Lighter dark for boque
Title: Lighter dark
Author: hibernater
Giftee: boque
Pairing: background Seamus/Dean, Seamus/Pansy
Rating: PG
Word count: ~ 4200
Summary: Request is: here One of the thousands of stories, one of the thousands of wars. One of the thousands of magics. This one was mine, that was all.
Notes: Many thanks to kaalee for the extension and M for the read through! ♥
Every time we get together at the dimly lit Leaky with its special stools for hags, or the bright Three Broomsticks with its irrepressible cheer, or the smoky Hanged Man with its animate bagpipes on a centre dais, Harry always gets pissed off his arse and raises a tankard to "Remus Lupin! The best Defence teacher we ever had!" And the entire crowd around him erupts with, "Hear! Hear!" and sundry whoops. They all roar for a while, and Harry looks flushed and bleary and as firm as he can swaying on his bum, and squints around till he finds me and raises his tankard again, in confirmation or in challenge- depending on how inebriated he is, and what kind of week he's had. I always smile with eyebrows lifted in as much Malfoyish mockery as I can muster and raise my tankard back at him before we gulp down our mead.
No, I bloody well don't think a werewolf is the best Defence teacher we ever had! Hermione would snort in that contemptuous way she has- of making people feel like absolute dirt- and toss her head in frustration. Prejudiced? Yeah, maybe I am. But I'll tell you this. There is never an empty Old Wives' Tale. Count Dracula does not disappear in a puff of mist and shadow, but he damn well exists. And before you ask, yes, I speak from personal experience, and no, this story is not about him.
I'm a half-blood, but my mother's family had all been purebloods for nigh on four hundred years. Of course there's a squib born now and then, but that's just the nature of the beast. Of magic. Magic is a living, breathing gift that you either have or you don't, and it extracts its own price from both the individual wizard and the society that it has a symbiotic relationship with. Much like a child, now that I think about it. A man pays every price in the book for having a child, and they say it takes a village to raise one.
So we were purebloods, and not the kind of sappy purebloods the Weasleys are either. Our wizardry was deep and abiding as the earth we had tilled for centuries. We knew magic, we felt it in our breath and our bones. Despite the fact that my mother threw away the majority of this understanding when she embraced the Muggle world, I did inherit some of her ancestral craft. Or art.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not a Death Eater. I never was nor thought I could be. If one can hear the hum of magic in sea and stone, in the air and the blood of the Wizarding World, one cannot follow a creature that tries to subvert the natural order of life itself. But magic is a fragile thing, and I know the touch of the mundane world destroys it. Not directly, no. But Muggles have been without magic for so long that they can no longer perceive it. They cannot comprehend how intensely it is a part of a wizard, how much of a wizard's senses are dependent on it. They think of it as trickery, as play. They do not even begin to imagine the enormity of intention that is behind the changes we work into the very fabric of existence when we transform our world.
When a witch begins to compromise, use less and less of her power, her power begins to wane. Or rather, it begins to seep away from her. It begins to leave. And don't say that a witch living with a fearful, or jealous, or contemptuous, or dangerously magic-enamoured Muggle spouse can continue to use and think about magic the same way as before, just don't. There was a reason we stopped interacting with Muggles, you know, apart from the inconvenience of having to cast flame-freezing charms every time we were caught and burnt at the stake. The Malfoys of the Wizarding world are right about the dilution of magic; it just doesn't come from Muggle blood. It comes from their minds.
So no, I don't endorse You Know Who or his followers, but I know there is logic behind their cause, because I feel the hollow heaviness of the Muggle world and do believe it should be kept away from ours. I also feel the darkness of Dark magic. I felt it in Remus Lupin, and I felt it in Dean for those few moments, while . . . While.
Dean and I were best friends from the moment he stepped into our compartment on the Hogwarts Express- Neville's and mine- and began to talk in that lower London accent. I'd never met a muggle born wizard before- my friends had always been either purebloods or Muggles, and just as he discovered magic in our mundane sweets and our uncomfortable train, I discovered magic in Dean's hands. When he spoke his fingers danced, and when he drew- tense and concentrated and relaxed all at once- they were the steadiest things I've seen.
After Dumbledore died and they shut down the school, Dean and I went to find Harry, and tell him we wanted to help. Dean came to see me, and told me he was going, did I want to come? And really, of course I didn't. I wanted to enjoy the extended vacation, wanted to help out my Da in the little radio and TV repair shop he ran down by the best bar in three counties, wanted to lie in my Mam's garden with its sweet peas and see if I couldn't see about getting it on with one of the pretty Hammond girls. But I didn't want to say that to Dean, who came with warm hands, dark, serious eyes and tales of war to make me feel trivial and selfish and childish.
So I laughed it off for a while and dragged him around my parents' house, showed him around the woods and told him to stay a while. I thought if I had time I'd change his mind, but really, whenever did that happen- me change his mind? He'd convinced me in fifth year- silently and reproachlessly- that Potter wasn't a mad bastard (no, it wasn't the article- I was already convinced before Harry had that published), and he convinced me in what should've been seventh year- with quiet laughter and distant looks over the next week- that there was somewhere else we needed to be.
