to torture her, though it wouldn't have been the first time if they had, and perhaps he would have done it, too. He saw her sometimes; was instructed, at times, to bring her things. He said nothing, did nothing, knowing full well that his mother sat upstairs with the Dark Lord and that anything he did would rain down on their heads. Not that he really thought about doing anything at all, by that point; it was too late, wasn't it? It was all too late, and to hear the Dark Lord tell it, Potter's loss was imminent.

Still, Draco's feet congratulated him. Still walking, they said. Still standing.

He said nothing to Luna, but she said one thing to him. Exactly one.

"The only difference between fear and courage is action," she told him slowly, finally addressing him one day just as he had turned to leave. She said it to the blades of his shoulders, to the weakness in his spine, to the gaps in his morality. "Fear itself is not the curse," she said, and then she let out a breath, closing her eyes.

He wondered if she were trying to build him up or break him, but he didn't ask questions. He said nothing in response.

Perhaps it was unsurprising that he, a magical being, began to get used to seeing people disappear.

Harry Potter had been gone, of course, from the start of the year, and Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, but to a lesser extent there had also been Dean Thomas, and others like him whom Draco had come to expect like threads in a tapestry, suddenly yanked and the landscape made unclear. Ginny Weasley didn't come back after Easter, and for some reason, Draco took that as a good sign. It seemed an intentional sort of disappearance, so he considered that maybe she was somewhere she couldn't be found. Better that sort of absence, he thought, than the kind that had been happening around the castle; Michael Corner, for instance, disappeared after being tortured for releasing a first-year that had been chained up. Until Draco saw him much later, he assumed Corner had been killed. He assumed the same of Seamus Finnegan, and also of Neville Longbottom.