Fic: Bleeding Hearts (Colin Creevey/Dean Thomas, PG-13)
Wow. I haven't been on liveournal since my last post. January. I don't really know what happened, I just sort of dropped out of the fandom. I think it was good-- I was never really talented enough at this whole fandom thing. Besides, I began to work a little more on stuffthat wasn't fanfiction. Apparently, that's happening quite a bit lately, if the closing of hp_literotica is anything to judge by. It figures-- the first time I go on lj in six months and it's the last day of my favorite community!
Anyways, here's a story I wrote ages ago. Probably in Jan or Feb. It’s actually a lot different from a lot of my old stuff-it’s longer, and not nearly as dark. The style seems to fluctuate a bit, too. I think I was playing with what worked and didn’t work in a longer-story setting. I hope Colin’s voice came through, and the city sequence doesn’t seem too out-of-place.
Title: Bleeding Hearts
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Colin Creevey/Dean Thomas
Warnings: none
Wordcount: 4,294
Summary: There was water everywhere, running over our faces and hair, absorbed in our clothes and the ground underneath me. There was mud and blood and saliva-blood from my nose and lip, the taste of it like the taste of the rain and of Dean, hard and foreign and metallic and sweet.
It was unexpected, to say the least. He showed up on my doorstep with only a small satchel, sopping wet from the rain, tired and thin. I barely knew him.
I still remember the way he looked that first morning-the tear in his coat collar, the water dripping from his clothes, the bags under his eyes. I hardly knew him. I didn’t know him.
I do now.
* * *
I guess he wanted someone who understood. About art, and life, and how it felt to see opportunity everywhere. To be constantly alert. I’m not going to say gifted, because I’m not the best and never will be the best, but I understood. I saw the way he saw, I looked the way he looked, even if we captured the things we saw differently. I took pictures, he drew. But both, essentially, were just ways of recording events, people, objects, landscapes. Both were ways of showing on paper what the eyes beheld, what the fingers touched, what the world presented you.
It was raining when he first turned up on my doorstep. I was living in the back of a rare book store, my small flat partitioned off and facing out toward a back alley. It had one room, two if you counted the tiny closet that held a toilet and shower. Half the room was a bedroom, the other half a kitchen area, littered with my developing potions and drying prints.
I had just gotten up and was nursing a cup of tea when he knocked. Hardly anyone came over anymore, after the war. They were all dead, or grieving the dead, or off somewhere on a tropical island forgetting the dead. We all were, in a way.
I have always loved the sound that rain makes on rooftops. And the smell of the rain on the asphalt-- stinging, fresh. I lingered on that as I walked to the door, my curiosity strangely muted, lost in the patter of the raindrops. All that changed when I saw him, tired-looking and obviously worse-for-wear, standing there, silent. I let him in, and stared. He was the last person I would have expected.
“Dean?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. He cocked his head a little, looking at me with friendly eyes. “What, forget me already?”
“I... what? No,” I stammered. “Here, let me get you a towel... tea...” I busied myself quickly, tearing around the room throwing dirty laundry in corners and books on shelves, grabbing a towel and launching it at him. He caught it, and laughed.
“Hey, Creevey, stop. Calm down,” he said, still smiling. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Slow down.”
I grinned too. “Sorry. Here-sit. I’ll get tea.” He raised an eyebrow. “Slowly,” I said.
I moved to the kitchen, hearing him dry off behind me and sit in a chair I had just cleared of papers and dirty socks. I took out a mug, poured the tea. Wondered why he was here.
“I bet you’re wondering why I’m here, aren’t you,” he said.
“Oh. Well, no... Here--” I handed it to him. “I mean, a bit. It’s good to see you.” He looked at me. “I don’t see many people anymore.” He stared, cocked his head again. I sipped my tea awkwardly, and heard the reassuring sounds of the rain. I opened my mouth to explain, to clarify what I meant about the loneliness of peace, and of war, but he must have seen it in my eyes and he cut me off.
“You mind if I stay here a while?”
“No... Bit small, though... I mean, if you don’t mind... cramped... sorry... It’s fine, though. Sure. Yeah.”
He grinned.
* * *
I hadn’t seen Dean in almost three years. We weren’t really friends at Hogwarts, but we were friendly-- you sort of get to know people, being stuck with them in your House for seven years. I remember a conversation we had one time in the beginning of my sixth year, after Dumbledore died and McGonagall was in charge. The war was just starting, and we had both tried to capture it in our art. Most of my pictures were of Daily Prophet headlines, students in the Great Hall-how the war was affecting Hogwarts. His were different. They were pencil drawings of the incident at the Quidditch World Cup three years earlier. I could tell he was experimenting with light-shadows and shading. The angles were interesting, too. Wide panoramic scenes, a close-up of a woman’s face, images from above-they made you live it. You were running with masses of people, terrified, screaming, trying to escape the fire, the hooded figures. It was overwhelming. I liked it.
We checked up on each other every now and then, and saw each other in the common room or Great Hall. But we weren’t really friends.
* * *
“Where did you go?”
“After Hogwarts, you mean? I went back home with Dennis. And stayed there, while it was all happening. I mean, I came back to... you know, fight, and all, but I was at home. Me and Dennis. What about you?”
