In Between (Harry/Draco, R, ~ 10 000 words)
Title: In Between
Summary: How far can you go in loving someone? How deep can you sink after their loss? How bold can you get in wanting them back? And finally, if the world is not fair, do you have to be?
Pairing and rating: Harry/Draco, R (yeah, I've gone nuts :p)
Author's notes: Much gratefulness to my betas luciology and stellahargrove, for the swift and competent work. All remaining mistakes are mine, because, as authors usually do, I fitted in some last minute changes.
Dedicated to: hiddenshallows with many, many hugs because some parts of the fic were influenced and inspired by a post on her journal that I read months ago (you'll know which post and which scenes, I'm sure): May she always possess the almost Harry-Potterian luck that she has enjoyed so far :)
In Between
~*~
It hurt.
There was neither light nor a tunnel, and definitely no angelic music. There was the sickness of blood loss and the nausea of the upset balance. Then, it was quiet for a while.
I felt odd, light: almost as if I was some weightless, airy almost-substance borne by the wind above the place where my crumpled body lay. I can't say that I didn't know what had happened, but I doubt whether I realised the full meaning of the situation, either.
I had died. Boy-Who-Lived or no, a curse is still a curse, and it kills you before the polite introduction. It's hard to tell whether I was sad or relieved, because inside me everything was a bit mingled together, a bit unclear. I had killed my long time enemy and had fallen from the spell uttered by an unnamed someone. Such irony.
I think I was mostly confused.
Someone must have found me and raised the alarm, but I didn't remain for long enough to see that. I was sucked away.
I landed at a strange place, too much like a cloud to be really acceptable, yet too unlike anything familiar to be really reassuring. Oddly enough, I was only impressed by the means of my arrival.
"Yes," a voice remarked behind me, and I would have jumped had my body been a bit more substantial. As it was, I swirled around instead, and my mouth fell agape.
"It rather feels like a Portkey, doesn't it?" Cedric Diggory continued. My stomach turned and turned and turned, and I was positive that I'd throw up.
"A pity," he spoke once more and graciously sat down. "It was thought that you'd take it more easily if you were met by someone familiar."
"Who thought that?" I asked, suddenly curious, and he laughed.
"All in due time, Harry. You asking questions with too difficult answers for now."
I fell silent. I had dreamt about that boy for years, sensing the weight of his death upon my shoulders. He had been my… motivation, my nightmare in a way, my warning.
"Oh, dear," he said, and he sounded almost bored. "I thought you had got over my death."
I stared. "Um…"
"You should have," he waved his hand dismissively; "it wasn't your fault after all. He will pay his debts now, and that will be quite enough."
We lapsed into silence in which he seemed to be staring into space while I looked around at the dream-like pale softness of the vicinity.
"Would you like to see your funeral?" he suddenly asked, and I realised with a shuddery coldness in my chest that I had been anticipating that question.
In truth, my reply should have been an instinctive no, because no person wants to behold that particular scene. But then again, no person wants to die, not really.
"You don't have to, you know," he continued, as if he knew how hard it was to perceive the idea was. But I had to see a few people, had to watch in a perverse, masochistic urge.
"I want to."
"Close your eyes and focus," he instructed me with a startling indifference, as if he had no concern about me and my choices.
I followed his words and found myself at the quiet cemetery where I had buried many people I had cared about.
It wasn't raining, that was the first thing to make an impression. Somehow, I had imagined rain, piercing coldness, crying taking place under dark umbrellas, emotional words, flowers. I had hated the very idea.
What I saw, however, were a dozen of people around a new grave under the surprisingly warm caress of the March sun. They were silent, standing in couples and trios, and no one was crying. There were those who looked on the verge of tears and had to make some conscious effort to remain at least seemingly calm, their eyes darting to a tall man with concern.
The grave stone was simple:
Harry James Potter
1981-2004
We will never forget you
On the freshly dug soil a single, long-stemmed calla-lily lay, with a thin ribbon that held a tiny piece of parchment wound around it.
I rushed to the flower, a gentle wisp of spring wind, and read the words written by a hand that I had kissed thousands of times: I will hate you till the day that I die and then will get my own back on you. How could you?
I flew up, along with the wind, and my soul twisted in the most painful way. How could you? Indeed.
It wasn't on purpose, my love, I wanted to say, although that wouldn't have placated him even if I had had the lips to whisper it.
Instead I watched how one by one most began to seep out, split between being happy that the horror was over and being sad that I was gone, too. Be happy, something in me screamed, because life is too short for anything else.
Soon there were only five people remaining; my dearest. But no, that's only three of them.
Hermione obviously needed to cry, to express her grief in a tangible, soul-relieving way, to tire herself out in order to forget that someone who'd been by her side for twelve years was no longer there. I almost felt the death grip she had on her husband's hand, the hollowness in her, and wondered with an all-knowing awareness whether the child that was growing, still unnoticed, in her would give her enough joy to fill that void in her heart.
Ron's face was hard; hurt and betrayal fighting in his chest. He couldn't help being accusatory of me, although he knew that he had no reason to feel that way. It was he who steeled himself and put an end to that bleak vigil. He took his girlfriend's hand and led her slowly away, and I ached when Hermione's husband did the same shortly after.
A lone, tall figure stood now beside the grave where my body was supposed to find its last shelter. A figure dressed in colour.
His hands were in his pockets, the same long fingers that had written the note and placed the calla on the ground. His head was bent, the wind toying gently with the longish blonde locks; his eyes closed.
He wasn't crying.
I was pathetically grateful for that, because to see him crying was the last thing I could cope with. I wanted to thank him for making sure that the last part of my journey back to the ground wouldn't be in the fashion I had so abhorred, but in a much more ordinary way. I wanted to kiss his cheek and send him home, to watch him smile at me and me alone like he had done in the past.
More than anything, I wanted to be alive and have him hold me.
~*~
When I resurfaced, back on my cloud Cedric was smiling, and in my crying heart I held the strong desire to kill him again and wipe that stupid grin away.
"Who knew the two of you would end up together?" he idly remarked when he should have been silent. Inside me, something was choking.
"I'll leave you alone now," he said eventually when it became obvious that I wouldn't happily answer him. And as he melted into nothing, I allowed my wounded heart to recall my love and greet each memory with a tear.
Who lied and said that crying was a corporeal business?
~*~
For months I continued to watch.
I saw the way he acted like nothing had happened to the point where people would yell at him about it and demand to know what was wrong with him.
I witnessed with dismay how Ron and Hermione burned the fragile bridges to him, because his bright coloured clothes and seemingly unconcerned behaviour were more than they could take.
But I didn't worry about them - I had been, more or less, something peripheral in their lives. They had their Special Someones that would fill up the hole I had left; they had their other friends and, most importantly, they had each other.
Draco, however, was an entirely different affair, mainly because he was perpetually alone.
I watched how morning after morning he would wake up, turn to the left in search of me, then remember and repeat to himself to be reasonable. He would never drink cappuccino anymore because when he did, he never managed to get the vision of me out of his mind; me and my obsession with foam and sprinkled cinnamon.
So he drank a cup of black coffee and went to work, where he would pretend that I had never worked at the desk behind his own.
But sometimes, only sometimes, his illusion that nothing's wrong would get too good, too realistic, and he would remember a joke or a nice story heard the day before in the coffee shop queue. Then he would turn, as per habit, to share it with me, a typical smile on his lips.
At my desk, however, he would see another employee, and his world would come crashing down.
Then, at home, at the flat that had been initially only his, but which we had eventually shared, he wouldn't gather the strength to eat. He couldn't enter the spacious kitchen that was filled with so many laughing memories: of meals that I had cooked for him and ones that he had done for me; of times when we had started a recipe together but ended up making love on the work top or the table, jumping up in alarm when the air filled with the scent of burnt food.
Lying in what was once our bedroom, in a brand new bed, with brand new sheets, he would pretend that he had a new life, too; that he slept.
Night after night, I would see his form coiled in a tight ball in the centre of the bed. His eyes would be shut, and his breathing would be perfectly measured and even. But I would know better.
I would see the crystalline drops seeping from beneath his lids to soak the pillow. I would be aware of the loud thump of his heart in his throat, would hear the muffled uncontrollable sob that sometimes he couldn't suppress.
I hated the large swipes of darkness under his eyes, hated myself for causing them.
I was sure that at the beginning he hated me, too. Angry and hurt and alone, he couldn't forgive me for not only dying but also taking Voldemort with me, thus robbing him of the exorcism of a possible revenge.
He lost half his weight before my very eyes. His normally angular features sharpened to the point where I was positive that should someone touch his face, they would cut themselves. His hipbones jutted out harshly and the slightly protruding bones on his wrists, which I had loved to kiss, grew so defined that it looked like the joints would snap any second now.
For the first time ever, I wished that Voldemort was alive and the war - ongoing. At least back then, Draco had been almost happy.
I didn't watch Ron and Hermione as closely or as frequently, because in their own way they were coping. Sinking into a pit of despair and denial, Draco was not.
~*~
One day Cedric complained about my being so quiet. But how could I not be when I was helpless to stop Draco from turning into a wreck?
Cedric laughed when I told him that. "Really, why do you care?" he asked with lightness that shocked me. "There'll be no going back. He's not your problem anymore."
At that moment I understood that for all the knowledge that being dead had given him, Cedric was still an immature fifteen-year-old boy who knew nothing about real life.
"All these clouds are making me dizzy," I said instead of an answer. "Why does it have to be like that? And why aren't there any others?"
"You want it like that," he explained. "You've imagined afterlife in a similar way… so there you go. Although few get this now that I think of it." He frowned in thought, then his gaze suddenly glazed over. "I have to go."
And he disappeared.
~*~
I saw when Draco broke out of that first stage of pretence and sank into the next.
It was late in the summer when he found my favourite T-shirt in the back of the wardrobe, and it made his chest constrict so much that there wasn't enough space left for his breath.
He buried his face in the faded green cotton which bore his name and the Slytherin crest, but which I had appropriated and loved. There was no counting how many times he had peeled it off my sweaty, heaving chest before showing me how much he wanted me.
And when he flung the T-shirt at the wall and set off to methodically destroy all of the furniture, I wasn't much surprised. But as he broke glass and wood, I felt my soul tighten more and more in pain and fear.
Because he needed help, but there was no one to offer it, for the sole reason that nobody save for me saw the necessity.
~*~
In a way, that second stage of his mourning was more harmful than the first. And I'm not talking about the fact that it tore me apart, but about the inevitability with which it was closing him into himself.
He pretended that I hadn't existed at all. He sold or threw away everything that I had ever owned or touched, which is to say that he refurbished the flat completely. Everything that could be linked to me in some way and he didn't have the heart to get rid of, he packed into a trunk and left in his Gringott's vault.
