The fic is placed some six-seven years after the end of the canon. H/D, of course. In the darkness of the night (the place is the one the reader can imagine better, thinking about this situation).

To FP and William Patrick Corgan, humbly by one of his fans, because after I read this fic for the N-nth time I remembered his WONDERFUL "Stand inside your love". [I'm blushing!]

Birthmark

by Catriona Snape
 
 
 

Biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto,
ma l'un de' cigli un colpo avea diviso.

Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, Canto III, vv. 107-108 (Manfredi).
 
 

Her soft lips are warm on my perfect traits.

I love the way we love each other, after all this years of fighting and renouncing to the ones we cared for. All this people lost in long gone times, whose names are like scars in my flesh and salt in a newly reopened wound. At least, we closed the door to the absolute chaos, to the total negation of what is logic and natural- Voldemort.

"Who cut you eyebrow, Draco?"
I love her fingers too, brushing away pain and anchoring firmly me to present. But now the present is pain. "I don't know, Hermione."

She climbs into my lap, Her sweet warm weight. She breathes in synch with me, looking into my eyes, as we unconsciously caress each other's back. "Did I hurt you?"

"No." I'm too quick in my answer. She feels this as I do. It's like a defensive manoeuvre, when you spar and you're skilful enough. It's me who have hurt her, now. I crush her body, how luscious, how concrete, to mine, in an awkward (too fast) hug.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be, it's nothing."

"You know, I think it's the truth. I really don't know when someone cut my right eyebrow. I'm clueless, as they erased my memory about this particular event.

"Maybe it was Voldemort, when he went to our house, and he marked me like a beast of his property, and I fought him, but he was chasing me like the death's shadow, and he got me in the end.

"Or maybe someone could think my own father did this to me... They think he was a brute, that he used to beat me, or my mother, or the both of us. How are they wrong. I remember the way they were embraced in their bed, when the Dark Lord's killers went there to murder them, proud traitor parents of a traitor son.

"Perhaps Harry did, when we duelled, when I screamed to him I was innocent, I wasn't a Death Eater anymore, I loved you, and he fought back like a lion, desperately clutching to his idea of revenge, for Ron and Cho and Lavender, and his parents, and for you too, you were the sibling he never had, and he cursed me for stealing you."

"He probably never understood why do I love you." Her eyes, full of laugh and tears. I whisper a kiss on her lips, then put a finger on this tender rose flesh.

"Or in the final battle, in the chaos, when we all gave up our hopes of living and illusion of unity, and a deluge of fire and violence left his marks on our lives forever. Maybe someone scarred my "corpse", when I fainted, just before the end. Maybe I did this to my own flesh, when I stumbled and fell on the field."

I kiss her just to drown our ghosts in the newly found equilibrium of today. "You know, it doesn't steal a tiny bit of beauty from you."

"I don't think anymore about beauty when I look at this scar, Hermione, if I ever did. I- I look at this and sense all the path we made and all the things we lost, and I, for once, feel I'm reborn, just with some knowledge and memory I couldn't have twenty-four years ago.

"For it's not my scar, but my birthmark."
 
 

THE END
 
 
 

notes: this particular Dante's quote bugged me some month ago. Manfredi (Manfred, in English) is the illegitimate son of Fred II (also know as Frederick II of Swabia, I'm not sure about the translation of the region's name), the emperor. He's a very cool character (okay, a historical one), and I think he's a lot like Draco: beautiful, blond, arrogant, aristocratic. Probably Draco would die the way he did (during a battle, excommunicated- the real hobby of a medieval pope, believe me, excommunication-, a rebel, in a way-too-simple-word). I tried to write a fic about this little portrait Dante gives of Manfredi (like a self-challenge), and today I found the way!
I find this fic to be quietly angsty and tragic, but hopeful too. That's the real meaning of the last line. He's been through so many tragedies and now he's trying again to build a life again, and love has a big part in this new beginning.
And for the SP relation, it's because the lines "And for the first time/I feel as though I am reborn in my mind/recast as child and mystic sage". Stand Inside Your Love is one of my favourite songs, and I'm surprised (shouldn't I?) to find some bits of its message here, in this depressive/optimistic fic.
Ah, for the "total negation of what is logic and natural" bit, I said this because 1) Voldie is crazy, so he can't be logic; 2) he's trying to cheat death (so I think he doesn't really need an heir, and if he's going to find himself one, it's because she/he is a very powerful one, or important one, and he wants to captivate her/him; "Death Eater" means "someone who finds her/his nourishment in someone else's death" but also "someone who mocks death, who's not eaten by death but who eats death"), a thing not very natural.

translation: He was blond and beautiful and elegant, but a blow had parted one of his eyebrows.
[Oh my goodness, I killed Dante! The Italian version was better. If you can, find a copy of the Commedia somewhere and read this there.]