We sent an owl to Lupin- who'd been in the hospital wing at Hogwarts after the Death Eater attack, and who Dean had always been a great fan of- asking him if he knew about the war. He came in person the next day, reeking of Darkness and smiling that mild, comfortable smile that made Dean unfold in a way that made my throat burn. I slipped out with him and Dean without Mam finding out, because one: she would've brought the house down with tears, recriminations- anything at all that would stop me, and two: because she would've called the Werewolf Registry and have Lupin locked up for the rest of his natural life for trespassing. He took us to a decrepit, grand old house in London, where Harry was staying too (we found out only later that it was his house, that he'd inherited it from Sirius Black, but that's another story, and I'm sure you've heard it already, better told than I could hope to do third hand) with Ron and Hermione.
They were surprised to see us, and Harry's mouth twisted with annoyance at having two more people in a fight he wanted to fight alone. No, don't be stupid- of course he wasn't concerned with credit for the damn war, he was afraid. He was always afraid that people he knew would die; I think if he could've, he would've locked us in cupboards till he'd sorted old Voldemort out, and then he'd've let us inherit the earth. No, he's no martyr either, nor a saint, but he hates seeing people he knows in trouble. That's the one virtue even I don't deny him. He hates it. Voldemort took advantage of that in the end, with Snape and Malfoy in the . . . but that's another story too.
Anyway, Harry hates seeing people he knows in trouble, especially if it's because of him, and he had this niggling little, mad idea that the fact Voldemort was alive was his fault. It wasn't even an idea- just a shadow of the shed skin of an idea; an ingrained, unconsciously rock-solid foundation of belief that was so unapparent no one saw it, and so no one thought to correct it, not even the Chosen One himself. So he felt unfathomably guilty about anyone else fighting this war, which is why I say he'd've let us inherit the earth after he'd cleaned it of the scourge that was the Dark Lord.
Ron was glad to see us, even if he did send dark looks Dean's way whenever Ginny was present, or was mentioned, or was referred to, or was hinted at, or whenever Ron happened to think of her. I found this endlessly amusing, even though I felt slightly sick myself, when it happened . . .
Ah, you've caught the pattern, have you? Of my feeing odd aches around Dean? Well, I hadn't. I never thought about Dean at all, except that he was like a wall I leant against. When he wasn't there I kept mentally stumbling backward, surprised at its- at his- absence, or I kept looking back to see if it- he- was back yet. I felt . . . off-balance, but assumed it was how one felt, about best mates.
Parkinson once asked me, when we were drunk, how I could've been so blind to attraction- wasn't I a normal, horny teenage boy? At that time I didn't have an answer- mostly because I couldn't think, I couldn't even see her face in the candle light, I was that drunk- but I thought about it a lot, later. Thing was, I was always with Dean, so the fact that I got hard around him didn't mean anything, to me. Besides, I didn't think about Dean very successfully, I'd been doing it for years. In our family we never spoke about love; I didn't think I loved my parents either, just that ma was an ace cook and an ace healer for bruised knees, and that Da was the best kind of adult bloke I knew: everything about him, from eyes to feet on winter mornings, was warm. Coincidentally, the same was true for Dean. Parkinson said I had an Elektra complex when I told her that, but I don't know what the hell she was talking about.
Anyway, so we were settled in at Grimmauld Place, and like us, others got in touch with McGonagall, or Moody- who was made Advisor to the Head of the Auror Office at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for the period of the war, or Shacklebolt, or Diggory, or even Dung Fletcher (no one else ever approached Lupin voluntarily, for which I was glad in a way I knew even then was, in Parkinson's- in Pansy's words, puerile) and as the average age of a member of the Order of the Phoenix grew younger, a bunch of Hogwarts' kids joined us at the house. First there were Longbottom and Lovegood, then Justin Finch-Fletchly- whose house Bellatrix Lestrange apparently torched, then there were Susan Bones and Hannah Abbot- who wanted good, old-fashioned revenge, and finally, Pansy Parkinson and Theo Nott- she'd gotten a hysterical owl from Draco Malfoy but her parents had told her to forget about it, and his father was still in prison.
"I was rattling around the house," he said. "I was bored." Yeah, right.
We almost became friends at once- Parkinson and I, mostly because the two of us were the only ones who really disliked Lupin. So we rolled our eyes at his back, and mocked the others when they mooned over him or praised him inordinately, and generally criticised him a lot. Apparently he'd been stern with Malfoy a few times in school, and Pansy was crazy about Malfoy. Also, he was a werewolf, and Parkinson's mother was a Seer of the old school, and with unadulterated, old blood running through her veins Pansy could see Darkness in him the way I could. We never talked about that, but he entered the room one day and Parkinson and I looked at each other by chance, with uneasy eyes, and knew the other saw it too. She stood up from where she was sitting next to Nott, came over to sit by me, and that was that.
