Chapter 14: Monsters in Common

Clearly introductions were in order, though she wasn't sure where either one of them would begin. It seemed unlikely at that very moment that he would turn to her, extend a hand, perhaps sketch a polite bow and utter, "Hello, I'm Draco Malfoy and I'm a Death Eater." Even more unlikely was her uncertain reply, "Pleased to meet you. As far as I know I'm Hermione Granger."

"Charmed."

"Likewise."

It was absolutely preposterous, this imagined conversation, but it was all she could envision in light of the fact that there was no protocol for an occasion such as this. They had come to the one moment that exceeded rules of etiquette—or engagement for that matter. She barely understood why it was so important to have these rules, these social strictures to bind them, until now when they were forced to confront the unfamiliar with nothing to mitigate their fears.

She looked at him, arm drawn up to his chest in an attempt to conceal what she'd already seen. It was no use. His shirt lay twisted in the sheets and with his arms and torso bare there was no concealing anything. The edges of the mark were still visible along the seam where the flesh at the inside of his forearm met his chest. He was tense, coiled as if ready to spring. Skittish, she thought, as if sudden movement would drive him to strike.

He did strike then, his right hand snaking out to grasp her wrist. Draco's fingers were tight and cruel. His grip was intended to ensure that she remain still rather than draw her closer. With his left hand, he grasped several strands of her hair between his fingers. The mark was revealed to her then, but he no longer cared. His entire body was the mark; it read in the slope of his shoulders, in the corded sinew of his arms, in the very cast of his bones. Surely she saw that. It had been ridiculous of him to think that he could cradle his arm to his chest and deny its existence.

He tugged at the inky, black hair between his fingers and then suddenly released it, released her as quickly as he'd grasped her to begin with. His shoulders shook in what would have been an expression of mirth, but the laugh which escaped his lips was hollow, bitter. When he finally spoke, his voice had a hoarse, bruised quality, as if the effort to speak were taking its toll.

"Fool," he uttered. "Fool. Charms and potions… disguise… and I am a fool." It saddened him. It angered him. It was absurd that this should be the truth of it. "They painted your hair, told you what to be so that I would… what? Tell you things? Like you? Fuck you?"

Hermione couldn't let him say this, but neither could she stop him. Her throat was tight; fear, guilt and anxiety a clot that barely allowed air to escape the narrow passage.

"And for you it was what?" he asked. "A chance to help them? A chance to protect Potter?"

Hermione closed her eyes, shutting them over the wetness that had begun to collect at the corners of her lids. She shook her head, denying it, not the truth of it, but the way he'd made it sound. It sounded callous, manipulative. It failed to take into account the way she felt even now, wanting him despite the blackened skin inked upon his arm.

"Granger," he said, with that laugh that wasn't a laugh. "Granger." It all made sense: the haughtiness, the books; that she had found him barely conscious in the hall, that he had sworn it was she who had left his bed that morning days ago.

A mudblood.

And yet he had come back to her. Even after seeing it with his own eyes, he had come back to this room to find her, to lie down beside her because he knew nothing else; he had nothing else; he wanted nothing else.

And he hated her for it. And he hated himself.

She didn't have the words. She knew that there was nothing she could say. If she spoke even this tenuous thread that kept him anchored here in anger, in self-loathing, would snap and she would lose him. It was perhaps what led her to instinct. She reached out, her fingers clasping his arm, tracing the lines of the mark.

Draco flinched, his jaw tightening, knowing that he should be sickened by her touch, but instead it was the opposite and he could not move with her small fingers on him.

Once it had been the absence of this mark which had won her; that pale stretch of nothingness on the underside of his arm. That absence had gained her trust. The presence of the mark should have destroyed that trust, but it was not as she thought it would be. When she touched the mark, she felt his shame. She felt the tension in him beneath her fingers. He placed his hand over hers, crushing her fingers against the mark, willing her to strip him of it, to peel it from his flesh.

She couldn't take it from him, and even if she'd known how, she wouldn't have done it, for its presence spoke to her, whoever she was; she, neither one girl nor the other, whose thoughts were sometimes strange, who knew herself to be Hermione Granger but was increasingly met with doubts. She would not have done it because, much like her own doubt, it equalized them, it bound them; it made them monsters in common.

