Sic Transit

A/N: Have a depressing one-shot while I get around to editing Wolves and Devil (I just noticed that I tend to give things nouns as abbreviated names. Go me. Ten points to me). More at the bottom.

TW Major character death, implied gore/rape/violence.

When he sees her next, he knows her immediately. It isn't how she looks— that's never been consistent— he just knows it's her as much as he knows that he is himself.

He had been pacing up and down the train like an animal in a cage. There is the familiar tugging sensation somewhere between his heart and his stomach that pulls him toward her like a magnet looking for its opposite. It's always like this, every time. He has waited eleven years in this new body, with this new life, to find her, and now the tug is everywhere. He has been patiently searching for her in every face since he first opened his eyes in this world and now that he has been patient for so long, he cannot be patient any longer.

He finds her with a dough-faced, weepy boy. She asks if he has seen the boy's toad. Plain as day, nothing more or less. She introduces herself, holds out her hand, and looks him in the eye with polite curiosity and a hint of impatience. He can't find words to respond. The air has been knocked out of him.

She doesn't know him.

She doesn't know him and he hates her for it but he also loves her for it. The sheer complexity of the emotion catches like a lump in his throat that he can't swallow down. He is so keenly alone in this vast universe that his brain, in a rare act of self-preservation, clamps down around it, shutting off the parts of him that should be feeling anything at all.

He hates her for it, of course, because the fact that he is not remembered—that she of all people doesn't remember him—is unthinkable, unfathomable. It reminds him of all of the promises they've traded over the years. Hundreds of promises. Thousands of promises. Promises stacked high enough to reach the sky. She promised, he promised, together, separate, alone, and in crowds they promised. They wouldn't forget each other, and now she has gone and done the thing that she said, over and over, that she would never do.

But it is also a relief. To mean so much to another person is a heavy burden to bear and it had been so long-forever, really-since he had not been bound to her by innumerable promises, that he had forgotten what it felt like have no binding ties. It's as though he had been living forever with a ball and chain wrapped around his ankles and now, suddenly, he is free. He is unbearably, painfully weightless. He calls himself a coward for it, but the relief remains.

She doesn't remember him. He is completely alone. And he feels so many conflicting things at once that he doesn't feel anything at all. So he resolves to live out this lifetime without her. He's got it all planned out: He's young now, from a good family, and with all the promise in the world. He's going to see new things, meet new people, and he isn't going to miss her.

After much too long, he answers her questions, puts a bit more malice in his voice than is really necessary, swats her proffered hand away, and moves along as though nothing is wrong. The tug in his chest tries to pull him backward, but he ignores it, slinks into a cabin flanked by Thick and Thicker (or whatever their names are), and pretends his hands don't shake.

She does remember him, of course. There is no iteration of any reality in which he is not a thumbprint, hot and jagged, against the very fabric of her soul. She just handles herself differently than he does. She always has.

She didn't waste her time looking for him. Instead, she spent the first eleven years of her life learning everything she can about this time and place. She wasn't too concerned. He'd find her when it was time, or she'd find him. It never occurred to her once in those eleven years that he might not be here. He is always here, wherever she happens to be. Immutable. Constant. Like she said, a thumbprint. She paid attention to the things other than him so that, when he finally showed up and the fireworks or the wars or the political intrigue invariably started—because there is always something going to hell and they are always right in the middle of it—she wanted to be ready this time. It was going to be different.

She sees him first. The tug starts up as soon as she is on the platform with her parents, and she takes off at a run in what she knows is his direction. Like a fish being reeled faster and faster toward the shore by an invisible line, she finds herself wound closer and closer until he is in front of her. She stops before she reaches him, though.

He is not alone, which is unusual for him. He is combative and stand-offish by nature, and keeps most other people at arm's' length, but he is sandwiched between two adults who look like him and two children who are smiling. He is smiling. After so long, it is rare for him to smile like that, so unguarded, like the weight of so many deaths doesn't sit heavily on him, and the gears are turning quickly in her head. She wonders if maybe it isn't because...

She turns and walks slowly back toward her parents. Her legs are lead and weightless at once and, as soon as she gets on the train, she is so desperate for distraction that when the little boy asks if she's seen his toad, she throws herself into helping him look.

