Disclaimer: Harry Potter does not belong to me, nor myself, nor I
A/N: Please forgive smol child for posting nothing but one-shots. I promise I will TRY to have some lengthier ones up soon! Which should hopefully be higher quality cause brevity ain't really my jam. But anyway.
Two shadows slither across walls in silent retreat.
In the ruckus of darkness, nobody notices.
Two phantoms, ghostly husks with cracked lips and cracked hearts, shutter themselves in a moment of peace. In one crumbling corner of the massive tomb they stand in, among jagged lights and screams that pierce through marrow, they take refuge.
Why they seek each other out at the moment they do eludes the both of them. Perhaps the girl sees how the phantom encapsulates the boy. Perhaps the bone-white skin and the hair dangling limp and colourless on his brow make it so much sharper that he is slipping away. Or perhaps the boy feels the cliff's edge under their feet and has done what is natural – sought to hold on to the strongest thing he can.
They are silent for a long while. There is only so much words can accomplish at times like this.
"I'm not ready," the girl finally says. Her voice is hoarse.
The boy finds her hands and rubs at the callouses, the quill-scratches, the memories. He understands. What they'd had… it had been beautiful.
Too beautiful.
Everything had been so gloriously bright for such a small, small time; an insignificant speck on the rope of life, really. But it had been bright enough to blind them nonetheless.
"We never would've been," the boy replies, quiet.
There is silence for a moment. All that exists is the two of them – though just now, it is difficult for them to view themselves as more than one being. Rasping in air thick with death, clinging to something too precious to keep.
The girl touches a finger to the boy's jaw and traces it all the way to the other side. Then she follows it around his ear, then across the too-soft line of his hair, down over his temple and his cheekbone and through the line framing one side of his mouth.
"This could be the end of us," she whispers, continuing to sketch out his face as if committing to mind a model she must paint later from memory.
The boy barks a laugh. It sounds so grating that the girl feels it must have hurt him on the way out. "Of us? No. Of everything, maybe." He catches her fingers as they brush against the other cheek and holds them there. The stubble speckling it burns her skin. You never would have caught him dead unshaven, before. "But… us isn't something that's… that's just all of a sudden over after the last time we meet, or the last time one of us takes a breath."
The girl finds herself nodding. He is right. Of course, he is right. Something so incomprehensibly immense cannot possibly be so mortal. It's an ocean, a planet, a concept. Their love is no temporal thing that must abide by common laws of deterioration. It's eternal.
Still, there is desperation in the kiss that follows, and a loathing for the word goodbye. There is fear in the way they hold each other and try to pretend the sounds of battle aren't rushing back into their ears.
One soul tears itself in two to return to the darkness. One pair of brown eyes meets one pair of grey ones, and sees in them the same colour as that of the dust clinging to their flesh and clothing. The ashes of something great.
One Draco Malfoy asks one Hermione Granger, "On the other side?"
She does not ask on the other side of what. She does not suppose it matters.
Somewhere, a clock unaware of the war massacring its home strikes midnight. The girl smiles.
"On the other side."