“I stayed with Seamus.”
“In Ireland?”
“Something like that. You’ve got a muggle family, right?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t expecting I’d ever live with them again. Besides summers, I mean. I thought I’d get to finish school, then go from there. Get a job. Work in newspaper.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Colin Creevey-head photographer, Daily Prophet.”
“Didn’t turn out like we expected, though, did it?”
“No. It didn’t.”
* * *
Dean had been with me for a week. We transfigured my armchair into a bed, and as far as I knew he didn’t mind my messy flat. We would get up late in the mornings, drink tea, and read the Prophet or Quibbler. We’d usually skip breakfast, but go out somewhere for lunch. Dean’s favorite was a little pub that served fish and chips, called Trowley’s.
He didn’t talk much about why he had come, or what had happened to him during the war, and I didn’t ask. Seamus Finnegan’s name had been in the papers, along with so many others, in the long lists from the final battles. So many dead. Too many.
It was a week before he started drawing, too. I saw the tablet before I realized what it was. He carried it under his arm while we walked, and when we got to the pub he set it in front of us on the table like some sort of offering. He slid into the booth. I sat down too. We ordered beers, and glanced at each other as if checking protocol, unsure of how to proceed. He spoke, voice a little too loud, a little too confident, and I could tell by the way his jaw was set, the way he spoke the words-he was scared.
“I want to draw again,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes.
“Oh?” I said mildly. “Again? I mean, you stopped? I didn’t... know. Was it... during? ’Cause I can see why, you know, you would. And all.”
He laughed. It was a nice sound, one that he made often. Like his grin; or grins, I should say- that flash of white teeth, a nice contrast to his dark skin. It seemed like he had a million of them. A million smiles. I often got lost thinking about the war, but his grin was a map back to the present. Of course, not all the time-he would still get that look when I mentioned it, that gaze, and he’d sort of close off. But he’d turn around in a second, Dean, with bright teeth and big lips and a tiny movement of his eyebrows, with a million smiles.
“So what do you want to draw?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. He looked down at the table and repeated it softly. “I don’t know.”
We sat there, glancing around again to see what to do.
“Come on,” I said suddenly, maneuvering myself out of the booth and grabbing his wrist, pulling him from his seat toward the door.
“Hold on,” he laughed. He grabbed his notebook from the table, stumbling after me as I left the pub.
* * *
We stared in through the gate. Foliage exploded everywhere-ivy grew over the walls of the house, winding its way over bricks and through the bars of the iron gate. A giant tree stood to the left of us, an oak or elm, and small spindly trees stood in clumps on the other side. In between was a winding dirt path, the kind of dirt that almost glows, it looks so vivid. Stones of concrete were arranged along the side, imbedded with glass and beads, and small plastic toys. Surrounding all this were ferns and moss, herbs and flowers-flowers of a million different colours. I noticed the hyacinth that my mother had loved, chrysanthemums, tulips, bleeding hearts. A birdbath stood out quite prominently beside them, covered in a mosaic of mirrors and colored wire. Strands of beads hung from branches, and the crystals dangling from them cast rainbows on the brick wall of the house. A wooden swing was just visible hanging from the opposite side of the tree, and in my mind I envisioned a young girl in a white dress, kicking her legs out and staring up through the sun-soaked leaves.
I watched Dean. A look of rapt concentration had replaced his smile. His eyes darted from one corner of the garden to the next, trying to memorize its flowers, trying to spot all its secrets. When I thought he was done I put my hands on his shoulders and gently pulled him away from the gate. He stiffened, and I stood still. For several seconds he remained tense, but he slowly relaxed his muscles and turned toward me.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said.
* * *
I took him to Madame Curio’s, home of oriental wizarding antiques (and the Madam’s sixteen pet cats). We visited the alley I discovered last July, painted top to bottom with graffiti murals, done collectively over many months and years. I showed him the playground where Danny the Busker stayed all spring and summer, playing with the children and his harmonica, expounding to passers-by about the beauty in poverty, the dignity of choice. I showed him the field filled with wildflowers in the middle of the city, looking alien and beautiful in its concrete landscape. And the slums, too, both wizarding and muggle. Cardboard boxes, grimy windows, junker cars. Houses so desperate the walls needed charms to stay up. And when it started getting dark I took him high, to watch it all light up. He said “one more,” not wanting it to end, and I obliged. Day-glo hair in spikes and pigtails, platform shoes and bondage pants. The party spilled out of windows and doors, out to the steps and the street and the night that fell on the city. The thumping of the bass made it all pulsate before our eyes, and the dancing bodies swam, merged, mutated, flew. And he said “thank you, take me home.” So I did.
* * *
I mixed the ingredients like I’d done a thousand times, counting one two three four, switch stir three four. Dean was still sleeping, and I had woken up only an hour ago. Our adventure from yesterday left us both exhausted. I stared out the window above the sink, still stirring my potion and sipping Earl Grey. It looked out on another alley, but I was more enjoying the quiet than the view.
