Don't act so surprised.
There was plenty of foreshadowing. Just go and look for it.
More will be explained in the following, erm, follow-up.
Part Fourteen : Breath
Dampness has soaked through my socks and into the chilled flesh of my toes, the snow clustering in melting clumps on the edges of my robes and dusting across my face like the coldest kind of kisses. No, I take that back - Dementors kiss colder. And sometimes, so does Potter.
"You came," he says, almost surprised, when he yanks open the door. White lights sparkle faintly out of the corner of my eye, remnants of last week's celebrations. (Winter's fireflies, lighting the night sky like so many starry reflections. Colors are gaudy, but the pale white is a different sort of beauty. The kind of lights overwhelmed in evergreen eyes, swallowed into the darkness like the night gulps down its own jeweled ornamentation. Wistful.)
"Fearfully," I retort. "I was afraid some Weasleys might still be lurking in your closet, or something."
"The closet?" But he steps back to let me in, revealing starker furnishings than Sirius had maintained, a more bare living space. The lights are the only remaining signals that any celebration at all went on for Christmas; no leftover ribbons and paper, no new presents lying casually on tables, not even a tree whispering its wintry secrets to the walls.
I settle on the couch, the familiar musty smell wrapping me in its arms. "I'm sure you had an interesting holiday, what with Granger and the whole Weasel clan swarming your flat."
"And yours was better, out with Jackson at his cozy little cottage? What did he do, feed you Death Eater paraphernalia for Christmas dinner?"
"It's Preston," I say. "And I only went for two days. I spent the rest of the time at the Manor."
"Which must have been so much better, that empty house filled with talking portraits of dead people." He looks down at me, curiously, with unreadable energy in his eyes. "You're not hungry, are you? Dinner might be awhile. Want a drink?"
I watch his fingers fumble with the bottle, watch the stream of white gold bubbles burst into the glasses. I wonder if they were Sirius' glasses. If he drank from them with Cho, both nervously fidgeting on the couch as I am now. If they toasted each other that Christmas, that last Christmas before they both died.
"What are you thinking about?" he asks, settling down at my side.
"Death." To paraphrase.
He smiles, faintly, bitterly. "Me too."
(Take a sip of this fermented moonlight, let the shine of Christmas lights tingle your throat, and lick away the last lingering taste on your lips.) I watch him sip, swallow. He looks to me as I speak. "How so?"
A noncommittal shrug. So he brushes me off like one stomps away the snow, melts away my questions and querying looks. And then, hesitantly, "How did we get here, Malfoy?" His voice, for once, is quiet. A slow whoosh of fire, not a roaring blaze. Effervescent emeralds swallow me. "I mean it. I hated you. I mean, I do. But-"
"In an entirely different way?"
He blinks at me, then lets a reluctant smile bleed its way across his lips. "Malfoy," he says tiredly, "I hope you know that to the day I die, you will always be a mystery."
"Thanks," I reply, voice as dry as the last ghostlike leaves skittering on the ice. He laughs, humorless, face creasing.
"It wasn't a compliment."
I shrug. "I know." And yet I am gray, or colorful, and you are your string of ethereal fairy lights and angel wing snow. (Must you revert to our stark colors, our opposite black and white like chess squares? Balance out your world, hide beneath your veneer of palest dawn.) We stare at each other for a moment, each of us focusing on the space just above the other's eyes rather than directly at them. "Potter," I finally say quietly. "I have it."
It is not that his eyes light up, it is that they fix so intensely on me that everything else is but a blur. "Your father's friend Preston?"
I give him the enchanted map, the tiny dots blinking, and our fingers fumble like those of hormonal adolescents. "It's only good for another five days. He is, obviously, wary of being caught."
"As well he should be." Potter smiles, much like the archetypal big bad wolf. "This past year, he's grown weak."
His fingers wrap around the glass, lift it to his lips, tip it wryly in a halfhearted toast, and he sips. I watch the movement of his throat as he swallows. "You're going, then. With the map."
"You would rather?" He looks amused.
"No, but - You'll take reinforcements, won't you?"
"Oh, because storming into Voldemort's stronghold with fifty Aurors won't be noticeable. Dumbledore, probably, he'll come. He can arrange it."
I look at him. Really look, at the same eyes and tired countenance and tousled hair that haunt me and have haunted me for so long. And I wonder how tired he is of holding up that mask, of keeping the world at bay time and time and time again. How tired I was. How long I've watched him like this, and how distant he's made himself stay.
It might be all me, but I think he leans in at the last moment so our lips meet a hair more forcefully than I'd meant. I can taste the champagne, faintly sweet, like fermented summer nights bottled to drink in the new year. After a moment, he pulls away, his breath still dancing with mine. "You've changed," he says softly, enigmatically. "From the boy in the shop, I mean."