OOO

The territory was familiar, the setting known, but the dull panic that seemed to live with him these days precluded a feeling of habit. Harry sat in Dumbledore's office once again. He loved coming here and at the same time he hated it. It was here that truths were revealed to him, that crucial information was imparted. Yet, those same truths often served to complicate his understanding of the world around him, to challenge what he thought he knew. It was here that he lost conviction more often than he gained certainty. It was here more than anywhere else that he felt unmoored.

Dumbledore stood quietly by the hearth, seeming to sense the delicate balance of the young wizard's thoughts, and so he made up his mind to tread lightly on the faulty ground of Harry's faith.

"Did you ever think, Harry, that there would come a time when you and I would address each other as equals? When you would call me Albus and we might talk as men, though I would still be the elder and older, even though it hardly seems possible, than I am now?"

Harry blinked. "I hadn't thought of it, sir." There was something about Dumbledore's question that had caused him to add the formal form of address. The question itself broached uncharted territory and it prompted him, in defense, to reinforce the established relationship between the two of them with his words.

Dumbledore smiled faintly and shook his head, denying the need for the verbal stratification. "Had you never thought of your future, Harry?"

Harry stared at the older wizard, something like anger welling at the corners of his eyes. It faded quickly, however, to a dull blankness. "I can't really see around it. Around him. Voldemort. That's as far as I see. After that…" He shrugged.

Dumbledore paled. The boy could not know. He could not know that the second prophecy had called him a sacrifice. It marked him as one without future. Yet it was impossible to live this way. Even if the future was denied there must be, at the very least, the expectation of it. Everyone, no matter how small, mean, cruel, deserved the expectation of a future, the expectation of a life yet to live. When that was taken there was nothing left.

"I have tried to do right by you, Harry and perhaps my methods were… are questionable, but if I thought that I, that he… that we have robbed you of your expectation of future, then we have already lost."

Harry shifted uncomfortably, tamping down a sense of rage that seemed to wend its way up through his body from the base of his spine. He wanted to ask how, how to see past Voldemort, how to expect a future on the other side of the Dark Lord. Instead, he leaned forward in his chair, restless, resting his elbows on his knees.

Dumbledore stilled. He thought once again of past, present and future, of prophesy and lore, of how the present is the future of a past and also the past of a future. All three conflated, all three existing simultaneously.

There was a way.

Dumbledore's breath caught and mingled in his lungs with a long-forgotten sensation. It mingled with hope. Slowly, the elder wizard drew away from the hearth. He stopped in front of the boy's chair and extended a hand to him.

"It is now, Harry. It is now, this very present."

Harry sat back in his chair, his restless anger mitigated by the peculiarity of Dumbledore's words. "I'm not sure I understand, sir."

Dumbledore clasped hands with him.

"Albus. You must call me, Albus. And I shall call you friend."

OOO

When the boy emerged his hair was damp, his shirt loose. Youth, Snape thought, and tucked the unbidden thought away with several others: that his hair was the color of his mother's; that she was somehow present in this boy, who, with his carelessness in the face of time exemplified youth.

Draco did not sit, but stood in front of the enchanted staircase facing him, wary still, wary always.

Snape caught the look in the boy's eye and knew that it would be difficult. Draco had, as youth had allotted him, a certain vigor, a certain urge to fight. It exhausted Snape before he had even begun, but he knew he would press on anyway, Sisyphean in the attempt.

"Master Malfoy," Snape said, a bit wryly, anticipating the antagonism to come.

"Is that really the first thing you want to do, patronize me?" Draco asked. "Really the first thing you want to say to me?"

Snape sighed. "I thought to offer you the floor."

"An offer from you? By now I should know to refuse it."

Snape inclined his head, ceding a point. Then he sat and stared at the boy in stony silence. He would wait. If there was one thing youth did not have it was patience. Snape had it in spades.

A vein ticked in Draco's temple, pulsing as moments slipped by. Finally, he spoke.

"I have only been thinking that I know why it is you were Potions Master, why in some ways you still are."

Snape continued to stare, offering nothing.

"It's a precise science, isn't it? I mean, Potions really is the science of magic, more so than spellwork, than anything else. It's got ingredients, to be measured, mixed, combined. And then you wait. You wait and you watch. You get what you expect, what your measurements—your precision has told you to expect."