But then one day she ruined it by calling Dean a Mudblood. She'd sat through the meal very quiet and observant-like- which was unusually mature of her, but we were all a little unusually mature- while the rest of us horsed around like we were wont to do after DA meetings or Quidditch games, and afterward as we trooped up to the maze of bedrooms on the second, third, and fourth floors, she pulled at my sleeve and whispered, "Just kiss him."
"What?" I asked, much too loudly for her to do anything but roll her eyes and climb on up toward her and Hermione's room without explaining further.
I just stood there for a moment with my heart inexplicably beating like it wanted to jump into my mouth, then shook my head at the insanity of Slytherins, and decided Parkinson's horrible nose probably wasn't as unattractive to me as I'd always imagined. Because obviously that had been some kind of invitation, and obviously- since it had got me all hot and bothered- I'd liked it. I was just a bit puzzled about why exactly that might be, but that could be worked out later.
Then Dean had poked his head out to ask me if I was going to stand in the cold (it was summer, and not cold at all) hall all night. "Do you and Parkinson want some privacy?" he asked with a smirk, and Parkinson laughed over her shoulder.
"I would never touch a Mudblood's leavings, Thomas," she said cuttingly, and continued up the stairs as though oblivious to the outrage erupting around her.
"You're such a doxy's shit, Parkinson," I started, but Dean had already pulled me into the room.
"Leave it, it's just a word." The door closed behind us and I heard Ron snarling at Pansy, and then heard her laughing some more.
"It's a stupid word," I said savagely, and Neville blinked at me from the bed, where he was unpacking.
"I don't think she even thought about it, before saying it," he said.
Dean laughed as we heard Hermione and Ginny thundering up after Parkinson and the door to Harry, Ron and Nott's room slammed shut. "Oh, she notices," he said with a half-smile. "She just doesn't care." He ran a hand through his minimal hair, which irritated me even more, for some reason. Or maybe it was Nott's low laughter in the next room- I never could do Cause and Consequence puzzles.
Dean was looking at me sideways, like I was a basket of fruit he wanted to draw, but couldn't get the light to catch properly. "Anyway, she called you my leavings," he said, faux-sly, with an implicit almost-question I couldn't hear, couldn't hear at all. "Shouldn't you be worried about that?"
I shrugged, careless and distant and smirking because it was what was needed, right then. I just didn't know how to do it, all of a sudden. I was floating in a haze, or watching myself from some place else; inwardly I felt Petrified and still and utterly cold. "Why should I? My reputation precedes me. But she can't call you that, you are a . . ." And then I stopped, as feeling rushed back with a dizzying roar.
"A Mudblood," Dean finished quietly, leaning over his trunk.
"Muggle-born," Neville said, voice strong and low, and I could have kissed him if I could have moved. "You know what he meant, Dean, we're all here."
Dean was looking at me coolly, head cocked and hands still on the clothes in his trunk. "But Seam didn't want to be here, did you, Seamus?" I couldn't say a thing, so I looked away, walked over to my own trunk and began rummaging for pajamas. "I had to force . . ."
Neville laughed, and I wondered why he couldn't feel the air in the room grow suffocatingly thick with the same ugly thing that Dark Magic is all about. With hate, and fear, and regret. "You never forced anyone in your life, Thomas, you wouldn't know where to start."
He was wrong, so wrong I can't wrap my head around the wrongness. Or maybe it was just me Dean could always force, in his dispassionate, remote way. He'd explained it best: he'd once told me a person is shards of personality, shards of experience that have flocked together by chance, floating around in a void. Dean said we were all these bunches of weird experience-shards floating around and affecting other bunches of experience-shards- by gravity or magnetism, or by touching each other, losing shards in each other and gaining shards from each other*. Maybe he was right, and Dean's shards of personality came too close to mine, maybe I let them come too close to mine, so that I couldn't imagine my own without his, anymore. Or maybe he was wrong, and I alone became shards of personality, just by believing him.
Maybe I broke because I began to expect I would break apart, without him.
He and I both laughed with Neville, both went to sleep, both woke and asked McGonagall for real work, were both assigned to Lupin, as his bodyguards- so to speak- when he met with the vampires, the half-hearted or the trapped Death Eaters, the goblins who'd been ejected from their little cliques, the werewolves that escaped from Fenrir Greyback's pack. Neither of us looked at the other, for no reason that either could articulate. Well, perhaps Dean could, but he never did. Not when Amycus Carrow shut the three of us in the Malfoys' dungeon for three weeks, not when Lupin Changed and mauled him, and I just sat there, horror-stricken and frozen again, too much of a coward, too empty a Gryffindor to move. He screamed almost all night- werewolves immobilise their prey but eat them alive, for as long as they can- but he never said anything to me.
Parkinson was the only one to ask me how I survived- I've never told her. Truth is- everyone's favourite professor didn't attack me at all. He was too busy with Dean.
