Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. The linguistic principles are clearly not my own.
Rating: PG
Author's Note: Inspired by philosophical/linguistic theories of language and meaning, obviously. Inspired by the idea of being soulmated and telepathic – and my definition of soulmate is very, very clichéd, but there you go… I was interested in what telepathy would actually be like, and this is the result.
Beta'd by Merin; I am ever so thankful for the assistance. Merin made me explain things I never would have otherwise; it's made this a much stronger piece. She made me think about what I was writing, and… not just think about it, but actually write it down. This is A Good Thing.
Also edited by the Sonya. She gets a 'the' before her name because she's special. Sonya doesn't read fan fiction normally, but read this because I asked her to. Mostly her editing consisted of her pointing out the extremely obvious and laughing at me for it, but that helped, because she has a very sharp eye for grammatical errors.
The conversion of meanings into sounds allows human beings to transfer ideas from one to another. Ideas … have some kind of … existence in the nervous systems of individuals. Whatever their representations there may be, they cannot pass from one person to another in that form, for there is… no pathway over which ideas can travel in their original state.
Wallace L. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language, the University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970, pg 16.
Language, Truth, and Telepathy
By maudlinrose (email maudlinrose@hotmail.com)
I: Soulmate
Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy were soulmates of the typical sort: they were destined – by the gods, by the stars, by some kind of curse – to be together. The world they existed in as a couple was outside almost all their other activities; their emotional closeness coupled with physical proximity made it difficult for either of them to concentrate on anything else.
They'd discovered it in the typical way: a series of uncomfortably close encounters prompted a series of uncomfortable reactions – erection, furious blushing, running, tripping, angst, and the fear of discovery by the other – until Draco, the smarter of the two, had stumbled on a very dodgy-looking book in the Restricted Section. Soulmates, indeed.
He had been looking for information on love potions and curses. Most spells of that type had been outlawed sometime in the period between the 15th and 19th centuries, and thus any books discussing such spells were located firmly in the Dark Arts section of the Hogwarts library, and their use strictly controlled. The symptoms both Harry and Draco had been experiencing were typical of soulmate bonds and a few of the more complex love curses; Draco had wanted to rule out any love spell – since they could be countered – before accepting his fate.
The book had outlined a 17th century test for determining soulmates. The more recent ones were simple and generally inaccurate: "Hold a flower and pull off the petals one by one, chanting 'S/he loves me, s/he loves me not. Love will become clear as you pull off the last petal." The book Draco found, on the other hand, required a hair from both the parties involved, a moonstone, a star ruby, and a small vial of Dragon's Blood. Getting the hair and the gemstones had been easy; getting the Dragon's Blood had not, but the cautious manipulation of Professor Snape had wielded three thimbles full, and a warning not to get caught.
Draco had put careful thought into getting Harry to meet him in the disused Magical Ethics classroom – the subject had died off during the first rise of You-Know-Who, when neither side wanted the new recruits to think too much about what they were doing – and the conversation within had been unpleasant. By the time the result of the test had come through: a ruby shining silver and a light that filled the room, Harry and Draco were cowering in opposite corners of the room. Harry's bottom lip wobbled, and Draco clutched his knees to his chest, but neither had gone so far as to actually cry.
The immediate problem of discovering why they reacted in certain unexpected ways to each other solved, Harry and Draco moved on to bigger things, namely trying to make the soulmate bond and relationship work. That is, Harry called it a relationship, and Draco called it a soulmate bond, refusing to admit to anyone that he was involved with a Potter by choice. The shift from enemies to friends was not easy; the shift from friends to lovers, later, near impossible. They held off finalising their relationship for as long as they could, until nearly six months after they left Hogwarts in June for the last time.
If they had been friends it would have been easier. As it was, they really knew nothing about each other. Naturally, being rivals for so long had led to both knowing what annoyed the other the most, but this was no basis for a relationship. If they had been friends, they would have had mutual friends, instead of Ron and Hermione on Harry's side, and Vincent, Gregory, and Pansy on Draco's. Neither side reacted well to the news; neither boy had expected them to, although Harry in particular had been shocked by his friend's vitriol towards Draco.
Eventually, their relationship became accepted, if not understood or approved of. Ron and Hermione were hardly going to give up their friendship with Harry simply because of who Harry happened – unluckily, in both of their opinions – to be bonded to. Vincent, Gregory, and Pansy weren't concerned so much with friendship as with power: if Draco was allied with Harry Potter, their little group of Slytherin had a much better chance of surviving the Dark Lord without gaining a pretty black tattoo.
