- It's been a whileI'm sorry, I know it's annoying. Life is crazy right now for me, for a variety of reasons. Anyway, and this chapter is extra long, to make up for the wait, and it shouldn't be too long before the next chapter. Thanks for sticking with it this long. I'd love to hear what you think, so drop me a review
Chapter 6: nothing much
But of course you were
always nothing. No thing.
A red-hot rocket, patriotically
bursting in my
veins. Showers of stars-- cascading stars
behind closed eyelids. A
searing brand across my
forehead. Nothing of importance.
A four-letter word stencilled
on the flesh of my inner
thigh.
Stomping through my brain's
mush valleys. Strewing a
halt of new loyalties.
My life, so I say
nothing much.
-Maya Angelou, "Nothing Much"
================================================
As he kicks the door closed and drops his keys and the groceries on the countertop in an empty apartment, Harry thinks he's probably lucky. He's always been good at looking after people, and that is what he's done, one way or another, with most of his life. For a while, he thought he hated it- saving the world once a year with unfailing regularity and being idolized by half the people he knew and envied by the rest. For a while, he was convinced that Ron, with his protective nature and his passionate, unswerving loyalty, should have been their adopted saviour and superhero instead. Now Ron is dead, for loyalty, along with all the others Harry couldn't look after enough. Harry remembers him (sometimes the memories are too clear, knife-edged in his mind) and looks at those who are left behind- Draco, Hermione, Ginny, and himself- and wonders if maybe people become exactly what they are expected to be. Do they spend their lives doing what they are good at, or do they just become good at what they have to do?
Harry bends his neck to lift the camera over his head, then places it on the table to unload the finished roll of film. Since the war (and Harry's world) ended simultaneously, he's been looking for beautiful things and learning to find them more and more, even in the dark. The camera isn't magic, because he'd rather the photographs didn't move. If a picture can move, it can change, and nothing real stays beautiful forever, as far as Harry can see. And if the pictures don't move, it's easier to see them only in the instant, more perfect than memory. Harry wishes he had even one still photograph of Ron. And he's just as glad as Ginny that Hermione's painting of that night on the hill doesn't move- he'd hate to think of that image being any more real than it is, when already it's far too real.
-----
Harry hears the door click and open, then the jingle of keys being shoved back into a pocket. He looks up momentarily, although he already knows who it is.
"You're back," Draco says, his voice flat and unreadable, which is something he's perfected of late, out of necessity. Draco's control is like an eggshell these days, smooth and fragile, but unbreakable by simple steady pressure. Harry hasn't yet nerved himself to deliver the shattering blow, partially because he's terrified of what he'll find inside. A rotting yolk, maybe, or the shell sucked empty and dry.
"I'm back. Thanks for feeding the fish"
"Anytime." Draco opens the refrigerator and tosses Harry a bottle of beer, talking absently over his shoulder. "Drink? Here they are- you'll have to go by the liquour store tomorrow, Harry. The beer's all gone, and I finished the whisky the other night."
"And the rum, and the half bottle of tequila, and the champagne I was saving at the back of the cupboard. I know." Harry almost laughs, and Draco grins despite himself, unapologetic. He slides across the kitchen floor- he's wearing black and white striped socks, of all things- and leans against the counter, tapping a quick rhythm with his striped feet on the tiled floor, but his hands are shaking.
"Well, yeah. It's not my fault your apartment is boring without you in it. The fish aren't much company. I wish you'd get a cat, Harry."
Harry just goes on unpacking the groceries, pretending not to look at Draco. He's gotten quite good at this, watching with half-closed eyes, in quick glances. Draco keeps talking, shifting his weight, tapping the glass bottle, laughing like shards of a broken mirror, and shaking. If he doesn't stop moving, he doesn't have to think about the fact that he's barely breathing. Even like this, lost and scared and trying to hide it, Draco has a kind of cut-crystal perfection that makes it difficult for Harry to look away.
-----
It's easy to lose things, once you have them. Harry has known this since forever, he feels, although if he is truthful with himself he has to admit that the first time he really understood it was at the end of fifth year, at the Ministry of Magic, when a tattered black curtain swallowed a star. It is not difficult to lose a thing, once you have it- what terrifies Harry is the idea of finding something that you cannot live without- and, more, the idea of becoming the thing without which a person cannot live. Dreams ought not to be built out of glass, Harry thinks, although all too often they are.