Lupin Changed back near dawn, and vomited for hours. He didn't make any other sound, didn't look at me or away from me, was calm as only a predator can be, because after all, we'd all known what was coming for weeks. We'd hoped something would happen to stop it, but we did know. So Lupin awoke and I'm sure he was actually quite relieved, to see I was still alive and in a way, unhurt. He didn't flinch from what he'd done- I'll give him that- and he was too kind to be kind to me. He simply smeared Dean's blood on me, and waited with me for Carrow to return, giggling, with Greyback at his heels. Told them he'd had enough, told them I was alive, and a werewolf. If it had been Lucius Malfoy, Remus would never have been able to fool him, but Voldemort was still furious with Malfoy, and had paradoxically left him in the one place that was truly safe- Azkaban prison. Greyback slid open the door to drag us out and Lupin killed him. I don't know exactly how it happened, just as I don't know how I killed Carrow. I just know we did, because I returned to Grimmauld Place with Carrow's wand, unharmed. I think that Lupin could have returned if he'd wanted to- he could've killed Greyback cleanly- but he got himself torn to shreds- it was astounding how controlled his murderous fury was, how precise. Harry had told Pansy and I once when we were making sarcastic comments about his mild-manneredness, how he'd been prepared to kill Peter Pettigrew all those years ago. We hadn't really believed him, hadn't believed Lupin had ever meant it. I think Harry still hates the two of us for it a little, the more now Lupin is dead.
Pansy let me fuck her the night after I spent thirty hours sleeping, sometimes with the aid of Sleeping Draughts, but mostly because I was knackered and half-dead with . . . with so much emotion I thought I'd die from it. Grief and hate and rage- it was because of the night Dean died that I became an Auror, after the war. It was a very simple thing, the decision. Parkinson was sitting at my bedside when I awoke. She said, "What will you do?"
And I answered, "Be an Auror," and then I retreated back under the sheets. My voice was hoarse from tears and from screaming and something else that felt like atrophy- that felt like I was going to choke to death, wheezing my last breaths like Great Uncle Silas. I was afraid, so afraid of the world outside my cocoon, a world without Dean in it that I was afraid to think, to breathe, and Pansy just smoothed down the sheets, smoothed down a few wrinkles on my sleeve, and looked at me till I opened my eyes again. I asked her what the fuck she wanted. She bent down and kissed me.
It was pity- I knew it even then. She pitied me, but she was desperately unhappy to see my grief because we'd smiled at each other behind Lupin's back, and she was probably thinking about Dean laughing as she called him a Mudblood and regretting it a very, very little bit. But mostly, her mouth was warm like Dean's hands, and the embarrassing, supernovic explosion of pleasure at her touch almost wiped out Dean's absence from my mind, just for a moment. So I lurched up and promptly pulled her down, undressed her- my hands flying everywhere- and kissed her everywhere with a bizarre mixture of an absolute, stunning lack of self-consciousness about the sex after years of torturing myself about what the first time would be like, a burning shame at the litany of Deandeandeandean in my head, and the still worse shame still of wanting, wanting Pansy with a greater intensity than I had ever wanted anything in my life. Except perhaps the intensity with which I wanted Dean, just then. So I shut my eyes, and when she came I covered hers too, as though I could block out not just her but reality itself. Because in that moment when only she and I existed, if she didn't know what was real and I didn't, for a moment, no one did. Then Pansy whispered, "Draco," and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Draco died in the war too, an anonymous death we only heard about because Snape had written to Narcissa Malfoy about it, and Narcissa Malfoy kept all her correspondence, to prove that she was never a Death eater. It didn't help her much- she was found guilty of aiding and abetting or some such, and died with Lucius in Azkaban. I don't know what would have happened, if he had lived. Whether Pansy would've . . . no, of course I know. She would've wanted him.
We didn't go back to her parents' house, ever, and after Bellatrix destroyed Twopatrick- that was where my Da's shop was- I never went home. Mam and Da settled near Diagon Alley after all, and saw Pansy and I once a year, which almost seemed too much when Mam started talking about grandchildren, and how accursed she was in her son, who wasn't a poof but couldn't oblige his old Mam with a sprog or two. Pansy invariably broke a plate or two, more often than not the one that had the Christmas turkey. I got to know Theo pretty well. He and Pans don't get along, so Theo and I get along like a house on fire. He can't draw, and he can't fly, but one can't have everything. It always amazes me that not a single Weasley died in the war. I never said anything, though, because Hermione told me once that Molly's maiden name was Prewett, and even in Ireland, Gideon and Fabian Prewett were legendary. And in any case, the way the Weasleys are related to other purebloods, the nine of them were attending funerals every day for weeks after the Dark Lord died. Excuse me, Voldemort.
But that's 'After The War' and this story wasn't supposed to be about that, not really. It was . . . it was just a story. One among thousands of stories, one among thousands of wars. One among thousands of magics. This one was mine, that was all.
-fin-
*This is a paraphrased explanation- I didn't make it up. I just can't remember who did; my Theatre professor at college used to quote it at us.