When she can't hide from him anymore, when he corners her in the corridor, she introduces herself to him and thinks she hasn't succeeded in fooling him until he leaves, heartbreak on his heels.

For as long as he can remember, in as many lives as he can recall, lying awake in bed at night, he has always held lengthy conversations with her. Even now that she isn't here to talk to, he knows her so well that he can imagine everything she says in any given situation, so the habit persists even though everything is different. For the first eleven years of this life, before he met her again, it was all the things they'd tell each other when they found each other. They'd trade what details of the last round of lives they lived, since neither of them ever remembered everything. They'd laugh and they'd cry and then they'd scream at each other and then they'd apologize. It was always different, but it was also always the same. But that's not how it's happening this time around.

After the train ride, the conversations changed, and now in their imagined conversations he tries to tell her everything she doesn't remember.

"Hermione," he starts in his head, staring up at the ceiling above his bed, listening the the soft and even breaths of his roommates, "you don't know it, but you and I—" and this is where it invariably fails, because you and I what exactly? They have lived so many lives in so many ways that they have already used and discarded any labels that she might recognize. They have lived opposite and intertwined with each other for so long that words sand down the edges and carry off the finer details. Words cheapen whatever they are.

"We know each other." But that isn't right, either.

If she were actually here, she would point out that, no, they don't know each other. That, if anything, he knows her much better than she knows him, and how can he be sure, and why hasn't he said anything sooner? She'd ask questions until his head ached and he agreed with her just because he couldn't think of any way to argue himself out of it.

So, eventually, he just starts telling himself stories, reminiscing all alone just to be sure that he doesn't forget all about it, too, because it happened and it mattered, even if no one else would ever know about it. He doesn't know why she forgot about him, but he doesn't want it to happen to him, too. He can't figure out if it is cowardice or bravery that keeps him repeating old stories to himself.

"Once upon a time, we were a king and a queen and we ruled a kingdom from the backs of dragons. You led legions into war and your name was a battle cry that rattled the bones of your enemies. I was the home you returned to at the end of the day. I would wash your feet in spring water and I would comb out your hair with my fingers until it shone. 'Where have you conquered today?' I would ask, and you would tell me your stories." He likes to start out with this one because he relishes the role reversal. In that life, she was the one telling him stories, and now here he is, telling no one in particular about lives that no longer matter.

"Once upon a time, I was a tempest and you were a mountain. I railed against you for fifty days and fifty nights and on that last night you opened your arms to me and I was home." He tries to keep the bitterness of abandonment out of his voice when he says this.

"Once upon a time, you were a doctor and I was a soldier and you'd stay up late into the evening, tracing out your anatomy homework on my body. I still remember: Clavicle, scapula, iliac crest." If she were here, she would interrupt with a coy comment and arched eyebrow about what all three of those bones had in common on his person. If that were to happen, "I don't quite recall," he would purr as he closed the space between them, "Why don't you show me?"

He tries to distract himself with the life he's meant to live here, but for the longest time it doesn't get any easier.

She throws herself into life with a fury that doesn't really suit her. She hasn't had to worry about making friends for so long that she's forgotten how to do it at all, so maybe she comes on too strong at first. Pretentious and bossy, but she keeps at it and perseverance wins out over her innate lack of skill. If they were speaking, he would say something about it being a testament to her stubbornness.

This happens more than she'd like to admit: She'll be going along, reading something or listening to someone blather on about this or that, and all at once she'll hear his voice so clearly that she has to keep herself from responding out loud. It doesn't help that what he normally has to say is some sarcastic remark or some clever comment.

When she thinks about it, she knows exactly what he would say in almost any situation. It works so well that sometimes she wonders if maybe he and she are not really just one person after all, that the boy across the great hall is only a piece of herself that broke off in transit and grew a body of its own.

"Do you remember when we ruled together on the backs of dragons?" He asks in her head her one day while she is trying to read about dragon's blood.

"No," she mentally replies, and tries to focus on the lines of print that are already blurring together. She can never concentrate when he's around, even when he isn't really there.

"Well, once upon a time, we were king and queen and—"

"You always remember it wrong. Now leave me alone." She snaps the book shut, stands and goes off to find her friends. She won't go down this rabbit hole again. It's different now.

