Disclaimer: Characters and places owned by J.K. Rowling. Story by me. Harassment by the FBI.
Author's Note: The last in this trilogy. It was meant to be happy but I changed my mind...Please don't beat me to death with Bludgers!
Summery: Some people have never known love...but when they do, how do they cope?
Rating: R – slash, don't read if you don't like yadda yadda.
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
If any so by love refin'd
The Ecstasy ~ John Donne
When I heard the news of your fate, I simply could not allow myself to believe that it was true. I felt like shutting my eyes, ramming my fists over my ears and screaming a litany of futile denial over and over again.
However, I did not. I could not, the coldness I had cultivated remained still frozen over my countenance, although inside I burned.
Nobody knew, nobody saw, why would they? We were enemies and as far as all the other students and teachers alike were aware, that had never changed.
But it had, my love, it had.
Sometimes I feel angry, because you promised you would come back...and there was something you wanted to tell me, wasn't there Harry? I can now only guess what that was.
I sit on my bed, with it's deep forest green covers (so very like your beautiful eyes) and I close my own eyes and remember...
"So...Voldemort's storming the castle?" I asked, trying to seem unconcerned, even mocking, but my insides were in knots. I hadn't yet told you, and we had not met at night again for a while now. Something was definitely different, I couldn't put my finger on what it was then but it seemed to be driving us apart.
"Yeah, it seems so," You replied, trying to seem bold and brave as always, but there was a definite tremble in your voice and I longed to put my arms around you in comfort. I mentally rolled my eyes at myself.
I had never expected nor wanted to fall in love and this was partially why. Such nauseating gestures were and empty and useless in my estimation. Just more proof that you were always stronger than I...you had never seemed after all to have fallen in love with me and thus ruined our pact against that happening...Harry Potter would never have been that stupid or so I assumed.
"And as usual, you will be the one stopping him. Potter, have you ever thought of telling Dumbledore to get stuffed and sort Voldemort out for himself?" I asked, attempting to lighten the broody atmosphere with a dose of good old gallows humour.
"Can't say that I have Malfoy, but if you're offering to do it for me, you're welcome." We both laughed, but it sounded every bit as forced as it really was.
Most of the school was leaving and I would be amongst them, I simply was not a fighting person and till the end of my days I will hate myself for my cowardice.
"I better get back to my dormitory and get ready to go," I muttered reluctantly. You grasped my arm and murmured, "Don't I get a goodbye kiss?" You pouted at the end, knowing I could not possibly resist that. I practically pounced on you, not caring if someone would come in and discover us. Secrecy no longer mattered... Why would it when it seemed so close to the end of the world?
It hadn't been the end of the world in the strictest sense. Just the end of my world.
I'd felt it too, a horrible pain had ripped through me, tracking from one side of my body to the other like a white hot needle threading in and out as it went.
I screamed and the other students at the safe house with me stared at me in horror. The Astronomy teacher, one of the few who came with us, Professor Sinistra knelt down beside me, asked what was wrong.
"All I could whimper was, "Potter."
You managed to finally kill Voldemort all right Harry.
And he killed you right back.
What exactly you were going to tell me haunts me even now, just like your memory haunts me day and night still. I feel constantly run down and tired these days and my appearance shows it. I look grey and washed out, scattered and abandoned is my former vanity but perhaps I am better off for that at least. Now I no longer have to pander to what my father wanted me to look like since he's dead and gone and my mother...well, she's far to obsessed with her own appearance to care about mine.
I am certainly not the same boy who walked these halls seven years ago for the first time and I will walk them no more after today. It's our graduation and Professor Dumbledore (who miraculously did survive) has arranged some lavish party for us all that I'll have to pretend to enjoy. And the actual ceremony will undoubtedly contain a mention of you.
Were you going to tell me you love me?
I turn with a heavy heart on what should be a joyous day and walk out of my room, out of the dungeons and into the main school. I pass your former friends Granger and Weasley. I pretend I don't see them.
And I wonder...
We should never have found love, we were never meant too after all.
It played us both for fools.
I step out of the castle and into the sunlight and join the rest of the seventh years milling around on the lawn.
I love you Harry.
Did you love me too?
My Ecstasy, my purity...
My undoing.
~Finis