Draco moved then. He crossed the room. He stood in front of Snape, close, close enough so that the former Potions Master heard him easily despite the fact that he hissed at a whisper, "Did you get what you expected?"

Snape made no reply. He would let the boy spend his anger. He imagined that Draco had turned his anger to the girl as well, but as had been the case in the past Snape was the easy target. He always had been.

"Me. Her. Ingredients. Color her hair. Change her face. Put us together. Wait. Wait and watch." Draco's face was close. "You did watch, didn't you? Last night. You watched."

"Don't be vulgar," Snape snapped. The boy had crossed into his space in a way that made him uncomfortable, reminding him of Narcissa, threatening him. He pushed Draco back, watched him stumble and recover, watched him think about rushing forward again; fists clenched, hate in his eyes. Draco held still, however.

"I am many things. I am nothing. But I am not vulgar." It was enough. The statement was enough to exhaust Draco, to grind the vigor of his youth to a stunned halt. Snape's patience had paid off, though it could not have prepared him for what came next.

Draco lowered his head as if it had become heavy on his shoulders. "I have… for her… what I have for her is…not for you to watch… not for you to create… not for you to know. You can't. You can't."

For Snape it was a lesson he should have learned. He thought that he had learned it years ago in Lily Potter's arms. Yet it had taken this boy, this inexperienced youth, to tutor him, to find the lesson and flaunt it in front of his very eyes. It is not for you to create.

"I won't," Snape said at last. The words seemed to come of their own accord. The promise had been made even before the sound of his voice had died away. "But I must ask you—it is the only way—was she, Imogene, Miss Granger, was there anything at all unusual? Any other manifestation?"

Draco shook his head no, but partway through the motion he stopped, his chin raised, head tilted slightly, snagged in memory. He was almost reluctant to allow the memory to surface, knowing how it would color him, how it would take hold of his thoughts and lead him back to last night and to her.

She drew him back. Whether through memory or desire, she drew him. He had seen her and fled. Left Spinner's End for good, he'd thought. For good, if such a thing truly existed. Hours later he'd returned as surely as his thoughts returned to her now; Imogene, Granger, Hermione.

He was there again, fingers pleading with hers, pressing her fingers against the mark. Take it, he thought. Undo it. Unmake it. Violence. It would require violence.

Only she wasn't acquainted with violence, not like he was. It wasn't that she'd never known it. It wasn't that she was unscathed. It was that she was unpracticed in it, truly unpracticed in a way that he, a Malfoy and a Death Eater, could never be.

Her lips met his shoulder. He remained sitting there, rigid, his fingers crushing hers against his forearm while her mouth touched him in gentle supplication. He was not gentle, nor did he want her to gentle him, but if she continued this way there was a chance she might transmute his anger, leaving him lost, rudderless beneath her fingers.

And ashamed. Ashamed of his marked body that was both a disappointment and a failure, owned as it was. He no longer wanted to inhabit it, not when it wasn't his own. But she forced him to with her mouth, with her fingers. She forced him to be wholly in it, to give in to its urge, its facile ability to interpret the tactile and respond to it bluntly, elegantly.

He cursed her for it.

He touched her with shaking hands and damned her silently for leaving him so exposed, so at the mercy of this worthless shell of skin and bone, of tissue, hide and hair that had heretofore served merely to contain him, but now formed the boundary which separated him from her; and she, flush against him, skin feverish to the touch, coaxing him to rebel against the shame, the disappointment.

They met, then, for the second time at the limits of the body, fitted one to the other; a careful introduction driven by need.

And when Draco thought on it, returning to last night, head canted slightly to the left, he heard Snape's question again: anything unusual? He stopped shaking his head, realizing that he should have been nodding all along.

Yes, everything unusual, everything extraordinary, down to the last sigh, down to the last of her whispered words: mine.

OOO

She was hiding in her own home. Narcissa stood, arms folded across her stomach, head bowed in a tiny alcove off the main hall. It was the kind of niche that ordinarily held statuary, but today it held a lone woman who, as it turns out, was not made of stone after all.

She took several deep breaths and placed a hand against the wall to steady herself. Some called Malfoy Manor the finest wizarding estate of its kind; others, an ostentatious display of wealth; but there was something about the presence of the Dark Lord within its walls that made it seem a garish prison, designed to suffocate its inhabitants under the weight of its eaves and its tightly sealed corridors.

