Flowers and worship to ShinigamiForever,
the wonderful beta and consultant for this chapter, who helped work it
into sense and gave me hope that it wasn't blathering trash. You
are amazing. And again for my dear Christy, whom I love more than
life. Ah, onward to winter.
Part Ten : Tomb
Winter's chill owns my bones as I shiver and wait. And shiver. And wait.
And wait.
Beside me, Longbottom is as nervous as ever, shifting from foot to foot. Perhaps it is the cold, but more likely it is the fear. The stupid git fidgets like the very last leaves of autumn, dried and sopping wet and black, shifting beneath the snow. "Er," he manages, voice streaming across the thin air to my ears. "So."
"Please," I drawl. "Your sniveling chatter is not helping the desolation here."
This seems, unfortunately, only to further intimidate him into more nervous drivel. "You j-joined us," he manages, and I don't know if his stutter is caused by the cold or by me. "Against You-Know-Who."
"Brilliant observation."
"Im-important mission, this is, isn't it?"
Dryly, "Sharp today, aren't you? Don't miss a thing."
He seems to have built up a measure of confidence, for he is suddenly peering at me suspiciously. (The desolate backdrop of Azkaban is quavering behind him, sharp lines of gray sky and lonesome stones, a hasty sketch of charcoal and faded pencil shading.) "You're spying for Y-You-Know-Who, aren't you!" he finally questions, fright making his voice sharp.
"Y-Y-You-Know-Wh-Who?" I mimic. "No, Longbottom. I'm not."
"Then why are you here?" he asks, quietly shrinking from me, though the query is reasonable enough.
Shrug. "Potter. Basically."
"What?"
Conversation, it seems, is inevitable. I sigh heavily. "D'you really think I care about Voldemort-" here he cringes, "or the quality of blood or Dumbledore's ridiculous morals? A miracle, eh, Malfoy's been converted? No, no, and no. I could really care less."
He squeaks. "But - you and - you and Harry?"
Smirking, "Jealous, Longbottom?"
At that moment, he nears, and I can feel him behind me even before I see the surprise in Longbottom's eyes. Can feel his breath stirring the winter air before he speaks, can sense him and his presence and his touch before it even reaches my wrist. "Oh, hullo, Neville," he says distractedly. "C'mon, Malfoy. Dumbledore wants to see us."
I throw the gaping boy my most evil smirk as we walk off.
"Were you teasing him?" Potter demands in exasperation. "Honestly, Malfoy, I don't know what to do with you sometimes."
We near the cluster of people that is Dumbledore and his company. The grimness haunts Dumbledore's eyes and seethes all around us. This is no time for banter, so I swallow any comment I might have been tempted to make and follow him forward. Sirius seems to be involved in a heated argument with Dumbledore, yet again, and Cho is hanging uncertainly off to the side.
"Harry, Draco," Dumbledore greets us, and even Sirius looks glad for the brief reprieve. "You are ready?"
"Certainly, Professor," I say.
"Good. Harry, come with me. We should be off."
It takes but one look at Potter to know that he has lied to me (and strange that I believed him, he so transparent to me. Am I that much of a fool for his words, that eager to fall under his spell?) and is not, as previously planned, lingering about the entrance with me and casting his Patronus at all the Dementors to near. "No," I whisper, but the syllable is but a breath on the winter air and the wind carries it away.
Sirius looks almost sympathetically at me and I suddenly realize the spark of their interrupted arguing. He must be going somewhere dangerous, then, for such a heated discussion. But then, what here in Azkaban, under the power of Voldemort, is not dangerous?
"I can't believe you," I say to Potter, but my words are halfhearted at best. (Weak, faded, winter sky and dried out husks of flower petals. Almost silence, for the lack of response.) "You - why? Why can't I go with you?" I turn to Dumbledore pleadingly, though I have never seen his eyes that impenetrable and final. "Why can't I go with him? Why?"
"Whining doesn't become you, Malfoy," Potter says, which takes a bit of nerve, as I've whined for things all my life.
