Title: Glove Anaesthesia (Love Ridden 16)

Author: Romie

Archive: Anywhere.  I'd appreciate an e-mail so that I can visit your site if I haven't seen it yet.

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Spoilers: None

Disclaimers: not mine.  Rowling's.  That said, anybody's pretty much

free to steal from anything I've done, as long is it generates

something cool.

Warning: Features same-gender romantic interaction.  Don't read if you can't handle it.

Summary: The conclusion of the Love Ridden series.  Draco's POV.

=====================================

 

Flecks of purple twirl within translucent gemtones, an amorphous galaxy glittering under my hands, filling my cauldron with delicate blue.  Trompe l'oeil makes it touchable but impossibly far away, nattering firebugs calling for my consumption.  I want to follow them, to stop this fight with gravity and embrace the depths.  To split the room with silent screaming, particles streaming in spiraling spitfires.

 

It is a seductively beautiful potion.  It is not, however, the potion I intended to make.  A proper Solaris elixir is opaque orange and smells like charcoal.  When dabbed on the tongue, it calls down the songbirds; when smeared on the eyelids, it banishes dark.

 

I broke my viola.  Smashed it to ragged splinters while looking for its secrets.  Peeled the lacquer away, split the grain.  Plumbed with my thumbnails, probing the deepest recesses, admitting light to the hidden compartments.  Even in expiration, it frustrated, biting my hands in flat refusal, unwilling to show its music.  Withholding against hysterical interrogations, unmoved by my furor.

 

I simply could not stand to look at it anymore.  Mocking me from the corner, cheeks a garish red.  Leering tone holes bisected by bars of silvered nylon - an infernal tease of antonymous signals.  Tuning pegs canted in jocular curls, curving devil's thorns that masquerade as crowns.  (How could I hope to create when my only skill is destruction?)

 

It was a stupid, pointless, theatrical gesture - I acknowledge that.  Theatrical because of the satisfying gunshot snap when the bridge popped off, the firework of shattering fingerboard, the plummeting moans of stretched strings shuddering loose.  Pointless because no one but me will ever notice it is gone.  Stupid because now, yet again, I have nothing to distract me from my morose musings once I revisit my room.

 

Snape has not yet caught on to the fact that I am sabotaging my potion.  Stalling.  Or maybe he has - maybe he is pretending, too.

 

I return to powdered beetle's wings, avoiding the lyssomer paste until the last possible moment.  (I do not like to get my hands dirty.)  So I shuffle the poultice, pretend to search for flaws until Snape stops me.  Says I should be getting back now.

 

He walks me down back hallways and shifting staircases, the journey long rather than short.  I suppose I should be thankful for the delay, but it just prolongs the tension.  Gaping depression prevents my enjoyment of these clandestine corridors, or amusement in my sequestration.

 

Finally, he leaves me at my door.  I ask him whether he thinks it is safe to trust my recognizance, but I cannot muster a proper sneer.  Aloof and sallow, he mutters something about "for my own protection."  I stare him down until he turns the corner.

 

And that is why I am alone when I discover the ubiquitous Harry Potter.  I suppose I did not properly disabuse him of the notion that we are friends - that, or he has come back to duel properly.

 

He looks older when he sleeps, lips set in an uneasy 'o'.  His glasses hang askew across the slope of his nose, one earpiece jutting loose against the ether.  I remove them to better see the lines around his eyes.  A boy this young should not have wrinkles, but an unmistakable crease furrows his eyebrows and another traces the side of his mouth.  His skin is so pale - paler even than when he wakes.  Or maybe it only seems so against the shadow of a bruise.

 

I should not be watching him.  I should wake him roughly, jolt him into consciousness, order him to leave and hurt him until he knows not to come back.  Then again, this is Harry Potter; I imagine he stops to look at train wrecks, too.

 

Instead, I take quiet pleasure in seeing him thus unguarded.  He has entered My sanctum, so I take the time to observe His.  It is not a pleasurable one, from what I gather; his rest is less than placid.  In a moment of forethought, I disarm him, placing the wand beside his glasses.