I moved around the kitchen, intent on my work, and groggy still from sleep. I let the potion simmer, grabbing film and prints, trays, ladles, wand. Grey light drifted in through the window, the sun occasionally brightening up the sky. I looked around to where Dean was sleeping, but found him sitting up instead, leaning against the wall, drawing tablet in hand. I hadn’t heard him wake up.
“Oh, hello,” I said.
“Shhh,” he replied.
Puzzled, I walked over to him. He pulled the notebook up to his chest away from my view and looked at me with calm, exasperated eyes.
“Oh. Right. I get it. I don’t have to see it. I mean, nothing is perfect the first time around, right? It doesn’t have to be great, you know. My stuff is usually pants anyway, and I haven’t even taken a break. All that over there? Pants.” He laughed, which made me grin. I started walking backwards, throwing my arms up and crying out ridiculous phrases describing the quality of my work. “Pants! Rubbish! Troll snot! Dragons’ brains!” He laughed harder, and pointed at me. My grin spread. “Pants, I tell you! Year-old pants! Decades-old pants! McGonagall’s pants!” Gasping for air, he shook his head forcefully and gestured toward the kitchen. I soon realized he was pointing not at me like I had thought, but directly behind me, where my potion was eking thick, black smoke.
“Pants,” I sighed.
* * *
One day he looked at me and said something strange. He said, “You aren’t what I thought.” And that was all. I lingered on it for a long time, trying to figure out what it meant. I never did.
Generally, we became more and more comfortable with each other. After that first week, the time he spent in my flat flew by; I hardly noticed its passing. We went out more, and had more time apart, him going out for coffee in the afternoons while I walked around and took pictures. I also needed steady work, so I spent some time going through the newspapers and asking around for openings.
But after that day I never saw him draw again.
* * *
The sunset was orange. Rain was falling gently, a mere sprinkle of tiny wet drops that dusted our clothes and our hair, chilling us slightly and giving the park around us a sense of gloom. I liked it. I had always liked rain.
I pushed my legs against the ground. My fingers gripped the chains on either side of me, slippery and ice-cold. I pushed myself forward and back, forward, back, creating a small arc of movement. It was getting dark, but off in the distance an orange glow permeated the drab sky, caused I’m sure by pollution and lights, but also by those angels of creation that made rainbows and rain and glowing skies.
I stopped swinging and sat in silence punctuated only by the faint rumble of muggle cars and the creaking chains of the swing next to me, which Dean occupied. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and was also staring into the distance. I wished in that moment that I could read his mind. No smiles to give it away. Was he okay? Should I say something?
I settled for clearing my throat. Nothing happened. No smile, no flash of revelation. But as I continued to stare at him and the swing set we were perched on, a flash of memory struck me, unbidden, unwelcome. Dennis and I in a park, sun streaming all around us, running and laughing and swinging, me pushing him as he pumped his legs, sending him higher and higher, our dad sitting off to the side and nothing was bad, nothing was sad. We were laughing and nothing was sad.
Then it was dark again and it was raining and my brother was dead. And the stranger sitting by my side was not smiling, was not laughing, and things were bad had been bad since we got into this ridiculous war and the deaths started piling up and the fear started rising up strong.
Without realizing it I had stood. My thoughts were still with Dennis, but I vaguely recognized that Dean was staring up at me with confusion. I slowly lowered myself back down, steadying the swing and once more gripping the chains. I was gradually coming out of it, regaining focus, returning to reality.
“Are you okay?” Dean asked.
“Yeah...”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine. Just had a.... moment. That’s all.” He nodded. “I saw... something. A memory. Of my brother.” I breathed deep and held the air in my chest, exhaling only when I couldn’t hold it any longer. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’ll be fine.” I checked his face. The darkness was beginning to blur his features, making it hard to tell what expression he was giving me.
“No it won’t,” he said frankly. I made a small questioning noise. “It won’t,” he repeated, looking at me intently. “It won’t be fine. Nothing is the same now, and it never will be. And we can’t do anything about it, either. Nothing really matters anymore. Now that Voldemort’s gone, nothing matters. Everyone else is gone too,” he turned his head away from me again.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to start. “But if nothing matters, then why stay here? I can’t believe that, Dean, I just can’t. If you live like there’s no point, then there is no point.”
“The ‘point’ died with everything else. Our government’s in shambles, and neighborhoods are still getting back on their feet. Most of my friends are dead, Colin. Did you see the lists?”
The question held a sense of urgency and dependency, as if he needed someone to reassure him, to tell him right now that what he saw was real, that what he lived was real. The rain was starting to come down harder now, splashing fat drops on our bodies and skin, on the pavement and rooftops.
“Did you see them?” He asked again.
“I did.”
“You did. I did. The whole world saw the lists, Colin. Most of my friends are dead. Dumbledore’s dead, Harry’s dead, Ron, Ginny, Neville, Parvati, McGonagall, the Weasley twins. All dead, Colin. Who’s left?”
“I’m left,” I said.
“You’re left. And I’m left. Why are we still here? Why do we get to live, and not them? I’d rather die, knowing what I do now, than be left behind in a crumbling world trying to piece itself back together like Humpty Dumpty. I’d rather die than have to live without them, than have to piece myself back together again.” His voice rose, whipping defiantly out into the night and the rain. I had tears in my eyes.