Dumbledore lays a heavy hand on my shoulder and his voice is the tone of funeral marches, the final thump of soil on coffin lids. Dumbledore never sounds like that. "We need you here. And Harry is needed elsewhere." (There are lines, spidery wrinkles beneath his eyes and over his forehead, shadows collecting in the grip of winter on his skin. He is old. Old in a way I never noticed, in a way any of us probably never noticed. Old in too many ways to count.) And then, for a moment, his eyes betray a glint of the merry optimism he is so known for, and he squeezes my shoulder. "I will take good care of him, young Malfoy, I promise."
"It's not-" I begin, when Sirius frowns at me, the same regret pooling in his eyes. And I know how hopeless it is, how much time I am wasting, how much breath. So I simply turn to Potter and his arms and his lips and I try not to show how terribly much I care.
"P - Harry," is all I can manage, fingers curled in the hair at the nape of his neck, insides twisting like melting glass. (So you turn me to glass and melt every bit of me, or shatter me to pieces, or at least know that you can. How strong is the steel you turn in my presence, how malleable, how immune?)
"I told you not to call me that," he says, but kisses me back with such ferocity that I hardly notice.
I watch him walk away beside the stooped figure of Dumbledore and the taller shadows of two strangers I do not recognize enough to remember names, and I realize that I don't know anything about the supposed plan. It isn't as if I've paid attention, but even still. I do not know what sort of opposition we face, what danger he is walking right into. I do not know if he'll ever walk out. I do not know - well, I don't know anything, really. I don't know what's been worth it, what I've wasted. I don't even know how Dumbledore plans to take Azkaban, or what it is that is being held there. What it is that is so important.
"Draco." Sirius lays a hand on my shoulder, the same place Dumbledore's hand warmed a moment ago. Reluctantly, "I'm sorry. Dumbledore is right, though; we can't have-"
"I don't care. You're going together, thanks to the potion. I should have thought of using that excuse."
Sirius' eyes flare, but he has the patience not to snap. Beside him, Cho's eyes burn razor blade bright, shifting into the shadows protecting Azkaban. She does not look at me. Sirius must be counting to ten, or probably one hundred, because it takes several beats of silence before he finally says softly enough, "Harry never needed a potion, Draco. He knows you'll follow him anywhere."
This does not have the reassurance he probably meant it to have, and I simply turn away. "Yes, well. Can you say the same for me?"
"Why don't you trust him? If you - if you care about him so much, why won't you believe that he actually has feelings -"
"You don't know." My fingers curl around my wand and I wonder if I could catch up to them, were I to run hard enough. But all Dumbledore would do was look patiently at me and shoo me away, Potter's eyes haunting the shadows with their knowing glints. And he would watch me go. "Sirius, you just don't - we don't -"
But no. Can I tell Sirius how I bought him drinks in Diagon Alley ("Galleon for your thoughts," he teased, and I wonder still if he remembered that long ago day), how I so innocently suggested we forget who we were for simply one day, a feat previously unaccomplished by the both of us, how we inventively rewrote history to a decidedly warped version for the tomes of homework issued by our young and sadistic History professor, how Potter didn't believe me when I kissed him the first time (second, really) and how I didn't believe him the next when he kissed me back? No, because Sirius wouldn't see it anyway. Sirius would see the laughter and the companionship we somehow slipped so easily into, not the same spite we'd known for so long. Not the distant look that steals Potter's eyes on certain days, the way he sometimes brushes me off, the way he kisses me like he is fulfilling something as regular as homework, or maybe something enjoyable but as routine as early morning Quidditch practice. (Some days he is restless as the autumn leaves, some days he can be warm as any summer night and I'll think, I'll hope, that I but imagine the rest. Yet it is these wintry days that push the worry into my soul.)
Is Sirius right, and is it simply a fear of trust that makes it seem so far from real?
"Well," he says, a bit awkwardly, "good luck." And he sets off across the rocky ground with Cho at his side; the two of them are a shadowy picture of blurred lines and doubts. Two fifth-year Hogwarts students, a girl named Fiona and her twin brother David, have been reluctantly admitted to our ranks and they are, in Dumbledore's words, under my care.
Wonderful.