Author: hibernater
Giftee: boque
Pairing: background Seamus/Dean, Seamus/Pansy
Rating: PG
Word count: ~ 4200
Summary: Request is: here One of the thousands of stories, one of the thousands of wars. One of the thousands of magics. This one was mine, that was all.
Notes: Many thanks to kaalee for the extension and M for the read through! ♥
Every time we get together at the dimly lit Leaky with its special stools for hags, or the bright Three Broomsticks with its irrepressible cheer, or the smoky Hanged Man with its animate bagpipes on a centre dais, Harry always gets pissed off his arse and raises a tankard to "Remus Lupin! The best Defence teacher we ever had!" And the entire crowd around him erupts with, "Hear! Hear!" and sundry whoops. They all roar for a while, and Harry looks flushed and bleary and as firm as he can swaying on his bum, and squints around till he finds me and raises his tankard again, in confirmation or in challenge- depending on how inebriated he is, and what kind of week he's had. I always smile with eyebrows lifted in as much Malfoyish mockery as I can muster and raise my tankard back at him before we gulp down our mead.
No, I bloody well don't think a werewolf is the best Defence teacher we ever had! Hermione would snort in that contemptuous way she has- of making people feel like absolute dirt- and toss her head in frustration. Prejudiced? Yeah, maybe I am. But I'll tell you this. There is never an empty Old Wives' Tale. Count Dracula does not disappear in a puff of mist and shadow, but he damn well exists. And before you ask, yes, I speak from personal experience, and no, this story is not about him.
I'm a half-blood, but my mother's family had all been purebloods for nigh on four hundred years. Of course there's a squib born now and then, but that's just the nature of the beast. Of magic. Magic is a living, breathing gift that you either have or you don't, and it extracts its own price from both the individual wizard and the society that it has a symbiotic relationship with. Much like a child, now that I think about it. A man pays every price in the book for having a child, and they say it takes a village to raise one.
So we were purebloods, and not the kind of sappy purebloods the Weasleys are either. Our wizardry was deep and abiding as the earth we had tilled for centuries. We knew magic, we felt it in our breath and our bones. Despite the fact that my mother threw away the majority of this understanding when she embraced the Muggle world, I did inherit some of her ancestral craft. Or art.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not a Death Eater. I never was nor thought I could be. If one can hear the hum of magic in sea and stone, in the air and the blood of the Wizarding World, one cannot follow a creature that tries to subvert the natural order of life itself. But magic is a fragile thing, and I know the touch of the mundane world destroys it. Not directly, no. But Muggles have been without magic for so long that they can no longer perceive it. They cannot comprehend how intensely it is a part of a wizard, how much of a wizard's senses are dependent on it. They think of it as trickery, as play. They do not even begin to imagine the enormity of intention that is behind the changes we work into the very fabric of existence when we transform our world.
When a witch begins to compromise, use less and less of her power, her power begins to wane. Or rather, it begins to seep away from her. It begins to leave. And don't say that a witch living with a fearful, or jealous, or contemptuous, or dangerously magic-enamoured Muggle spouse can continue to use and think about magic the same way as before, just don't. There was a reason we stopped interacting with Muggles, you know, apart from the inconvenience of having to cast flame-freezing charms every time we were caught and burnt at the stake. The Malfoys of the Wizarding world are right about the dilution of magic; it just doesn't come from Muggle blood. It comes from their minds.
So no, I don't endorse You Know Who or his followers, but I know there is logic behind their cause, because I feel the hollow heaviness of the Muggle world and do believe it should be kept away from ours. I also feel the darkness of Dark magic. I felt it in Remus Lupin, and I felt it in Dean for those few moments, while . . . While.
Dean and I were best friends from the moment he stepped into our compartment on the Hogwarts Express- Neville's and mine- and began to talk in that lower London accent. I'd never met a muggle born wizard before- my friends had always been either purebloods or Muggles, and just as he discovered magic in our mundane sweets and our uncomfortable train, I discovered magic in Dean's hands. When he spoke his fingers danced, and when he drew- tense and concentrated and relaxed all at once- they were the steadiest things I've seen.
After Dumbledore died and they shut down the school, Dean and I went to find Harry, and tell him we wanted to help. Dean came to see me, and told me he was going, did I want to come? And really, of course I didn't. I wanted to enjoy the extended vacation, wanted to help out my Da in the little radio and TV repair shop he ran down by the best bar in three counties, wanted to lie in my Mam's garden with its sweet peas and see if I couldn't see about getting it on with one of the pretty Hammond girls. But I didn't want to say that to Dean, who came with warm hands, dark, serious eyes and tales of war to make me feel trivial and selfish and childish.
So I laughed it off for a while and dragged him around my parents' house, showed him around the woods and told him to stay a while. I thought if I had time I'd change his mind, but really, whenever did that happen- me change his mind? He'd convinced me in fifth year- silently and reproachlessly- that Potter wasn't a mad bastard (no, it wasn't the article- I was already convinced before Harry had that published), and he convinced me in what should've been seventh year- with quiet laughter and distant looks over the next week- that there was somewhere else we needed to be.