 

It is only then that I realize the wand is not the thing he was protecting.  The wand is not the thing he was cradling close to his chest, tightly bound between fingers and palm.  With infinite patience, I coax the hand open, freezing whenever he stirs and moving only when he is quiet.  Release is not a thing you can force - it must be given incrementally, embraced and recognized as it occurs.  Finally, his fingers part enough to reveal their treasure.

 

It rests against his love line, nestled in the furrow there and buttressed with his thumb.  I almost laugh at the ironies of chance.  Fortune must be in love; there is no other reason she would delight so much in baiting me.

 

His hand - his right hand, his future - holds the bridge.  The heart of the viola.  The brace which turns the strings' vibration to notes that resonate.  The link that turns trembling to music.

 

I raise my head to find he has awoken - my fingers must have clenched without my notice.  He regards me with sleep-shod eyes, face lax and features soft.  For a moment, he looks befuddled - uncertain of where he is or why I am watching him.  He blinks, and portcullises slip into place; they have not closed yet, but the awareness is there.  He blinks again, and they are gone once more.  He is completely open, completely unafraid.  Several minutes pass before we speak, and I am thankful for it.  Words have always been our weakness, the barrier to comprehension.

 

"You will leave me," I finally say, and he will.  Constancy is not a cloak he wears well; his pursuit of me confirms his distaste for routine.  Somehow, he understands what I am telling him, the warning and the omen tempered by a longing that once revolted me but which I hardly notice now.

 

"You haven't given me the chance to arrive," he answers, regret elongating the syllables just enough that it is not a challenge.  Instead, it is a eulogy.  He knows he's lost - finally, permanently.  If he stays, he is mine.  If he goes, he is not the soul he believes himself to be.  He thinks he might be in love with me, but he does not know.  He wants to find out; he fears what he seeks.  He is stunning in his indecision; confusion has stripped his usual confidence.

 

I regret putting him in this position.  It surprises me to make that realization; I take no joy in what I have done.  Such sorrow should never shade those features, no matter how beautiful; such tension should never break that lethargy.  "Go back to sleep," I say, embarrassed, and I withdraw.

 

Or try to.  Even half asleep and half blind, he is a Seeker, and he catches my wrist easily, gripping more securely than any handcuff.  "Please," he whispers, and I expect him to continue, but he does not - just leaves the plea hanging in the air.  He does not know what he is asking for.  This is the first time he has comprehended that.

 

"You will leave me," I say again, only this time it is an order, the 'alone' implied as I glance at my captured wrist.

 

"I'm sorry," he apologizes, releasing my wrist immediately.  He has the grace to blush as he stands, not bothering to look for his wand or his glasses, but checking for the remnant of my broken instrument.  He walks briskly to the door - trying, I surmise, to distance himself from his one great failure.

 

"Harry -" stops at the door, turning his head only a fraction, but enough that I can see his discomfort.  He tries to obscure it, but his face is never this blank; he has done his job so well that I am instantly suspicious.  I accept the possibility that he is merely exhausted -- hand braced wearily against the doorframe and feet shuffling without correction.  He looks like a grapevine deprived of its trellis, the tilted windmills of his eyes still and ragged.

 

"Harry."  I say.  "Come back to bed."

 

Trite, I know; but I suppose this is how romance novels close.

 

Not that this is the end of the story - we have never even kissed, let alone made our peace.  He has not told his friends; he knows no word for his emotions besides "confusing".  I am still the pariah of Hogwarts; my mother is still in captivity, and I am not yet convinced that he will not desert me tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after.  Whether I will reattempt the viola is a mystery.

 

In my experience, nothing ever concludes completely - there will always be 'after's, even in death.  And so I will rest here, for while it is not The ending, it is at least An ending, and a relatively happy one, despite its flaws and my misgivings.  Curling against the retiring scaffold of Harry's back, I lay my head against his shoulder, (MY shoulder,) and drift slowly into slumber.