He opens his eyes. He opens his eyes and there are lights and there is shattered glass, and cold white smoke which whispers. He opens his eyes and there is a girl, a woman, lit up from behind with six blinding kinds of green and tired eyes aglow. There is a choice, and she chooses him.
He opens his eyes.
There is a story, an epic, the kind that spans lifetimes. It starts with a letter.
The letter is expected. It's two pieces of parchment and a scarlet wax seal; it's an invitation, a new beginning, a future; it's what he has always waited for. His parents have waited too, waited with him at a table that stretches smoothly across the room. They wait and sit poised on his eleventh birthday like two white chess pieces, carefully blank and cold and patient because the letter is expected. It comes in the early morning, pale and heavy on the shining wood table, and he already has his wand. Later he will watch white peacocks stride across the lawn and will still feel the emptiness of his father's handshake.
It began, it has begun, it begins: with a letter and not a cupboard. Then a handshake. A train. Next, a girl, a woman, but somewhere between them there is a war. One day he will find her in the ruins of a castle and she will kiss him, she will kiss him and taste like bright colour and he will think, hand pressing against her spine, that this is how the story ends.
The carriage flickers with the colours that speed past him outside, white blue sky and yellow fields. It's his first time. The journey is long, and he spends it thinking of the future, of the things he wants to do. He wants to make his mother proud. He does not know that four compartments away, a girl is looking for a lost toad. Her hair is wild but her voice is steady when she walks toward his door. She says, don't worry Neville. We'll find your toad, she says.
By chance and the distraction of the food trolley, she misses his compartment. He never knows.
He is breaking her best friend's nose, he feels it bend and change and crunch beneath his foot, and it makes him feel sick. But he laughs and leaves the boy in the dark where nobody can find him, in the belly of a train that takes children to strange places, that takes him away from the peacocks and endless table just because of a letter.
On his second day he says 'Wingardium Leviosa' and nothing happens, the wand just sits dully in his fist and the feather lies on the desk, but two rows ahead she flies hers right to the ceiling and he hates her.
There is a word – just two syllables, eight letters – and then she hates him too.
The girl hisses 'what do you want, Malfoy,' in their fourth year and it isn't even a question, it's flat and painful like five ink-stained fingers and a palm. He flinches and almost puts a hand to his cheek, because he can feel red rising there in the ghost-shape of her anger. She is gone before he can say anything, and he is grateful because he would have said nothing. He watches her walk away, back straight and form indistinguishable through heavy black robes and red gold pride, and wishes he knew what he wanted.
His father tells him "don't disappoint me," and steers him toward the train. Hands are pushing out of compartment windows and faces are pressed up against the cheap sticky plastic-glass. A swarm of people approach from behind and in the rush he forgets to tell his mother goodbye.
There are tables and people between them and stars and darkness above them; the Great Hall is alive. People are breathing and speaking and eating and laughing, but he is watching. The red-headed boy says something and she smiles, lights right up. It's only a year later but he knows what he wants. He corners her in the corridors later and this time, when she asks what he wants, she just sounds tired. He will say nothing.
A letter, a train. It's a war before they kiss. She chooses him long before he kneels and asks her to. She will stand and smile all in white and all he will have to do is reach out.
The peacocks are gone and the table is scratched and dusty. She is filthy, clothes torn and bloody, but she is still beautiful. He knows she is not Penelope Clearwater, knows why she says she is, and he wants to save her but does not know how. All at once there are questions and wands and threats and he knows he must lie because otherwise she is dead, but he stammers, he is scared. We are too young for this, he thinks. We are too young.
And then they are older and he closes his eyes and remembers, picks his way back through one hundred thousand memories and remembers the first time he loved her. It was in a cold bed, because they'd barely climbed in it before his hands were stretching out for her and her mouth was on his, but it wasn't cold for long and when he woke in the morning it was with the taste of butterbeer on his tongue and her hair on his shoulder.
He opens his eyes, he closes his eyes. He dreams of otters that rise against the breaking waves; he dreams of broken castles and dark embraces, stones splitting as two crumbling, bloodless arms reach for him. He looks and sees loss and hatred and a woman, a teacher, spinning slowly above a table and pleading for her life; he sees a wand lifting and hears a spell he is not supposed to hear and then "come, Draco," and the arms are reaching again, jagged and bent in ways that don't look right; he wonders if he looks as terrified as he feels, if his hands shake as they clutch desperately at the wand he is too scared to use.
He looks across the small dinner table sometimes, late at night when her hair is bursting out of the bun she tamed it into hours ago before she kissed him on the cheek as they left for work, and he wants to tell her things. He wants to tell her that he is sorry, that he is thankful, that when the light catches the silver ring on her finger he doesn't know what he feels. He wants to ask her why the ferret and not the weasel, but he's afraid that she wouldn't know, either.
There is a war, a war, a chaos which he tumbles through and does not ask to survive. He clings to the cloaks of wizards and witches as he passes them and does not care what they scream, does not look back to see them raise their wands or slip gracelessly to the ground. He does not look down either, even when he stumbles over lumpy softness that he knows is not ground, because he thinks if he does and sees her face, he won't get back up again. He searches for her amidst the rubble and terror. The air is filled with a thousand lights and they burn past him, they whisper 'war' and laugh lime green horror.
He opens his eyes. He opens his eyes in a compartment and it's the first time, and a girl walks past and does not know him. He opens his eyes and calls her a name, he opens his eyes and she slaps him. He opens his eyes and thinks, I am scared.
He never tells her what it felt like when the Dark Lord held him. He will kiss her and he will love her; he will listen to how she was hunted and he will trace her scars; but he will never tell her. On the nights she works late and he sleeps alone, he wakes up cold and sick and wrong, wrong, wrong. She always comes home soon after, like she knows, and she drops her books at the foot of the bed and crawls right up to him and they kiss until he forgets, until he stops shaking and the darkness snakes away.
He opens his eyes.
I am not scared, he thinks.
She is standing and smiling, all in white. He only has to reach out. And he does, reaches out, stretches a hand which doesn't shake and slips a silver ring on her finger. When she reaches back for him he smiles at her. Then he looks down, away from her eyes, because he wants to watch as she takes his hand to ease his finger into a smooth gold ring. It fits – perfectly is not the word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
He closes his eyes.
There is a story, an epic, the kind that spans lifetimes. It starts with a letter and not a cupboard, because it's someone else's story. It ends with a kiss, like every story should, but there's so much more.
because everything i start to write turns into draco/hermione. this was supposed to be my celebratory 'i finished lost so i'll write a lost fic' fic. but the angsty mind of draco surfaced instead. i don't know why i'm complaining!
- bump.