Title: Azkaban Wedding
Rating: PG-13/T (to be safe more than anything; there's nothing explicit here)
Disclaimer: If you can sue me for owning it, I don't. I found the beginning quote online somewhere, hopefully the site I found it on credited it to the right person.
Summary: The perfect prefect of Gryffindor isn't so perfect, after all.
A/N: Did this for the Reasons to Get Married challenge over at the HP Fic Challenge forum. The two reasons I got were: they weren't sure how much time was left before they died and both were hopelessly in love. Not sure if the marriage is as central to the story as the challenge requires, since I focused more on the events leading up to it than on its consequences and whatnot. Ah, well, it was interesting to write, at least. Rather obviously AU, of course.
Azkaban Wedding
Weddings are not over until they are sealed with a kiss.
~Susan Marg, Las Vegas Weddings
oOoOoOo
"Yeh're the cleverest witch at Hogwarts, yeh are," says Hagrid, beaming, as she explains a complex spell that helps zucchinis grow. She smiles, pleased at his compliments, and blushes a little.
oOoOoOo
She can remember exactly when she first saw him; on the train to Hogwarts his first year. All she recalls of that encounter is a fleeting memory of messy black hair and bright, shy eyes.
She rather thinks she talked too much when she first saw him, maybe to make up for his relative silence. This might be just a trick of the mind, though, because she always did talk too much when she was young.
oOoOoOo
She was always very obsessed with rules and order. Her family had been very strict about that sort of thing. It made her an excellent prefect, when that time came, for her professors believed her to be as unyielding and stern as she always tried to be.
It took him only a little time to show her the thrills of rule-breaking, only a little time to teach her that some things mattered more than curfews, or House points, or obedience to the wrong sort of authority. She took pleasure, then, in helping refine their mad schemes, in rebellion, in disorder.
The perfect prefect of Gryffindor isn't so perfect, after all.
oOoOoOo
She runs down the staircases nimbly, towards the secret alcove where she knows he will be, studying sometimes, planning other times, sometimes just doodling. His doodles scare her and fascinate her- all skulls and snakes and roses. But maybe this is just his way of excising his dreams from his mind.
"Look," she says breathlessly, waving a newspaper in his face. "Look! We've won- the Dark Lord's dead!"
His eyes catch hers, dark and unfathomable. "Do you really believe that?" he asks her, quietly. "This is just the start of things, you know."
"You knew," she accuses him, focusing in on his lack of surprise. He unsettles her sometimes, still.
"Of course I knew," he says. "How could I not?"
And she thinks of words whispered- in darkness, and in secrecy. "They're saying Dumbledore did it," she tells him, knowing already what his response will be.
"They're fools," he says, a touch of anger in his voice. "Dumbledore could never have killed him, and you know that."
She touches his arm, cautiously. "Is he dead?" If anyone knows, it would be him.
He looks away from her, runs a hand through his hair, and sighs. "No," he says wearily. "No, he is not. Not yet, anyway. Only true Dark Lords never die."
oOoOoOo
She learns what Death feels like, her seventh year, when they cart that poor, dead Hufflepuff out of the school. It feels like adrenaline, she realizes, and is frightened by that realization.
"Justice must be done," he says, when she dares to ask him about it. She agrees with this in theory. In reality, things are harder.
"We're at war," he reminds her, coldly, and she nods and stiffens her resolve.
oOoOoOo
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. She is grateful for the fact that the flashes are not in order. She doesn't think she could bear that pain- of watching herself fall. This way, at least, they might end with her innocence, and not with her silence.
oOoOoOo
Their first kiss comes during her sixth year. It is brief- a jumbled press of her lips to his- and ends with her blushing furiously and stepping away.
"Sorry," she says, wincing. "I, er..." Words, usually so ready on her tongue, don't seem willing to spring forth.
He touches his lips, looking astonished. "I didn't know," he says, staring at her. "I never thought of you- not that way-"
She resists the urge to hunch over, the weight of her too-full book-bag dragging at her all of a sudden. "We can be just friends again," she says, wincing at her own presumption at kissing him. Really, what had she been thinking?
"No," he says, with sudden decisiveness. "No, it doesn't have to be like that."
Their second kiss is longer, and sweeter, and she can't help the silly smile that sticks to her face the rest of the day.
oOoOoOo
All she remembers of the courtroom is the chains that bind her to the chair. The rest is just a blur- Dumbledore's sad, disapproving face, the unforgiving glares of the Wizengamot, the cold stench of the Dementors lurking in the corridor, the verdict of guilty of murder, accessory to murder, treason.
It is only the chains that are real, glossy metal holding her down, preventing her from thinking, from protesting, from pleading.
oOoOoOo
He always gets angry whenever someone complains about their parents. It's an adorable trait, to her, and completely understandable. He grew up without parents, after all. Some of his stranger aspects, his dark moods, his anger, make sense to her in this light. It's only reasonable that he should know hatred as well as he does. A childhood sans love of any kind would instill that in him.
It fascinates her. It always has, even when it scares her.
oOoOoOo
Their wedding ceremony is short, and depressing. She almost cries- not from happiness, but from despair. She'd never expected him to ask her that one, sweet question, but in her dreams, when he did, it was never like this.
The Aurors guarding them perform the ceremony and watch her warily, as if expecting her unshed tears to burst suddenly forth and turn to poison.
