The Sound of Your Voice
I just don't understand these days. How I could look you in the eye and remember to smirk, as if hatred was what kept me breathing through it all. Sometimes I caught myself wanting you, hurting when I had to draw away, piecing together the few sharp words we exchanged in a slideshow in my mind. Frame by frame, they fell into place, like the stages of a spell.
This secret of mine has become so much a part of living that I barely notice anymore. Naturally you could never know, naturally you could never feel the same, but you couldn't deny me my infatuation. I would never deny you anything, but you have never asked.
I could only wait and shoulder this pain. Wait for a hopeless cause that sometimes overwhelmed me so that I laid awake at night, needing just another word from you to put the feeling back in my limbs. Needing you so badly that it hurt when I found myself still numb in the morning.
I made my desperate insults and breathed again when you flared up and retorted. And then? I moved about my day as if you were never my savior. Resisted temptation and resisted the urge to smile at the danger in your eyes. Nothing out the ordinary- my schedule was wrapped up in hating and loving you.
Hating and loving you.
And the seasons passed, and the leaves fell, and the snow drowned my hours in silent prayers. Spring brought hope and then summer sapped it, those long months spent starving for the sound of your voice. I passed holidays wondering just what to say to you during the coming year.
Routine was routine and I could not break it. We drifted from the hatred that had never held us apart, and soon there was no hope, leaving me peering into a dry well. I woke up one morning and wondered when I had lost it, and when you had lost that icy touch. I was defined by what I felt for you, and suddenly… you were no longer within reach. Who was I without an enemy? Who was I without you?
The numbness simply wouldn't go away.
You noticed one day. I heard you talking to your friends, those damn friends of yours that I would give anything to curse, to be, and then I saw you turn. Your gaze doubled back and held me. Your words felt so good wrecking havoc within.
'I told you this would happen from the start, Malfoy.'
'I suppose you did.'
'Why did you have to choose the losing side?' His friends laughed. 'Look what's happening to you.' They didn't taste the concern in his voice.
'What is happening to me? I don't understand, Potter, and I don't understand why you feel the need to bother me.'
'Do you see what this doing to you? Do you? I'm trying to be charitable, Malfoy. Listen to me. You can't have wanted it to be this way, you-…dammit, Malfoy, why the hell did you do it?'
You fell silent and walked away while I absorbed your words, as if dead from thirst. I slept that night. One break in silence lasted me another long season, but I knew that soon there would be nothing left for me to drink. I rationed, I conjured up some small hope.
Hope could only last so long. On the last drop, I gave up on you. Gave up on hating and loving you.
The numbness will never go away now. At dawn I wake and there it is inside of me. I sleep with it curled within my chest, its fingers stretched to my limits.
I just don't understand some days. How I can live without the sound of your voice and only the thought that I'll never have your touch. My eyes can only get darker and my cheeks more drawn, but I suppose desperation fades over time.
My own has yet to. My prayers turn to needing you, my whispers echo your name and I don't know why I let this lost chance kill me, why I let it slip by. There is no reward for the patience I have had. It dwindles, and I waste away.
God, I need you. What is life when living is yearning for you and gasping for just another half-hearted curse?
My execution day. A Dementor stands before me. My hands are bound, I am spelled into submission, but I look up into its hood and still see your eyes where it has none.
Your breath was always this cold.
Your flesh was always this cold.
Your kiss was always this cold.
And something fades, my soul and the sound of your voice.