“But you are here, Dean.”
He was silent.
“And there isn’t a single minute of a single day that I don’t spend thinking about my brother, about how I’d trade places with him in a second, given the chance. I agree, I know-it isn’t fair that I got to live and he didn’t, but there’s nothing we can do and I’m sure as hell not going to waste it. He was always so much more than me, so much happier, so much more confidant, and while we might have seemed like double act, both of us small and chirpy and whatever the hell else people said about us, it was him all along. And I’m not going to waste it, this time I have here, living. He wouldn’t want me too. And Seamus wouldn’t want you to, either.”
Dean stood and walked toward the street. I got up too, the rain falling into my eyes, plastering my hair to my head, drenching me in every possible way. I cried out to him. “He wouldn’t, Dean, he wouldn’t. He would have wanted you to live! You’re not dead, and you know it! Draw! You said you wanted to draw, so draw! Why did you come here, huh? Why? Just draw, you little shit!”
“I did!”
“Once! And you wouldn’t even show it to me! You can’t just give up! You came here for a reason, for that reason, and one lousy drawing and it was all over. Fuck you, Dean. I’m trying to help you and you throw it all away! You’re not even trying! It’s hard for me, too, you know!”
I grabbed his shoulders and tried to spin him around, but he shook me off and kept walking, his hands shoved in his pockets and his head down. “Dean!” I yelled. I tried again, grabbing his shoulders and pulling. This time he moved like I wanted him to, easy, too easy, and before I knew it his fist was flying toward me, connecting with my face, sending me to the ground. And then he was on top of me, straddling me, kissing me, mouth fumbling on mine with a kind of desperate intensity. There was water everywhere, running over our faces and hair, absorbed in our clothes and the ground underneath me. There was mud and blood and saliva-blood from my nose and lip, the taste of it like the taste of the rain and of Dean, hard and foreign and metallic and sweet. His tongue played games in my mouth-I was hardly aware what was happening. I could barely keep up. I could barely breathe.
He pulled away. He was perfectly still, face inches from mine, staring at me. All I could see were his eyes, his dark eyes and dark skin. He stood up slowly, looking down at me from above, then turned away and left. I leaned on my elbows and watched him walk away, under trees and streetlamps, rain softly illuminated, forming a billowing sheet that drowned him, that swallowed his fading form.
* * *
I picked myself up and made it back home, where I fell in the shower, the water washing me clean of mud, of blood, of Dean. I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Dean’s face rose in my mind. I turned the water higher, so hot it burned, and my fingers tingled with scalding pain. Red hot pain, and it hurt like his fist hurt, like his kiss hurt, like the image of his back as he walked away.
I turned the water off. I went to bed. I didn’t know where Dean went, where he could go, if he was coming back. I didn’t care. I just wanted sleep. Wanted to lie in bed and forget what had happened, and how much more I wanted.
* * *
My head hurt. The sun came in too bright through the window, waking me. It seemed cruel and ironic, that the sun should be so bright, now, this morning, and its rays were sharp and mocking and made my head ache. It was a dull, throbbing ache, the worst kind, intensified by light and sound and coffee. If I could have pinpointed its exact location, I wouldn’t have known where to start-it was everywhere. It filled my entire head.
I groaned and pushed the covers off, stumbling to the bathroom. I turned on the light. My hair was sticking up everywhere in a frizzy mess, the product of a sleepless night. My eyes moved lower, taking in a discoloured bruise and a fat lip. Damn.
I got dressed and made myself tea. I moved around my flat restlessly, Dean’s possessions jumping out at me from their ordinary places around the flat. Dean’s clothes. Dean’s notebook.
I couldn’t take it anymore, the waiting, so I left, only to resume my pacing outside. I walked around the block, around the neighborhood, around the city. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next, what I was supposed to do, so I just kept walking.
I ended up back at home, just as anxious as I had been when I left.
I shut the door and leaned against it, lost. His drawing book stared at me from its place on his bed. The black leather tablet looked staged. It didn’t belong there. I went over to his bed and stared at it, wanting to look inside but afraid to, as if I’d get caught. Sitting down, I pulled it on my lap and opened it. I was surprised to find the pages filled up-sketches of witches and wizards, complex doodles, a dragon whose scales seemed to shimmer. At the bottom of each page was a date. They weren’t recent. I turned the pages, pages filled with wrinkled hands and quidditch games, with a unicorn and Hogwarts and Dean’s friends. Then the drawings stopped. I thumbed through the book-sheet after sheet of pure white paper. Finally, near the end of the book I glimpsed pencil lines. I turned to the page, and stared.
It was me.
Like the other pages, there was a date at the bottom. I thought back, trying to place it. It was the day after I took him around the city. The day after the garden, the field, the slums, the party.
All of that, and he drew me.
I shut the book and left my flat.
* * *
I stood at the iron gate, drawing tablet held securely under my arm. I breathed deep and looked into the garden. He was there, leaning against the tree, legs spread out in front of him. I apparated to the other side of the gate, appearing with a small pop that made him look up. I smiled at him and stood easy, stood quiet. After a time he smiled too-wide smile, happy smile, relief and teeth and big full lips. He started to get up, but I shook my head slightly and moved toward him, careful not to crush the hyacinth, the ferns, the tulips and bleeding hearts. I held out the notebook as an offering, as a beginning, and he looked up at my face and took it.
