Rhapsody (Draco/Luna, with illustrations by shored) R
Title: Rhapsody
Author: hansbekhart
Illustrator: shored
Summary: And so the Manor burns. (Draco/Luna, rated R)
Notes: Done for the challenge community, 20_inkspots. Please remember the talented shored in your feedback!
She flies to the edge of the world as it burns around her. Falls slipshod down twisting staircases, ankles over knees over hands over head. Hand over hand up the banister, wax melting and smearing across her palms like sin. There’s blood between her fingers, beaten out of her by the shouts and smoke. Glory hour come far too soon and Dumbledore’s Army is shaken and beaten and far too young.
Smell of parchment burning. Hundreds of years compounding thousands of words and she never got to see any of it. Wonders if he did even as her robes catch around her knees and she nearly falls again. Screaming, far off (his mother? A woman. Ginny?) the sound of it so much louder than spells and hexes and smoke. The smoke trembles in its path, sliding out of its way even as the fire finds its voice and tries to shout down the world. It roars in her ears even as she claps bloody hands over them. Hooded figures swim through the air, ignore her, blasting holes in tapestries and paintings whose occupants shriek and the light covers them all in green and red. She thinks she’ll never find his voice again.
Naked boy in the middle of the room (not him), folded in on himself, face pressing against his stomach. Blood flows down his chin, sulky in death and magical in the heat. Must be too hot for it to clot and turn his white skin to violent poetry, some reason for it to slide from his mouth and turn his eyes to a mockery of tears. She doesn’t know him. Can’t know him (it’s not him, it isn’t). Others in the room, rolling around like animals on the carpet, smearing black across it, kicking desperately. She flees and there is no clutch around her ankles.
War upstairs. And she runs. More twists and turns than she would have thought, how did people actually live here? How did he? Elbow catches her and flings her around. Knocks a table to matchsticks beneath her body, new agonies peeling back her resolve and she can’t even look up. Can’t move (where is he?). Nobody even there when she does, somebody else’s flight interrupted but she’s been left where she fell. Lucky girl, lucky girl, and she sings it out loud.
“Hermione! Where are you?”
Bellowing. Thick smoke-coloured words. Feet stomp and pass and all’s well. Sooner or later a lion will come across her and there will be no Daniel to keep them from biting. Back on her feet.
It isn’t the lion that catches her, but the werewolf. Ravaged face and fresh blood and he catches her by the shoulder and pushes her along. Wand out, roaming ceaselessly through empty hallways and sudden silence that blossoms like cool green water. She chokes but only the fire still deafens her, the counterpoint of scream and death gone and only the bass notes remaining. He doesn’t speak.
A smile on his face that she’ll remember for the rest of her life when he turns from her. No running for him, not anymore. She knew it long ago and would have told him so but he would know too, she was sure of it. She wants to say, “Say hello to Stubby Boardman for me,” but coughs sullen blackness from her lungs instead and then he is gone.
Standing under wandering clouds then, wrists bent around bony waist and shocking cold. Rain in the air that’ll wash away the blood and ash between her fingers and she clutches them to her body. Wind lashes against her and glass cries and breaks and for a moment there is a body that arcs out over her head, equilibrium bending and twisting its limbs and it falls with the wet squish of skull. Woman. Long hair tumbling over torn robes, impossible to see the colors of the rainbow in the endless dark. Doesn’t look, doesn’t scream. Words so far away that she doesn’t know if she’ll ever find them again. Told when she was a child that the sun would rise and the world would go on but not after this.
Shouting. Blind animal staggering across the green, monstrous and shuffling. The tangle of rosebushes and beyond that a sharp voice with drawled tones and light, red and gold and green. She runs.
Thorns that rip across her skin and she should have known he would be here. Magic so old it’s fastened beneath his skin, singing through his veins and out here are monsters that shamble and lie. Escaping the old bonds, she thinks, earthworm cavities hidden beneath the blood of ages, wet breasts that swing heavy across their chests, thick hands and knuckles and somewhere among them, she hears his voice.
