(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, had such small hands.

~ "somewhere i have never traveled" by e.e. cummings

Dyre was dead. Draco stood at the bedside, watching that cold fix. There had once been a story. Of a maiden who swallowed poisoned fruit. She too had lain like this, but the breath of life had not been far from her lips. She'd rested in glass, fragile and cool as ice, and Dyre looked very much like her. He too did not decay, preserved by those same mysterious forces that made time seem simple.

It was not. Nothing was simple. Not death. Not life. And not love.

It was almost three years since the end of the Tournament. Not after begging, after raging, after sitting each day in that uncomfortable chair and telling him how lonely he was had Dyre returned. Not after three years.

They never quite made the move to St. Mungos, never quite admitted that it might be permanent, even after three god damn years. After so long, he wondered why they couldn't just surrender to the fact the Dyre was never going to wake up.

When Draco graduated, there was a moment when he stood at Dyre's bedside and debated about whether he'd ever come back. (He'd been abandoned first, his heart screamed.) He stood until his legs ached and even after that, forestalling the decision in a stupid contest between his muscles and the floor. Just a little longer, he thought. When ten minutes turned into two hours into a night, he forgot for a moment why he was there, what he was there to do. And he wondered at the pain in his feet and cursed himself the fool for fighting for something useless.

The next day, he pretended it hadn't happened and went to his father's side, mockingly re-memorizing the role of a son. He lasted not even the week, crawling back over that stone with promises of desertion. (It's just for closure, he lied.) Dyre didn't even know he'd gone. And he cried and cursed him and made more promises he didn't keep. He always came back. Even when he promised he wouldn't because he promised he would.

The wyvern stayed on his nightstand, and he looked at it every night before he went to sleep, telling himself that he kept it because it was pretty, not because he thought the light would return.

Merlin, he was such a liar. Such a stupid liar.

If he sat still for long enough, he still cried. He felt phantom hands, and even though he knew he was driving himself insane, he didn't know how to stop. There was a mask as cold as Snow White's death over his features, that let him survive the freezing abyss in his chest. That too he didn't understand, couldn't contemplate in fear of drowning.

Dumbledore came to him with the name Gellart and wasn't that a story? He was angry that Dumbledore could even pretend to understand what he felt, angry that no one seemed to understand, and even angrier when they tried. But the rage skimmed inside his cool mask, met against oil, and fell. He'd screamed, and it left him with only broken things.

So what that he existed in a shell, forever waiting for something he didn't even elieve in? He was his father's heir. He made most the right moves, let the old mothers with winking daughters fawn over him like fresh mackerel, and if he lacked passion, what did he care? If he married them, what did it matter? His father's office was flooded with proposals, with their rosy faces and shackled ambitions. What did he care? They should be lucky he was moving at all, not when it was such a fucking chore to rise in the morning and to sink into bed at night.

What did he care?

On his good days, Draco imagined Dyre's body disappearing. He imagined everything just stopping and that he never had to worry about any of this again. On his bad days, he imagined him waking up. Those were days when the hole in his chest tried to kill him, when everything he touched reminded him of things that weren't there and he couldn't breathe without an echo.

When he'd whisper dreams and pretend that his limbs were slowly falling off, one by one by one.

o.O.o

April fifth, Lily did not hold classes. She spent the day in the infirmary. And she carried flowers.

She didn't know why. She associated bringing flowers to two things, James and funerals. Neither were adequate here, so she didn't know what purpose they served. But each year, they were here with her, always beautiful and always white. Last year, it was orchids, the year before lilies. This year, it was roses.

She didn't plant them in the vase, the one small touch of homeliness persistent through the years. (Temporary, it was just temporary, she reminded herself.) Usually, marigolds sat in the urn, or daisies or some bright flower that Lily never cared to ask who delivered. Dumbledore and Sirius were the only ones left with such sentimentality, and only Dumbledore would actually pick something so lively and bright. Her own somber, elegant things rested in her lap. She carried them in and she left with them, never able to lay them down.

Alice gave her son candy wrappers. Maybe her madness included flowers.

Lily wasn't sure if he was soulless. No spell had touched him, and God, had they tried. Even Kissed men, staring hollowly out at the world, had more function than Dyre. She wondered if she could do this for ten years, fourteen years, twenty?