Anyways, here's a story I wrote ages ago. Probably in Jan or Feb. It’s actually a lot different from a lot of my old stuff-it’s longer, and not nearly as dark. The style seems to fluctuate a bit, too. I think I was playing with what worked and didn’t work in a longer-story setting. I hope Colin’s voice came through, and the city sequence doesn’t seem too out-of-place.
Title: Bleeding Hearts
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Colin Creevey/Dean Thomas
Warnings: none
Wordcount: 4,294
Summary: There was water everywhere, running over our faces and hair, absorbed in our clothes and the ground underneath me. There was mud and blood and saliva-blood from my nose and lip, the taste of it like the taste of the rain and of Dean, hard and foreign and metallic and sweet.
It was unexpected, to say the least. He showed up on my doorstep with only a small satchel, sopping wet from the rain, tired and thin. I barely knew him.
I still remember the way he looked that first morning-the tear in his coat collar, the water dripping from his clothes, the bags under his eyes. I hardly knew him. I didn’t know him.
I do now.
* * *
I guess he wanted someone who understood. About art, and life, and how it felt to see opportunity everywhere. To be constantly alert. I’m not going to say gifted, because I’m not the best and never will be the best, but I understood. I saw the way he saw, I looked the way he looked, even if we captured the things we saw differently. I took pictures, he drew. But both, essentially, were just ways of recording events, people, objects, landscapes. Both were ways of showing on paper what the eyes beheld, what the fingers touched, what the world presented you.
It was raining when he first turned up on my doorstep. I was living in the back of a rare book store, my small flat partitioned off and facing out toward a back alley. It had one room, two if you counted the tiny closet that held a toilet and shower. Half the room was a bedroom, the other half a kitchen area, littered with my developing potions and drying prints.
I had just gotten up and was nursing a cup of tea when he knocked. Hardly anyone came over anymore, after the war. They were all dead, or grieving the dead, or off somewhere on a tropical island forgetting the dead. We all were, in a way.
I have always loved the sound that rain makes on rooftops. And the smell of the rain on the asphalt-- stinging, fresh. I lingered on that as I walked to the door, my curiosity strangely muted, lost in the patter of the raindrops. All that changed when I saw him, tired-looking and obviously worse-for-wear, standing there, silent. I let him in, and stared. He was the last person I would have expected.
“Dean?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. He cocked his head a little, looking at me with friendly eyes. “What, forget me already?”
“I... what? No,” I stammered. “Here, let me get you a towel... tea...” I busied myself quickly, tearing around the room throwing dirty laundry in corners and books on shelves, grabbing a towel and launching it at him. He caught it, and laughed.
“Hey, Creevey, stop. Calm down,” he said, still smiling. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Slow down.”
I grinned too. “Sorry. Here-sit. I’ll get tea.” He raised an eyebrow. “Slowly,” I said.
I moved to the kitchen, hearing him dry off behind me and sit in a chair I had just cleared of papers and dirty socks. I took out a mug, poured the tea. Wondered why he was here.
“I bet you’re wondering why I’m here, aren’t you,” he said.
“Oh. Well, no... Here--” I handed it to him. “I mean, a bit. It’s good to see you.” He looked at me. “I don’t see many people anymore.” He stared, cocked his head again. I sipped my tea awkwardly, and heard the reassuring sounds of the rain. I opened my mouth to explain, to clarify what I meant about the loneliness of peace, and of war, but he must have seen it in my eyes and he cut me off.
“You mind if I stay here a while?”
“No... Bit small, though... I mean, if you don’t mind... cramped... sorry... It’s fine, though. Sure. Yeah.”
He grinned.
* * *
I hadn’t seen Dean in almost three years. We weren’t really friends at Hogwarts, but we were friendly-- you sort of get to know people, being stuck with them in your House for seven years. I remember a conversation we had one time in the beginning of my sixth year, after Dumbledore died and McGonagall was in charge. The war was just starting, and we had both tried to capture it in our art. Most of my pictures were of Daily Prophet headlines, students in the Great Hall-how the war was affecting Hogwarts. His were different. They were pencil drawings of the incident at the Quidditch World Cup three years earlier. I could tell he was experimenting with light-shadows and shading. The angles were interesting, too. Wide panoramic scenes, a close-up of a woman’s face, images from above-they made you live it. You were running with masses of people, terrified, screaming, trying to escape the fire, the hooded figures. It was overwhelming. I liked it.
We checked up on each other every now and then, and saw each other in the common room or Great Hall. But we weren’t really friends.
* * *
“Where did you go?”
“After Hogwarts, you mean? I went back home with Dennis. And stayed there, while it was all happening. I mean, I came back to... you know, fight, and all, but I was at home. Me and Dennis. What about you?”
“I stayed with Seamus.”
“In Ireland?”
“Something like that. You’ve got a muggle family, right?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t expecting I’d ever live with them again. Besides summers, I mean. I thought I’d get to finish school, then go from there. Get a job. Work in newspaper.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Colin Creevey-head photographer, Daily Prophet.”
