"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."
-Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420
"It's wrong!" Dean spits out, throwing his pencil across the table and nearly yelling in frustration.
Parvati jumps. "What is it, Dean? What's wrong?"
He stands and gestures wildly to his parchment. He runs a hand through his hair and takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry," he mutters. "I just can't draw. I…I don't know. It's weird. Eerie. Confusing. I used to—"
He stops, because used to is taboo, now, because used to is gone forever.
She tentatively walks toward him and puts her hand on his shoulder. "I know," she says simply.
She used to have a best friend. She used to be a child. She used to be shallow, nothing, a giggling bimbo. She used to…but now?
He turns to her and lets his head fall to her comforting shoulder. He's too tall for this, too tall to be held by her—what a wrongly paired couple they make!—but neither care as she wraps her arms around his shaking shoulders.
He lets out a dry, raw sob. "Everything's wrong, Parvati! Nothing is right anymore!"
"You'll be able to draw again, Dean. You'll be able to be yourself again…but it takes time. Like the healing of physical gashes…our emotional wounds are just as bad. They need just as much care."
At another time he'd have smiled, teased her for becoming the philosophical adult she is now, but goddamnit! She's eighteen, and she's going to finally act like it.
This passes through both their heads, but no one comments as she strokes his back.
"It takes two to tango," he says abruptly.
"What?" she asks, startled.
"Two. It takes two to tango. It wasn't just Voldemort." He feels a shiver go through her—they haven't really discussed this yet.
"Yeah. I know. It was his idiot Death Eaters."
"But it was also us," he says. "It was also us, because we were fearful. Back then, those kids were bullies to him, right? And then his friends started to admire him. And then people started to run—started to scare themselves with nightmarish stories and men with red eyes. It's our fault too. My fault—for running this year. Yours—for living in terror. It got this bad because he was encouraged." He should know. With seven little brothers and sisters, he understands the power of feeding your fears.
"But he's the one with the fucked up soul. He's the one who started it!"
"You sound like Lena," he says quietly, picturing his sister's face.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs, miserable. "It's just—it's not all our fault."
"But it's a lot of our fault." He pauses. "I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. Ignore me. I just—I had an epiphany."
"It takes two to tango," she whispers, and it's his turn to hug her. She looks lost and confused, and alone, and he gathers her in his arms as she begins to cry. "I shouldn't cry. I should be happy and…brave…and…and…"
"No," he says. "Not happy. Not brave. None of us are brave. Not even Godric Gryffindor himself. We weren't brave enough to not be scared." He knows it's a lot to ask. In a war-torn country where a madman is running loose, it's not easy to live peacefully. It's not easy to pretend everything's okay.
Then again—pretend is rather cowardly, too. Pretend is a game for children. To have stopped it at the beginning…that would be it. That would be right. And then there would be no used to's or what-ifs.
Parvati breaks away and goes to the table. She looks at the picture sitting there, discarded as horrible.
It's a plain sketch of her—she's looking solemn, with her hair in ringlets around her face like she likes it and her eyes staring straight ahead.
"It's the expression. It looks like you, but it doesn't have the right emotion. It looks…wrong."
"Try again," she says, retrieving the colored pencil.
He leans down and begins to flesh out the face—slowly, at first, and then faster as his ideas come to him. His tongue pokes unconsciously out of the side of his mouth like it did when he was a first year. Carefully, he softens the curve of her eyes and sets her mouth in a pouty shape.
He finally sits up, staring at it for a long time. She stands, motionless, next to him, waiting.
He looks at her and does not smile. He looks at her and studies her and learns about her, and then he gives her the picture.
She smiles faintly as she studies it.
"You used to what?" she asks finally.
"I used to be able to study a person and know about them—know how to make them. I—I have to re-learn."
And suddenly used to's are unimportant, and now seems at the front of their minds. "I love you," he says suddenly.
She looks at him, and her eyes brim over. "You love me?"
"With all of my heart."
"It takes two to tango," she reflects, and then she kisses him. "I love you too."
A/N: For the Idiom Challenge—I'm so happy, I actually got to write down all of my random thoughts. Thanks to Cuban Sombrero Gal for her amazing Dean piece and her lovely challenge! I don't own the cliché "It takes two to tango", or the quote at the beginning. Or Dean & Parvati.
Since you've gotten this far…will you review?