When dusk began to descend, she tried to touch his cheek and could never quite manage. She left, trailing the aroma of roses, now wilted though not yet brown.

She was invisible while she walked, some form of magic or maybe she was just a ghost. She opened her quarters and threw the roses in the bin, willing to let the sick of decay overcome the beauty, thinking of both Harry and Dyre and the men they couldn't be. Faintly, she wondered what James was doing.

She was sure that she still loved him and he her, in his own way, but the soft, insistent burning that had grown between them, that had filled the cavern of her breast, making dances and candlelight and pleasure, wasn't there anymore. Stale. It had been a struggle to keep the marriage after Halloween in 1981, years of personal, little betrayals and finally the understanding that they alone were the only ones who understood this angry pain.

This was too much. They never spoke of divorce, and even now, Lily wore the same ring on her finger, sparkling in the firelight while she coaxed bourbon down the back of her throat. But James was in Malfoy manor, attending his lord, and Lily was here, and that was the way it was.

In her youth, she had never considered being with someone work, or a responsibility. She could look back now and think that she was foolish and understand why now she just didn't have the effort to be anything other than alone.

On this one night, three years decayed, she allowed herself to cry. This was the first year though that she didn't feel the violence of it. It came silent as a single flame, a surprise when her nose started to turn stuffy. She didn't know if that was a relief. Shouldn't she rave? Shouldn't she rage and curse the world and demand things that she knew no one would grant her? For so long she'd been in this deplorable place, and she didn't know if she'd fallen so deeply now that she was numb to it, or if this was some horrible ploy for acceptance.

She almost threw the bottle against the wall but decided she didn't have the energy for that either. She stripped out of her robes and climbed into her nightclothes. The bed was smooth and cool, like a gentle sea, and she succumbed to it. She cried herself to sleep, holding her barren belly, with the taste of alcohol still clinging to her tongue.

o.O.o

She wasn't where she was supposed to be. Lily remembered falling to bed. She remembered bourbon and barrenness and roses, but she wasn't in her chambers. Stone cooled her feet, and a draft folded into her arms. Blearily, she realized that she wasn't dreaming.

She was in the castle. She was walking the castle in her nightclothes. Even while part of her realized that this was strange, that it was cold and she hadn't grabbed a stole much less a robe, she didn't stop. It was drizzling. She felt it in damp goosebumps against her flesh and the tips of her toes. She stepped into the night, the difference of stone and grass wakening her a little more.

The rain was drifting, a mist too fine to see in the dark. Just as she began to fear tripping, wondering what the hell she was doing, torches rose. There was a procession of orange flame, hissing quietly in the wet.

Mystified, she went. There was a small sense of wonder, one that had never died since she was a small girl and learning that magic ("Like fairies and leprechauns and dragons?") was real. For a moment, the world dropped away, and she was a girl again. She was big-small, and the world was small-big, and there was nothing she couldn't do. She was in a land of mist and night, and the fire was a comfort, winking secrets that Lily yearned to keep.

All too soon though, she realized where she was. The ground was still desolate, starved of green. The place where Voldemort had used her boy to summoned that demon. There were places with more bloodshed, places of terrible deeds and evil, but to Lily, this would always be the worst.

She had always avoided this place. Dumbledore had quarantined it, for practical reasons as well as personal. Something horrible resided in the earth. A force of destruction had been summoned, and though not released, it had fallen with great terror. Had Dumbledore not been so humble, it would have done much worse.

Now along the parched dusty soil, there was a creature as resilient to spells as the Hel saint. At the place where Dyre had opened a hole in the world, grew a plant, looming in the way of stooped hags with knowing eyes and greedy claws.

Lily called it a plant only because it had leaves and flora, but she always considered it more of a creature. In the light of the torches, she saw the black tendrils, thorny roots that slithered along the ground like tentacles. From the flesh, thickened, came a great bush like a heart.

Even as terrifying as the thing was, Lily could not deny that it was beautiful. The buds puckered like tiny mouths out of the fauna. Lily had never seen them flower.

She did now.

The petals burst, revealing a meaty center that glistened. They were unexpectedly fat, the pistil swollen and the stamen long as dragon tongues.