“Draco!”
Manor burning, really burning now. She hopes that Lupin got to see Stubby Boardman. Got to help someone else. Harry Neville Ginny Ron. Hermione (couldn’t have been her on the ground.) Dean. Anyone. Weary names in her mind and the fury of falling beams and rooms turning to ash. It blows across her skin and he turns to her and the relief in his eyes like lamplight over sharp cheekbones.
Abandons the monsters, black robes streaming behind him liquid dark and then he is there crushing her against his body. Hard chest, collarbones, solid and there and alive. “You!” she says. Voice drawn down to earth by soot and burning books with calfskin bindings.
“You!” Hand wrapped around her hair so hard it hurts, shaking fingers against the back of her neck, pulling her out of herself and into him.
“Anyone else?” he says and she shakes her head. Doesn’t know.
“Professor Lupin pulled me out. He was called Loony too, did you know?”
Earth rises beneath her feet, stomach lurching as everything catches up to it, grabs hold of her and shakes her like a child. Shuffle of clumsy feet behind them, trapped by thorns and dark and fire on the other side. Gone, all of it gone. His arms around her waist and holding her up and she cannot understand why her feet won’t carry her through.
“My family?” he asks, but she doesn’t know that either. Wants to take refuge in nonsense, keep talking and the words will pour out and sooner or later one of them will be the name of the naked boy in the room, whose blood must be cooked black by this time, bubbles popping and dissolving in the fire. Wants. No inbetween about it. No distance between too many words and not enough.
Presses warm lips to her forehead. Holds her tightly until they both stop shaking and he doesn’t say a word. She will tell him that they must go back and find their friends in the moaning ruin of his childhood. It snaps and calls to them and its screams fills the silence that once held human voices. Body getting cold on the ground, dark hair soaking up the rain that is beginning to fall. Falls on the ground and in his hair and hers and argues with the fire. It falls like a breath without words, hitting the soil and the monsters turn wet faces up to look at the grey dawn.
“Loony.” His voice in her ear. Not knowing how to offer comfort other than the circle of his arms. Far beyond it and eyes on the burning home, intense enough that she looks.
And it is light breaking across the house, light behind her eyelids and behind her heart. Knew what the monsters had been as soon as she had seen them, family magic disentegrating and leeching from the stones buried far below the ground. Monsters lurching from their tombs, seeking familiar blood. But. Underneath, something. She knows it. Knows it from the soft place in the crook of his arm. Knows the smell of it from the skin on the back of his neck. Turns towards him, stretched slow and langorous and curious. Can’t even think of the house, the boy (not Harry, not Harry she can’t be sure) a thousand years ago. Echoes of a past that sings polyphonic rising as the sky lifts, the rain falls.
She holds him. Passes through her and into him, lets it happen, hands on his waist and his eyes roll back in his head. She doesn’t let him fall. Feels the last whoosh of sound from the house as all life and music is extinguished, yoked too long and voice lifted high in the body of its keeper, the only one left now.
It anchors, holds her body tight to the ground, to him. A thousand cacophonic joyful voices that seperate and call to her. Whisper what she knows, what she’s always known and she feels truth. Power of those voices to bring anything into existance, crumple horned snorkacks, teedy tweedlebugs. All of it. The same voices inside of her, where they’ve always been, where reality and truth lies.
She lifts her own voice, and it joins the thousands, where it has always been. His face presses against her neck.
Single voice now. Quieting. Burning, she can feel it in Draco’s heart. Hand pressed to his chest and his hands over hers before dragging up and over her face, holding desperately to a lifeline, thumbs on her cheekbones and sobbing breaths hot on her mouth. Crying so hard he doesn’t seem to know it’s coming from him. Words slipping from him between see-saw breaths half-mad and broken. He knew. He understood. Grey eyes look into hers and see.