The worst part is that eventually it does get easier. He thinks about her less and less until one day, in his fifth year, he catches himself thinking about her as Hermione Granger, Potter's annoying mudblood friend, and he pauses in the process of taking off his socks to sit heavily on the edge of the bed.

He tests the weight of the idea out in his mind, rolls it around on his tongue, before saying out loud to the empty dormitory "I don't love her any more."

And he doesn't feel anything.

He thinks that maybe he has a responsibility to go to her-just stomp right up to Gryffindor tower, bang on her bedroom door and when she opens it, get right in her face and scream I don't love you any more. How fucking dare you. And then throw in a few insults and maybe a punch in the nose for her new friends just for good measure. But it just sounds like so much work and, really, it doesn't seem like it's worth it anymore.

"Once upon a time," he says to himself, just to be sure he doesn't forget, even though she doesn't matter anymore. "There was a soul who always remembered every life it ever lived." His forehead wrinkles. No, that's not quite it. Too specific. "Once upon a time, there was a soul who always remembered every life it ever lived, but that wasn't too bad because it was never alone. Wherever this soul went, another one went, too, and they kept each other company."

But he's got homework to do and a girlfriend to screw, so he doesn't waste his time on memories anymore.

She joins the Order of the Phoenix in the summer after her sixth year, as soon as she knows that she and her friends aren't going back to Hogwarts. She kisses Ron. Hastily, sloppily, and everyone thinks it's because she's in a hurry even though that isn't it at all. She kisses him like that because she can't shake the feeling that she's doing something wrong, even though she knows it's what everyone expects of her, and she does sort of fancy him. So she kisses him hastily, sloppily, like ripping off a band-aid, just to get it over with.

"Once upon a time," a familiar voice starts in her head.

"Shut up," she snarls.

Harry informs her that Draco Malfoy has been spotted with a band of Death Eaters outside of Sussex. Harry says it with hatred in his eyes and no sympathy for how this might make her feel. But why would he be sympathetic, she chides herself, Draco Malfoy has never meant anything to me.

And by the time she thinks it, it's true. Increasingly for the last two years, watching him curl into corners around Pansy Parkinson hasn't made her feel anything except vaguely embarrassed by such public displays, and when he let the Death Eaters in at the end of the year, she was angry and hurt before she even thought that she ought to feel personally betrayed.

She wonders if his memories have faded with time. If maybe all the lives they've lived are like a dream and, if you stop remembering them, they won't come back. Not, of course, that it's worked for her. She knows he must have been angry at her, at least at first, and she wonders if her betrayal of their promises might have fueled his hatred for muggle borns. Or maybe that's just how he has been bent by everything. Guilt twists like a hot knife in her gut.

"I did it for you," she says, even though she knows that he can't hear her. "I did it all for you."

When war comes, he is on the side opposite her, and there have been lives like this before, but never like this—a life where he doesn't care if she lives or dies.

She thinks that she might really come to love Ron when the war is over. He is coarse and clumsy, but he tries his best, and he really seems to love her in his own way. She tries not to think about how short and insignificant a single life's love truly is in the grand scheme of things.

There is a boom and then a crash and then he falls through the floor. Pain rips through his stomach and then he doesn't feel much of anything at all except confused. He's tired, though, and warm and sleepy. He'll just take a nap and sort all of this out when he wakes up.

"Draco," she says, and he opens his eyes. She is there, but she is upside down. No, he realizes suddenly, he is upside-down, not her. She isn't quite looking at him as she nears him. She disappears from his field of vision at his left side, and he can just barely register that she is tugging at something that seems to be protruding from his stomach. He leans back and closes his eyes again.

"Draco," she says again, and she sounds like she is right by his ear. Her hands are running over the lines of his face like she's done it a hundred times. She has, he corrects, just not this face. "Can you hear me?"

He blinks quickly and focuses on what she is saying. There is a warm tugging in his chest that he is suddenly very aware of, like a magnet very close to its opposite. It cuts through the numbness. It wakes him up. "Hermione," he croaks.

"These are such horrible names," she laughs a little, and something black dribbles out of the corner of her mouth. That certainly gets his attention.