There was something sinister about them, something that begged along the hairs on her arms. Then, revealed by the torches, she realized what glistened was blood.

She swallowed, stepping back through the row of firelight. Even that was lush and lustrous. She wondered if she were to cut into the roots if she'd find blood there too. She didn't doubt it, but she wasn't sure she could stomach it.

"Lily?"

Across the way was her husband, her James. He looked as pale and frightful as she felt. He was much more properly attired, though disheveled, and she knew the difference in his hair that meant he'd been running his hands through it and the unkempt appearance that told her of sleepless nights and his choice poison of whiskey.

He looked utterly lost, gazing at her from over the cruel beauty of the harbinger. His glasses were misted, she noted absently.

"What are we doing here?"

She shook her head and noticed that all of her hair carried droplets as well, which for a moment almost drove her insane, thinking it too was blood. She was suddenly glad he was there. That she wasn't alone.

The plant seemed to stretch taut then sigh, and Lily thought the movement reminded her of someone waking from a nap.

"Through the eye of god, we see no evil."

She shuddered. Lily didn't know the voice, but she felt it run through her like an old nursery rhyme. She grabbed her shoulders, shivering.

"It is but a veil of truths," started another.

"We seek the all-seeing," mote the last.

They came as one but from different corners, meeting from the darkness into the light of the plant. The old crone with her rheumy eyes had changed none, but the girl and mother, who years ago had somewhat resembled Dyre, now looked more like her. Wyrd had the short red hair and freckles of her youth, even if the length of her body and its pallor was wrong. Ver∂andi too had red hair that shone copper. Lily had only ever been that plump once, in pregnancy, and her hair had never fallen in froths like that. A wet, distended glint of her smile that did not match Lily's at all.

The rage exploded before she even thought.

"What do you want? What can you possibly want?" she screamed, grabbing her hair. "You took my baby from me! What could you possibly want now, you filthy hags!"

They gazed back serenely both with and without eyes. Lily's chest split open, full of sobs and whimpers she wished she could pretend were not real.

"They came to give him back."

This voice she knew. Dumbledore, who stood at the edge of the torch's light, looked like he'd come the normal route through the castle. There was a small ward to keep the rain from him, but he walked with the heaviness of weight not his own. Dumbledore had always been ancient, but only after Dyre had he become old.

"What?" she stuttered, glancing back and forth between the two, still stained with tears.

James remained on the other side of the circle, swallowing. His eyes were both dark and bright, half-mad with liquor.

"I always wondered, Lily," Dumbledore said softly, stepping beside her. "I woke every morning for this night," he confessed so quietly she almost couldn't hear. He looked up. "They've come because Dyre has paid the price." He looked to her when she still did not understand. "It has been three years."

Something clicked like a fallen brick into an old wall. A memory, the Three again, dancing in a circle of salt, a rhyme and a prophecy she'd lost in the pain of grief.

She grabbed her chest, fisting where the gown clumped.

"I can have him back?"

Dumbledore looked at her, a look of compassion mixed with pain, but he did not answer, turning instead to the Three. They gazed back, corporeal as mist. Helpless, Lily turned to them too.

"Dyre Durmstrang died," Wryd said in a soft, lovely voice. She looked at her with the hollow vessels of her eyes. "One to die, so the other may live."

"But they both died," she cried again, tearing her lip with her nails.

Ver∂andi gave her a smile at once tender and malicious. The other two shared a look, undecipherable before seeming to surrender something beyond their understanding.

"Ask," the girl said.

Lily panicked, so terrified of making a mistake she couldn't speak. James looked much the same. Mercifully, Dumbledore set a hand on her shoulder.

"What do we need, to have that child returned to us?"

"The three," the crone said. "The body, the soul, and the spirit. Only the three can return that child to you."

He nodded. "How do we find the spirit?"

Ver∂andi stared passed them, with eyes that seemed bloated on rot. Her lips made the movement of a snake. When Lily turned, she saw a pale Draco Malfoy peeling away from the column. If he, like she, had been called, she did not know. If he'd followed James from the manor or her from the school, or even Dumbledore. He approached, looking like he was going to throw up.