He hasn't taken any photographs of Draco, because of what might unintentionally be admitted in the shadows or the angle, the focus of the lens. He's not Hermione- he won't betray his addiction with every click of the shutter, as she does with every stroke of her brush. He's seen her sketchbook and her paintings, dripping with red, gold, and green. Does Ginny ever open her eyes, he wonders, and crushes the sharp twist of anger before it can cut too deep. It's strange that the need he always felt to protect his little-sister-Ginny never transferred to his best friend, Hermione- who is, after all, just as much his sister. Probably, he thinks, this is because Hermione has always given the impression that she can take care of herself, and of everyone else at the same time. Even on the battlefield, even that night in hell, he was holding on to her with only the same fierce despair that he could feel in her, no more, no less.
At any rate, he's never felt like he needed to protect Hermione- until now, that is, and this time it's not evil or darkness, nothing so concrete. Spells and incantations wouldn't help him here, nor swords; there is nothing he can do, at all. He won't hate Ginny, if he can help it, because she can't help destroying Hermione, any more than she can help destroying Draco, any more than Draco can help destroying her (or Harry). He won't hate his best friend's little sister for being blinded to beauty by too much horror, because he can more than understand how the war-that-is-now-over is not over, how it won't ever be. He suspects that Hermione has no such reservations about hating Draco.
-----
Draco stops talking almost suddenly, trailing off into silence in the middle of a sentence, looking over his shoulder out of the window. Harry doesn't speak right away, and when he does, it's quiet. He doesn't cross the kitchen floor, which takes more control than he's ever been able to believe he can depend on exercising. The room is nine large tiles across; Draco, is standing on the ninth.
"What's wrong?" Harry asks softly. He can't bear to scare Draco away, any more than he can dare to draw him any closer. Most of the time, he thinks his sanity depends on keeping this thread stretched taut, keeping Draco just so close and no closer- and he's terrified that if he pulls too hard, the thread will snap, and then he'll have less than the almost-nothing he has now. The rest of the time he almost wants to snap the thread, in the desperate hope of replacing it with something stronger.
It takes a moment for Draco to answer. He slides down the wall he's leaning against to sit on the floor by the window. "I broke up with Ginny. She broke up with me. Something like that."
Harry stops breathing altogether. Draco won't look up at him, which is just as well, because he's gone white as a sheet, and his green eyes are nearly glowing.
"It's strangeI always thought it would hurt more than this. Or maybe less. I don't know." Then Draco looks up with those avadakedavra silver eyes, and Harry recovers enough to stammer a response.
"Oh.ah, is she okay?"
"I think so. She will be."
Or at least, as close to "okay" as any of us will ever get, Harry thinks. He has absolutely no idea what he can say to Draco right now. There's a difference between being hurt and being broken- Harry hasn't quite figured out how to recognize that fine line, in himself or in others, but he thinks he knows what it is. Hurt will heal; broken can't. He asks another question, although he's more than certain Draco doesn't know the answer.
"Are you okay?"
-----
It's raining outside, sheeting down like the world's been flipped over and the ocean is crashing down over the city from the sky, thrumming invisibly on roofs and windows until the lightning tears the dark and turns the raindrops silver and it's false blue daylight outside. Draco is sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall under the window with his head tilted back and his eyes closed and his hair falling softly back against his shoulders, like feathers. He looks like a child in the hard momentary flashes of brilliance- Draco often seems childlike; his movement and his speech have a quality of starry candour which is deceptive, Harry knows, because Draco never really was a child. Which is why he won't answer Harry's second question directly.
"It's just like everything else." Draco stops then, and doesn't speak for so long that Harry almost thinks he's said all he's going to say. And then he goes on. "It's just like everything else. You'd think one of us would have known better. We really should have fucking known better." He scrubs his hands across his eyes viciously, then looks straight up into Harry's eyes. "You know, the most fucked up part of this whole thing is that I actually loved her, in a weird sort of twisted sick dependent sort of way. I think she might've loved me back."
Harry looks at him but doesn't say what he is thinking, which is how the hell were they together that long if that was the whole explanation. And that Ginny didn't love Draco really, because she's been in love with a certain brown-eyed girl since school, since before she'd even known it. The most fucked up part of this whole thing, Harry thinks but doesn't say, is how can Ginny know she's in love, then forget. Or worse, how can she give up just when it's finally okay to remember. What's worst of all, what he tries not to even think, is how can you have never figured it out in the first place, Draco, and with me knowing it all too well.
