Headcanon: Another Macnair Family Death
“Drink up,” he commanded in that chillingly low voice – in that voice just above a whisper but hardly loud enough to be considered even the lowest of murmurs. “Didn't they teach you how to read?”
A smirk - almost a pitying grimace - played on his lips, twisted them scarlet and thin against untouched alabaster flesh. Eyes locked, a snake’s adrenaline slithering along his shoulders, his arms, his back, as blue widened, locked with the most dangerous of looks; it was a faint boredom hidden just behind pale irises, a there-ness that wasn’t even all there, as if Walden had other places to be and other things to do and this was just a blip in the radar. (Perhaps because it was.)
Imperio his mind wrapped around the word once, twice, lip curling at the filth that lay before him; a simple Avada Kedavra would have done the trick, he supposed – but how utterly insulting that would have been to the soul whose mind he currently controlled. Yes, yes, how insulting that the man’s entire existence, regardless of its insignificance, should be blown out, as if it were a candle’s flame, a barely lit match – no, Walden was well trained in these affairs, knew that respect went a long way. Manners were upheld on one of the highest of pedestals in society, and even Walden was not above manners.
“Open your mouth.” Another snake’s hiss leaving his lips, a soft, barely audible whisper-murmur, as if his mind were infatuated with the idea of a pristine, kept silence, as if he did not dare to shatter it – preferring to allow the life before him to shatter first.
Deft fingers twisted the bottle open, elm and dragon heartstring directed at the mouth of the container’s plastic; aguamenti his mind whispered, and a dribble of water filled the bottle, diluting its poison.
“Why won’t you drink?” Walden mused under his breath, eyes narrowing, flickering devilishly up at tonight’s victim. Why won’t you, why won’t you, why won’t you? The words echoed in his ears, a symphony that played forwards, backwards, rattling against a mind that could not supply the answer to such a question. Drinking the poison would have been easier, no doubt; it would have been quicker, would have been cleaner – certainly less painful. Alas, some people were brave in all the wrong ways, weren’t they? A downright shame.
Ah, this one would not be spared. This one had done direct harm to him, had abandoned him at a desperate time, had chickened out of a life's contract. It was his fault that everything was wrong, all the pain Walden felt, all the anger built up inside of him was his fault. And Walden wanted needed him to pay.
Confringo his mind demanded, his wand complying.
“Swallow,” Walden commanded, lifting the Imperius from the man. “How does it feel?”
A jerk, a spasm, elbows tucking into a stomach, hands clutching at an esophagus, and finally there, there, the purest of screams leaving tortured lips – deadened eyes and a why are you doing this behind the murky fog of pain.
“Should have taken the bottle.”
The trembling came to a standstill, and Walden bent, pressed a forehead against drenched sweat and unveiled fear. This was control at its finest – this was how it felt to morph a life with delicate palms, to hold it with a certain fragileness between knuckles scrubbed crimson as the sclera of the eyes he watched dilated with the most contained of fears.
“It’s not too late,” and his voice dropped to a whisper now, eyes cold and unfeeling but pitying and tinged with what might have been mistaken for genuine worry. (This was Walden Macnair, practicing his emotions using another’s irises as his mirror.)
The man neither nodded nor gave any indication that he did not wish to swiftly bring upon him the death that his near future already possessed. Previously tanned skin paled, undertones ashen as lips quivered, struggling to wrap around words, to convey what thoughts still remained in such an addled mind.
Open your mouth, blue implored of hazel; let me help you. And it was such a twisted help, such an earnestly unsettling way that Walden went about his crimes, went about murdering as if he hated, then pitied – went about it all as if he were saving them, saving them from this life instead of exiling them. (Perhaps he did both.)
The contents of the bottle were tipped back, dribbling past lips that were too weak not to comply with his eyes’ request.
A cross, a similar bottle of holy water, a hole drilled carefully – lovingly – through the man’s forehead, the gentlest of kisses pressed to such a forehead, to his neck, to his cheek, to his hand came in quick succession as the life drained from such a fragile, such a breakable body.
An I love you might have slipped past Walden’s lips at one point – and perhaps he might have meant it at that point, might have been sincere in his love of a body over which the beauty of death hovered in that uncertain certainty. Humans – so horrifically beautiful, even in death; because death was when the mind faded, the mind whose pulchritude had no match – and yet the mind, the mind that was vile in its mere existence.
Good-bye he might have whispered one last time before setting the body down, before surveying the scene and clearing it of all incriminating evidence, before attaching the tag to the bottle of emptied poison – an elegantly written Drink me, before placing it on a tray beside a simple key (a key, of all things) – a key that would open the door to an Irish bar quite a few miles from Dublin, a bar whose name just happened to be The Rabbit Hole.
Goodbye he might have thought as the door shut behind him and the click-clack of his shoes faded, muffled by the darkest of carpets. Goodbye father.