“Didn’t turn out like we expected, though, did it?”
“No. It didn’t.”
* * *
Dean had been with me for a week. We transfigured my armchair into a bed, and as far as I knew he didn’t mind my messy flat. We would get up late in the mornings, drink tea, and read the Prophet or Quibbler. We’d usually skip breakfast, but go out somewhere for lunch. Dean’s favorite was a little pub that served fish and chips, called Trowley’s.
He didn’t talk much about why he had come, or what had happened to him during the war, and I didn’t ask. Seamus Finnegan’s name had been in the papers, along with so many others, in the long lists from the final battles. So many dead. Too many.
It was a week before he started drawing, too. I saw the tablet before I realized what it was. He carried it under his arm while we walked, and when we got to the pub he set it in front of us on the table like some sort of offering. He slid into the booth. I sat down too. We ordered beers, and glanced at each other as if checking protocol, unsure of how to proceed. He spoke, voice a little too loud, a little too confident, and I could tell by the way his jaw was set, the way he spoke the words-he was scared.
“I want to draw again,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes.
“Oh?” I said mildly. “Again? I mean, you stopped? I didn’t... know. Was it... during? ’Cause I can see why, you know, you would. And all.”
He laughed. It was a nice sound, one that he made often. Like his grin; or grins, I should say- that flash of white teeth, a nice contrast to his dark skin. It seemed like he had a million of them. A million smiles. I often got lost thinking about the war, but his grin was a map back to the present. Of course, not all the time-he would still get that look when I mentioned it, that gaze, and he’d sort of close off. But he’d turn around in a second, Dean, with bright teeth and big lips and a tiny movement of his eyebrows, with a million smiles.
“So what do you want to draw?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. He looked down at the table and repeated it softly. “I don’t know.”
We sat there, glancing around again to see what to do.
“Come on,” I said suddenly, maneuvering myself out of the booth and grabbing his wrist, pulling him from his seat toward the door.
“Hold on,” he laughed. He grabbed his notebook from the table, stumbling after me as I left the pub.
* * *
We stared in through the gate. Foliage exploded everywhere-ivy grew over the walls of the house, winding its way over bricks and through the bars of the iron gate. A giant tree stood to the left of us, an oak or elm, and small spindly trees stood in clumps on the other side. In between was a winding dirt path, the kind of dirt that almost glows, it looks so vivid. Stones of concrete were arranged along the side, imbedded with glass and beads, and small plastic toys. Surrounding all this were ferns and moss, herbs and flowers-flowers of a million different colours. I noticed the hyacinth that my mother had loved, chrysanthemums, tulips, bleeding hearts. A birdbath stood out quite prominently beside them, covered in a mosaic of mirrors and colored wire. Strands of beads hung from branches, and the crystals dangling from them cast rainbows on the brick wall of the house. A wooden swing was just visible hanging from the opposite side of the tree, and in my mind I envisioned a young girl in a white dress, kicking her legs out and staring up through the sun-soaked leaves.
I watched Dean. A look of rapt concentration had replaced his smile. His eyes darted from one corner of the garden to the next, trying to memorize its flowers, trying to spot all its secrets. When I thought he was done I put my hands on his shoulders and gently pulled him away from the gate. He stiffened, and I stood still. For several seconds he remained tense, but he slowly relaxed his muscles and turned toward me.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said.
* * *
I took him to Madame Curio’s, home of oriental wizarding antiques (and the Madam’s sixteen pet cats). We visited the alley I discovered last July, painted top to bottom with graffiti murals, done collectively over many months and years. I showed him the playground where Danny the Busker stayed all spring and summer, playing with the children and his harmonica, expounding to passers-by about the beauty in poverty, the dignity of choice. I showed him the field filled with wildflowers in the middle of the city, looking alien and beautiful in its concrete landscape. And the slums, too, both wizarding and muggle. Cardboard boxes, grimy windows, junker cars. Houses so desperate the walls needed charms to stay up. And when it started getting dark I took him high, to watch it all light up. He said “one more,” not wanting it to end, and I obliged. Day-glo hair in spikes and pigtails, platform shoes and bondage pants. The party spilled out of windows and doors, out to the steps and the street and the night that fell on the city. The thumping of the bass made it all pulsate before our eyes, and the dancing bodies swam, merged, mutated, flew. And he said “thank you, take me home.” So I did.
* * *
I mixed the ingredients like I’d done a thousand times, counting one two three four, switch stir three four. Dean was still sleeping, and I had woken up only an hour ago. Our adventure from yesterday left us both exhausted. I stared out the window above the sink, still stirring my potion and sipping Earl Grey. It looked out on another alley, but I was more enjoying the quiet than the view.
I moved around the kitchen, intent on my work, and groggy still from sleep. I let the potion simmer, grabbing film and prints, trays, ladles, wand. Grey light drifted in through the window, the sun occasionally brightening up the sky. I looked around to where Dean was sleeping, but found him sitting up instead, leaning against the wall, drawing tablet in hand. I hadn’t heard him wake up.
“Oh, hello,” I said.