We sent an owl to Lupin- who'd been in the hospital wing at Hogwarts after the Death Eater attack, and who Dean had always been a great fan of- asking him if he knew about the war. He came in person the next day, reeking of Darkness and smiling that mild, comfortable smile that made Dean unfold in a way that made my throat burn. I slipped out with him and Dean without Mam finding out, because one: she would've brought the house down with tears, recriminations- anything at all that would stop me, and two: because she would've called the Werewolf Registry and have Lupin locked up for the rest of his natural life for trespassing. He took us to a decrepit, grand old house in London, where Harry was staying too (we found out only later that it was his house, that he'd inherited it from Sirius Black, but that's another story, and I'm sure you've heard it already, better told than I could hope to do third hand) with Ron and Hermione.
They were surprised to see us, and Harry's mouth twisted with annoyance at having two more people in a fight he wanted to fight alone. No, don't be stupid- of course he wasn't concerned with credit for the damn war, he was afraid. He was always afraid that people he knew would die; I think if he could've, he would've locked us in cupboards till he'd sorted old Voldemort out, and then he'd've let us inherit the earth. No, he's no martyr either, nor a saint, but he hates seeing people he knows in trouble. That's the one virtue even I don't deny him. He hates it. Voldemort took advantage of that in the end, with Snape and Malfoy in the . . . but that's another story too.
Anyway, Harry hates seeing people he knows in trouble, especially if it's because of him, and he had this niggling little, mad idea that the fact Voldemort was alive was his fault. It wasn't even an idea- just a shadow of the shed skin of an idea; an ingrained, unconsciously rock-solid foundation of belief that was so unapparent no one saw it, and so no one thought to correct it, not even the Chosen One himself. So he felt unfathomably guilty about anyone else fighting this war, which is why I say he'd've let us inherit the earth after he'd cleaned it of the scourge that was the Dark Lord.
Ron was glad to see us, even if he did send dark looks Dean's way whenever Ginny was present, or was mentioned, or was referred to, or was hinted at, or whenever Ron happened to think of her. I found this endlessly amusing, even though I felt slightly sick myself, when it happened . . .
Ah, you've caught the pattern, have you? Of my feeing odd aches around Dean? Well, I hadn't. I never thought about Dean at all, except that he was like a wall I leant against. When he wasn't there I kept mentally stumbling backward, surprised at its- at his- absence, or I kept looking back to see if it- he- was back yet. I felt . . . off-balance, but assumed it was how one felt, about best mates.
Parkinson once asked me, when we were drunk, how I could've been so blind to attraction- wasn't I a normal, horny teenage boy? At that time I didn't have an answer- mostly because I couldn't think, I couldn't even see her face in the candle light, I was that drunk- but I thought about it a lot, later. Thing was, I was always with Dean, so the fact that I got hard around him didn't mean anything, to me. Besides, I didn't think about Dean very successfully, I'd been doing it for years. In our family we never spoke about love; I didn't think I loved my parents either, just that ma was an ace cook and an ace healer for bruised knees, and that Da was the best kind of adult bloke I knew: everything about him, from eyes to feet on winter mornings, was warm. Coincidentally, the same was true for Dean. Parkinson said I had an Elektra complex when I told her that, but I don't know what the hell she was talking about.
Anyway, so we were settled in at Grimmauld Place, and like us, others got in touch with McGonagall, or Moody- who was made Advisor to the Head of the Auror Office at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for the period of the war, or Shacklebolt, or Diggory, or even Dung Fletcher (no one else ever approached Lupin voluntarily, for which I was glad in a way I knew even then was, in Parkinson's- in Pansy's words, puerile) and as the average age of a member of the Order of the Phoenix grew younger, a bunch of Hogwarts' kids joined us at the house. First there were Longbottom and Lovegood, then Justin Finch-Fletchly- whose house Bellatrix Lestrange apparently torched, then there were Susan Bones and Hannah Abbot- who wanted good, old-fashioned revenge, and finally, Pansy Parkinson and Theo Nott- she'd gotten a hysterical owl from Draco Malfoy but her parents had told her to forget about it, and his father was still in prison.
"I was rattling around the house," he said. "I was bored." Yeah, right.
We almost became friends at once- Parkinson and I, mostly because the two of us were the only ones who really disliked Lupin. So we rolled our eyes at his back, and mocked the others when they mooned over him or praised him inordinately, and generally criticised him a lot. Apparently he'd been stern with Malfoy a few times in school, and Pansy was crazy about Malfoy. Also, he was a werewolf, and Parkinson's mother was a Seer of the old school, and with unadulterated, old blood running through her veins Pansy could see Darkness in him the way I could. We never talked about that, but he entered the room one day and Parkinson and I looked at each other by chance, with uneasy eyes, and knew the other saw it too. She stood up from where she was sitting next to Nott, came over to sit by me, and that was that.