While I knew how he had lived before starting off with me, to see it so close up was excruciating.
He worked like crazy, applying for field jobs and not minding having to stay late, doing what he could to exhaust himself enough to fall asleep as soon as he heard the word bed. And in the evenings of his free - thus sleepless - days he went to clubs.
The first time I saw him pick someone up, I was shocked. Not because of any expectations of him staying faithful to me ever after, but because being with him had led me to believe that he wasn't one of those one-night-stand kings - an illusion that long time lovers habitually sink into. And now he simply behaved too differently.
We had met in a club, too, when we first hooked up, and I had assumed that I knew pretty well what he was like when he was out. But as I watched him find a new body every night with the clear intent of a quick, mindless fuck, I realised how much he had changed inside.
I am not sure whether he had loved before me; he is just not the type to talk about feelings. Maybe he had. Maybe he hadn't. He had never hated before me, though, that's for certain, before those glorious school years, and he had never had the two feelings bleed into one another the way I suspect they had when we got together.
But that wasn't the point. What I meant to say was that now he wanted to feel neither love, nor hate; nothing if at all possible. He brought people in his flat, young, willing victims of his madness, and night after night attempted to fill up the hollowness inside himself.
He never let anyone fuck him, and that seemed somehow important. He was a magnificent lover, had always been, and so they allowed him everything, wanted him everywhere. And they had no way of knowing that this wasn't him.
He had once told me that having someone in him made him feel so whole; so powerful and weak simultaneously. And I knew what he'd meant. But he didn't want this, not now. He wanted two things: oblivion and me. Too bad that he didn't realise it. He understood and accepted only the need to forget, and he thought that he had to forget me perhaps.
But he had chosen a thoroughly wrong strategy.
He wouldn't forget me and find someone new when deep down his heart was chanting my name in rhythm with his every thrust; when he chose my diametrical opposites for lovers and then blamed them for not being me; when all he thought about was what he had lost.
~*~
The next change came when one night he met a friend of mine. The man was tall and dark, and really nice, and when Draco sank into him, it felt so good; almost enough. Almost, until in the highest moment Draco buried his face in the other's neck, and in the quiet of the room, filled only with panting and the whisper of skin over skin, heard the low chant in himself.
My name. In himself. That minute, the second stage crashed as well. And he was suddenly dizzy with loss.
He acutely felt that this man, a stranger, was invading some so far unmarked border, some unspoken circle of privacy suddenly formed. He wanted to scream.
The man, however, left quickly, and that was good, because otherwise he would have been thrown out, although he bore no fault.
Alone again, in the darkness, Draco curled into a foetal position and, fighting with himself for sleep, wished he had died, too.
At that moment… oh, at that moment I had had enough. I didn’t know whether that place which was now my home was heaven or hell, or somewhere in between, but I knew one thing: it felt like hell. And in hell, people were supposed to suffer, true. But Draco… Draco was still living so he wasn't entitled to share pain and punishment for what I had obviously done.
He was not.
With my mind, with my heart, I reached and touched his cheek, damp with what he persuaded himself was sweat. I touched him and, although I was probably breaking a bookful of rules, went into his dream.
~*~
He dreamed darkness. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing in it. Complete, hollow blackness that was like suffocation.
"Draco!" I called, my voice coming out as if through a veil. "Draco!" I tried again and it was clearer this time.
"Go away!" an unhappy answer somewhere near, the hoarse trace of tears. "You left, right? Stay away!"
"Draco, love," I repeated, somewhat helpless, my throat starting to constrict. "Where are you?"
"How could you leave?" the tears more tangible this time, more accusing - shards of glass in the already threadbare fabric of my soul.
I went in the direction of the sound, feeling my way towards his form, curled into what seemed to be a corner.
I knelt before him, his legs parting to give me space, hands pulling me closer for all his words.
"I didn't mean to, I swear," I whispered, lips against his neck, arms going to circle his waist and draw him closer.
I could feel his warmth, his pulse, his scent around me, and I was suddenly torn between pain and joy. "I'm sorry," I heard myself murmur again and again, holding him tight. "I'm sorry."
He pushed me abruptly onto my back, following me, straddling my hips, pressing his forehead against mine. "Come back," he whispered softly in a desperate voice that took my breath away. "Come back to me. Gods, I miss you so…"
"Stop," I hugged him and silenced the plea, his face burrowing into my neck, ragged breathing ghosting over skin. "I won't come back, Draco," I said and his fingers dug into my flesh. "We are not mates. We were not connected. We…"
"You belong with me!" he claimed in a tiny, helpless tone that broke my heart over and over again.
"No, I don't," I forced myself to tell the truth. "We were lovers. Two different human beings. I died. You lived. Go on and forget me."
He pulled sharply away from his current position of being so close to me that it almost made me forget that we truly were two separate bodies.
"I'll never forget you, you idiot!" he exclaimed, and I knew that he believed it. "I hate it when you talk like that."
"You can't hate the truth," I countered him, my hands finding his, fingers interlacing. I brought our joint limbs to my lips and kissed his wrist bone the way I had always loved to when we had been together.
He wanted to argue, I could see that very well, but he didn't. He leaned in and kissed me instead.
"I want to make love to you," I heard him say into my mouth, and God, there was nothing I wanted more than that, too.
I let him undress me like a doll. I stood immobile while he pulled clothes off and worshipped the skin beneath. I wondered, arching into him, whether he was trying to remember every reaction, the way I responded, in much the same fashion that I memorised his every touch.
His lips were fire, absolution and completeness for the duration of each caress after months of being alone. His fingers were like those of a master persuading the clearest sounds from the strings of my soul.
A violin. I could perfectly picture in my mind's eye the surprising passion written all over his features as he played the delicate instrument, a gift from his mother for his fifth birthday. I remembered how I used to kiss the marks on his left clavicle and the telling hardening of the skin on his fingers that testified for a life-long love story.
"Draco," I moaned, and he kissed me again, then pulled away and started undressing himself, while my very soul was falling apart with memories and the unfulfillable desire of happiness again.
I love you, I needed to say, but I knew that it wasn't fair so I worshipped his body instead, telling myself that the memories would be enough to sustain me; that I wouldn't miss his smooth skin now that I had had the opportunity to touch it one last time; that I wouldn't need to reach and caress his cheek, just like that, without a reason; that I would be able to make do without his gentle breath over my chest in the mornings.
I was aware that I was trying to lie to myself. I was aware that it wasn't working.
When he slid into me, it was perfection, in the way things are only in dreams and fantasies, and I felt like crying, acutely realising that it wasn't real. He kept the pace slow and it was obvious that he, too, wanted it to last forever.
But it was impossible. And as I climbed the staircase to heaven, a heaven that I didn't want because I knew that it would be the end of that bittersweet dream, I heard that he was sobbing into my neck, soft sounds and wetness that mingled with his passion.
I cried out in completion and held him tight, and shortly after, he joined me breathless into bliss. Or was it? I couldn't recall another situation when I had felt so desolate or confused.
"Sh-h-h," I embraced him in an unsuccessful attempt to calm him. He clutched me as if afraid that I would slip away from his grasp. Which I was going to, inevitably.
We both knew when in the real world he began to stir and slowly awaken.
"I don't hate you, ever," he whispered, as close to any admission as he had ever got, belying the words from earlier.
"I know," I answered and tasted his lips one last time, unable to stop myself. "Move on, Draco. Forget me."
In the empty bed, he woke with a start.
~*~
His conscious mind took control and diminished the dream, thus pushing me out, and I opened my eyes up on my cloud. I gasped, like a swimmer breaching the surface.
My own reality pressed me down with a harsh kick in the face.
There was a storm going on, a stark opposite of the oppressive calm that had ruled my world ever since I first appeared there. So far I hadn't felt anything real; the sun never truly warm, the gushes of wind never exactly tangible.
But now everything was shockingly clear, almost frighteningly so. The vicious jets of cold water hit me relentlessly, weighing me down, numbing my perception with iciness, holding me prisoner.
"That was a stupid thing to do," I heard an even voice that obviously had no problems stabbing through the heavy sounds of the rain.
Turning, I saw Cedric, sitting in the cloud in a bubble of calm, dry whiteness that had surrounded me, too, so far.
"The dead are dead," he went on with a look that was probably supposed to be reproving but came across suspiciously like childish pettiness. "You had no right to invade his life just when he was starting to recover."
I could have laughed. But I didn't, suddenly overcome by guilt. What if he really continued to hope for me because of that dream? I had wanted only to give him, however brief, solace; to tell him to forget. What if I had done him wrong?
Like always lately, I was split between two opposite emotions. When had I obtained such duality?
Cedric flickered out and I opened my eyes to watch the rain. The nearly living slate grey of the clouds, swirling and changing; the torrents of water that stripped my soul bare; bolts of lightning forking their way down, threatening to burn me to helpless ashes.
I did laugh this time. How could they expect me to forget when my punishment was to live in Draco's eyes?
~*~
When I looked to check on him again, a day had almost passed, darkness enveloping the earth once more. He was curled in the middle of the unmade bed, staring into space. I shivered and the guilt welled up, wanting to swallow me whole.
Up in my 'heaven,' under the unforgiving rain, I curled into a mirror image of his position and watched him.
~*~
He remained nearly catatonic like that for more than a week; barely eating, hardly sleeping, almost not moving. Thinking. For what, I wasn't allowed to reach and see, but it made me progressively worried just the same.
When the first letter from his employer arrived, he completely ignored it. The second made him snort. The third was accompanied by all his things stacked neatly in a box bearing his name.
He didn't care.
High above, I trembled, cold with two weeks of incessant rain and with hopelessness.
~*~
One day he got up, showered, shaved and dressed, and went out. After hours of tedious digging in the largest wizarding library in London, he got home with at least a dozen thick old tomes.
When I, who up to that moment had not seen the titles of the books, saw the inscriptions on covers dark and hard with wear, I wanted to curse, to hit, to pour some brains into his obnoxious Slytherin head.
The topic was one and the same, though formulated in different ways: magical bonding.
"Dear God," I whispered fervently, praying for something unknown, wanting help from someone I hadn't particularly believed in all my life. "Don't let him get too deep, don't let him do what I think he'll do. Please God, keep him alive and sane, and don't make him pay for my stupidity."
I couldn't remember ever being so sincere or so repentant. I was pretty aware at that point that I had made a huge mistake, and I wanted to kick myself for acting before thinking, like always. I was ready to go through anything, everything, in order to stop Draco from doing what it looked like he was planning to do.
But if anything, the rain only poured harder.
~*~
He read the information carefully, taking notes and marking the questions he had. Two more times he went to the library, bringing more and more obscure books, using his now former occupation as a reason and excuse. When someone asked too many questions or got suspicious, he paid for silence.
There are different types of connection, he found out and I learnt with him: magical, spiritual, physical. Link of blood. Link of debt.