“Shhh,” he replied.
Puzzled, I walked over to him. He pulled the notebook up to his chest away from my view and looked at me with calm, exasperated eyes.
“Oh. Right. I get it. I don’t have to see it. I mean, nothing is perfect the first time around, right? It doesn’t have to be great, you know. My stuff is usually pants anyway, and I haven’t even taken a break. All that over there? Pants.” He laughed, which made me grin. I started walking backwards, throwing my arms up and crying out ridiculous phrases describing the quality of my work. “Pants! Rubbish! Troll snot! Dragons’ brains!” He laughed harder, and pointed at me. My grin spread. “Pants, I tell you! Year-old pants! Decades-old pants! McGonagall’s pants!” Gasping for air, he shook his head forcefully and gestured toward the kitchen. I soon realized he was pointing not at me like I had thought, but directly behind me, where my potion was eking thick, black smoke.
“Pants,” I sighed.
* * *
One day he looked at me and said something strange. He said, “You aren’t what I thought.” And that was all. I lingered on it for a long time, trying to figure out what it meant. I never did.
Generally, we became more and more comfortable with each other. After that first week, the time he spent in my flat flew by; I hardly noticed its passing. We went out more, and had more time apart, him going out for coffee in the afternoons while I walked around and took pictures. I also needed steady work, so I spent some time going through the newspapers and asking around for openings.
But after that day I never saw him draw again.
* * *
The sunset was orange. Rain was falling gently, a mere sprinkle of tiny wet drops that dusted our clothes and our hair, chilling us slightly and giving the park around us a sense of gloom. I liked it. I had always liked rain.
I pushed my legs against the ground. My fingers gripped the chains on either side of me, slippery and ice-cold. I pushed myself forward and back, forward, back, creating a small arc of movement. It was getting dark, but off in the distance an orange glow permeated the drab sky, caused I’m sure by pollution and lights, but also by those angels of creation that made rainbows and rain and glowing skies.
I stopped swinging and sat in silence punctuated only by the faint rumble of muggle cars and the creaking chains of the swing next to me, which Dean occupied. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and was also staring into the distance. I wished in that moment that I could read his mind. No smiles to give it away. Was he okay? Should I say something?
I settled for clearing my throat. Nothing happened. No smile, no flash of revelation. But as I continued to stare at him and the swing set we were perched on, a flash of memory struck me, unbidden, unwelcome. Dennis and I in a park, sun streaming all around us, running and laughing and swinging, me pushing him as he pumped his legs, sending him higher and higher, our dad sitting off to the side and nothing was bad, nothing was sad. We were laughing and nothing was sad.
Then it was dark again and it was raining and my brother was dead. And the stranger sitting by my side was not smiling, was not laughing, and things were bad had been bad since we got into this ridiculous war and the deaths started piling up and the fear started rising up strong.
Without realizing it I had stood. My thoughts were still with Dennis, but I vaguely recognized that Dean was staring up at me with confusion. I slowly lowered myself back down, steadying the swing and once more gripping the chains. I was gradually coming out of it, regaining focus, returning to reality.
“Are you okay?” Dean asked.
“Yeah...”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine. Just had a.... moment. That’s all.” He nodded. “I saw... something. A memory. Of my brother.” I breathed deep and held the air in my chest, exhaling only when I couldn’t hold it any longer. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’ll be fine.” I checked his face. The darkness was beginning to blur his features, making it hard to tell what expression he was giving me.
“No it won’t,” he said frankly. I made a small questioning noise. “It won’t,” he repeated, looking at me intently. “It won’t be fine. Nothing is the same now, and it never will be. And we can’t do anything about it, either. Nothing really matters anymore. Now that Voldemort’s gone, nothing matters. Everyone else is gone too,” he turned his head away from me again.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to start. “But if nothing matters, then why stay here? I can’t believe that, Dean, I just can’t. If you live like there’s no point, then there is no point.”
“The ‘point’ died with everything else. Our government’s in shambles, and neighborhoods are still getting back on their feet. Most of my friends are dead, Colin. Did you see the lists?”
The question held a sense of urgency and dependency, as if he needed someone to reassure him, to tell him right now that what he saw was real, that what he lived was real. The rain was starting to come down harder now, splashing fat drops on our bodies and skin, on the pavement and rooftops.
“Did you see them?” He asked again.
“I did.”
“You did. I did. The whole world saw the lists, Colin. Most of my friends are dead. Dumbledore’s dead, Harry’s dead, Ron, Ginny, Neville, Parvati, McGonagall, the Weasley twins. All dead, Colin. Who’s left?”
“I’m left,” I said.
“You’re left. And I’m left. Why are we still here? Why do we get to live, and not them? I’d rather die, knowing what I do now, than be left behind in a crumbling world trying to piece itself back together like Humpty Dumpty. I’d rather die than have to live without them, than have to piece myself back together again.” His voice rose, whipping defiantly out into the night and the rain. I had tears in my eyes.
“But you are here, Dean.”
He was silent.