"Hermione, are you hurt?" He asks before he can remember that he doesn't love her any more. She smiles sadly at him. His eyes begin to adjust to the dim light and he looks closer. Her hair is dark and matted against the side of her face. Her hands, still tracing his cheeks, seem fine. Her arms are more or less intact, even if the left sleeve of her robe is ripped and the bare arm underneath it looks scraped raw. Her chest is heaving but looks alright. Her torso is hunched forward but seems ok. Her legs—

Oh. Her legs are completely gone. Now that he's paying attention, he can see the uneven streaks of wet blood where she has dragged herself across the floor toward him and the raggedy nubs of flesh just below her hips. Off to the left, there is something that looks like it might have been a limb in the recent past.

Unthinking, he tries to stand, to gather her against him, to find help.

The familiarity of this isn't lost on him. Always, every time it ends, he tries to keep it going just a little bit longer. Maybe it's a biological imperative hardwired into the human body to fight for life and for the lives of those we love as it leaves. Maybe it's just the way his personality is warped.

"Stop, stop, stop," she cooes, and it is her tone, not her words, that gives him pause. "You'll just make it worse."

"What is it?" he asks, and then, because he can't stand the seriousness in his own voice he adds, "Is it serious, Doctor?"

She rolls her eyes. "I'm not a doctor here." She's intentionally not answering him, not telling him how close he is to death. He knows it and he doesn't mind. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed talking to her.

"You're always a doctor," he grumbles. The words are thick, like something is stuck in his throat. He ignores it for now. "Even when you aren't a doctor, you're a doctor of something."

"I don't think we're going to live long enough for me to be a doctor of anything this time around," she mumbles, her fingers lacing into his hair just the way he likes.

"So you do remember." It's an accusation, and he should be angry that she's been lying to him for their entire lives, angry about the lonely nights and lonelier days watching her across the great hall with her stupid friends and unable to go to her because she didn't know who he was. It's only a tiny sliver of anger, though, because he's too tired to muster up much more, and he's just relieved that he can finally talk to her again.

She doesn't look at him, just keeps running her fingers through his hair.

He wants to hold onto his little piece of anger, since it makes him feel a little more alive, but it's just too much work. He lets it go and asks "How much and for how long?"

She laughs hollowly, spraying his face with something warm that he suspects is blood. The air smells like copper. "More than you, and for longer."

"Longer?"

She nods. "I'm older than you here."

He nods. There is only one more thing to ask before he can go to sleep and worry about all of this when he wakes up: "Why?"

She gives him a look that is equal parts heartbreak and fury. He can see the mountain in her, and the warrior queen, and the doctor, and one hundred thousand other versions of the same, familiar soul. He knows her, but he doesn't know what she will say next.

"Tell me a story." She says quietly.

He can't think of anything creative to say, so instead he draws up the stories he told her in his head when he was little. "Once upon a time, we were a king and a queen and we ruled a kingdom from the backs of dragons. You lead legions into war and your name was a battle cry that rattled the bones of your enemies. I was the home you returned to at the end of the day. I would wash your feet in spring water and I would comb out your hair with my fingers until it shone. 'Where have you conquered today?' I would ask, and you would tell me your stories."

"And it was very good for a little while, but my enemies grew numerous and strong, and their fear made them stronger," she answers.

How strange, he thinks, I had forgotten that there was more to it than just my part.

"And they came at night while our dragons were sleeping and they took us from our bed and they-" her voice breaks and her face crumples for an instant before she resumes, "and they hurt you and they hurt you and they made me watch as they hurt you. And then they made you watch as they hurt me and that was even worse because you were never to see me like that. And then they pulled me apart and threw me to the four corners of the winds and they kept you alive for themselves for two moons before you died, too, all alone and broken and telling yourself stories about my glory with no one but me to hear you."

"And what glory it was," he says with a soft smile. He remembers now how it ended, but it doesn't matter too much in retrospect. Now that it's done, the life they lived was magnificent.

She's in a hurry. She rolls her eyes. She clicks her tongue."It doesn't matter. Tell me another."

"Once upon a time, I was a tempest and you were a mountain. I railed against you for fifty days and fifty nights and on that last night you opened your arms to me and I was home." The words are a speech he remembers well.