The rituals, the ways, the possibilities and dangers, he knew them all long before the beginning of the New Year. He was also aware by then that the more links connected two individuals, the more they belonged together.
Of all the bonds, he could possibly forge only one - magical. All the others required my active participation. But he was obsessed, mad with grief and loneliness, determined like never before.
Late on New Year's Eve, when all the others celebrated, he cleared the living room of furniture and began drawing sigils and symbols on the smooth marble floor. He had brewed the potions needed earlier the same month, had prepared all the objects he would have to use.
He undressed and purified himself, cut his hair, painted spells and runes over the pale silk of his skin. He put my wand, which he had received as a last memento of me, in the centre of the room and began chanting.
Hours passed. He sang and spelled his way from one stage to the next; walking in circles, tying ribbons, evoking old magics. When at dawn he fell on his knees, bending so as to touch his forehead to the glowing marble of the floor, my wand in his wand hand, his own in the left, and whispered the final incantation, I felt a tiny pang in my chest.
Like a small hook at the end of a long gold thread that began from his magic and reached mine, that intimate place behind the ghost of my heart. He passed out from exhaustion.
Watching him, wanting him, hating me, I cursed my fate, cursed the Gods and myself.
The connection was warm and shining, full of hope and life. Yet I was filled with endless desperation.
~*~
He returned all the books and borrowed new ones, this time on necromancy and mate link properties. He drew tables, made comparisons, listed and evaluated pros and cons. He was thinking of what to do next, what to choose.
And while he prayed for success, Cedric nagged and the heavens poured over me, I didn't know what to do, weep or hope.
He decided something at one point, although I had no idea what. He packed a small bag and went to Hogwarts, to Severus Snape.
"I need some books," he told the Potions Master, making the latter scowl.
The library at Hogwarts kept precious, rare books. Books that were dangerous, both for the reader and on the whole.
Snape wasn't stupid. No one went there to seek books which could be found just at every other bookstore.
"Draco…" he began.
"Please, Professor," Draco interrupted, "I won't take them anywhere. I won't do anything that is dangerous."
"Even to your own person?"
Here Draco kept silent.
He had always had a good relationship with Snape, one based on mutual respect and understanding. The Professor knew him well enough.
"Tell me the topic of your research." Intelligent dark eyes sought entrance into Draco's mind.
"Necromancy," Draco answered, tensing up for a fight.
"I won't allow that," Snape stated firmly, and for an instant I thought, hoped, believed, that he'd manage to talk sense into Draco. Then I saw unwavering determination in stubborn grey eyes. I could have screamed.
"You can't stop me," Draco argued. "I already have some information. I have murky spots that I might like to clarify, but even if you deny me a pass and I don't, I'll still try."
"You will die," Snape told him, because yes, most attempts ended like that.
"I won't," Draco smiled; a wistful frightful smile. "And even if I do, it won't be worse than it is now."
Snape tapped fingers over his pursed lips, thinking.
"Draco," he started again, and I knew that the words were hard for him. "Love might be a stupid weakness, but it is sweet, intoxicating, addictive. I know that. But it is over. He is dead. You are not. Don't throw the gift you have away. You can go on. You can."
Draco closed his eyes, and I could tell right away that Snape's breath had been lost.
"I came here for information. Will you give me access to it or not?"
Snape saw the choice, it was a pretty obvious one: to send Draco to his death or to provide him with a weapon - if unsure - against it.
"Do you have Potter's cloak?" the man asked, giving in, and Draco nodded, prepared in advance for the condition not to be seen under any circumstances. "Pull it on, then, and follow me."
A week later, Draco left Hogwarts even more single-minded than before. But he didn't go home.
He headed for the mountains.
For the mountains, where a secluded village lent shelter to a feared and secret part of the magical society - vampires.
~*~
I knew that a vampire could bond to someone - could take a mate. The details of that bonding, however, its purposes and rituals, were not meant for mortals to understand.
I had no idea what Draco had in mind. How vampire bonding rituals could help him was a murky question, even though I have to admit I had my suspicions.
When dusk fell, he was on his knees in the centre of a small stone square, his arms hanging by his sides, his only luggage the clothes he was wearing. His eyes were tightly closed, his neck bare.
The creatures smelled him, of course; felt him. An hour later they were in a thick circle around his unmoving form and were waiting impatiently for their leader, I supposed.
When he came, a man seemingly in his thirties, dark and smooth, with seduction weaved into every line of his cynically twisted features, voices rose in the silence; voiced carrying suggestions that made my stomach churn. The leader didn't respond, didn't encourage or stop them. He went to Draco with determined strides and yanked his bent head back, forcing his pale throat into a tensed, clean arch.
"What are you doing here, food?" the vampire hissed, and a few of those standing hungrily around laughed. "Looking for trouble?"
"I came here to seek hope," Draco answered quietly, his light eyes boring into those of the enquirer.
"Hope?" the man looked carefully at the kneeling body, and saw for the first time the pose of offering and submission.
"Yes."
"Disperse!" the leader ordered, gaze still locked with Draco's but the word clearly intended for his people.
The two of them were alone in a matter of moments.
"Talk," the vampire said, his fingers still woven in Draco's short hair.
"My lover died," Draco began. "I want to bring him back."
"Him?" the other interrupted, laughing; his hand moving to caress Draco's cheek and lips, invoking a tremble.
"Yes, him." The answer, despite everything, was perfectly even.
"I don't see the connection between that and you being here," the vampire continued. "And as far as I know you will probably die, too, in that inane attempt."
"You can help me!" Draco countered, and the eyes of the man flared. Obviously he wasn't accustomed to being opposed to.
"Be careful, food," he warned Draco, so deadly low that the hairs on my neck stood on end in alarm and defence. "If you are quiet and respectful I might not punish your stupidity in coming here. You can't imagine, however, what will happen to you if you continue to talk to me in such a fashion."
I saw Draco's jaw tighten. "Please," he uttered almost inaudibly. "I'm ready to do whatever you require."
The vampire stopped, probably fascinated by the audacity of a simple mortal.
"You speak unclearly, food. Tell me in detail what it is that you so desire."
"I want to be turned," Draco shot. "My lover and I are connected magically. If I am a vampire I can choose him for my other Half and then call him back."
The face of the man hardened and darkened. "I am responsible for four hundred and thirty immortal souls. I have problems as it is: food, shelter, peace and unity are difficult to acquire. With the recent political developments in your world many of my kind have headed home in search of a new chance and absolution. In years no one has been turned according to an unspoken decision. I can't help you."
"I won't need your shelter and protection," Draco spoke, and it was as close to a plea as he would ever get: partially entreaty, partially persuasion. "I'm ready to pay, to offer anything you might request."
The vampire was silent for a while, and I could see that the temptation was enormous. "How much can you pay?"
"How much do you want?" A thoroughly Slytherin answer - a question. Not proposing a price himself, but allowing the other to choose.
"Five hundred Galleons for the turning, and ten more for each day that you spend here."
"Deal."
The vampire looked suddenly curious. "You realise that you won't be able to fool me, don't you?"
"Of course I do." Draco's smile was self-depreciating and a bit twisted.
"Who are you?" the man asked.
"Draco Malfoy."
For a moment it was quiet. "I knew your father, Draco Malfoy. Long ago, in another lifetime."
Draco nodded in acknowledgement and put paid to the issue.
"So you agree?" he asked instead.
"My people could use the money," the vampire pointed out in a way of an answer. "Let's go to my house," he continued. "And by the way, my name is Gabriel."
Moving to his feet, Draco smirked, and it seemed like all his confidence had come back in a single second. "Gabriel?" he repeated, obviously amused. "Like the angel?"
His companion laughed. "Like father, like son, isn't it. Once your father asked the same."
~*~
The turning took place the very next night, after a nervous day which Draco spent pacing around.
"It may hurt," Gabriel warned and then looked away in a rather coy fashion. "But there are things I can do to make it better."
He licked his lips as if to clear all doubts as to what those things were.
"We can do whatever you like," Draco said carefully. "But I want to make it very clear that it will mean nothing."
"I remember what it is to love someone," Gabriel remarked, although in truth Draco had never uttered the word love in relation to himself, even before me. The vampire's expression became a tad wistful then cleared. "Shall we?" he bowed, as if asking Draco to a formal dance.
Draco was afraid at first, but Gabriel prepared him, awoke his body and senses, and took his mind off the impending biting.
Never before in the long months I had watched, had someone taken Draco, and so tenderly at that, so carefully. I was jealous for the first time, as if I had any right to be, as if it were right to feel that way. But I couldn't control it; I hated the vampire who was seducing my lover, hated myself for being stupid, hated fate. Again.
When Draco reached the summit, and his mind was shut down sufficiently, Gabriel bit his neck, the bluish image of the jugular visible through pale skin. Draco screamed. It hurt, in the way all things feared hurt. But as Gabriel used Draco's arousal to distract him, pain and pleasure coalesced together. The edges between the two feelings blurred, until they blended into pure, unadulterated, impossibly bright ecstasy.
I felt it as clearly as Draco did when his heart slowed gradually down and his senses dimmed. It almost became a physical pull when his subconscious mind reached out to me to use my power and sustain him. Only I wasn't present enough to lend that support.
I can't remember ever hurting so much - physically or mentally - as at the second when Draco's heart stopped beating.
~*~
I wasn't allowed to watch his training.
I think it was the worst period in my entire conscious existence. Almost two months I was gradually going mad with loneliness and guilt and shame. I kept focusing, but the image never came, my mind bumping futilely against a barrier of invisible power.
When I attempted to see him again one day, I unexpectedly succeeded. Draco was alone, back at his flat, sleeping. Had he moved on? Had he forgotten? Had he…
Stop, I ordered myself, forcing reason into me. He is the one that matters. He has to be happy. He should move on and forget you.
Oh, but sense hurt!
By that time, I had got used to the incessant raining for the most part. But as I watched Draco there, sure that if he was happy I'd never try to connect to him, a heavy block of pure ice settled in me.
"I told you he'd move on," a voice claimed behind me, and I suddenly had to blink back tears.
"I've never doubted that, not really," I answered but my voice was hopelessly uneven. "I'm happy for him."
"Yes, you really seem to be jumping with joy," Cedric commented, sarcasm too heavy to actually become him, and it suddenly hit me as strange that he should be so smug about it.
"I didn't say that I was jumping with joy," I countered quietly and looked away from him, at the living grey around me.
He shimmered out after a while.
~*~
I promised myself that I would stop. That I wouldn't watch anymore. And for some time, I kept to that decision, although it was hard.
One day Cedric came again, wearing a thoroughly unreadable expression.
"Hello," he muttered.
I started. We hadn't used greetings and formalities in ages.
"You will be moving soon," he announced after a prolonged period of uncomfortable silence, and I eyed him sharply.