“And there isn’t a single minute of a single day that I don’t spend thinking about my brother, about how I’d trade places with him in a second, given the chance. I agree, I know-it isn’t fair that I got to live and he didn’t, but there’s nothing we can do and I’m sure as hell not going to waste it. He was always so much more than me, so much happier, so much more confidant, and while we might have seemed like double act, both of us small and chirpy and whatever the hell else people said about us, it was him all along. And I’m not going to waste it, this time I have here, living. He wouldn’t want me too. And Seamus wouldn’t want you to, either.”
Dean stood and walked toward the street. I got up too, the rain falling into my eyes, plastering my hair to my head, drenching me in every possible way. I cried out to him. “He wouldn’t, Dean, he wouldn’t. He would have wanted you to live! You’re not dead, and you know it! Draw! You said you wanted to draw, so draw! Why did you come here, huh? Why? Just draw, you little shit!”
“I did!”
“Once! And you wouldn’t even show it to me! You can’t just give up! You came here for a reason, for that reason, and one lousy drawing and it was all over. Fuck you, Dean. I’m trying to help you and you throw it all away! You’re not even trying! It’s hard for me, too, you know!”
I grabbed his shoulders and tried to spin him around, but he shook me off and kept walking, his hands shoved in his pockets and his head down. “Dean!” I yelled. I tried again, grabbing his shoulders and pulling. This time he moved like I wanted him to, easy, too easy, and before I knew it his fist was flying toward me, connecting with my face, sending me to the ground. And then he was on top of me, straddling me, kissing me, mouth fumbling on mine with a kind of desperate intensity. There was water everywhere, running over our faces and hair, absorbed in our clothes and the ground underneath me. There was mud and blood and saliva-blood from my nose and lip, the taste of it like the taste of the rain and of Dean, hard and foreign and metallic and sweet. His tongue played games in my mouth-I was hardly aware what was happening. I could barely keep up. I could barely breathe.
He pulled away. He was perfectly still, face inches from mine, staring at me. All I could see were his eyes, his dark eyes and dark skin. He stood up slowly, looking down at me from above, then turned away and left. I leaned on my elbows and watched him walk away, under trees and streetlamps, rain softly illuminated, forming a billowing sheet that drowned him, that swallowed his fading form.
* * *
I picked myself up and made it back home, where I fell in the shower, the water washing me clean of mud, of blood, of Dean. I still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Dean’s face rose in my mind. I turned the water higher, so hot it burned, and my fingers tingled with scalding pain. Red hot pain, and it hurt like his fist hurt, like his kiss hurt, like the image of his back as he walked away.
I turned the water off. I went to bed. I didn’t know where Dean went, where he could go, if he was coming back. I didn’t care. I just wanted sleep. Wanted to lie in bed and forget what had happened, and how much more I wanted.
* * *
My head hurt. The sun came in too bright through the window, waking me. It seemed cruel and ironic, that the sun should be so bright, now, this morning, and its rays were sharp and mocking and made my head ache. It was a dull, throbbing ache, the worst kind, intensified by light and sound and coffee. If I could have pinpointed its exact location, I wouldn’t have known where to start-it was everywhere. It filled my entire head.
I groaned and pushed the covers off, stumbling to the bathroom. I turned on the light. My hair was sticking up everywhere in a frizzy mess, the product of a sleepless night. My eyes moved lower, taking in a discoloured bruise and a fat lip. Damn.
I got dressed and made myself tea. I moved around my flat restlessly, Dean’s possessions jumping out at me from their ordinary places around the flat. Dean’s clothes. Dean’s notebook.
I couldn’t take it anymore, the waiting, so I left, only to resume my pacing outside. I walked around the block, around the neighborhood, around the city. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next, what I was supposed to do, so I just kept walking.
I ended up back at home, just as anxious as I had been when I left.
I shut the door and leaned against it, lost. His drawing book stared at me from its place on his bed. The black leather tablet looked staged. It didn’t belong there. I went over to his bed and stared at it, wanting to look inside but afraid to, as if I’d get caught. Sitting down, I pulled it on my lap and opened it. I was surprised to find the pages filled up-sketches of witches and wizards, complex doodles, a dragon whose scales seemed to shimmer. At the bottom of each page was a date. They weren’t recent. I turned the pages, pages filled with wrinkled hands and quidditch games, with a unicorn and Hogwarts and Dean’s friends. Then the drawings stopped. I thumbed through the book-sheet after sheet of pure white paper. Finally, near the end of the book I glimpsed pencil lines. I turned to the page, and stared.
It was me.
Like the other pages, there was a date at the bottom. I thought back, trying to place it. It was the day after I took him around the city. The day after the garden, the field, the slums, the party.
All of that, and he drew me.
I shut the book and left my flat.
* * *
I stood at the iron gate, drawing tablet held securely under my arm. I breathed deep and looked into the garden. He was there, leaning against the tree, legs spread out in front of him. I apparated to the other side of the gate, appearing with a small pop that made him look up. I smiled at him and stood easy, stood quiet. After a time he smiled too-wide smile, happy smile, relief and teeth and big full lips. He started to get up, but I shook my head slightly and moved toward him, careful not to crush the hyacinth, the ferns, the tulips and bleeding hearts. I held out the notebook as an offering, as a beginning, and he looked up at my face and took it.