Dryly, "Maybe because I was eleven then and I'm twenty now."
He only looks at me in faint surprise. "I've known you that long. I didn't realize."
Something like smoke, but sweeter, lingers about him. We are crushed together now, limbs and gazes and folds of fabric colliding. "Well," I shrug, almost apologetically, and he can feel the movement against his shoulder, "for the majority of that time we abhorred the mere sight of each other."
"What makes you think I still don't?" He looks at me, but a half-smile flickers over his face. "You know," he says softly, with one hand outstretched to his champagne glass, "I never would have wondered. You were simply the Slytherin Enemy, until that day your mother died. And you tried to look so together." Painful laughter jars his lips. "If it wasn't for her, everything would be different."
I add to his quiet laugh, an underscore of bitterness. "Is that what you mean by death equaling necessity?" When an answer does not come, "What prompted all of this nostalgic recollection, anyway?"
Pause. "You. You should know what."
"Should I?" Silence throws her blanket over us. (The heat of his skin, the pounding of my heart. Life. Oh, let us wear away the hours under this quilt of muffled falling snow, let us sink into this wordless comfort and forget. Only we never do, do we?)
"I won't let you take the glory," he murmurs to my shoulder. "For leading us to Voldemort. I won't let you steal all of this."
"As if that's likely. Come on, Potter, what are you on about?"
But he only looks at me, distantly, as if he sees someone else reflected in my eyes. "I don't know. I don't know if I can keep on like this."
Breath barely a ghost of hope, "Like what?"
He looks at me with blankness in his eyes. "Never - never mind." With a sip to wash down his words, he turns his gaze from me and sends it out the window. I let him avoid me and rest my chin in the curve of his shoulder, simultaneous sighs escaping the both of us.
"Cages," he says suddenly, loudly. "Don't you see it?"
"See what?" I reply impatiently, feeling stupid or perhaps just left out.
"Everyone bars themselves up in cages." He sounds almost angry. "They turn life into their prison, shackling themselves to everyone they come across. It's pointless, you know, and they do it anyway. These stupid ties."
"Some people call it love." Carefully, noncommittal.
"Some people can't afford to."
Silence, yes, weaving ribbons through our hair. The lights in the windows beckon me, winking with their fleeting brightness. (Too bright to sustain any presence save themselves.) "I could kill you now," he whispers to my skin. "I could."
"Would you?" I murmur back, but receive no answer. "Why, then?"
He peers at me, torn, yet unyielding. "You could be on their side still. This map could be a trick. None of them - unless Dumbledore does - even trust you."
I ask, in an echo of words seasons before, "Should they?"
"No."
"Should they trust you?"
Green fragments, leveled at my heart. "No one should trust anyone. At all."
A beat. "I don't believe that. Why else would you?"
"It's dangerous, Malfoy. I'm dangerous. You remember Cho, don't you? The potion, the goddamn potion. It was a death sentence."
"And you blame me?"
"No, I blame - I don't know. Life. The stupid ties we take on ourselves. Love - anything - shouldn't be allowed to do that." (Will death set you free, Potter? Is that it? Because when the words were on your lips, it was not light that I saw, but color. Color, and its opposites swimming in your eyes.
Will death make you a hero? Or will being a hero make death? Is there a difference?)
"Why else?"
(Hand half-raised to my cheek, eyes glittering: an angel. Or at least a Christmas decoration that tries.)
"Because I don't need this," he mumbles with his lips moving but the barest sound escaping. "I don't need you."
"You're proving a point? That's ridiculous, Potter. Why?"
"Because I need to do it."
"No."
"Because the world needs me to do it!"
"No, why? Really, why?"
Urgently, but softer, "You need me to do it."
And more quietly, yes, "Why?"
"Because you're the - the only - because nobody else - because I love you."
And a high-pitched voice squeaks nervously behind us, frightened, "Dinner is ready, Master. Should Dobby be laying out the table, sir?" I watch him beam happily at Potter as if he is the messiah.
Without moving his gaze from me, voice low, "Are you hungry?"
"No."
"I didn't think so." He turns slowly from me to look at the house elf, says quietly, "Set only one place tonight, I think," and returns that gaze to me, the gaze that slides down my back like twin blocks of ice. His eyes are unreachable now, unreadable to the point of emptiness. A green void, spilling down into the shadows he won't let anyone touch.
Desperately, roughly, "Say it again."
He blinks at me, carefully, as if there is something in his eyes he must hide. Those luminous orbs like winter fog raising in between the trees. And sometimes I want to kiss his eyelids shut. "No."