Ron and Hermione never made an effort to become friends with Draco, both feeling that it should either happen on its own or not at all. The Slytherins were more proactive, mainly out of desperation, and put a lot of effort into befriending Harry Potter. It had become clear, by the time Harry and Draco were in Sixth Year, that a war was coming; Gregory, Vincent, and Pansy wanted to make sure they survived it intact.
Being soulmates in the wizarding world was not without perils. There were, naturally, the expected side-effects: being able to use the other's wand, intense states of euphoria caused by the other's presence, and equally intense states of depression caused by their absence.
The one thing neither Harry nor Draco had expected was telepathy. Harry had heard about it in the Muggle world and thought it a myth; Draco, knowing better, had thought it a curse. It came late: once their relationship was stable, settled, once they'd left school and bought a flat and had done everything they could to form a loving, long-term relationship.
It had taken a lot of effort on both of their parts to create a relationship that actually worked. The soulmate bond made it easier, certainly, in creating a reason to be together and stay that way. It had not, though, changed either of their philosophies on life – only the way they thought of each other.
II: Telepathy
Language is a funny thing. There are approximately 44 distinct sounds in the English language, depending on accent; certainly more sounds than letters, but a terribly small number when compared to the hundreds of thousands of words, and the infinite range of possible sentences and meanings.
Language is ambiguous, or rather, many words are. Language shapes the way we describe our world, and indeed the way we think of it. We use language to exaggerate and to emphasise, to deny, to allege, to explain and to make clear our everyday, ordinary thoughts as well as our abstractions and our deepest desires.
Very rarely do we think of the language itself, or our relationship to it. We use it almost unconsciously, and take for granted that we can use it to come to a common definition of concepts indescribable outside of it.
Telepathy gets past all that, and so it did for Harry and Draco. Harry and Draco no longer needed speech or body language to convey their thoughts to one another – instead, they could do so in waves of pure feeling, in sounds and pictures and the naked, unvarnished truth. They could, with practise, literally see through one another's eyes. It was not nearly as pleasant as it sounded in theory.
They'd spent years discovering their similarities. They'd smiled at each other for a full five minutes when, in Seventh Year, they'd discovered that they both liked strawberry jam on buttered white toast for breakfast, and thought beans, in any form, disgusting. Draco had ceased expressing his political viewpoints – despite the fact that to some extent he still held them – and Harry had stopped calling Lucius Malfoy Death-Eating scum every time Draco mentioned his father. They had done this because they felt that they needed to; relationships require sacrifice, theirs perhaps more than most.
It became clear through the telepathy, however, that they did not have so very much in common after all. The world was brighter through Harry's eyes, Draco found, and not just in the figurative sense. Harry, in an accident of genetics, saw colours more vividly than Draco. It disturbed them greatly that, when they thought about it, they did not even have the same definition of the colour red.
And if they didn't even have comparatively simple ideas in common, ideas with referents, ideas you could point at and say "Look, red!" then what about the abstract ideas? What about love? They could feel each other's pain – physical pain, at least, the fiery stabbing of abused nerve-ends – and the same was true for love. It sparked between them as it would for any other soulmated pair, and therein laid the problem: it was not the same.
Oh, Harry loved Draco, and Draco loved Harry, and their love was not brotherly or platonic. They could be secure in that, at least. But it wasn't the same emotion – or, it was, in spoken or written language: Draco could say he loved Harry and mean it, and Harry could reciprocate, and neither of them would have lied – but in truth… what Harry felt for Draco and what Draco felt for Harry were two quite separate ideas. Even though they knew that they loved each other, they still felt a sense of… betrayal, almost, at the discovery that they didn't love each other in quite the same way.
It brought them both to the earth-shattering conclusion that they were intrinsically alone. They had previously thought that the soulmate bond would bring them closer together, and in a physical sense it had, but the telepathy had only served to highlight their differences, rather than bring together their similarities.
They were not the same. They did not share common ideas about morality, or justice, or love. There were similarities, certainly, but their basic thought processes were different. Draco read Machiavelli, and liked the theory; Harry didn't think much about such things but thought that murder was wrong, full stop.