"What?"
"I said that you would be moving soon," he repeated, although he probably knew that I was actually asking for details.
"Why?" I enquired again, and he looked extremely unwilling to be there with me at all. I wondered briefly what forces were taking away his personal choice.
"Tomorrow at noon is your one year anniversary," he uttered rather darkly. "This means that you will be transferred to another location. Goodbye, Harry. It was a pleasure to meet you again."
And he was gone, leaving me there confused and agape. Soon after that, I felt the first pull, terribly sharp, at the chord of my connection with Draco. I closed my eyes and tried not to answer that cry by looking, and asked myself what he was doing in order to need power from that particular source - me.
But after a few minutes, the call became too strong, too encompassing for me to ignore.
When I focussed, I saw Draco, naked and already purified, in the living room which still bore the signs of the bonding ritual he had performed several months ago. And as he began chanting in a low, concentrated voice, while painting new, more powerful sigils to overlie the old ones, I realised with a jolt of unrecognisable emotion that he hadn't given up after all.
I knew that being at the very same place where the first bond had been initiated would strengthen further the magics he sought to build. He used his own wand, then mine, then both of them simultaneously. He lit a fire and fed it with bewitched oils that filled the room with coloured, intoxicating fumes. As the ritual proceeded, his body became the palest, brightest thing imaginable; a walking flame that at the culmination of the ceremony practically pulsed with magic and energy.
He cut his wrists, allowing the blood to drip on my wand, and continued singing spells to life.
Twelve drops - one for each year we had known each other. One more for our previously achieved connection.
Thirteen, a magical number, the number bearing bad luck or ill fate, the main symbol of all the really important rituals, a powerful component that could fulfil your wish or kill you because of the impurity of your intention.
I held my breath although I didn't feel it right away.
He said the last words, then my name, then his own, then stepped into the now coal black flames of the fire. It burst high and turned into a rainbow of iridescent colours, blinding me, making me hold my eyes tightly shut.
Before I even had the time to worry, I felt the new, stronger cord attach itself to my soul.
The link pulsed, like elastic trying to shorten and pull us together. I knew that he had chosen me for his other Half, that I was his mate now. The connection was weaker that it would have been had I been present, but still, it was suddenly unbearable to be so far away from him.
Some of the greatest escapes in history have been accomplished due to a similar connection: a vampire tied to their mate. With some inexplicable intuition, I knew that if I had been somewhere on earth, the link would have transported me directly to him.
But I was not.
~*~
By the time I looked again, the fire was nothing but a tiny flame dancing on his palm. He bent his head and, totally illogically kissed it. The action seemed to suck the warmth of the fire into himself, into the link, into me. I shivered with the impossible intimacy of it.
He lay on the floor then, for long minutes doing nothing, simply breathing deeply, recovering his strength.
He got up again after that, though, and my head spun with the realisation of what he was going to attempt. Don't be an idiot! I wanted to scream frantically, It's dangerous enough without playing smart!
He couldn't hear me, however, could he? So he took the knife again and carved a shallow circle over his heart, then deepened the scratches on his wrists and cut the pads of his fingers. Up there, cocooned in rain and surreality, but still connected to him, I swayed with pain. How was he doing it to himself was a question I couldn't answer.
The runes he drew with his own blood were too complex for me to discern with my basic knowledge. Soon he was lying in much the same position he had been in at the end of the very first ritual - on his knees, forehead on the floor, arms spread wide, palms pressed against the marble. He represented the centre of a large flower painted on the floor. The petals were the sigils of his blood.
Beneath that drawing were the remnants of the previous magics, lines and runes in gold, green and silver. He had bound the first two rituals to that last one, drawing strength to finish the rite and survive.
The whole time he was chanting one and the same sentence over and over again, although I could not understand the words. His voice grew progressively weaker and weaker as pools of blood gathered under his hands and all the runes began glowing softly.
My vision of Draco slowly faded until only the bright red sigils remained painted on the black insides my lids. His breathing, which I realised I had been feeling in the back of my perception, stopped.
Pain filled me suddenly and, screaming, I was sucked away into darkness.
~*~
When I regained consciousness, there was only darkness. Strangely, however, it didn't feel even minutely like I was in an unlit room.
It was more as though my very essence permeated the thick darkness around me. I was aware; aware not in the way I was when I saw something, but more as if all of me had suddenly turned into perception. It was a thoroughly disconcerting feeling: interesting yet too unfamiliar to be safe or pleasant.
I tried to move but found out that I had no body, not even the ghostly, ethereal one I had possessed in the past year. I became even more uneasy.
"It seems unusual, does it not, pretty soul?" a voice asked me; a voice outside and inside me, a voice almighty.
It does, I thought, because I had no lips to utter the words, but it came out as if spoken aloud.
I shivered mentally.
"I have received a special request, pretty soul, one concerning you. Do you know what is it?"
I do.
"And what would you say about it?" The presence was gentle yet insistent, much stronger and deeper-going than Legilimens.
I can't imagine a greater gift.
"Most souls that cross the line between life and after-existence want to go back. I cannot allow that to all, do you understand?"
Yes.
"You have had an interesting way, pretty soul, a difficult fate that you fulfilled. You have been regarded as extremely benevolent during your lifetime. Yet you killed many times, and so did the claimant."
What could I say? I remained blank while the presence searched carefully through the depths of my soul for what I could not voice.
"Choices are a difficult task, pretty soul. When I granted your kind that privilege, I brought myself such great entertainment. There seems to be no clear logic in your choices."
Silence again.
"Why, for example, did you choose to break the rules and enter the dream of a living being, even be it your mate's?"
He was so unhappy. I wanted to take his pain away.
"And did you manage?"
No.
"Did you ask him to invoke the ritual which could bring you back?"
No.
"Yet you gave him the idea, is it not so?"
Not on purpose.
A clear, bell-like peal of quiet laughter. "Ah, purpose. You people have no true knowledge of the intentions of your souls deep inside. You tend to go too far without a map of the path."
Please, I couldn't help myself, afraid of where those questions were heading to, Don't let him die, even if his plea is not fulfilled.
"But that is an entirely different wish, pretty soul. Why should I grant both of your desires?"
My mind froze. I heard a high, keening sound as if from afar, not realising that it came from me. This voice, this… God, obviously, could send me back and still take Draco, could just switch our places.
A horrible, horrible possibility.
"Why, pretty soul, do you not want to live?" There was a curious note now, almost amusement.
No, not like that! Something in me was on the verge of tears.
"He is brave and determined," the voice stated with seemingly no connection to the previous train of thought. "No one has called upon me in centuries." A pause. "I might fulfil his wish. But tell me, what will happen if you decide that you want someone else once you get back?"
I won't.
"That was not what I asked."
I can't imagine ever being with someone else.
"And are you sure that he will always want you?"
I could have swallowed or closed my eyes. No.
"What will you do if he ever abandons you?"
I…I don't know.
"Well, pretty soul, he seems very intent on his plea."
In the back of the darkness, I heard Draco's voice chanting probably that very same sentence; only this time I could understand the words:
Gift me back my mate.
"There are conditions, pretty soul. Conditions you'll have to follow."
I agree.
"No, not so quickly, pretty soul. First hear them. You will live as long as he lives. But if your feelings change, no matter whether you admit it or not, you will return here and will not be allowed to watch upon the earth for the rest of his lifetime. If his feelings change, likewise. And you are not allowed to tell him about those conditions. Do you still agree, pretty soul?"
Yes…
How could I not agree when I bore the negatives all by myself, when I wouldn't endanger Draco, when I was given a chance to live again? Before the word was even finished, I faded into the blackness.
~*~
I woke up naked on a floor that was stone cold and covered with blood. Having a body felt more than simply weird, and I needed a moment before I could get my bearings and actually move.
When I turned, I was face to face with Draco's unmoving, unbreathing form.
Unbreathing.
Panic seized me to the marrow of my bones. Something was out of place; something was not right with the links, although it was a mystery how I could tell. He wasn't drawing power from me, wasn't using the chance for survival. He was barely there. It was all by instinct that I realised the connection was not fully functional.
I was too afraid to think. Purely by intuition, I drew Draco's body so that his back was pressed against my chest, and cut my wrist with the knife lying nearby.
I opened his mouth and allowed the blood to drip freely into his throat.
It was almost pain to have myself bleed, almost pleasure. Massaging his neck gently, I made him swallow. I concentrated hard on him, praying for a result, fighting off despair. When I finally passed out again, I vaguely registered that he was moving in my arms.
~*~
The princess in the fairy tale must be very happy to be woken up every time with a kiss. A silly thought, I have to admit. But it crossed my mind for the few seconds needed to regain full consciousness. I answered the caress out of habit and instinct, pleasantly grounded by the fact that I could actually feel the touch.
I tasted the remnants of blood on his tongue and on my own as well, and could only guess that he had finished the final stage of the connection which I began. My hands found his shoulders and pulled him closer, his skin sliding against mine.
My mind reached easily towards his, almost as if it had practice, and I explored with fascination that unknown world. He did the same, testing how far he could go. I allowed him access everywhere, all that I had or thought or owned was his if he wanted it, and he had to know that. All, except for the small guarded compartment that held my promise of secrecy. He touched the idea, tried to unfold it, to explore it. Upon denial, he pulled away.
Just then, I found a similar closed space in his thoughts and gasped, realising that he had probably promised something, too.
"I hate you," he whispered into my mouth, knowing as well as I did that neither of us would ever understand the full set of conditions.
"No, you don't," I answered quietly and kissed him again.
I held him close, drinking in the pleasure of his mere presence, more concerned that I had him again than with being oblivious to some heavenly information.
This was life, I realised with amazement and relief and a heart full of other, unnamed emotions, while my fingers reacquainted themselves with the skin of his back. His lips found the skin just behind my ear, making me shiver.
This touch, craved and denied, forgotten and dreamt of for so long, it was reality, universe and life all by itself for the sole reason that it solidified two souls soaked with feelings and presented them in a form that cannot be mistaken.
Touch gave security.
Love had never seemed surer or more real than at that moment when I hugged and worshipped him. I wanted so much to tell him how I felt, to thank him and never let him go. But that would have been a helpless cliché, and he held such hatred for those.
So instead, I invited his mind back into mine and closed my eyes against the bone-deep pleasure of it. Then I touched his features, combed through hair softer than raindrops would ever be, traced his lips with the pads of my fingers. I tried to paint from memory a bruise on his left collar bone, one that should have been there had he not been too busy and sad to play. When I kissed his fingertips, they were smooth, having, too, long forgotten the bow and strings in favour of dusty books with spells. The paint brush had carved small indents on his fingers while he had clutched it and I kissed those marks as well.
Letting emotions whirl freely into my mind, letting go, I allowed him to read the feelings and make whatever he chose out of them.