"Potter-" And a seizing desire to speak it, his name, his real name, that my tongue clenches in the back of my throat. Choked, almost, "Why?" (It is a question I am continually asking, slipping through my teeth and over my lips and into the air, time and time again, inevitable, like the ticking of seconds. Why? Why? I never have enough answers.)
"Because I'm a liar," he replies, his growled answer softening to a muffled hiss, the soft thud of snow upon snow upon snow. When you step, then, you find below it all the ice that pulls you down. "Because-" And, "Why am I explaining this? Why do I have to?"
Why? Because. Why? Because.
(Patterns. Black and white, green and gray, winter and summer and spring and fall. Malfoy. Potter. Harry. Draco. Patterns.)
"You don't," I murmur to his collarbone, finding that somehow his hands have tangled around the back of my neck and he is pressing his lips desperately to the line of my scalp where my hair parts for his touch. "But I want - I want to know why you - what you're so afraid of. What you're looking for, if you're lying now. What you - what you want out of love."
He is cold when he presses his hand to my chin and pulls my gaze up to his, almost shivering as if the snow outside is burning through his veins with frigid desperation. Seeking the light, the warmth, the way we all do. "Guarantees. Someone that won't leave me, that won't try to save me and instead just abandon me. Someone whose love I don't have to share, who'll forget me after so long. Someone who won't tie me to danger, to them. Someone who won't betray me. Someone who won't see me in the fame that tracks me. Someone who won't - someone who won't-"
"You don't know how it goes, then, Potter."
"Don't I?"
"You don't sign a bloody contract. You don't write your name in blood. You don't sell your soul."
"Maybe you should."
"Maybe I've tried." Silence, where the low hum of cars and the falling night and a few clatters in the kitchen settle between us. "Maybe you haven't." His hand in his pocket. His eyes like solid ice interrogation. His breath sending shivers down my spine. "You want something no one, not even I, can give."
He smiles almost sadly. "That's why it's never better in the cage."
"Sir," Dobby squeaks from the kitchen, "Dobby is watching sir's food get cold, Dobby is."
"I don't mind," he says, perhaps too quiet for the house elf to even hear. Perhaps he has his fingers clenched around his wand, something to hold onto when everything else is falling loose. Perhaps. Perhaps words echo in his mind, taunting him. Perhaps. "What would you do if I were to kill you?"
(Silence, sweet silence, wrap me in your arms. In your wings, your halo of Christmas lights.) "Love you anyway."
I think of the sight of him, years ago, jostling with his friends down on the school grounds. Watching him lie back in the snow, arms outstretched, eyes pressed to the stars, making an angel mold for himself. Spreading the wings, the snow soaking into his scalp and down his back, dreaming somewhere else. Probably, if he had lain there long enough, Winter would gather him to her touch and lift him to the stars.
"Malfoy," he says patiently, painstakingly, as if I'm missing some axiomatic principle right in front of my eyes, "It's death."
"Yes," I say, "I know." Quietly, inversely, "And what would you do if you killed me?"
"Love you anyway."
Quietly still, "But?"
I can't read his expression. I can't see past the silence streaming from his eyes. But I hear the raggedness in his voice, the sudden desperation. "But I live - we all live - in a fucked up world, Malfoy, and all I've learned is that the nature is for survival. Do you get it? It doesn't matter one bit if it's the Muggle or magical world, we're still screwed for being-"
"Human?"
He isn't looking at me now; he's looking beyond me at the frigid snowscape outside. "I need out. I need out of here, damn it!" Dazed, "Wouldn't everyone else? Wouldn't anyone? Wouldn't you grasp for the freedom if you could?" And then, his voice tearing like jaws of steel, "I forgot, you won't let yourself. After all, you're just like them."
I can't respond to that, simply cannot conjure the words. Instead, voice too calm to tremble, the world spinning in painful monochrome emerald, "Your eyes are green."
He looks as if he is going to retort sarcastically, but something glitters in his eyes and his mouth loosens, lines slipping: just for a moment. "Malfoy-"
I catch his hand. "It's Draco, thanks."
"All right. Draco." And he leans in and kisses me, so deeply that I think time might stop.
His breath is like frost: a cool silken whisper of champagne and darkness. I can feel his lips move against the pounding of my pulse. (Dry skeletons frames rustling, autumn colors a masquerade of grandeur, crushed beneath the ice. Lost, melting into oblivion, colors trampled into black and white.) "Avada Kedavra," his lips murmur to my heart.
I watch as the light and my breath fade like morning mist into the tears of those green, green eyes. (I am shivering. So cold.)
It is winter again.