Standing nine tiles away from Draco, staring at his hands, Harry knows this whole night is a bad idea. More than a bad idea, in fact; staying in this apartment for even ten more minutes could be the single most reckless thing he's ever done in his life- and he's been doing reckless, stupid things since he was eleven. The reasonable thing to do would be to walk out of this apartment right now, away from what he can't have- what he can't even ask for, because it would be dangerous and foolish and too much- walk out right now and come back in a week, when he can better pretend to be the understanding but detached best friend. It's beyond reckless, staying standing here and watching Draco breathe like he's some sort of glass figurine or a star fallen, standing here wishing he could gather up the pieces or some other equally foolish, desperate metaphor.
-----
Draco is still talking. He's talking about breaking things.
"You know, I'm very good at what I do, Harry Potter. And don't tell me I need to see a psychiatrist or stop drinking or take a fucking vacation- all I'm saying is that I'm good at my job. A veritable symphony of destruction, that's me." He's looking up and blinking too fast, his eyes a little too shiny.
Harry is starting to be angry at him for breaking down now, when he never has before. He doesn't know what to say because he's never seen Draco cry before, but he has a feeling this isn't just about Ginny. Not that he'd ever be able to figure out what else it could possibly be, since Draco's about as easy to read as hieroglyphics. Or maybe not hieroglyphics, after all- the thing about Draco, really, Harry thinks, is not that you don't know the words, but that it's too dark in the room to read them. Or they're printed in white ink on white paper. It's frustrating because you know there's something written there that you could understand, if he'd only let you see.
"That's not your job anymore, Draco. It's not what you do, now," Harry says flatly.
Draco goes on as though he hadn't heard at all. "Every time I find anything good, I end up smashing it to pieces. Everything that means anything to me gets shredded and blasted to hell, and then there I am going out and looking for more, and I never fucking learn. And that's when I'm at my least destructive- it's even better when I just see the good thing coming and run like hell in the opposite direction. Why the hell does this keep happening to me?" He gets up from the floor and looks out the window, gripping the ledge so hard his knuckles are white.
"Christ, Draco, you don't need a goddamn shrink, you're doing just fine on your own. You've got it all fucking figured out. Of course it's all your own damn fault you and Ginny didn't work out, and that your daddy didn't love you, and that Tom Riddle was a sick sick bastard, and that you had to kill a few people in the war." Harry sort of knows Draco doesn't quite deserve this biting sarcasm, but right now he's too angry to care. Not to mention that he recognizes some of the things that Draco just said for more reasons than he wants to admit.
-----
Draco whirls around to face Harry, his face gone absolutely white. "You bastard, like you're any better. You've spent most of your life convinced the fate of the world rested solely on your shoulders, feeling so effing guilty for everything that bastard did to us- and you're telling me I'm deluded?"
Harry just stands there for a moment, staring at Draco and not hiding it, too tired now to keep pretending. Besides which he can't remember ever having seen Draco's eyes quite this close to stars. He realizes belatedly that he's not nine tiles across the room any more. At this distance, he could just barely move his hands and he'd be able to touch Draco's and stop them from shaking. He shoves him back against the wall and punches him in the face instead. Draco's head hits the wall with an audible crack.
"Damn it, Draco, do you think you're the only one who's ever destroyed anything?" Draco stays where he is, trapped against the wall with Harry's hands on his shoulders. He reaches up and touches his jaw with one hand disbelievingly.
"Do you? Answer me." Harry is close enough now to whisper, so he does, and Draco can hear in it something like desperation. "Come on, answer me, just say something..please, say anything."
Draco's mouth is bleeding. He says, "You."
And Harry kisses him. Draco kisses back just as violently, his mouth opening, his head tilting back at an impossible angle. His hands find Harry's shoulders, and he's clinging all of a sudden like he's drowning, or disappearing, and his legs don't seem to hold him up.
When Harry pulls away, Draco leans back against the wall, breathing hard, eyes half-closed. After a moment he feels Harry moving. Harry's hands, which were heavy on his shoulders, slide down his arms and grip his hands momentarily before letting go. Harry backs away slowly and raises one arm to wipe his mouth. The back of his hand comes away bloody, and he looks as though he is about to cry. He whispers, " I'm sorry. I'm so sorry" and then he whirls and runs out of the room.