Regardless, the manor was a solid structure and the cool stone wall beneath her fingers unyielding. It was what she needed, the firm resistance beneath her palm, the foundation against which to brace herself. She was crumbling, the brittle façade of elegant wife and chatelaine peeling away in sheets, threatening to leave her exposed.

Narcissa knew what was expected of her. She knew that there were standards for her behavior, but she also knew that, try as she might, she could no longer meet them.

"There you are, Wife."

She jumped at the sound of Lucius's voice.

"I have been looking all over for you."

He tucked a hand behind her elbow and drew her out of the alcove. "Startled? By me?" he asked. "Why ever should I startle you, Narcissa? Who else would possibly happen upon you and call you wife?" There was quiet menace in his words, couched though it was in singular politesse.

She forced a smile, using the act to buy time. It was her own bit of charm, more feminine than magical in nature, though just as effective as any spell. Her features softened, lashes sank. She tilted her head slightly, exposing the delicate contour of her cheek, the smooth skin beneath the light filtering in through the leaded glass windows of the hall. A bit of hair slipped free of the clasp at her nape and fell forward to brush her cheek. All in all it was quite artful, better than she could have hoped, having assembled the last shreds of the façade and stretched them thin, so thin, as thin as they would allow in the name of guile.

All the while she was thinking, trying to find a way to do what was expected, trying to remember Lucius and her affection for him before he had sacrificed her son, trying to recall how it was that she had moved him in the past from simmering anger to, at the very least, distracted resignation.

Lucius studied her; cool, grey eyes momentarily alight with quiet fascination as they swept her face. He reached out, touched the loose strands of hair at her cheek and smoothed them back behind her ear, before quickly dropping his hand.

He was uncertain, she realized, shocked by his own gesture. She hadn't seen that kind of uncertainty in him since he was a boy; the boy who, for all his fine, pureblood breeding and unparalleled arrogance, had courted her with nervous hands and trembling fingers.

Narcissa pressed her advantage. She touched his face, her hand settled along the line of his jaw. Lucius's breath stilled. He placed his hand over hers and let it rest there a moment before his fingers closed around hers, crushing them as he jerked them from his face.

"Clever woman," he said. "I hadn't thought about it much when I met you. I hadn't thought that you would be clever. I was… distracted by other things. Yet here you are after all these years, still beautiful and, it seems, wretchedly clever."

Lucius maintained his tight grip on her fingers and used it to pull her along behind him as he began walking. "Have you heard from the boy?"

"No." Narcissa managed to find her voice at last. "He's gone back up to Hogwarts. You know we don't hear much from him during the term. His studies—"

"—Don't, Narcissa. Do not thwart me with the guise of your banal housewifery—not with the Dark Lord in residence, not when you have just proven yourself to be so damnably clever."

Narcissa stumbled behind him, hard-pressed to meet his furious pace with her feet trapped as they were within the confines of her expensive dragon hide heels.

"As you know the boy has been given a task. It is our duty to monitor him. You are certain you have received no communication from our son?"

"Yes, I'm certain. I haven't heard from him. I would know when I've spoken to Draco."

The door to Lucius's study rose up in front of them. He threw it open, dragged Narcissa inside and slammed it shut behind them.

"Then that is unfortunate," Lucius said, dropping his voice to a whisper. "The Dark Lord believes that Draco's silence indicates the need for motivation, a certain incentive to see the task through."

"What kind of incentive?" she asked, dreading the answer.

"You know how He achieves his ends. He has threatened those nearest to Draco. There is the girl, Imogene, but as the depth of his attachment to her is still unclear, He has also threatened the boy's… mother. You, Narcissa, my wife."

A sense of panic fell heavily on her. She sank into a chair, arms folded across her stomach once again.

"I would not… lose you to the boy's lack of motivation, whatever your faults," Lucius said, his voice unexpectedly gentle given the coldness in his eyes. They were a cold-eyed family it seemed; wintry grey irises which froze others in their gaze, keeping them trapped and suspended at an icy distance. "So I will ask you again," Lucius uttered slowly, "have you heard from the boy?"

It was a moment before Narcissa caught his meaning.

"Yes," she lied, surprised to feel the soft tread of hot tears on her face as they sprang from the corners of her cold, cold eyes.