Ver∂andi lifted her arm, stretching out one black-tinted finger. "He will know the way."

Draco looked more confused and lost than Lily, shaking his head in disbelief, but the Norns said no more. After a longer moment, Dumbledore nodded.

"And the soul?"

"That, we have kept," Skuld said, jowls wobbling with her jaw.

"I will pay the way," Dumbledore said almost immediately. He stepped forward.

Wyrd held her hand. "It was that child's wish. At the end of his payment, to be returned to you. He made this child," she said, brushing a petal. "Should you chose to follow."

"Then, the payment for answers..." he drifted off as Wyrd continued to shake her head.

"That too was paid," Skuld said, looking further into the distance of the scorched ground. "By that child."

Lily was no longer sure who they were talking about as the three grew silent. She wanted to get this over with. She didn't care anymore what old gods or old hags said. She wanted her baby.

Skuld gave her look, and if Lily wasn't sure, there might have been an eyebrow raised on her ruined face.

Wyrd plucked the blossom curled in her hand with a pinch of nail. The plant gave a small cry, like that of a babe, shrinking in on itself. The girl pranced and delivered the flower, strange and beautiful, to her sister, the crone.

Silently, she offered the young bud to Lily.

Anticipation. Fear. At a distance, the Norns were strange, old fables halfway brought to life, but up close, they were terrifying. She took a breath and broached the distance, feeling horribly alone even with Dumbledore behind her and James coming to join him. Draco shivered, alone even beside them.

Finally, she was able to pluck the flower. It was so warm. Unexpectedly so. Soft with new life. She gazed down at it in awe, suddenly horrified at the prospect of eating it. It seemed like no more than a small child.

Blood shone in its pearly center, dripping down the stamens. There was a flutter like a pulse against her fingers.

"Life is sacrifice," Ver∂andi said, though her mouth seemed connected to all three.

Lily looked at her and gasped. She wondered how she could have ever thought that the goddess was crude. Her swollen eyes were filled with potency and she could see herself, cringing when she lost her virginity, smiling at she mounted her husband, screaming when he thrust into her backside. She could smell the wetness of sex. It was wrapped in Ver∂andi's hair, the veins in her wrists. For a moment, Lily even smelled the terrifying scent of Harry's birthing, brutal and mysterious.

But there was love as much as there was desire, a mother's love as much as a wife's.

There was greatness in all of the three, making Lily feel so pathetically human. They could do unimaginable harm, but there was understanding, pain and pleasure and horrible and wonderful things.

The goddess gave her a slick smile, and Lily knew that she found beauty in everything - the depraved, the ugly, the weak, monsters and mothers alike. It was a terrible thought. Like the love of a rapist.

She looked down at her small, fat flower. It was her choice. Never before would she have thought to weigh the life of a flower against that of her son, but holding it in her hand, she couldn't help but find herself evil.

She slipped it into her mouth. It screamed quietly as she chewed, and she felt tears running down her face. It had the simple taste of fresh blood but that only made it worse. This was what it felt, she decided, to be a monster.

"Only you can retrieve him," Ver∂andi told her, touching her arms. It was like being touched by the walls of a womb. She swayed in their hold, dizzy.

"The way was not meant for the living to pass," Wyrd said, coming to her side. "Do not stray, little mother."

"Why?" she whispered, about all things.

They did not answer.

The earth trembled. The plant, the wicked thing that she had feared and hated and briefly loved, withered. It keened as it died, and Lily imagined that it too begged to be saved. It sunk into the ground, a short, brittle, black weed, and when it made its last appeal, it cracked and sundered onto ash.

Lily could still taste the ripe blood of the flower. On her hands and knees, she brushed away the burned skeleton and dug. This ground alone was soft with death, moving with her touch in richness. At last, her fingers felt wood. It was odd, smooth and molded, and after she cleared the soot and debris, she found a door. It was small, the same size as the plant, with tarnished brass handles.

For all the world, it looked like the door to a cupboard.

Lily stared at it, wondering if she could get through at all.

A woman, she didn't know who, perhaps her own mother, hummed in her ear. She opened the door into black.

"Bring him back, Lily," James whispered.

Into the moaning, on the wet night of April fifth, Lily climbed through the door to Hel.