“Yes,” she says, and it’s the only word she needs.
Author: hansbekhart
Illustrator: shored
Summary: And so the Manor burns. (Draco/Luna, rated R)
Notes: Done for the challenge community, 20_inkspots. Please remember the talented shored in your feedback!
She flies to the edge of the world as it burns around her. Falls slipshod down twisting staircases, ankles over knees over hands over head. Hand over hand up the banister, wax melting and smearing across her palms like sin. There’s blood between her fingers, beaten out of her by the shouts and smoke. Glory hour come far too soon and Dumbledore’s Army is shaken and beaten and far too young.
Smell of parchment burning. Hundreds of years compounding thousands of words and she never got to see any of it. Wonders if he did even as her robes catch around her knees and she nearly falls again. Screaming, far off (his mother? A woman. Ginny?) the sound of it so much louder than spells and hexes and smoke. The smoke trembles in its path, sliding out of its way even as the fire finds its voice and tries to shout down the world. It roars in her ears even as she claps bloody hands over them. Hooded figures swim through the air, ignore her, blasting holes in tapestries and paintings whose occupants shriek and the light covers them all in green and red. She thinks she’ll never find his voice again.
Naked boy in the middle of the room (not him), folded in on himself, face pressing against his stomach. Blood flows down his chin, sulky in death and magical in the heat. Must be too hot for it to clot and turn his white skin to violent poetry, some reason for it to slide from his mouth and turn his eyes to a mockery of tears. She doesn’t know him. Can’t know him (it’s not him, it isn’t). Others in the room, rolling around like animals on the carpet, smearing black across it, kicking desperately. She flees and there is no clutch around her ankles.
War upstairs. And she runs. More twists and turns than she would have thought, how did people actually live here? How did he? Elbow catches her and flings her around. Knocks a table to matchsticks beneath her body, new agonies peeling back her resolve and she can’t even look up. Can’t move (where is he?). Nobody even there when she does, somebody else’s flight interrupted but she’s been left where she fell. Lucky girl, lucky girl, and she sings it out loud.
“Hermione! Where are you?”
Bellowing. Thick smoke-coloured words. Feet stomp and pass and all’s well. Sooner or later a lion will come across her and there will be no Daniel to keep them from biting. Back on her feet.
It isn’t the lion that catches her, but the werewolf. Ravaged face and fresh blood and he catches her by the shoulder and pushes her along. Wand out, roaming ceaselessly through empty hallways and sudden silence that blossoms like cool green water. She chokes but only the fire still deafens her, the counterpoint of scream and death gone and only the bass notes remaining. He doesn’t speak.
A smile on his face that she’ll remember for the rest of her life when he turns from her. No running for him, not anymore. She knew it long ago and would have told him so but he would know too, she was sure of it. She wants to say, “Say hello to Stubby Boardman for me,” but coughs sullen blackness from her lungs instead and then he is gone.
Standing under wandering clouds then, wrists bent around bony waist and shocking cold. Rain in the air that’ll wash away the blood and ash between her fingers and she clutches them to her body. Wind lashes against her and glass cries and breaks and for a moment there is a body that arcs out over her head, equilibrium bending and twisting its limbs and it falls with the wet squish of skull. Woman. Long hair tumbling over torn robes, impossible to see the colors of the rainbow in the endless dark. Doesn’t look, doesn’t scream. Words so far away that she doesn’t know if she’ll ever find them again. Told when she was a child that the sun would rise and the world would go on but not after this.
Shouting. Blind animal staggering across the green, monstrous and shuffling. The tangle of rosebushes and beyond that a sharp voice with drawled tones and light, red and gold and green. She runs.
Thorns that rip across her skin and she should have known he would be here. Magic so old it’s fastened beneath his skin, singing through his veins and out here are monsters that shamble and lie. Escaping the old bonds, she thinks, earthworm cavities hidden beneath the blood of ages, wet breasts that swing heavy across their chests, thick hands and knuckles and somewhere among them, she hears his voice.