You loved him once, she wants to scream at them. Can't you love him still, as I do?
oOoOoOo
The year after she graduates, she stays at Hogwarts as an assistant to the Transfiguration professor, working on her Animagus transformation. She wonders what she will be, though she has too much pride to say anything to her professor. She wonders if her animal will be awful.
"You'll be something beautiful," he says, when she confides her secret worry to him. "Something that only seems ordinary."
oOoOoOo
He was a daredevil, a radical, a Parseltongue. He was everything she never should have befriended, let alone fallen in love with. Maybe that was what cemented their friendship- that he was so different. All the adoration he received, all the awards and job offers and admiration- that meant nothing where she was concerned.
She didn't care about the bright walls he showed the world; she was too intrigued by the dark spaces within, the ones that few people ever noticed.
oOoOoOo
The first time she killed someone, she almost killed him afterwards, she was so angry.
"It's justice," he told her, eyes stubborn, arms folded. "Those who support evil must die."
She's listened to his rhetoric enough times to believe in his ideas of justice. He has grand ideas- schemes, plans- that appeal to her idealistic young mind. But this-
All that blood.
On her hands.
"You'll get used to it," he says callously. "I did."
She hits him, her palm leaving red marks and bloody streaks across his face. He stares at her, wide-eyed, clearly not having expected this.
"This is war," he whispers, voice strange, as his fingers delicately probe his bruised face, feeling at the blood left there, the blood that is neither his, nor hers.
She gasps for breath, is violently sick all over the living room floor of the corpses of the half-blood wizards they have just murdered.
He gingerly reaches out to her, and she lets him hold her, cradle her while she cries. Later, of course, she steels her resolve and determines never to lose it again, not like that. Later, she forces herself to understand that Justice must be dealt by an iron hand. But for now-
For now, she just cries.
oOoOoOo
She doesn't know who turned them in. A so-called friend, perhaps, who saw something they shouldn't have. But the evidence is clear, and damning.
All his eloquence, his speeches on the rightness of what he sought for the world, mean nothing to the unhearing ears of the Wizengamot. And all she has to offer is her belief in him, her surety, her silence.
It's all for naught, however. Two lives, cut short before they'd even really begun. She wonders what they would be like, fifty years from now, if they'd been allowed to become wise and jaded, to age, to really live.
She will never find out.
oOoOoOo
His eyes remind her of chains, sometimes. She thinks this is how he loves her, though he will never admit it. He wants her with him, wants her to stay by his side to the bitter end. This is how he understands love; as a hand grasping tightly and never letting go.
This is why he asked her to marry him. So that when they die, any time now, she will never cease being bound to him. This is when she knows he loves her, beyond all doubt.
This is also when she knows that she loves him: when she says yes, and prepares herself for the walk to death's door with his eyes like chains upon her skin.
oOoOoOo
When she is ready, she transforms into her new form, eager to see what shape her Animagus other-self is.
She is horribly disappointed when she sees herself in the mirror.
"It's all right," says her old professor kindly. "We are not always what we hope to be. But I assure you, beauty comes in the strangest forms. I myself am quite fond of your new form."
These words soothe her not at all. It is only later, when she transforms in front of him, almost afraid of her plainness, that she is comforted.
"Who cares what you look like?" he demands, fingers stroking her soft fur. "What matters is who you are. And you are an Animagus. That's what matters."
She knows he means this- it is power he respects, not the veneer of it. And it's his opinion that counts. So she relaxes into his touch, purring as his fingers ghost over the spectacle-marks around her eyes. She doesn't find the tenderness of his caresses odd at all. He is as much a riddle as his name suggests, and she loves him for it.
oOoOoOo
The wait is almost intolerable. She knows they will be Kissed any time now. She knows they will be forced to separate, will be Kissed by themselves, alone. It shouldn't matter as much as it does. Neither of them take any comfort in the other's presence now; he because the concept of comfort is alien to him, and she because she knows he cannot abide weakness.
His anger weighs on her as they lay together on the hard mattress in their cold and stony cell. She is too exhausted to be angry, but he is not. For him, these last few hours are torture, the knowledge that all his grand plans will come to nothing are stretched out into eons of agony, knowing that all his power and schemes and idealistic joy are for naught.
His only victory will be her death, his last pleasure the Howlers disapproving of their marriage that they will never receive, his last defiance the articles in the Prophet about how he corrupted her, about how they died together, as husband and wife.
She doesn't know quite how she feels about this. But she wouldn't be anywhere else right now, not for all the gold in the world, not even when the dripping moss on the walls freezes at the Dementors' approach.
It takes all her Gryffindor courage to be able to walk down the aisle to the Kissing room, the Aurors her only escort.
Till death do us part, she thinks, holding her husband's hand, head held defiantly high.
oOoOoOo
"Yeh're the cleverest witch at Hogwarts, yeh are," says Hagrid, beaming, as she explains a complex spell that helps zucchinis grow. "An' the nicest. No one else talks ter me after I was, well, yeh know." He makes a strange, embarrassed gesture in the air, indicating his expulsion for presumably opening the Chamber of Secrets.
She smiles, pleased at his compliments, and blushes a little.
There is nothing of guilt in her smile.
oOoOoOo
So there you go. Do let me know if you found it too confusing. The pairing, of course, is a young Voldemort/Minerva McGonagall.