~*~
The End
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Summary: How far can you go in loving someone? How deep can you sink after their loss? How bold can you get in wanting them back? And finally, if the world is not fair, do you have to be?
Pairing and rating: Harry/Draco, R (yeah, I've gone nuts :p)
Author's notes: Much gratefulness to my betas luciology and stellahargrove, for the swift and competent work. All remaining mistakes are mine, because, as authors usually do, I fitted in some last minute changes.
Dedicated to: hiddenshallows with many, many hugs because some parts of the fic were influenced and inspired by a post on her journal that I read months ago (you'll know which post and which scenes, I'm sure): May she always possess the almost Harry-Potterian luck that she has enjoyed so far :)
In Between
~*~
It hurt.
There was neither light nor a tunnel, and definitely no angelic music. There was the sickness of blood loss and the nausea of the upset balance. Then, it was quiet for a while.
I felt odd, light: almost as if I was some weightless, airy almost-substance borne by the wind above the place where my crumpled body lay. I can't say that I didn't know what had happened, but I doubt whether I realised the full meaning of the situation, either.
I had died. Boy-Who-Lived or no, a curse is still a curse, and it kills you before the polite introduction. It's hard to tell whether I was sad or relieved, because inside me everything was a bit mingled together, a bit unclear. I had killed my long time enemy and had fallen from the spell uttered by an unnamed someone. Such irony.
I think I was mostly confused.
Someone must have found me and raised the alarm, but I didn't remain for long enough to see that. I was sucked away.
I landed at a strange place, too much like a cloud to be really acceptable, yet too unlike anything familiar to be really reassuring. Oddly enough, I was only impressed by the means of my arrival.
"Yes," a voice remarked behind me, and I would have jumped had my body been a bit more substantial. As it was, I swirled around instead, and my mouth fell agape.
"It rather feels like a Portkey, doesn't it?" Cedric Diggory continued. My stomach turned and turned and turned, and I was positive that I'd throw up.
"A pity," he spoke once more and graciously sat down. "It was thought that you'd take it more easily if you were met by someone familiar."
"Who thought that?" I asked, suddenly curious, and he laughed.
"All in due time, Harry. You asking questions with too difficult answers for now."
I fell silent. I had dreamt about that boy for years, sensing the weight of his death upon my shoulders. He had been my… motivation, my nightmare in a way, my warning.
"Oh, dear," he said, and he sounded almost bored. "I thought you had got over my death."
I stared. "Um…"
"You should have," he waved his hand dismissively; "it wasn't your fault after all. He will pay his debts now, and that will be quite enough."
We lapsed into silence in which he seemed to be staring into space while I looked around at the dream-like pale softness of the vicinity.
"Would you like to see your funeral?" he suddenly asked, and I realised with a shuddery coldness in my chest that I had been anticipating that question.
In truth, my reply should have been an instinctive no, because no person wants to behold that particular scene. But then again, no person wants to die, not really.
"You don't have to, you know," he continued, as if he knew how hard it was to perceive the idea was. But I had to see a few people, had to watch in a perverse, masochistic urge.
"I want to."
"Close your eyes and focus," he instructed me with a startling indifference, as if he had no concern about me and my choices.
I followed his words and found myself at the quiet cemetery where I had buried many people I had cared about.
It wasn't raining, that was the first thing to make an impression. Somehow, I had imagined rain, piercing coldness, crying taking place under dark umbrellas, emotional words, flowers. I had hated the very idea.
What I saw, however, were a dozen of people around a new grave under the surprisingly warm caress of the March sun. They were silent, standing in couples and trios, and no one was crying. There were those who looked on the verge of tears and had to make some conscious effort to remain at least seemingly calm, their eyes darting to a tall man with concern.
The grave stone was simple:
Harry James Potter
1981-2004
We will never forget you
On the freshly dug soil a single, long-stemmed calla-lily lay, with a thin ribbon that held a tiny piece of parchment wound around it.
I rushed to the flower, a gentle wisp of spring wind, and read the words written by a hand that I had kissed thousands of times: I will hate you till the day that I die and then will get my own back on you. How could you?
I flew up, along with the wind, and my soul twisted in the most painful way. How could you? Indeed.
It wasn't on purpose, my love, I wanted to say, although that wouldn't have placated him even if I had had the lips to whisper it.
Instead I watched how one by one most began to seep out, split between being happy that the horror was over and being sad that I was gone, too. Be happy, something in me screamed, because life is too short for anything else.
Soon there were only five people remaining; my dearest. But no, that's only three of them.
Hermione obviously needed to cry, to express her grief in a tangible, soul-relieving way, to tire herself out in order to forget that someone who'd been by her side for twelve years was no longer there. I almost felt the death grip she had on her husband's hand, the hollowness in her, and wondered with an all-knowing awareness whether the child that was growing, still unnoticed, in her would give her enough joy to fill that void in her heart.
Ron's face was hard; hurt and betrayal fighting in his chest. He couldn't help being accusatory of me, although he knew that he had no reason to feel that way. It was he who steeled himself and put an end to that bleak vigil. He took his girlfriend's hand and led her slowly away, and I ached when Hermione's husband did the same shortly after.
A lone, tall figure stood now beside the grave where my body was supposed to find its last shelter. A figure dressed in colour.
His hands were in his pockets, the same long fingers that had written the note and placed the calla on the ground. His head was bent, the wind toying gently with the longish blonde locks; his eyes closed.
He wasn't crying.
I was pathetically grateful for that, because to see him crying was the last thing I could cope with. I wanted to thank him for making sure that the last part of my journey back to the ground wouldn't be in the fashion I had so abhorred, but in a much more ordinary way. I wanted to kiss his cheek and send him home, to watch him smile at me and me alone like he had done in the past.
More than anything, I wanted to be alive and have him hold me.
~*~
When I resurfaced, back on my cloud Cedric was smiling, and in my crying heart I held the strong desire to kill him again and wipe that stupid grin away.
"Who knew the two of you would end up together?" he idly remarked when he should have been silent. Inside me, something was choking.
"I'll leave you alone now," he said eventually when it became obvious that I wouldn't happily answer him. And as he melted into nothing, I allowed my wounded heart to recall my love and greet each memory with a tear.
Who lied and said that crying was a corporeal business?
~*~
For months I continued to watch.
I saw the way he acted like nothing had happened to the point where people would yell at him about it and demand to know what was wrong with him.
I witnessed with dismay how Ron and Hermione burned the fragile bridges to him, because his bright coloured clothes and seemingly unconcerned behaviour were more than they could take.
But I didn't worry about them - I had been, more or less, something peripheral in their lives. They had their Special Someones that would fill up the hole I had left; they had their other friends and, most importantly, they had each other.
Draco, however, was an entirely different affair, mainly because he was perpetually alone.
I watched how morning after morning he would wake up, turn to the left in search of me, then remember and repeat to himself to be reasonable. He would never drink cappuccino anymore because when he did, he never managed to get the vision of me out of his mind; me and my obsession with foam and sprinkled cinnamon.
So he drank a cup of black coffee and went to work, where he would pretend that I had never worked at the desk behind his own.
But sometimes, only sometimes, his illusion that nothing's wrong would get too good, too realistic, and he would remember a joke or a nice story heard the day before in the coffee shop queue. Then he would turn, as per habit, to share it with me, a typical smile on his lips.
At my desk, however, he would see another employee, and his world would come crashing down.
Then, at home, at the flat that had been initially only his, but which we had eventually shared, he wouldn't gather the strength to eat. He couldn't enter the spacious kitchen that was filled with so many laughing memories: of meals that I had cooked for him and ones that he had done for me; of times when we had started a recipe together but ended up making love on the work top or the table, jumping up in alarm when the air filled with the scent of burnt food.
Lying in what was once our bedroom, in a brand new bed, with brand new sheets, he would pretend that he had a new life, too; that he slept.
Night after night, I would see his form coiled in a tight ball in the centre of the bed. His eyes would be shut, and his breathing would be perfectly measured and even. But I would know better.
I would see the crystalline drops seeping from beneath his lids to soak the pillow. I would be aware of the loud thump of his heart in his throat, would hear the muffled uncontrollable sob that sometimes he couldn't suppress.
I hated the large swipes of darkness under his eyes, hated myself for causing them.
I was sure that at the beginning he hated me, too. Angry and hurt and alone, he couldn't forgive me for not only dying but also taking Voldemort with me, thus robbing him of the exorcism of a possible revenge.
He lost half his weight before my very eyes. His normally angular features sharpened to the point where I was positive that should someone touch his face, they would cut themselves. His hipbones jutted out harshly and the slightly protruding bones on his wrists, which I had loved to kiss, grew so defined that it looked like the joints would snap any second now.
For the first time ever, I wished that Voldemort was alive and the war - ongoing. At least back then, Draco had been almost happy.
I didn't watch Ron and Hermione as closely or as frequently, because in their own way they were coping. Sinking into a pit of despair and denial, Draco was not.
~*~
One day Cedric complained about my being so quiet. But how could I not be when I was helpless to stop Draco from turning into a wreck?
Cedric laughed when I told him that. "Really, why do you care?" he asked with lightness that shocked me. "There'll be no going back. He's not your problem anymore."
At that moment I understood that for all the knowledge that being dead had given him, Cedric was still an immature fifteen-year-old boy who knew nothing about real life.
"All these clouds are making me dizzy," I said instead of an answer. "Why does it have to be like that? And why aren't there any others?"
"You want it like that," he explained. "You've imagined afterlife in a similar way… so there you go. Although few get this now that I think of it." He frowned in thought, then his gaze suddenly glazed over. "I have to go."
And he disappeared.
~*~
I saw when Draco broke out of that first stage of pretence and sank into the next.
It was late in the summer when he found my favourite T-shirt in the back of the wardrobe, and it made his chest constrict so much that there wasn't enough space left for his breath.
He buried his face in the faded green cotton which bore his name and the Slytherin crest, but which I had appropriated and loved. There was no counting how many times he had peeled it off my sweaty, heaving chest before showing me how much he wanted me.
And when he flung the T-shirt at the wall and set off to methodically destroy all of the furniture, I wasn't much surprised. But as he broke glass and wood, I felt my soul tighten more and more in pain and fear.
Because he needed help, but there was no one to offer it, for the sole reason that nobody save for me saw the necessity.
~*~
In a way, that second stage of his mourning was more harmful than the first. And I'm not talking about the fact that it tore me apart, but about the inevitability with which it was closing him into himself.
He pretended that I hadn't existed at all. He sold or threw away everything that I had ever owned or touched, which is to say that he refurbished the flat completely. Everything that could be linked to me in some way and he didn't have the heart to get rid of, he packed into a trunk and left in his Gringott's vault.
While I knew how he had lived before starting off with me, to see it so close up was excruciating.