But then one day she ruined it by calling Dean a Mudblood. She'd sat through the meal very quiet and observant-like- which was unusually mature of her, but we were all a little unusually mature- while the rest of us horsed around like we were wont to do after DA meetings or Quidditch games, and afterward as we trooped up to the maze of bedrooms on the second, third, and fourth floors, she pulled at my sleeve and whispered, "Just kiss him."
"What?" I asked, much too loudly for her to do anything but roll her eyes and climb on up toward her and Hermione's room without explaining further.
I just stood there for a moment with my heart inexplicably beating like it wanted to jump into my mouth, then shook my head at the insanity of Slytherins, and decided Parkinson's horrible nose probably wasn't as unattractive to me as I'd always imagined. Because obviously that had been some kind of invitation, and obviously- since it had got me all hot and bothered- I'd liked it. I was just a bit puzzled about why exactly that might be, but that could be worked out later.
Then Dean had poked his head out to ask me if I was going to stand in the cold (it was summer, and not cold at all) hall all night. "Do you and Parkinson want some privacy?" he asked with a smirk, and Parkinson laughed over her shoulder.
"I would never touch a Mudblood's leavings, Thomas," she said cuttingly, and continued up the stairs as though oblivious to the outrage erupting around her.
"You're such a doxy's shit, Parkinson," I started, but Dean had already pulled me into the room.
"Leave it, it's just a word." The door closed behind us and I heard Ron snarling at Pansy, and then heard her laughing some more.
"It's a stupid word," I said savagely, and Neville blinked at me from the bed, where he was unpacking.
"I don't think she even thought about it, before saying it," he said.
Dean laughed as we heard Hermione and Ginny thundering up after Parkinson and the door to Harry, Ron and Nott's room slammed shut. "Oh, she notices," he said with a half-smile. "She just doesn't care." He ran a hand through his minimal hair, which irritated me even more, for some reason. Or maybe it was Nott's low laughter in the next room- I never could do Cause and Consequence puzzles.
Dean was looking at me sideways, like I was a basket of fruit he wanted to draw, but couldn't get the light to catch properly. "Anyway, she called you my leavings," he said, faux-sly, with an implicit almost-question I couldn't hear, couldn't hear at all. "Shouldn't you be worried about that?"
I shrugged, careless and distant and smirking because it was what was needed, right then. I just didn't know how to do it, all of a sudden. I was floating in a haze, or watching myself from some place else; inwardly I felt Petrified and still and utterly cold. "Why should I? My reputation precedes me. But she can't call you that, you are a . . ." And then I stopped, as feeling rushed back with a dizzying roar.
"A Mudblood," Dean finished quietly, leaning over his trunk.
"Muggle-born," Neville said, voice strong and low, and I could have kissed him if I could have moved. "You know what he meant, Dean, we're all here."
Dean was looking at me coolly, head cocked and hands still on the clothes in his trunk. "But Seam didn't want to be here, did you, Seamus?" I couldn't say a thing, so I looked away, walked over to my own trunk and began rummaging for pajamas. "I had to force . . ."
Neville laughed, and I wondered why he couldn't feel the air in the room grow suffocatingly thick with the same ugly thing that Dark Magic is all about. With hate, and fear, and regret. "You never forced anyone in your life, Thomas, you wouldn't know where to start."
He was wrong, so wrong I can't wrap my head around the wrongness. Or maybe it was just me Dean could always force, in his dispassionate, remote way. He'd explained it best: he'd once told me a person is shards of personality, shards of experience that have flocked together by chance, floating around in a void. Dean said we were all these bunches of weird experience-shards floating around and affecting other bunches of experience-shards- by gravity or magnetism, or by touching each other, losing shards in each other and gaining shards from each other*. Maybe he was right, and Dean's shards of personality came too close to mine, maybe I let them come too close to mine, so that I couldn't imagine my own without his, anymore. Or maybe he was wrong, and I alone became shards of personality, just by believing him.
Maybe I broke because I began to expect I would break apart, without him.
He and I both laughed with Neville, both went to sleep, both woke and asked McGonagall for real work, were both assigned to Lupin, as his bodyguards- so to speak- when he met with the vampires, the half-hearted or the trapped Death Eaters, the goblins who'd been ejected from their little cliques, the werewolves that escaped from Fenrir Greyback's pack. Neither of us looked at the other, for no reason that either could articulate. Well, perhaps Dean could, but he never did. Not when Amycus Carrow shut the three of us in the Malfoys' dungeon for three weeks, not when Lupin Changed and mauled him, and I just sat there, horror-stricken and frozen again, too much of a coward, too empty a Gryffindor to move. He screamed almost all night- werewolves immobilise their prey but eat them alive, for as long as they can- but he never said anything to me.
Parkinson was the only one to ask me how I survived- I've never told her. Truth is- everyone's favourite professor didn't attack me at all. He was too busy with Dean.