OOO

Ginny Weasley was warm. Harry tried to get his head around the reality of it. He had always suspected that she would be, but he had doubted perhaps that the opportunity would arise in which he could confirm his suspicions. He never thought he'd have the chance. There were times when he thought it would have been Hermione in his arms, and then there were other times when he knew that that would have been preposterous. She would never have stopped talking long enough to kiss him. She would never have stopped thinking long enough.

Ginny was close. He tucked his fingers behind her knees, drawing them up around his hips, drawing her closer, tighter against him. He'd somehow imagined that having her there on his lap would make it easier for him to behave, easier than having all of that softness crushed beneath him, but he was wrong. This simply brought new pressure to bear in ways he'd least expected, pressure that drove him just as close to the edge of his control.

He thought of Molly disapproving; Molly, who wasn't his mother, but who had mothered him certainly. She would want him to respect Ginny. He was older than she; he bore the brunt of the responsibility. He wanted to be mature. He wanted to respect Ginny, but she was making it really difficult.

He hadn't known how all of the little things would affect him. Her small sighs as he discovered a new way to move his fingers against her skin. Her warmth, the way her waist flared into her hips. None of it inspired him to maturity. What it did was drive him to shift her weight, to draw her knees up closer so that she sat right where he needed her to, exquisite torture against his hardness.

And for a moment, the briefest of moments, he was just a teenaged boy, any unthinking teenaged boy, with a girl in his arms, doing what he knew he shouldn't. He was heady with it, nearly giddy, until the moment ended with the sound of his name on her lips. Harry. It called him to himself. Harry. Harry Potter.

He had no right to this. From the very beginning, from the day he'd earned his scar, he'd had no right to take a girl in his arms, to feel for her and make promises to her—not wearing his dreadful purpose as he did, marked on his forehead. It outweighed everything else, even these heated thoughts and instincts, even these tender feelings, rough and unfinished as they were.

His hands stilled. He dropped his forehead to her shoulder, let it rasp against the thin material of her uniform shirt.

"I have no right," he said, his words uneven as they bounced along the breath which seesawed through his lungs.

Ginny listened, hearing the things he hadn't said.

"No, you really don't," she answered.

He squeezed his eyes shut then, thinking already of the absence of warmth when she pulled away from him, of buttoning his shirt and his pants with unsteady fingers, of searching for his glasses. She was close enough that he hadn't needed them to see her features. The only reason he couldn't see her now had nothing to do with failed eyesight however, and everything to do with the fact that he couldn't lift his face from her shoulder. He wouldn't. He wouldn't let her see the sorrow in his eyes.

"You've no earthly right, Harry, unless you take it."

He did lift his face then. He stared at her. Ginny met his eyes easily and held his gaze even as she took his fingers, pushed them gently beneath her skirt and led him to the center of her feeling. She brushed his fingers against the taut skin there and only then did her eyes slip closed. Her forehead met his and he caught the warmth of her breath against his lips as she sighed.

Harry felt her softness, the liquid heat of her on the tips of his fingers. For him. For him to take. Mystery, he thought.

She was a mystery beneath his fingers and he would claim the right.

OOO

It was wily, her memory. She would even go so far as to say untrustworthy—something of a villain. It hadn't been easy for Hermione to come to such a conclusion. Her memory was, after all, all that she had. How could she know for certain that it was faulty? How could she know without a doubt that there were details, perhaps even whole instances missing? She couldn't. She could only harbor suspicions founded on instinct. She could only press forward dogged by the vague sentiment that something was wrong.

It should have unspooled behind her like a Muggle film reel—the trail of recent events, one frame leading to the next, a sequential history of how she'd come to be here in Snape's quarters. Yet her memory seemed to skirt the issue. It provided no explanation as to how she'd arrived, how she could have used the enchanted stair to reach his rooms, commanded it to allow her access when she knew that there was complex ward magic in play which had heretofore barred her from this section of the house.

Her treacherous, villainous memory. Could she trust what it told her of Draco last night, of the familiar tenderness of his hands, the fervent recognition of his body? Could she trust what it told her of her own feelings toward him, even now as she knelt in Snape's bed?

The former Potions Master slept. He lay on his back, very still like a corpse. The absence of light did nothing to dispel the illusion. He was pale, his pallor deathlike, and it didn't help that he was swathed in what appeared to be an ancient nightshirt the color of a burial shroud that managed to be both out of Dickens and out of date.