He worked like crazy, applying for field jobs and not minding having to stay late, doing what he could to exhaust himself enough to fall asleep as soon as he heard the word bed. And in the evenings of his free - thus sleepless - days he went to clubs.
The first time I saw him pick someone up, I was shocked. Not because of any expectations of him staying faithful to me ever after, but because being with him had led me to believe that he wasn't one of those one-night-stand kings - an illusion that long time lovers habitually sink into. And now he simply behaved too differently.
We had met in a club, too, when we first hooked up, and I had assumed that I knew pretty well what he was like when he was out. But as I watched him find a new body every night with the clear intent of a quick, mindless fuck, I realised how much he had changed inside.
I am not sure whether he had loved before me; he is just not the type to talk about feelings. Maybe he had. Maybe he hadn't. He had never hated before me, though, that's for certain, before those glorious school years, and he had never had the two feelings bleed into one another the way I suspect they had when we got together.
But that wasn't the point. What I meant to say was that now he wanted to feel neither love, nor hate; nothing if at all possible. He brought people in his flat, young, willing victims of his madness, and night after night attempted to fill up the hollowness inside himself.
He never let anyone fuck him, and that seemed somehow important. He was a magnificent lover, had always been, and so they allowed him everything, wanted him everywhere. And they had no way of knowing that this wasn't him.
He had once told me that having someone in him made him feel so whole; so powerful and weak simultaneously. And I knew what he'd meant. But he didn't want this, not now. He wanted two things: oblivion and me. Too bad that he didn't realise it. He understood and accepted only the need to forget, and he thought that he had to forget me perhaps.
But he had chosen a thoroughly wrong strategy.
He wouldn't forget me and find someone new when deep down his heart was chanting my name in rhythm with his every thrust; when he chose my diametrical opposites for lovers and then blamed them for not being me; when all he thought about was what he had lost.
~*~
The next change came when one night he met a friend of mine. The man was tall and dark, and really nice, and when Draco sank into him, it felt so good; almost enough. Almost, until in the highest moment Draco buried his face in the other's neck, and in the quiet of the room, filled only with panting and the whisper of skin over skin, heard the low chant in himself.
My name. In himself. That minute, the second stage crashed as well. And he was suddenly dizzy with loss.
He acutely felt that this man, a stranger, was invading some so far unmarked border, some unspoken circle of privacy suddenly formed. He wanted to scream.
The man, however, left quickly, and that was good, because otherwise he would have been thrown out, although he bore no fault.
Alone again, in the darkness, Draco curled into a foetal position and, fighting with himself for sleep, wished he had died, too.
At that moment… oh, at that moment I had had enough. I didn’t know whether that place which was now my home was heaven or hell, or somewhere in between, but I knew one thing: it felt like hell. And in hell, people were supposed to suffer, true. But Draco… Draco was still living so he wasn't entitled to share pain and punishment for what I had obviously done.
He was not.
With my mind, with my heart, I reached and touched his cheek, damp with what he persuaded himself was sweat. I touched him and, although I was probably breaking a bookful of rules, went into his dream.
~*~
He dreamed darkness. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing in it. Complete, hollow blackness that was like suffocation.
"Draco!" I called, my voice coming out as if through a veil. "Draco!" I tried again and it was clearer this time.
"Go away!" an unhappy answer somewhere near, the hoarse trace of tears. "You left, right? Stay away!"
"Draco, love," I repeated, somewhat helpless, my throat starting to constrict. "Where are you?"
"How could you leave?" the tears more tangible this time, more accusing - shards of glass in the already threadbare fabric of my soul.
I went in the direction of the sound, feeling my way towards his form, curled into what seemed to be a corner.
I knelt before him, his legs parting to give me space, hands pulling me closer for all his words.
"I didn't mean to, I swear," I whispered, lips against his neck, arms going to circle his waist and draw him closer.
I could feel his warmth, his pulse, his scent around me, and I was suddenly torn between pain and joy. "I'm sorry," I heard myself murmur again and again, holding him tight. "I'm sorry."
He pushed me abruptly onto my back, following me, straddling my hips, pressing his forehead against mine. "Come back," he whispered softly in a desperate voice that took my breath away. "Come back to me. Gods, I miss you so…"
"Stop," I hugged him and silenced the plea, his face burrowing into my neck, ragged breathing ghosting over skin. "I won't come back, Draco," I said and his fingers dug into my flesh. "We are not mates. We were not connected. We…"
"You belong with me!" he claimed in a tiny, helpless tone that broke my heart over and over again.
"No, I don't," I forced myself to tell the truth. "We were lovers. Two different human beings. I died. You lived. Go on and forget me."
He pulled sharply away from his current position of being so close to me that it almost made me forget that we truly were two separate bodies.
"I'll never forget you, you idiot!" he exclaimed, and I knew that he believed it. "I hate it when you talk like that."
"You can't hate the truth," I countered him, my hands finding his, fingers interlacing. I brought our joint limbs to my lips and kissed his wrist bone the way I had always loved to when we had been together.
He wanted to argue, I could see that very well, but he didn't. He leaned in and kissed me instead.
"I want to make love to you," I heard him say into my mouth, and God, there was nothing I wanted more than that, too.
I let him undress me like a doll. I stood immobile while he pulled clothes off and worshipped the skin beneath. I wondered, arching into him, whether he was trying to remember every reaction, the way I responded, in much the same fashion that I memorised his every touch.
His lips were fire, absolution and completeness for the duration of each caress after months of being alone. His fingers were like those of a master persuading the clearest sounds from the strings of my soul.
A violin. I could perfectly picture in my mind's eye the surprising passion written all over his features as he played the delicate instrument, a gift from his mother for his fifth birthday. I remembered how I used to kiss the marks on his left clavicle and the telling hardening of the skin on his fingers that testified for a life-long love story.
"Draco," I moaned, and he kissed me again, then pulled away and started undressing himself, while my very soul was falling apart with memories and the unfulfillable desire of happiness again.
I love you, I needed to say, but I knew that it wasn't fair so I worshipped his body instead, telling myself that the memories would be enough to sustain me; that I wouldn't miss his smooth skin now that I had had the opportunity to touch it one last time; that I wouldn't need to reach and caress his cheek, just like that, without a reason; that I would be able to make do without his gentle breath over my chest in the mornings.
I was aware that I was trying to lie to myself. I was aware that it wasn't working.
When he slid into me, it was perfection, in the way things are only in dreams and fantasies, and I felt like crying, acutely realising that it wasn't real. He kept the pace slow and it was obvious that he, too, wanted it to last forever.
But it was impossible. And as I climbed the staircase to heaven, a heaven that I didn't want because I knew that it would be the end of that bittersweet dream, I heard that he was sobbing into my neck, soft sounds and wetness that mingled with his passion.
I cried out in completion and held him tight, and shortly after, he joined me breathless into bliss. Or was it? I couldn't recall another situation when I had felt so desolate or confused.
"Sh-h-h," I embraced him in an unsuccessful attempt to calm him. He clutched me as if afraid that I would slip away from his grasp. Which I was going to, inevitably.
We both knew when in the real world he began to stir and slowly awaken.
"I don't hate you, ever," he whispered, as close to any admission as he had ever got, belying the words from earlier.
"I know," I answered and tasted his lips one last time, unable to stop myself. "Move on, Draco. Forget me."
In the empty bed, he woke with a start.
~*~
His conscious mind took control and diminished the dream, thus pushing me out, and I opened my eyes up on my cloud. I gasped, like a swimmer breaching the surface.
My own reality pressed me down with a harsh kick in the face.
There was a storm going on, a stark opposite of the oppressive calm that had ruled my world ever since I first appeared there. So far I hadn't felt anything real; the sun never truly warm, the gushes of wind never exactly tangible.
But now everything was shockingly clear, almost frighteningly so. The vicious jets of cold water hit me relentlessly, weighing me down, numbing my perception with iciness, holding me prisoner.
"That was a stupid thing to do," I heard an even voice that obviously had no problems stabbing through the heavy sounds of the rain.
Turning, I saw Cedric, sitting in the cloud in a bubble of calm, dry whiteness that had surrounded me, too, so far.
"The dead are dead," he went on with a look that was probably supposed to be reproving but came across suspiciously like childish pettiness. "You had no right to invade his life just when he was starting to recover."
I could have laughed. But I didn't, suddenly overcome by guilt. What if he really continued to hope for me because of that dream? I had wanted only to give him, however brief, solace; to tell him to forget. What if I had done him wrong?
Like always lately, I was split between two opposite emotions. When had I obtained such duality?
Cedric flickered out and I opened my eyes to watch the rain. The nearly living slate grey of the clouds, swirling and changing; the torrents of water that stripped my soul bare; bolts of lightning forking their way down, threatening to burn me to helpless ashes.
I did laugh this time. How could they expect me to forget when my punishment was to live in Draco's eyes?
~*~
When I looked to check on him again, a day had almost passed, darkness enveloping the earth once more. He was curled in the middle of the unmade bed, staring into space. I shivered and the guilt welled up, wanting to swallow me whole.
Up in my 'heaven,' under the unforgiving rain, I curled into a mirror image of his position and watched him.
~*~
He remained nearly catatonic like that for more than a week; barely eating, hardly sleeping, almost not moving. Thinking. For what, I wasn't allowed to reach and see, but it made me progressively worried just the same.
When the first letter from his employer arrived, he completely ignored it. The second made him snort. The third was accompanied by all his things stacked neatly in a box bearing his name.
He didn't care.
High above, I trembled, cold with two weeks of incessant rain and with hopelessness.
~*~
One day he got up, showered, shaved and dressed, and went out. After hours of tedious digging in the largest wizarding library in London, he got home with at least a dozen thick old tomes.
When I, who up to that moment had not seen the titles of the books, saw the inscriptions on covers dark and hard with wear, I wanted to curse, to hit, to pour some brains into his obnoxious Slytherin head.
The topic was one and the same, though formulated in different ways: magical bonding.
"Dear God," I whispered fervently, praying for something unknown, wanting help from someone I hadn't particularly believed in all my life. "Don't let him get too deep, don't let him do what I think he'll do. Please God, keep him alive and sane, and don't make him pay for my stupidity."
I couldn't remember ever being so sincere or so repentant. I was pretty aware at that point that I had made a huge mistake, and I wanted to kick myself for acting before thinking, like always. I was ready to go through anything, everything, in order to stop Draco from doing what it looked like he was planning to do.
But if anything, the rain only poured harder.
~*~
He read the information carefully, taking notes and marking the questions he had. Two more times he went to the library, bringing more and more obscure books, using his now former occupation as a reason and excuse. When someone asked too many questions or got suspicious, he paid for silence.
There are different types of connection, he found out and I learnt with him: magical, spiritual, physical. Link of blood. Link of debt.