Lupin Changed back near dawn, and vomited for hours. He didn't make any other sound, didn't look at me or away from me, was calm as only a predator can be, because after all, we'd all known what was coming for weeks. We'd hoped something would happen to stop it, but we did know. So Lupin awoke and I'm sure he was actually quite relieved, to see I was still alive and in a way, unhurt. He didn't flinch from what he'd done- I'll give him that- and he was too kind to be kind to me. He simply smeared Dean's blood on me, and waited with me for Carrow to return, giggling, with Greyback at his heels. Told them he'd had enough, told them I was alive, and a werewolf. If it had been Lucius Malfoy, Remus would never have been able to fool him, but Voldemort was still furious with Malfoy, and had paradoxically left him in the one place that was truly safe- Azkaban prison. Greyback slid open the door to drag us out and Lupin killed him. I don't know exactly how it happened, just as I don't know how I killed Carrow. I just know we did, because I returned to Grimmauld Place with Carrow's wand, unharmed. I think that Lupin could have returned if he'd wanted to- he could've killed Greyback cleanly- but he got himself torn to shreds- it was astounding how controlled his murderous fury was, how precise. Harry had told Pansy and I once when we were making sarcastic comments about his mild-manneredness, how he'd been prepared to kill Peter Pettigrew all those years ago. We hadn't really believed him, hadn't believed Lupin had ever meant it. I think Harry still hates the two of us for it a little, the more now Lupin is dead.
Pansy let me fuck her the night after I spent thirty hours sleeping, sometimes with the aid of Sleeping Draughts, but mostly because I was knackered and half-dead with . . . with so much emotion I thought I'd die from it. Grief and hate and rage- it was because of the night Dean died that I became an Auror, after the war. It was a very simple thing, the decision. Parkinson was sitting at my bedside when I awoke. She said, "What will you do?"
And I answered, "Be an Auror," and then I retreated back under the sheets. My voice was hoarse from tears and from screaming and something else that felt like atrophy- that felt like I was going to choke to death, wheezing my last breaths like Great Uncle Silas. I was afraid, so afraid of the world outside my cocoon, a world without Dean in it that I was afraid to think, to breathe, and Pansy just smoothed down the sheets, smoothed down a few wrinkles on my sleeve, and looked at me till I opened my eyes again. I asked her what the fuck she wanted. She bent down and kissed me.
It was pity- I knew it even then. She pitied me, but she was desperately unhappy to see my grief because we'd smiled at each other behind Lupin's back, and she was probably thinking about Dean laughing as she called him a Mudblood and regretting it a very, very little bit. But mostly, her mouth was warm like Dean's hands, and the embarrassing, supernovic explosion of pleasure at her touch almost wiped out Dean's absence from my mind, just for a moment. So I lurched up and promptly pulled her down, undressed her- my hands flying everywhere- and kissed her everywhere with a bizarre mixture of an absolute, stunning lack of self-consciousness about the sex after years of torturing myself about what the first time would be like, a burning shame at the litany of Deandeandeandean in my head, and the still worse shame still of wanting, wanting Pansy with a greater intensity than I had ever wanted anything in my life. Except perhaps the intensity with which I wanted Dean, just then. So I shut my eyes, and when she came I covered hers too, as though I could block out not just her but reality itself. Because in that moment when only she and I existed, if she didn't know what was real and I didn't, for a moment, no one did. Then Pansy whispered, "Draco," and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Draco died in the war too, an anonymous death we only heard about because Snape had written to Narcissa Malfoy about it, and Narcissa Malfoy kept all her correspondence, to prove that she was never a Death eater. It didn't help her much- she was found guilty of aiding and abetting or some such, and died with Lucius in Azkaban. I don't know what would have happened, if he had lived. Whether Pansy would've . . . no, of course I know. She would've wanted him.
We didn't go back to her parents' house, ever, and after Bellatrix destroyed Twopatrick- that was where my Da's shop was- I never went home. Mam and Da settled near Diagon Alley after all, and saw Pansy and I once a year, which almost seemed too much when Mam started talking about grandchildren, and how accursed she was in her son, who wasn't a poof but couldn't oblige his old Mam with a sprog or two. Pansy invariably broke a plate or two, more often than not the one that had the Christmas turkey. I got to know Theo pretty well. He and Pans don't get along, so Theo and I get along like a house on fire. He can't draw, and he can't fly, but one can't have everything. It always amazes me that not a single Weasley died in the war. I never said anything, though, because Hermione told me once that Molly's maiden name was Prewett, and even in Ireland, Gideon and Fabian Prewett were legendary. And in any case, the way the Weasleys are related to other purebloods, the nine of them were attending funerals every day for weeks after the Dark Lord died. Excuse me, Voldemort.
But that's 'After The War' and this story wasn't supposed to be about that, not really. It was . . . it was just a story. One among thousands of stories, one among thousands of wars. One among thousands of magics. This one was mine, that was all.
-fin-
*This is a paraphrased explanation- I didn't make it up. I just can't remember who did; my Theatre professor at college used to quote it at us.