"I know you," Fiona says to me, nudging her twin. His attention is focused on the movement in the shadows, the dispersion of others to various places around Azkaban. Brightly enough, Dumbledore and his fellow plotters seem to have told no one much save their own little duty. Brilliant, seeing as my mind will now be worrying about him for the rest of the night. Until I see him again. (Or his body, his dead body, skin tarnished with shadows and finally broken, icy green spirit shut off forever -)
"A statement so obviously supported by the fact we've met before," I return sarcastically, turning my attention away from her and to the broken gates of Azkaban. Its rugged towers jut towards the circling sky.
"That's not what she meant," David says almost protectively. I spot a flash of red near his collar and smirk: just as I thought, another Gryffindor. Exactly what I need. And now he presumes to read her mind? What are they, telepathic? (Or maybe, my mind suggests, intrusive as ever, they read each other's silences like you read his.) "We've heard of you."
"Everyone talks about you all the time," Fiona adds brightly. "The best student Snape's ever had, or so he likes to say."
"Snape gives me compliments?" I ask incredulously, drawn unwillingly into the conversation. It is not particularly comforting to know that one's name is circulating around Hogwarts on the tongues of disgusting little first years.
David chuckles. For a Gryffindor, he actually hasn't annoyed me out of my mind yet, which is saying something. Better than the little snot Longbottom, whose burdening presence has been passed on to someone with greater stores of patience. "First time for everything, I s'pose. Even the Gryffindors talk about you. They all say you were the worst enemy of Harry Potter. Well, besides You-Know-Who, that is."
"We're supposed to say Voldemort, now," Fiona corrects him gently. Then, unwavering gaze flicking to me, she adds, "We aren't scared of him."
"You should be."
"Are you?" David counters.
"I'm not scared of anything." (Except green eyes and a disarming smile, fingers that trace the thin shadow of my ribs and could just as easily cradle and crush my heart. Breath that changes like the seasons, sometimes as heated as summer's humid breezes, sometimes as icily casual as the winter we race through now.)
Fiona laughs, a sound eerily out of place in this desolate landscape. "Sure. They're saying you and he are together now. Is that true?"
I raise an eyebrow. "Why ever would you think that?"
"I don't know, maybe because we saw you passionately snogging just ten minutes ago?"
I skeptically eye her decidedly not innocent smirk. "You have a problem with that, Gryffindor?"
Her smirk, now that I think about it, is reminiscent of mine. This is by and large not a comforting fact. "No, I think it's sweet. Hope he's okay. And I'm not a Gryffindor."
"She's Slytherin," says David, delighting in the shock that paints my face pale. An echo of my words, "You have a problem with that?"
But a chill runs through all of us and our wands jerk from our pockets, my words robbed in the sudden fear and cold fingers of Dementors. The next moments are filled with held breath and muttered spells, silvery light blooming against the stark sky and herding dark hoods away from us. All in all, I am impressed with the way they work together, impressed with their knowledge at their young age. We find six Death Eaters pretending to be Dementors, and Fiona strips them of their hoods (and wands) without mercy in her eyes.
An owl shrieks past me and drops parchment on the ground before me. David grasps it before I can, earning a distinctly disgusted glare from me. He ignores it. "Harris dead, Longbottom and Davis missing. Kill them and come." Blinking up at me, he frowns. "Who's Harris?"
"He used to be the librarian at Hogwarts," I say quietly, though my eyes are already slipping to the immobile forms of the hexed Death Eaters. "A long time ago. He was one of the best tactical men Dumbledore had, or so I heard."
"Come where?" Fiona asks in turn, watching the paper curl into fire and then smoke and then nothing. David shakes his fingers, looking for burn marks.
"I know where. Follow me."
"It says to kill them," David reminds me, and I note how his wand is already held at hand. "You heard that, right?"
I look. One's face is frozen in a mask of mingled disgust and regret; I remember his stoic gaze at our dinner table when he struggled to eat the oddly green pudding. (Mother liked to pretend sometimes that she could cook as well as our house elves, a rare and unfortunate mistake of hers.) I heard he cried like a baby at her funeral.
I don't recognize all of them, but I've seen two of them with my father on numerous occasions and I think another might be called Gary.
"Just leave them," I say, voice strangled.