The rituals, the ways, the possibilities and dangers, he knew them all long before the beginning of the New Year. He was also aware by then that the more links connected two individuals, the more they belonged together.
Of all the bonds, he could possibly forge only one - magical. All the others required my active participation. But he was obsessed, mad with grief and loneliness, determined like never before.
Late on New Year's Eve, when all the others celebrated, he cleared the living room of furniture and began drawing sigils and symbols on the smooth marble floor. He had brewed the potions needed earlier the same month, had prepared all the objects he would have to use.
He undressed and purified himself, cut his hair, painted spells and runes over the pale silk of his skin. He put my wand, which he had received as a last memento of me, in the centre of the room and began chanting.
Hours passed. He sang and spelled his way from one stage to the next; walking in circles, tying ribbons, evoking old magics. When at dawn he fell on his knees, bending so as to touch his forehead to the glowing marble of the floor, my wand in his wand hand, his own in the left, and whispered the final incantation, I felt a tiny pang in my chest.
Like a small hook at the end of a long gold thread that began from his magic and reached mine, that intimate place behind the ghost of my heart. He passed out from exhaustion.
Watching him, wanting him, hating me, I cursed my fate, cursed the Gods and myself.
The connection was warm and shining, full of hope and life. Yet I was filled with endless desperation.
~*~
He returned all the books and borrowed new ones, this time on necromancy and mate link properties. He drew tables, made comparisons, listed and evaluated pros and cons. He was thinking of what to do next, what to choose.
And while he prayed for success, Cedric nagged and the heavens poured over me, I didn't know what to do, weep or hope.
He decided something at one point, although I had no idea what. He packed a small bag and went to Hogwarts, to Severus Snape.
"I need some books," he told the Potions Master, making the latter scowl.
The library at Hogwarts kept precious, rare books. Books that were dangerous, both for the reader and on the whole.
Snape wasn't stupid. No one went there to seek books which could be found just at every other bookstore.
"Draco…" he began.
"Please, Professor," Draco interrupted, "I won't take them anywhere. I won't do anything that is dangerous."
"Even to your own person?"
Here Draco kept silent.
He had always had a good relationship with Snape, one based on mutual respect and understanding. The Professor knew him well enough.
"Tell me the topic of your research." Intelligent dark eyes sought entrance into Draco's mind.
"Necromancy," Draco answered, tensing up for a fight.
"I won't allow that," Snape stated firmly, and for an instant I thought, hoped, believed, that he'd manage to talk sense into Draco. Then I saw unwavering determination in stubborn grey eyes. I could have screamed.
"You can't stop me," Draco argued. "I already have some information. I have murky spots that I might like to clarify, but even if you deny me a pass and I don't, I'll still try."
"You will die," Snape told him, because yes, most attempts ended like that.
"I won't," Draco smiled; a wistful frightful smile. "And even if I do, it won't be worse than it is now."
Snape tapped fingers over his pursed lips, thinking.
"Draco," he started again, and I knew that the words were hard for him. "Love might be a stupid weakness, but it is sweet, intoxicating, addictive. I know that. But it is over. He is dead. You are not. Don't throw the gift you have away. You can go on. You can."
Draco closed his eyes, and I could tell right away that Snape's breath had been lost.
"I came here for information. Will you give me access to it or not?"
Snape saw the choice, it was a pretty obvious one: to send Draco to his death or to provide him with a weapon - if unsure - against it.
"Do you have Potter's cloak?" the man asked, giving in, and Draco nodded, prepared in advance for the condition not to be seen under any circumstances. "Pull it on, then, and follow me."
A week later, Draco left Hogwarts even more single-minded than before. But he didn't go home.
He headed for the mountains.
For the mountains, where a secluded village lent shelter to a feared and secret part of the magical society - vampires.
~*~
I knew that a vampire could bond to someone - could take a mate. The details of that bonding, however, its purposes and rituals, were not meant for mortals to understand.
I had no idea what Draco had in mind. How vampire bonding rituals could help him was a murky question, even though I have to admit I had my suspicions.
When dusk fell, he was on his knees in the centre of a small stone square, his arms hanging by his sides, his only luggage the clothes he was wearing. His eyes were tightly closed, his neck bare.
The creatures smelled him, of course; felt him. An hour later they were in a thick circle around his unmoving form and were waiting impatiently for their leader, I supposed.
When he came, a man seemingly in his thirties, dark and smooth, with seduction weaved into every line of his cynically twisted features, voices rose in the silence; voiced carrying suggestions that made my stomach churn. The leader didn't respond, didn't encourage or stop them. He went to Draco with determined strides and yanked his bent head back, forcing his pale throat into a tensed, clean arch.
"What are you doing here, food?" the vampire hissed, and a few of those standing hungrily around laughed. "Looking for trouble?"
"I came here to seek hope," Draco answered quietly, his light eyes boring into those of the enquirer.
"Hope?" the man looked carefully at the kneeling body, and saw for the first time the pose of offering and submission.
"Yes."
"Disperse!" the leader ordered, gaze still locked with Draco's but the word clearly intended for his people.
The two of them were alone in a matter of moments.
"Talk," the vampire said, his fingers still woven in Draco's short hair.
"My lover died," Draco began. "I want to bring him back."
"Him?" the other interrupted, laughing; his hand moving to caress Draco's cheek and lips, invoking a tremble.
"Yes, him." The answer, despite everything, was perfectly even.
"I don't see the connection between that and you being here," the vampire continued. "And as far as I know you will probably die, too, in that inane attempt."
"You can help me!" Draco countered, and the eyes of the man flared. Obviously he wasn't accustomed to being opposed to.
"Be careful, food," he warned Draco, so deadly low that the hairs on my neck stood on end in alarm and defence. "If you are quiet and respectful I might not punish your stupidity in coming here. You can't imagine, however, what will happen to you if you continue to talk to me in such a fashion."
I saw Draco's jaw tighten. "Please," he uttered almost inaudibly. "I'm ready to do whatever you require."
The vampire stopped, probably fascinated by the audacity of a simple mortal.
"You speak unclearly, food. Tell me in detail what it is that you so desire."
"I want to be turned," Draco shot. "My lover and I are connected magically. If I am a vampire I can choose him for my other Half and then call him back."
The face of the man hardened and darkened. "I am responsible for four hundred and thirty immortal souls. I have problems as it is: food, shelter, peace and unity are difficult to acquire. With the recent political developments in your world many of my kind have headed home in search of a new chance and absolution. In years no one has been turned according to an unspoken decision. I can't help you."
"I won't need your shelter and protection," Draco spoke, and it was as close to a plea as he would ever get: partially entreaty, partially persuasion. "I'm ready to pay, to offer anything you might request."
The vampire was silent for a while, and I could see that the temptation was enormous. "How much can you pay?"
"How much do you want?" A thoroughly Slytherin answer - a question. Not proposing a price himself, but allowing the other to choose.
"Five hundred Galleons for the turning, and ten more for each day that you spend here."
"Deal."
The vampire looked suddenly curious. "You realise that you won't be able to fool me, don't you?"
"Of course I do." Draco's smile was self-depreciating and a bit twisted.
"Who are you?" the man asked.
"Draco Malfoy."
For a moment it was quiet. "I knew your father, Draco Malfoy. Long ago, in another lifetime."
Draco nodded in acknowledgement and put paid to the issue.
"So you agree?" he asked instead.
"My people could use the money," the vampire pointed out in a way of an answer. "Let's go to my house," he continued. "And by the way, my name is Gabriel."
Moving to his feet, Draco smirked, and it seemed like all his confidence had come back in a single second. "Gabriel?" he repeated, obviously amused. "Like the angel?"
His companion laughed. "Like father, like son, isn't it. Once your father asked the same."
~*~
The turning took place the very next night, after a nervous day which Draco spent pacing around.
"It may hurt," Gabriel warned and then looked away in a rather coy fashion. "But there are things I can do to make it better."
He licked his lips as if to clear all doubts as to what those things were.
"We can do whatever you like," Draco said carefully. "But I want to make it very clear that it will mean nothing."
"I remember what it is to love someone," Gabriel remarked, although in truth Draco had never uttered the word love in relation to himself, even before me. The vampire's expression became a tad wistful then cleared. "Shall we?" he bowed, as if asking Draco to a formal dance.
Draco was afraid at first, but Gabriel prepared him, awoke his body and senses, and took his mind off the impending biting.
Never before in the long months I had watched, had someone taken Draco, and so tenderly at that, so carefully. I was jealous for the first time, as if I had any right to be, as if it were right to feel that way. But I couldn't control it; I hated the vampire who was seducing my lover, hated myself for being stupid, hated fate. Again.
When Draco reached the summit, and his mind was shut down sufficiently, Gabriel bit his neck, the bluish image of the jugular visible through pale skin. Draco screamed. It hurt, in the way all things feared hurt. But as Gabriel used Draco's arousal to distract him, pain and pleasure coalesced together. The edges between the two feelings blurred, until they blended into pure, unadulterated, impossibly bright ecstasy.
I felt it as clearly as Draco did when his heart slowed gradually down and his senses dimmed. It almost became a physical pull when his subconscious mind reached out to me to use my power and sustain him. Only I wasn't present enough to lend that support.
I can't remember ever hurting so much - physically or mentally - as at the second when Draco's heart stopped beating.
~*~
I wasn't allowed to watch his training.
I think it was the worst period in my entire conscious existence. Almost two months I was gradually going mad with loneliness and guilt and shame. I kept focusing, but the image never came, my mind bumping futilely against a barrier of invisible power.
When I attempted to see him again one day, I unexpectedly succeeded. Draco was alone, back at his flat, sleeping. Had he moved on? Had he forgotten? Had he…
Stop, I ordered myself, forcing reason into me. He is the one that matters. He has to be happy. He should move on and forget you.
Oh, but sense hurt!
By that time, I had got used to the incessant raining for the most part. But as I watched Draco there, sure that if he was happy I'd never try to connect to him, a heavy block of pure ice settled in me.
"I told you he'd move on," a voice claimed behind me, and I suddenly had to blink back tears.
"I've never doubted that, not really," I answered but my voice was hopelessly uneven. "I'm happy for him."
"Yes, you really seem to be jumping with joy," Cedric commented, sarcasm too heavy to actually become him, and it suddenly hit me as strange that he should be so smug about it.
"I didn't say that I was jumping with joy," I countered quietly and looked away from him, at the living grey around me.
He shimmered out after a while.
~*~
I promised myself that I would stop. That I wouldn't watch anymore. And for some time, I kept to that decision, although it was hard.
One day Cedric came again, wearing a thoroughly unreadable expression.
"Hello," he muttered.
I started. We hadn't used greetings and formalities in ages.
"You will be moving soon," he announced after a prolonged period of uncomfortable silence, and I eyed him sharply.