Hermione pulled the neck of the nightshirt down, baring a strip of skin along his sternum. Already, she had begun to forget. The circumstances were no longer unusual. She was simply here in the present beside him, her wand clasped in her right hand.

She shook her head as if to clear it. Surely there was an explanation. Surely there was a reason why she leaned over him as she did, the point of her wand finding the ridge of his sternum mere inches from his heart. No explanation was forthcoming, however. Instead a distant hatred filled the void, answering her unasked questions. Her connection to that hatred was tenuous at best. It felt as if it were far away, removed; as if it belonged to someone else.

Tenuous or not, the hatred moved her. It moved her mind to find a spell altogether foreign and unknown to her. It moved her lips to speak the words, whisper the incantation. It moved her hands, both of them now tight fists around the wand, stacked one on top of the other around its hilt.

The wand looked no different. The surface felt familiar in her palms, the Vinewood smooth, the finish worn slightly in places as a result of her familiar grip. Yet the spell had been cast which had hardened it, forged it anew so that its tip glinted, razor-sharp, poised above his chest.

The hatred moved her hands. Somehow it knew that she wouldn't need force. It knew that the wand-blade would do the work; the spell eradicating the resistance of flesh and bone. The wand sank easily through tissue, penetrated the ribs themselves which formed the cradle around his delicate organs. It punctured with precision at only the slightest motion of her hands.

His eyes flew open. Snape gasped but the sound was cut short, collapsing into a ragged gurgle. Blood in his lungs and bubbling at his lips. His hands shot forward. He grasped, barely seeing. Pain and shock. His hands slipped through her. She fell forward on the wand and its tip perforated his back, emerging to meet the mattress beneath him.

Snape grasped again, this time making contact with her hands, her wrists. His fingers tightened around her, crushing, clenching. Hermione twisted the wand, feeling the damaged viscera inside him as it clung to the wood which had severed it so completely. A hoarse sound pushed through the burbling blood at his lips. His fingers tightened still further on her wrists, threatening to crush the delicate bones until shock began to paralyze him; the trauma seizing his body.

Blood seeped from the wound, slick on her hands, yet Snape managed to hold fast to her wrists. It wasn't until his eyes began to lose focus that she realized that his grip no longer seemed voluntary. It was the fixed rigidity of a dying body, the desperate clench of the mortally wounded.

OOO

Narcissa woke with a start. The vow was failing. Her first thought: that Draco was in danger and Snape had failed to protect him. It took her a moment to determine that this was not the case. In that instance the Unbreakable Vow would execute, killing Snape if he had indeed broken it. There was only one way for the vow to fail and that was for one of the parties involved to be in mortal danger. If either she or Snape were to die, the magic that bound them would fall inert, like so much stale earth upon an ancient grave.

The bedroom was dark, soundless. Narcissa sat up in bed and reached for her wand beside her, but it wasn't there. Perhaps she'd left it in the drawing room. She couldn't remember. In a panic she rose carefully from the bed, feeling her way along in the darkness. She found a dressing gown and pulled it on, headed in the direction of her closet.

Suddenly, she swayed on her feet. The strength of the vow's magic had dropped precipitously, fading almost to nothingness.

"Severus," she said softly, stumbling forward in the dark. She threw her hands out in front of her to steady herself and that's when they found him, standing in the doorway, barring her path.

"I had only to wait for you to give me his name, but I never would have guessed." Lucius's voice rang out eerily clam in the darkness. To the untrained ear, it may even have sounded as if he was bored, but Narcissa knew better. Her suspicions were confirmed when he pulled her forward against him, crushing her hands to the skin of his chest so that she could feel the anger which radiated from him, anger deceptively absent from his voice. "The half-blood professor, ink-stained and poor, besotted with the Potter wench long ago. All this time, I never would have guessed."

Narcissa tried to pull away, but he held fast to her. Lucius leaned down, his face dangerously close to hers.

"I salute you, Narcissa," he said with quiet irony, "for finding a lost cause, one hardly worth dying for."

OOO

The horror never crept in. It should have however, given the blood on her hands, the cold fingers circling her wrists. But Hermione could barely grasp the act before she obeyed the command. Forget. Forget. Forget. You needn't remember. You needn't remember anything ever again. You needn't know my name. You must simply close your eyes. You must simply close your mind. You are lost.

You are mine.