InsaneJournal

HP fic: "Getting By," Gen, PG13
And now for something slightly different.
Summary: This is the way wars are won, and lost.



Lucius Malfoy won the nightclub from Mario Bagman, after the Cannons failed to cover the spread. It was in the bad part of London, between Knockturn Alley and the Muggle city, where in theory the Death Eaters were in power and in practice no one was. It was called Isobel's, after a long ago mistress of Bagman's, and somehow they never got around to renaming it.

All the Death Eaters came there—the way all of the Order drank at the Unlucky Griffin in Hexham Street in Hogsmeade—and everyone knew, and no one did anything about it. Even in a civil war there are sacred places, neutral territories, sanctuaries: Isobel's was one of those.

Some of them came every night, and drank absinthe mixed with the Draught of Living Death, and danced to Muggle music, with beautiful and damaged boys and girls from the streets of London. They fucked in the bathrooms and sometimes on the dance floor; they fought in the alley in the back, sometimes barehanded and sometimes with wands. They fell in love.

Lucius proposed three times to Narcissa Black, once in the office and once in the bar, and the third time on the doorstep, lips bleeding and ribs broken. Bellatrix Lestrange lay on the dirty floor of the Gents' with only her cloak under her, and Rabastan and Rudolphus both inside her. Regulus Black and Evan Rosier drank themselves sick three nights running, in an epic duel that ended when Severus Snape threw Rosier through the plate glass window for making an improper advance.

They were very young, and very aware that they were living at the end of something, no matter who won the war. Most of them were desperately afraid, most of the time. Lord Voldemort knew what went on there and turned a blind eye, although much of it he condemned: the drugs, and sodomy, and Pureblood women having sex with Muggle men, and the reckless, foolish brutality they wrought on one another.

The Muggle police knew, and catalogued the dead, and did nothing. The Ministry knew, and they took Lucius's money and looked the other way. Abraxas Malfoy knew, but he had cast his son off long ago. There was no one to care about Isobel's, no one to put a stop to it.

And so it went on. They danced and drank; they fathered sons and deflowered daughters. They died in faceless Muggle buildings, in ditches beside public roads, in dark woods. They lived. They went to funerals for their friends, their parents, their brothers and sisters and classmates and second cousins.

They fought in a war, and the night after it ended they burned Isobel's to the ground, and they never spoke again of anything that had happened there. If their ghosts haunted the hole in the ground where it had been, no one ever complained.