"What?"
"I said that you would be moving soon," he repeated, although he probably knew that I was actually asking for details.
"Why?" I enquired again, and he looked extremely unwilling to be there with me at all. I wondered briefly what forces were taking away his personal choice.
"Tomorrow at noon is your one year anniversary," he uttered rather darkly. "This means that you will be transferred to another location. Goodbye, Harry. It was a pleasure to meet you again."
And he was gone, leaving me there confused and agape. Soon after that, I felt the first pull, terribly sharp, at the chord of my connection with Draco. I closed my eyes and tried not to answer that cry by looking, and asked myself what he was doing in order to need power from that particular source - me.
But after a few minutes, the call became too strong, too encompassing for me to ignore.
When I focussed, I saw Draco, naked and already purified, in the living room which still bore the signs of the bonding ritual he had performed several months ago. And as he began chanting in a low, concentrated voice, while painting new, more powerful sigils to overlie the old ones, I realised with a jolt of unrecognisable emotion that he hadn't given up after all.
I knew that being at the very same place where the first bond had been initiated would strengthen further the magics he sought to build. He used his own wand, then mine, then both of them simultaneously. He lit a fire and fed it with bewitched oils that filled the room with coloured, intoxicating fumes. As the ritual proceeded, his body became the palest, brightest thing imaginable; a walking flame that at the culmination of the ceremony practically pulsed with magic and energy.
He cut his wrists, allowing the blood to drip on my wand, and continued singing spells to life.
Twelve drops - one for each year we had known each other. One more for our previously achieved connection.
Thirteen, a magical number, the number bearing bad luck or ill fate, the main symbol of all the really important rituals, a powerful component that could fulfil your wish or kill you because of the impurity of your intention.
I held my breath although I didn't feel it right away.
He said the last words, then my name, then his own, then stepped into the now coal black flames of the fire. It burst high and turned into a rainbow of iridescent colours, blinding me, making me hold my eyes tightly shut.
Before I even had the time to worry, I felt the new, stronger cord attach itself to my soul.
The link pulsed, like elastic trying to shorten and pull us together. I knew that he had chosen me for his other Half, that I was his mate now. The connection was weaker that it would have been had I been present, but still, it was suddenly unbearable to be so far away from him.
Some of the greatest escapes in history have been accomplished due to a similar connection: a vampire tied to their mate. With some inexplicable intuition, I knew that if I had been somewhere on earth, the link would have transported me directly to him.
But I was not.
~*~
By the time I looked again, the fire was nothing but a tiny flame dancing on his palm. He bent his head and, totally illogically kissed it. The action seemed to suck the warmth of the fire into himself, into the link, into me. I shivered with the impossible intimacy of it.
He lay on the floor then, for long minutes doing nothing, simply breathing deeply, recovering his strength.
He got up again after that, though, and my head spun with the realisation of what he was going to attempt. Don't be an idiot! I wanted to scream frantically, It's dangerous enough without playing smart!
He couldn't hear me, however, could he? So he took the knife again and carved a shallow circle over his heart, then deepened the scratches on his wrists and cut the pads of his fingers. Up there, cocooned in rain and surreality, but still connected to him, I swayed with pain. How was he doing it to himself was a question I couldn't answer.
The runes he drew with his own blood were too complex for me to discern with my basic knowledge. Soon he was lying in much the same position he had been in at the end of the very first ritual - on his knees, forehead on the floor, arms spread wide, palms pressed against the marble. He represented the centre of a large flower painted on the floor. The petals were the sigils of his blood.
Beneath that drawing were the remnants of the previous magics, lines and runes in gold, green and silver. He had bound the first two rituals to that last one, drawing strength to finish the rite and survive.
The whole time he was chanting one and the same sentence over and over again, although I could not understand the words. His voice grew progressively weaker and weaker as pools of blood gathered under his hands and all the runes began glowing softly.
My vision of Draco slowly faded until only the bright red sigils remained painted on the black insides my lids. His breathing, which I realised I had been feeling in the back of my perception, stopped.
Pain filled me suddenly and, screaming, I was sucked away into darkness.
~*~
When I regained consciousness, there was only darkness. Strangely, however, it didn't feel even minutely like I was in an unlit room.
It was more as though my very essence permeated the thick darkness around me. I was aware; aware not in the way I was when I saw something, but more as if all of me had suddenly turned into perception. It was a thoroughly disconcerting feeling: interesting yet too unfamiliar to be safe or pleasant.
I tried to move but found out that I had no body, not even the ghostly, ethereal one I had possessed in the past year. I became even more uneasy.
"It seems unusual, does it not, pretty soul?" a voice asked me; a voice outside and inside me, a voice almighty.
It does, I thought, because I had no lips to utter the words, but it came out as if spoken aloud.
I shivered mentally.
"I have received a special request, pretty soul, one concerning you. Do you know what is it?"
I do.
"And what would you say about it?" The presence was gentle yet insistent, much stronger and deeper-going than Legilimens.
I can't imagine a greater gift.
"Most souls that cross the line between life and after-existence want to go back. I cannot allow that to all, do you understand?"
Yes.
"You have had an interesting way, pretty soul, a difficult fate that you fulfilled. You have been regarded as extremely benevolent during your lifetime. Yet you killed many times, and so did the claimant."
What could I say? I remained blank while the presence searched carefully through the depths of my soul for what I could not voice.
"Choices are a difficult task, pretty soul. When I granted your kind that privilege, I brought myself such great entertainment. There seems to be no clear logic in your choices."
Silence again.
"Why, for example, did you choose to break the rules and enter the dream of a living being, even be it your mate's?"
He was so unhappy. I wanted to take his pain away.
"And did you manage?"
No.
"Did you ask him to invoke the ritual which could bring you back?"
No.
"Yet you gave him the idea, is it not so?"
Not on purpose.
A clear, bell-like peal of quiet laughter. "Ah, purpose. You people have no true knowledge of the intentions of your souls deep inside. You tend to go too far without a map of the path."
Please, I couldn't help myself, afraid of where those questions were heading to, Don't let him die, even if his plea is not fulfilled.
"But that is an entirely different wish, pretty soul. Why should I grant both of your desires?"
My mind froze. I heard a high, keening sound as if from afar, not realising that it came from me. This voice, this… God, obviously, could send me back and still take Draco, could just switch our places.
A horrible, horrible possibility.
"Why, pretty soul, do you not want to live?" There was a curious note now, almost amusement.
No, not like that! Something in me was on the verge of tears.
"He is brave and determined," the voice stated with seemingly no connection to the previous train of thought. "No one has called upon me in centuries." A pause. "I might fulfil his wish. But tell me, what will happen if you decide that you want someone else once you get back?"
I won't.
"That was not what I asked."
I can't imagine ever being with someone else.
"And are you sure that he will always want you?"
I could have swallowed or closed my eyes. No.
"What will you do if he ever abandons you?"
I…I don't know.
"Well, pretty soul, he seems very intent on his plea."
In the back of the darkness, I heard Draco's voice chanting probably that very same sentence; only this time I could understand the words:
Gift me back my mate.
"There are conditions, pretty soul. Conditions you'll have to follow."
I agree.
"No, not so quickly, pretty soul. First hear them. You will live as long as he lives. But if your feelings change, no matter whether you admit it or not, you will return here and will not be allowed to watch upon the earth for the rest of his lifetime. If his feelings change, likewise. And you are not allowed to tell him about those conditions. Do you still agree, pretty soul?"
Yes…
How could I not agree when I bore the negatives all by myself, when I wouldn't endanger Draco, when I was given a chance to live again? Before the word was even finished, I faded into the blackness.
~*~
I woke up naked on a floor that was stone cold and covered with blood. Having a body felt more than simply weird, and I needed a moment before I could get my bearings and actually move.
When I turned, I was face to face with Draco's unmoving, unbreathing form.
Unbreathing.
Panic seized me to the marrow of my bones. Something was out of place; something was not right with the links, although it was a mystery how I could tell. He wasn't drawing power from me, wasn't using the chance for survival. He was barely there. It was all by instinct that I realised the connection was not fully functional.
I was too afraid to think. Purely by intuition, I drew Draco's body so that his back was pressed against my chest, and cut my wrist with the knife lying nearby.
I opened his mouth and allowed the blood to drip freely into his throat.
It was almost pain to have myself bleed, almost pleasure. Massaging his neck gently, I made him swallow. I concentrated hard on him, praying for a result, fighting off despair. When I finally passed out again, I vaguely registered that he was moving in my arms.
~*~
The princess in the fairy tale must be very happy to be woken up every time with a kiss. A silly thought, I have to admit. But it crossed my mind for the few seconds needed to regain full consciousness. I answered the caress out of habit and instinct, pleasantly grounded by the fact that I could actually feel the touch.
I tasted the remnants of blood on his tongue and on my own as well, and could only guess that he had finished the final stage of the connection which I began. My hands found his shoulders and pulled him closer, his skin sliding against mine.
My mind reached easily towards his, almost as if it had practice, and I explored with fascination that unknown world. He did the same, testing how far he could go. I allowed him access everywhere, all that I had or thought or owned was his if he wanted it, and he had to know that. All, except for the small guarded compartment that held my promise of secrecy. He touched the idea, tried to unfold it, to explore it. Upon denial, he pulled away.
Just then, I found a similar closed space in his thoughts and gasped, realising that he had probably promised something, too.
"I hate you," he whispered into my mouth, knowing as well as I did that neither of us would ever understand the full set of conditions.
"No, you don't," I answered quietly and kissed him again.
I held him close, drinking in the pleasure of his mere presence, more concerned that I had him again than with being oblivious to some heavenly information.
This was life, I realised with amazement and relief and a heart full of other, unnamed emotions, while my fingers reacquainted themselves with the skin of his back. His lips found the skin just behind my ear, making me shiver.
This touch, craved and denied, forgotten and dreamt of for so long, it was reality, universe and life all by itself for the sole reason that it solidified two souls soaked with feelings and presented them in a form that cannot be mistaken.
Touch gave security.
Love had never seemed surer or more real than at that moment when I hugged and worshipped him. I wanted so much to tell him how I felt, to thank him and never let him go. But that would have been a helpless cliché, and he held such hatred for those.
So instead, I invited his mind back into mine and closed my eyes against the bone-deep pleasure of it. Then I touched his features, combed through hair softer than raindrops would ever be, traced his lips with the pads of my fingers. I tried to paint from memory a bruise on his left collar bone, one that should have been there had he not been too busy and sad to play. When I kissed his fingertips, they were smooth, having, too, long forgotten the bow and strings in favour of dusty books with spells. The paint brush had carved small indents on his fingers while he had clutched it and I kissed those marks as well.
Letting emotions whirl freely into my mind, letting go, I allowed him to read the feelings and make whatever he chose out of them.
~*~
The End
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