It's strange, she thinks, that in all the years she's known him she's never noticed the color of his eyes.
They are gray, like winter and steel and clouds just before a storm, like rocks and glassy pools and mercury. Mercury, she thinks, it fits—those mercurial eyes, always shifting. She thinks maybe they're not so different, after all: both stuck in the middle, fighting a war neither wanted to be part of.
The only difference is that she chose this. She volunteered, willing and determined to be on the front lines, while he was put there by force—because in Voldemort's world, the ones who fight the real battles are always expendables.
They are alike, him and her. Fighting on opposite sides, but alike nonethless—she can see it in the lines of his face, the circles under his eyes. Tired. She knows tiredness, knows the ache that sets into your very bones and makes the simple act of standing up a remarkable achievement. She knows exhaustion, that jaded, world-weary, all-encompassing sense of fatigue, when everything seems hopeless. When she looks at the bodies, visits the graves of those she once named as friends, feels the casualties piling up, and wonders if so much death is worth the cost of freedom.
Once, when the grass was wet underneath her bare feet and the stars glinted like tiny knives in the night sky, she asked him. Is is worth it?
He looked at her for a moment, mercury eyes dark and shadowed, catching and suspending her in his gaze. No, he said, and the tiredness came back, seeping in like some sort of slow-creeping disease.
She looks at him, looks at those faded gray eyes, and can almost see some traces of the boy hiding within. The pale-haired, poison-eyed, serpent-tongued boy who'd spat slurs at her in school, sneered and laughed and called her every name imaginable (including the one that degraded the very blood in her veins), hiding behind his insults and his friends and his money, because bullies don't know how to be strong, only spiteful, and he was never taught the difference.
She feels sorry for him, because maybe if he'd had someone to show him what real courage looked like, he wouldn't have turned out so broken.
Do you love me?
He looked at her again, and this time his eyes were burning. No, he said. Do you love me?
No, she lied.
And then he kissed her, his lips searing hot on her frozen mouth, and she kissed him back and pretended like it wasn't a lie because the truth made things complicated, and she had enough complications in her life right now. There was a war going on outside, and no time for feelings or hopes or dreams or anything but the cold hard edge of reality. Reality said that they both could die tomorrow, maybe at the hand of the other. Reality said she could die now, a stray curse hitting her in the back, a surprise attack from any one of Voldemort's followers, and reality had no patience for the truth. After all, she thought, love has no place on a battlefield.
But today they buried one of her friends, and she didn't want to think about battlefields or love or the endless empty eyes staring up at her from broken, mangled bodies, so she pulled herself closer to him and let his kisses burn away the pain.
He is like winter, silver and shifting and cold and hard to read. She is like summer, brown and steadfast and warm and so transparent, the veracity of her feelings always written on her face. Sometimes she thinks they are complete opposites, but she's never met anyone so alike.
And then his mouth abruptly leaves hers and she leans back, back against the wet grass and the hilltop that suddenly feels too solid, and stares up the twisted, tangled, stars, spinning and spinning and detached from reality for just this moment. Adrenaline pounds in her veins, that dizzy rush of feeling.
The space next to her feels suddenly, profoundly empty.
She rolls over. He's gone, the only clue a slight impression in the grass.
Malfoy?
He doesn't answer. For a second she thinks he won't, and then she hears him. Yes?
She wants to close her eyes, but she can't seem to tear her gaze away from the sky, icy and frozen and bitter—bitter, just like her, just like everyone else in this stupid, pointless war. Were you lying?
Silence.
Yes. A beat passes. Were you?
She closes her eyes, whispers. Yes.
But love has no place on a battlefield. So she pretends not to notice when he walks away, lays in the cool grass and stares unseeingly up at the night until her eyes start to sting with the effort of holding them open. She doesn't realize she is crying until she tastes the tears, salty on her tongue, mixed with the taste of him.
The truth is a tricky thing. It tangles, confuses, shatters the careful web of lies she has built as a safety net around her, and leaves her bare, naked, vulnerable. So she draws her lies around her like armor, a shield, and tells herself that this isn't real. Death is real. Pain is real. Suffering and blood and hatred is real, Mudblood is real, graveyards and hasty funerals are real. War is real.
Lying there among the stars, his kiss burns on her lips. But it isn't supposed to be real; this love cannot possibly exist in a sane world (except it isn't sane, not really, it is mad and crazy and desperate). So she buries it, deep down, where no one will ever find it.
When she finally falls asleep, her dreams are filled with madness and hatred and people dying all around her, the air thick with spells, and him. Winter is cold, it cannot feel, but summer is bright and burning and live and she feels every ounce of it, every jet of green light that hits someone she knew once upon a time, like it's a knife being driven straight into her chest.
His eyes are gray, like mercury, shifting and impenetrable and cold, except when he's tired or scared. And maybe, maybe sometimes, when he's looking at her.
She thinks it isn't such a bad thing, to be winter.