The telepathy drove them into themselves. They were no longer harryanddraco, no longer a matched pair which faced the world together. They were no longer a couple by choice – the telepathy had taken away any possibility of separation. Granted, there hadn't been much possibility to begin with, but it was very distressing to find that the little free choice they had left in their relationship – in having a relationship with each other at all – had gone. They became uneasy allies in a war against the rest of humanity - you don't understand, but everyone else understands even less than you, Potter – and their love, once strong, strained against the sense of you are not like me.
Spoken language offered no solution. It seemed so very imperfect when compared to telepathy: a constant struggle to conceptualise ideas in meaningless morsels of sound and scribble. Words forced themselves past unwilling lips and strained to explain truth to unenthusiastic ears. But the truth was never defined on the paper or in the sound of harsh breathing and glottal stops. Instead it existed in almost another realm, one which language with all its attendant ambiguities did not enter into.
For a time, they communicated in monosyllables and a constant stream of thought, both trying desperately to reconcile their notions of partnership and romance with the reality of being much more different than they thought.
For a time, they tried to sever their telepathy as much as possible; restrict it to almost verbal sentences. They existed in a state of constant, if unwilling, communication and strived to find a truth that made sense in a never-ending stream of half-finished thoughts and miniscule silences. Harry became more articulate and Draco silent, either unwilling or unable to say what he needed to.
Eventually it settled into a kind of everyday loneliness, a combination of words and thoughts and not-quite resentful emotion. They coped with the telepathy, because they had to, and became more aware of the implications of their soulmate bond as a result.
III: Power
Draco, in another world, would have followed his father into servitude; sometimes, in his most dismal moments, he wondered if his relationship with Harry wasn't effectively the same thing. Oh, he didn't have to get down on bended knee and kiss the feet of his Master, and Harry had certainly never asked him to run in black robes through masses of screaming, scrambling Muggles, shouting obscenities and Dark curses as he went, but that wasn't the point. He would do anything, anything for Harry, and Harry knew this. The feeling went both ways, but Draco was the one who resented it the most.
He resented the losses of control and choice. Control, because he was no longer the only person responsible for his actions, and choice, because he was accountable for his actions to Harry as well. In another world, he would have several people impacting on different parts of his life – a boss at work, a partner at home, friends, perhaps even acquaintances. Instead, there was just Harry, who knew everything there was to know about Draco.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.[i] Harry and Draco had absolute power over one another. The telepathy compounded this. They'd discovered the full extent of it on a lazy Sunday afternoon in bed. Harry had absentmindedly wished Draco's hand to be right in that spot and, suddenly, unexpectedly, it was there. Draco had stopped cold in the middle of licking down Harry's abdomen and said, in a very odd tone, "Harry, did you move my hand?" The moment spoiled, neither of them could decide whether Harry had moved Draco's hand, or whether Draco had simply responded unconsciously to Harry's unconscious desire.
They no longer knew where Harry ended and where Draco began. Before the telepathy, they'd loved moments where they felt like one person, loved sex together, loved closeness. It had stopped being merely moments, though, the first time Harry had accidentally activated Draco's fight-or-flight reflex when they got caught by a werewolf in the alleys behind their flat one full moon. It had stopped being common when Draco had subconsciously made Harry act out one of his longest-standing sexual fantasies on a cold winter's night. Draco's walk became subtly less graceful, as he began to move like Harry, and Harry developed an arch to his eyebrow and a curl to his lip that nobody – especially him or Draco – liked.
In the corners of their minds, where even the light of the love of the other didn't shine, they screamed.
IV: War
There is a line, somewhere, between good and evil. To some extent it does not matter where that line lies – we cannot define the point where an acorn becomes an oak tree, but we would not call an acorn a tree, or a tree an acorn. All that matters is that the line exists.
The line defines us. We fall on one side or the other, and despise those who sit on the fence, who do not want to express an opinion or commit to an act. We are good, or we are evil, and we are right or we are wrong, and we can never be both.
There is a line between individuals, and the line defines us: this is me and that is you. We argue about which side of the line we're on, and about what put us there: I never said that – you're putting words into my mouth. We live in the certainty that we are doing the right thing, most of the time; our capacities for self-deception are apparently limitless, and our convictions are strong. We don't question our individuality.