“Draco!”
Manor burning, really burning now. She hopes that Lupin got to see Stubby Boardman. Got to help someone else. Harry Neville Ginny Ron. Hermione (couldn’t have been her on the ground.) Dean. Anyone. Weary names in her mind and the fury of falling beams and rooms turning to ash. It blows across her skin and he turns to her and the relief in his eyes like lamplight over sharp cheekbones.
Abandons the monsters, black robes streaming behind him liquid dark and then he is there crushing her against his body. Hard chest, collarbones, solid and there and alive. “You!” she says. Voice drawn down to earth by soot and burning books with calfskin bindings.
“You!” Hand wrapped around her hair so hard it hurts, shaking fingers against the back of her neck, pulling her out of herself and into him.
“Anyone else?” he says and she shakes her head. Doesn’t know.
“Professor Lupin pulled me out. He was called Loony too, did you know?”
Earth rises beneath her feet, stomach lurching as everything catches up to it, grabs hold of her and shakes her like a child. Shuffle of clumsy feet behind them, trapped by thorns and dark and fire on the other side. Gone, all of it gone. His arms around her waist and holding her up and she cannot understand why her feet won’t carry her through.
“My family?” he asks, but she doesn’t know that either. Wants to take refuge in nonsense, keep talking and the words will pour out and sooner or later one of them will be the name of the naked boy in the room, whose blood must be cooked black by this time, bubbles popping and dissolving in the fire. Wants. No inbetween about it. No distance between too many words and not enough.
Presses warm lips to her forehead. Holds her tightly until they both stop shaking and he doesn’t say a word. She will tell him that they must go back and find their friends in the moaning ruin of his childhood. It snaps and calls to them and its screams fills the silence that once held human voices. Body getting cold on the ground, dark hair soaking up the rain that is beginning to fall. Falls on the ground and in his hair and hers and argues with the fire. It falls like a breath without words, hitting the soil and the monsters turn wet faces up to look at the grey dawn.
“Loony.” His voice in her ear. Not knowing how to offer comfort other than the circle of his arms. Far beyond it and eyes on the burning home, intense enough that she looks.
And it is light breaking across the house, light behind her eyelids and behind her heart. Knew what the monsters had been as soon as she had seen them, family magic disentegrating and leeching from the stones buried far below the ground. Monsters lurching from their tombs, seeking familiar blood. But. Underneath, something. She knows it. Knows it from the soft place in the crook of his arm. Knows the smell of it from the skin on the back of his neck. Turns towards him, stretched slow and langorous and curious. Can’t even think of the house, the boy (not Harry, not Harry she can’t be sure) a thousand years ago. Echoes of a past that sings polyphonic rising as the sky lifts, the rain falls.
She holds him. Passes through her and into him, lets it happen, hands on his waist and his eyes roll back in his head. She doesn’t let him fall. Feels the last whoosh of sound from the house as all life and music is extinguished, yoked too long and voice lifted high in the body of its keeper, the only one left now.
It anchors, holds her body tight to the ground, to him. A thousand cacophonic joyful voices that seperate and call to her. Whisper what she knows, what she’s always known and she feels truth. Power of those voices to bring anything into existance, crumple horned snorkacks, teedy tweedlebugs. All of it. The same voices inside of her, where they’ve always been, where reality and truth lies.
She lifts her own voice, and it joins the thousands, where it has always been. His face presses against her neck.
Single voice now. Quieting. Burning, she can feel it in Draco’s heart. Hand pressed to his chest and his hands over hers before dragging up and over her face, holding desperately to a lifeline, thumbs on her cheekbones and sobbing breaths hot on her mouth. Crying so hard he doesn’t seem to know it’s coming from him. Words slipping from him between see-saw breaths half-mad and broken. He knew. He understood. Grey eyes look into hers and see.
“Yes,” she says, and it’s the only word she needs.