"And as soon as your rage stopped," she chokes, her eyes are glassy and he isn't sure if it is with tears or something else he doesn't yet want to name. "As soon as you began to slow, life leaked out of you on all sides and no matter how tightly I held you I couldn't keep you from dying and then you were gone and I was all alone and I stood there, stuck without you, for thousands and thousands of years."

He swallows. What on earth is that lump in his throat? It's starting to hurt a bit. "I was still there, you know."

She gives him a stony glare. He's telling her things she already knows and he's not telling it exactly how it is. This is a pet peeve of hers, and it has been for as long as he has known her. "Not in any way I could see." She corrects, "Not moving on and still being there are two completely different things. As far as it mattered, I was completely alone."

"Have you always been such a pessimist?" he quips.

She snorts indelicately. "Oh please. This from the fellow who only ever remembers how it began and is still always such a stick in the mud." She pauses, and he thinks that she is thinking of what to say next, but then she slumps forward and he thinks, Oh this is it, you are going to die now. Before me, just like that, in the middle of our conversation. How fucking dare you. But then she is sitting up again, her breaths short and shallow, her face drawn and pale with pain. He hurts for her.

"Another. One more. I'm running out of time."

"Once upon a time, you were a doctor and I was a soldier and you'd stay up late into the evening, tracing out your anatomy homework on my body. I still remember: Clavicle, scapula, iliac crest." He wonders if he hasn't spent his whole life rehearsing for this one moment. If everything hasn't been leading to this final act.

Her eyebrow arches and she quips coyly, "You know, I'm not at all surprised that those are the bones you remember, given what they all have in common relative to your personal anatomy."

"I don't quite recall," he purrs, even though he is fastened in place by his own failing body and she is already edging nearer to death than to him, "Why don't you show me?"

She chuckles, and he thinks it would have been a full-blown laugh if she had enough life left for that. "And the corporal was jealous of what we had and he came into my tent in the night and I tried to fight him off but I couldn't. I tried. I tried. Please know that I tried and then he dumped my body in the river and it floated away and you," she is crying now and he cannot seem to make his arms move to draw her close or wipe them away, "And you thought I'd left you behind."

"But you didn't leave without me."

"I couldn't. You know that. We're both stuck until we're both gone. So I just sort of floated there, just where you couldn't see me, and you were so angry at me." Her fingers tangle through his bangs and the gesture softens the blow of her words.

"I was lonely." He says, even though it isn't much of a defense.

"And then I found you here and you looked so, well, so happy and I thought that maybe, if I left you alone, things could be different for you this time around." Her words slur together at the end. He thinks that she might already be dead and just too stubborn to pass on without having the last word. Good. He'll argue with her from now until doomsday if that's what it takes.

"So you pretended that you didn't remember me anymore."

Her hands drop from his hair. She slumps backward and looks up at the ceiling. "I almost didn't, you know. But you looked so relieved." And he hears the hurt in her voice. "I just wanted it to be better."

"I missed you," he says, and it is the truest thing that he has ever said in any lifetime.

"I missed you too," she replies so softly that he can barely hear her, and it is the truest thing that she has ever said in any lifetime, too.

A sigh circles around them both and escapes upward.

"Don't make decisions like that on your own," he says and looks over at her, but she isn't there anymore. All that is left is a hollow shell where she used to be; a broken body still bleeding out onto the floor. She's gone first again, he thinks to himself. It's impossible to swallow around the lump in his throat at this point, even though he keeps trying. Every time he does, it feels like it gets just a little bit higher and a little bit larger. It's getting harder to breathe. He's scared all of a sudden. He knows it's coming to a close now, of course, but as the lights shut off one by one in his mind, he wonders, not for the first time, where he'll wake up, who he will be, and if he'll find her there. He doesn't know. He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything at all.

Closing notes: Hi. Sorry about that.

For those of you who don't speak Latin (like me, 99% of the time, but Fiance knows some Latin and is helping me through this): The title comes from the saying "Sic transit gloria mundi," which means "Thus fades the glory of the world." "Sic transit," on its own, means "Thus it fades," but "transit" in Latin is third-person gender-neutral of "transire" (to fade/pass), so it can also mean "he/she/ze fades." This title, therefore, can be translated into English as "Thus he/she passes/fades." Because they both die. Ta-da.

I'm sorry-I got like three hours of sleep and now I'm typing this while trying to keep my cat from eating my breakfast.