Cold to Fire

I do not love you except because I love you;

I go from loving to not loving you,

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;

I hate you deeply, and hating you

Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

Is that I do not see you but love you blindly

-Pablo Neruda

Hate is, after all, so easy to take.

I wish we still had it left, you know. You believe we do. When you look at me with eyes of feather and ice, you see a stubborn, steady boy with a permanent scowl in place for you. I wonder if you're inventive enough to think what the frown could be covering; you probably are, but you wouldn't waste the time. You only waste time for this revulsion, to push me so far away I might as well be eye to eye and chest to chest.

I push back because I must, and because it is the only thing that will keep you close. Close and as blissfully ignorant as I wish I was. Close enough that the heat and cold in us hits and recoils. God, I need that so much it frightens me, and has frightened me for months. For a while the words and the pranks and spite lasted well enough. Then one day the hexes died on my mouth and I saw it, I saw it so clearly. It was like I'd been looking at the page of a book too closely; I leaned my head back and saw the print for what it meant, and it meant this: I burned. I burned in no uncertain terms.

There has to be some reason in this. I've gone over the possibilities. A love potion? It's possible; but not from you. Something like that would be disgusting to you, so disgusting that even the prospect of my humiliation would be outweighed by it. But to someone else who hated me, this would be the perfect revenge, watching me squirm and knowing I'd never tell. But who else is good enough to make an effective one? Your hands, pale and strong, are among the few that could have created one. The other pair- if they had done it, it would not be you I'd be thinking of.

It could be just the stress of living on borrowed (or stolen, I've been keeping it for quite a while now) time. Oh, I'll make a nicely pathetic figure when it's all done, whether or not I remember to look over my shoulder (sooner or later I won't be totally sane, and what could be more ridiculous then this want?). My enemy is smarter than the rest of us put together; he knows that this waiting, this uncertainty, this worry destroys deeper than any spell. He is not snapping the body and mind, keeping the ghost intact; he is shaking me down from the inside.

You, too, are there. But I don't try to shy away from it. No, I do, but I don't want to. Each breath I take without thinking about the way you breathe, the way you walk so the stars and moon might as well follow you- each is a won battle. Though I doubt I am winning the war.

I am tired, you lovely idiot, you damnably lovely moron. I had lived half my life without affection, and I can't wait around without it, hanging on without something. I need someone's warm thoughts, warm words, warm self; but I wouldn't even have your pity if you knew. Probably not even greater hate; you cannot hate something as low and repulsive as that with a passion. With an equal passion, at any rate. Are we equal, then? Even when you belittled me, there was always a spark of pride that assured me I was the better man, I was only dealing with you because I had to.

I have to now, more than ever, but I am not proud of it.

You make me want to separate from myself. Scorch myself from the inside out till I am someone you embrace in something other than a fight. That's not going to happen; so I must keep hate, if it is the only emotion I will ever be held with. Indifference is the real opposite of love, not hate; thoughts of me sear through you, though with a different variety of passion than those in my head. But they are there, I am there inside you, and I must remain if I'm to have any remnant of sanity.

The person I loathe the most is not you. It's someone weak enough to let revulsion and infatuation mingle and richochet without caution in his head, although he might be clever enough to hide it. No matter how much you detest Harry Potter, love, no one hates him more than me. No matter; I will thrive on it. Because hate is, after all, so easy to take.

"Why the hell are you staring off like that while I'm talking to you, Potter?"