Draco doesn't remember the day he was born or the day he first saturated fallen, dead leaves with salty water. He doesn't remember the shivers of first touches, the expiration date of parental affection.
Nor does he remember the moment he unceremoniously became a brainless soldier of a man fiend with no soul made from the finest atoms.
His vague world of smeared reflections is on constant alert for signs of subjugation imposed by his subconscious that tirelessly ambushes his vast horizon of self-indulgent lies.
How can he not lose himself in the beauteous expanse of sunset beams when the rays of light thread like silky locks of strawberry hair in the tempestuous sky.
His eyes only ever register multi-colored blurs that combine to form a safe spectacle of a world more ignorant than it already is, trespassing the border of the realistic, but not quite rising above it.
Maybe that's why although he sees his reflection in the Mirror of Erised he cannot fathom the depth of the image in his mind.
"What do you see?"
The space between them is over-boarded with questions, sentences ending with exclamation marks defined by scoliosis curves that endlessly poke fun at him, but never seem to bother her.
He wore a golden crown when he was 14. He had his father patting his back, adoration marring his face when he was 15. The air swelled with newfound gas leaking from the bloated body of the murdered ex-principal next to his triumphant silhouette when he was 16. Now at 17, he is a fallen meteor bursting across the night sky adulterated with shadows and dust with no ambitions and no dreams.
His aspirations are momentary, needs brief, nothing lasts, and even emotions abandon him.
Even now, his reflection, their reflection is only depicting the evidence of his quick-paced depersonalization.
What has he come to?
He feels the sudden drive to ask her back, but the desire evaporates into the suffocating air and mixes with her womanly scent that invades his nostrils like sprouting buds of young snowdrops disturbing the grim continuity of winter.
"I see the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It's beautiful. Too bad she's headless."
He doesn't know what she's mumbling about, but if that something is beheaded, he's grateful for not seeing it.
His eyes travel back to the mirror, but the disturbing image makes his stomach flip.
"Hey."
He likes to think this is ephemeral, the magical mirror, the reflection, this unexpected kiss too, just a fleeting moment like that of a human lifetime.
Her fresh flavor reminds him of strange flashbacks his brain haphazardly brings forefront, those which are too random, too bizarre, but the accompanying feeling of worth and importance prompts his mind to store them as special little memories.
But beyond the boundaries of abstract thoughts and surreal images, she tastes of everything he reeks of. His detachment from the shallow world of objects has numbed the receptors in his taste buds, making her lips sweeten with the flavor of the only person he knows inside out the best but despises the most at the same time.
To his surprise, the touch is almost gentle. Maybe it's only the soft response and warm welcome of her lips that palliates the uncontrollable violence and malevolence he attempts to emanate through the kiss.
When he almost believes she's on the brink of collapsing from lack of oxygen, she pushes for more, his green tie painfully tightening around his neck.
Why is she reacting so fervently, he has no idea. Maybe she's just crazy, a madwoman. But why is that every time she reaffirms his conviction of her lunacy she feels less otherworldly, more shackled to the unwritten laws and miseries of the world?
The world is not the world he woke up to survive this morning. Something, something has changed, the molecules have shifted and decomposed. A new element is born.
He breaks the contact. He reorients his gaze from Luna's flushed face that had contorted into an unreadable expression to the fogged up piece of glass where the same reflection stares back at him.
The mist that cooly sits on the surface of the mirror is the lovechild born from the fusion of elemental powers that flatten against the walls of two fervent hearts. Simmering in the blood that flows through the little organ, the stream searches for release outside the body: their oral cavity.
Water and air. Lovers that divide the Earth into two spheres, cut the world into its reflection, split the fate of human tears into droughty death and home. They balance the Order out, the complexity of multilayered emotions trapped in the fathomless well live by breathing cool logic.
She is free water, deep, inhabited and intuitive with arms like caressing waves, inviting and rocking, limpid but mysterious simultaneously. While he is expansive air, chilly, even cold but with a hint of warm breeze cutting through the frost, fresh and radical, vacant, filling the boundless expanse of the sky by itself.
The white haze evaporates, the moment flows by, but the lingering feeling remains.
It stays to hang in the space of the forgotten room, the stray air ousting it like venomous pollen and unripe spore; the water intently watching from below, the eye of the ocean darkening, its heart trembling with the promise of a raging storm.
"Has your deepest desire found its realization?"
He doesn't look back.
"Don't think too highly of yourself."