"No." Fiona whirls first, wand held out, and David follows her without question. I am stunned into silence by the coldness on their features, the firmness in their voices as they recite the words. I am further stunned that they know and can perform the curse, even I don't know if I can. Yet -
"Now come on," Fiona says to me, slipping her wand back in her pocket. I lead them silently away and do not think about the corpses behind me, the flashes of green light resounding in my head like deathly flashbulbs that are reminiscent of his eyes.
"Why?" is all I ask, when we are safely away.
"Our parents," David tells me softly, "are dead. So's our little brother."
"And that," says Fiona, "is all the answer you are going to get."
There is one lonely tree struggling to live in the craggy rocks of Azkaban's shore, and beneath it is where we are to meet. I find Sirius and Cho there, her fingers tangled in his cloak, and his eyes fixed worriedly on the smoke streaming from the prison. I wonder, idly, how it feels to look on such a place after being imprisoned there for so very long. With them stands two unfamiliar men, a gangly young woman only a year or two older than I am, and three schoolmates of Fiona and David.
"Sirius," I say, relieved, and approach him. There is blood on his cloak, blood specks on Cho's white fingers. "Where is he?"
But Sirius has no answer. And though he opens his mouth to admit not knowing, there is a loud pop beside us and Dumbledore stumbles forward. Age never looked so fearsome; everything about him is drooping, weary, worried, lost, and yet his eyes burn with the brightest light of all. "Thomas," he snaps, and one of the men darts forward to hear his whispered words. Sirius leans into their conversation.
I see the fear on their faces. I know.
War isn't supposed to be about waiting. It's not, and yet half of what we do - no, more than half - is wait. We stare at the changing skies and the disappearing faces around us and all we do is count sheep, or some other ridiculous thing like that. We wait; we wait, and all we're waiting for is the frightening freedom of death.
(The angel on her tomb is calling. He is cold, icy marble, and he too waits.)
"I'm going after him!" Sirius bursts out, and my worst fears that need no confirmation are confirmed.
"Sirius-" Cho and Dumbledore both try.
"No."
"Please," Cho whispers, and her fingers absently worry the bloodstained fabric of Sirius' cloak. She is not looking at him. She's looking at the ground.
"Listen to me. Thirteen years I couldn't watch over him like the godfather I am and then four more when I was hardly able to be there any better than when I was locked away here. Don't tell me that I can't go to him. Don't tell me he'll be all right. Don't tell me that I have to spend more time waiting, bloody waiting! I'm going, and none of you are going to stop me."
Dumbledore bows his head. "He will be all right, Sirius. But who am I to tell you where you cannot go?"
Sirius grabs Cho's wrist and I watch them, bitterly, as they race towards the fortress of stone. I shift forward, and Dumbledore arrests me with his flaming gaze.
"No."
"Professor-"
"No." Yet again his word is final. (Am I the fool, then, locked in this cage of fear, cowed by the strength of his voice? Am I the coward, or is he the wise man keeping me from the suicide of this?)
I slump against the tree, his eyes still warning me against moving. Fiona presses one hand to the crown of my head, a strangely comforting gesture that I nevertheless ignore.
And I wait. We wait. Everyone waits, and our bones shiver, and I wonder idly why we can't do anything. What is going on in there? Dumbledore has gone, after leaving strict instructions to everyone that no one must go anywhere. Fuck, he could be dying. He could be dead.
What are we waiting for? Freedom, or just another prison?
Azkaban, right now, does not look so forbidding.
"Don't worry," David says after what seems like an eternity but is most likely only twenty minutes. His lips are blue with cold. "Dumbledore's there, right?"
"Dumbledore is nothing," I say back, without meaning in my words. Numbness is freezing my limbs and my thoughts, taking over with every passing heartbeat. David's voice is as distant as the faraway beep of Muggle machines, a rasping breath.
"Do you think this is the end?" says a boy at his side, most likely another Gryffindor. He is nervously twining his fingers together.
"What," I say, "is the end? Truly? Who gives a fuck about Voldemort? It's Harry who-" But they are all gaping at me, and I don't know what to say to make them understand. Why do I suddenly care if they do? Why do I want them to? Because he doesn't, or he doesn't want to, and he may never get the chance to?
Potter.
A flash of green light blooms above the crumbling line of Azkaban's spires, then another, and another. By the time all our eyes are fixed in horrified fascination, the last green lightning caresses the sky.
