Soul Mates

I remember everything about the way he looked the last time I saw him. His hair was even more messy than usual. His eyes were wild and raw with a heady mix of indescribable emotions that flickered like candle flames, fleeting and vague and able to be snuffed out in an instant. I watched him intently, trying to scar his image onto my retinas. He stood against the wall, nervously picking at the edge of his robes, his chin dipped into his chest and his face dark and clouded. Every so often he would glance up through the thick canopy of his eyelashes and I would flinch, unable to answer the bitter question that he was asking in those looks: Why?

Our whole relationship had been based on questions. It was almost as if the moment our lips had met an egg timer had been turned on it's head and sand was sifting it's way slowly through it's glass case, counting down the seconds we had left. We were running against the clock, and now, here, on this dark winter night in the middle of an alleyway in Hogsmeade, our time had finally run out. We were now running on empty.

"I can't do this anymore," he whispered, his breath hitching in his throat.

I didn't blame him for not being able to continue because I couldn't either. It had been so exhilarating, so fucking dramatic. Our whole relationship, if you can even call it that, was based on passion. Both of us had a careless inability to be able to do anything half-arsed. When we found something we enjoyed, we pursued it obsessively. When we hated, we did so with a burning anger that could not be quenched. When we loved, we gave our everything, which if I think about it now, was probably where it all fell apart.

As soon as we realised that our bitter rivalry was in fact a disguise for something much stronger, deeper and altogether scarier, we fell into each other with such a desperate hunger only witnessed before in starving men. I remember stumbling across him in the halls one day, pulling him aside and forcing him into a dark alcove. I pinned his wrists above his head and proceeded to kiss him until our lips were red and bruised. I remember how we used to sneak out at midnight and meet under the stalls on the quidditch pitch. We would whisper our deepest desires to each other, our darkest fears, the wants and needs we barely even admitted to ourselves.

Harry was the missing part of my jigsaw puzzle. The ambling gait, the clumsy grace, the effortless precision of his flying; those curves and those angles all fitted against mine so well, filling my spaces and shaping around my protrusions. He was my sun and I was his moon.

I looked back at him, standing against that wall, resignation etched over that handsome face. I leaned in towards him and breathed deeply, inhaling the scent that was so distinctively his, indescribable with any other word than 'Harry'. I reached out and allowed my lips to brush against his, memorising the silk of his mouth, the taste of his heart. I pulled back, finally, and reached for his hand. He clasped mine gently, squeezing once before dropping it. He walked away, back down the alley towards the lights of Hogsmeade. I watched him go.

Out of the darkness came the shape of a girl, concern visible on her face. She hooked her arm in his and I heard her ask where he had been.

"Nowhere," he said. "Finishing off some business."

The girl smiled at him and ushered him back inside the pub.

I collapsed against the wall he had just been leaning on and imagined it still contained his warmth. I wondered when I had become business, and I decided that this final deal was almost as clinical as a business arrangement. He loved two of us: me and that girl. Of course, she had won. He knew her first and he would know her last.

I tried not to be bitter but the taste exploded like rotten fruit on my tongue. I swallowed heavily and forced myself to move away and back towards home. As I passed fields and country lanes I looked up into the sky and smiled. In amongst the tiny lights, a shooting star sparkled across the skies, taking with it any regrets I was harbouring. Harry could marry Hermione and they could raise a family. None of it seemed to matter anymore, because with or without him, we both knew the truth:

soul mates never die.