Harry and Draco put thoughts into one another's head, and lost their definition. Out of frustration, and resentment, and unsuppressed anger – because they couldn't suppress anything from one another, anymore – they made a new line, and each stuck to his own side. The line was artificial, and, at first, weak – more an agreement to avoid sharing emotions and unconscious thoughts wherever possible than a barrier.
In the world outside their flat, the line between good and evil was also blurring. The Dark Lord gained followers from the pureblooded nobility, and the rest fought tooth and nail against him. To fight effectively, though, we have to understand our opponent, and so the Dark Lord learnt about Muggle weaponry even as the untrained ranks of eager conservatives learnt the Dark Arts. The Dark Lord had always been more concerned with winning than with remaining true to any ideals; the only ideal he'd ever concerned himself with was that Wizards were superior to Muggles in every way.
A curse was stopped by a bullet, and a bullet stopped with a curse, and the Dark Lord had lost the war, if not the battles, because the line between the Wizarding and Muggle worlds blurred too. The Dark Lord had always been about revolution, about protecting the Wizarding from the encroaching evil of the Muggle world.
The war outside provided a new grounding for their relationship. War is death, and Harry began to think that maybe killing was justified at times. With this thought came others of the same kind, a new philosophy on life. If the end is acceptable, then the methods must be.
Draco comforted Harry through the death of Pettigrew; there would be no happy ending for Sirius Black now, not with Pettigrew nothing more than a pile of ashes in the shattered remains of a house. Harry comforted Draco through the death of his father; it became even more difficult to draw a line between the sides, when an Auror could burn a Wizard alive and smile at the scent of burnt flesh. The telepathy became, for a brief week during the worst of the fighting, almost a comfort.
The war outside provided a reason to learn to control their telepathy. Comfort, and later inertia, had caused them to lead a retiring life with each other in their flat for far too long. Fighting the forces of evil at least made them leave the property. Harry and Draco fought to survive, and somewhere along the line the telepathy settled into reality, and the line between them solidified.
In the war outside their flat, people continued to die, until even the Dark Lord himself could no longer deny the power of the machine gun and the bomb.
V: Truth
A Muggle, now dead, once said that men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.[ii]
The war ended in the way of all wars: with a battle to end all battles, the death of one of the figureheads, and a crater in the middle of a field. Harry defeated the Dark Lord and became the Saviour of the World for a second time; Draco held back and ordered the troops around with a shake of his shining blond hair and the supercilious arch of an eyebrow.
It turned out that love could save the world – Draco's constant stream of IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou gave Harry the strength to say those fatal two words, and the shared magical powers put the power needed behind the curse. These facts made Draco extraordinarily smug for a very long time afterwards, and though he hid it from strangers well, Harry was never fooled.
The war ended on a calm summer day, and the bedraggled remains of the Dark Lord's army had been gathered and processed like cattle into queues of guilty and very guilty by the time the leaves started to fall. The new Minister of Magic – a quiet fellow, distinguished and stern, much like a benevolent headmaster – built a beautiful memorial to stand tall outside of the Ministry headquarters, where he could look down upon it from his office. The Wizarding world, in turn, opened some of its doors to the Muggle world, which came in to sightsee like any tourist would.
It turned out that the truth was in the pudding – at least, for Harry and Draco. They settled back into quiet domesticity as if it had never left their lives, homemade dinners and snuggles on the couch as if the war had never happened. The truth was that Harry liked chocolate pudding, and Draco liked cheesecake, and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that they disagreed, if they were both willing to settle for lemon meringue pie. Maybe sometimes they woke up with nightmares, screaming the names of the dead, but the gaping holes where dear friends should be was nothing compared to the blank nothingness the death of the other would have caused.
The war ended, and the remnants of the Wizarding world picked themselves up off the floor and lived. There was, after all, nothing else they could do; this wasn't the first war they'd won, and it wouldn't be the last. They honoured Harry with everything they could – galleons, medals, awards. Draco they tolerated, because capable war generals are never desirable in peacetime.
It turned out that the truth was telepathic, and that Harry and Draco fit together like two pieces of a puzzle; from a distance the world couldn't separate them, but up close it was obvious where they had been fitted together. The fact that they could break apart made them happy, and the fact that they never would even more so.
The war ended; it turned out that the truth was love, and nothing else mattered.
FIN
[i] Lord Acton- Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton- April 5, 1887 - Letters on Freedom and Power
[ii] Winston Churchill