Harry.
No one reacts. You might think the world would stop, shudder to a halt in falling skies and Azkaban's falling stones, but nothing happens. Silence falls over our little company and none of us, none of us, meet the eyes of another.
It occurs to me, ridiculously, that he has no one to be buried with. No fluttery saying to be carved into his monument, unlike his parents, and "The Boy Who Lived" is so hideously inappropriate of a grave inscription.
Harry.
And then, another pop, and two wearied shapes appear from the shadows.
"It is over," says Dumbledore to our assembled ranks, and we look right past him. But his shadow does not speak. "It is over, for now," he says again, and there is something painfully still and grinding and harsh about his tone. "Go home. You're alive, you did your best; now is to mourn and to rest and to hope. But," and he looks at all of us, all mirth gone, solemnity darkening his eyes to midnight, "go now."
And still he does not speak.
And I do not speak, because I cannot speak. Relief and echoing terror and worry and panic and faint gasping elation at simply watching his chest rise and fall, imagining his heart still pumping steadily, is rendering me speechless. (And silence says enough, anyway. It always has.)
I take a step towards him as Dumbledore herds off the others, and he collapses.
I can't say a word, can't even say his name, but my eyes probably say quite enough. I trip my away across the dirt to him, to his huddled figure, and I pull him to me the way I've never needed to hold anyone else. (He is harsh color against the shadows and monochrome of Azkaban's stark background, too bright to be watercolor harmony but too real to be any child's drawing. We are playing catch again, tossing these silences between us, and all I want is to soothe away all the seasons that have brought him so close and pushed him so far. Power is not the only drug.) I breathe in his presence and can't bear to think of what else could be, what else was for a brief moment in the tumbling recesses of my mind.
His voice is ragged, gaze dancing frantically for an escape. "I-"
"Shh," I say with one arm around him, trying to relax the rigid steel tensing his neck. "Shh, it's all right now, just calm down, you're alive-"
"Sirius." Choked, hysterical laughter trips from his throat and he seizes my shoulders in a sudden twisting of his body. There is a crazy, haunted look in those eyes. (Those eyes, that light that I thought I would never see again.) "D-dead Sirius; I'm dead…Sirius…serious…get…it?"
"Potter." I pull him towards the base of the tree, pushing him into what is more or less a sitting position, but he only stares at me blankly.
"He's dead."
Someone else would know what to do. Someone else would find the words to say. But I only stare at him in what promises to be understanding silence, what might say more than anything else.
"Cho's dead," he continues, voice empty. "And Wilson, he's dead too."
I feel the warmth of his fingers almost incredulously, half expecting the brittle ice of my mother's. The unresponsive digits that felt waxy and limp in my own. But no, he is alive. "What," I ask, hesitantly, "was the fourth flash, then?"
"This," he chokes out, and rips something with such ferocity from his neck that I am taken aback. He flings it at my feet, the tiny stone that holds so much of me. "This, Malfoy! This! And I'm bloody tired of it! I shouldn't be here!"
"You're alive," I say, as blankly as he. As if I don't know what else to say. "You're alive."
"Cho'd be alive," he says, mind wandering without direction, eyes staring unfocused at the sky, "if it wasn't for the potion."
"What happened?" I finally ask him.
"It doesn't matter." He heaves himself to his feet, unsteadily, and looks down at me. Again, he says, "It doesn't matter."
Later, I will wonder why I let him walk away, and even later I will know that I had no choice. Now I simply watch his back and think of how many times I have before, now I simply whisper his name (Harry Potter, both words, like a compromise) and let him pretend he doesn't hear.
Harry never needed a potion, Draco. He knows you'll follow him anywhere.
Except where he doesn't want to be followed. Except where I can't follow. Except where he doesn't let me follow. (The marble angel trumpets his melancholy tune and calls for me, beckons. He knows. He waits. You can only cheat death for so long, when you give up your life in whispers of green to others. That, I think, is what my father has known all along, that when you don't grasp the punitive power you can, you risk others taking it from you. Only, my father cares about this. And I do not.)
An empty Azkaban, really,
is the only thing left to watch me walk away.