Essential Beauty

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but not from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Lullaby, W.H. Auden

Essential Beauty

Beauty /'bju:ti/ n. combination of quatlities that delights the sight or other senses or the mind; person or thing having this.

Chapter One

She was supposed to like the city, the grey and the persistent kitten-patter rain. She was supposed to like the dusty empty quiet of a tiny one-bedroom flat. She was not supposed to be sitting naked and cross-legged in an impersonal white bathtub, letting her freckled skin soak in the soapy water and become wrinkled, watching with a somewhat mindless fascination as water droplets trickled one by one by one from the water faucet, wondering what in the world possessed her to be there, just right there and then.

She had thought she had been sure that, having been engulfed by the noise of 12 Grimmauld Place, which was so polluted with memories and ghosts of memories and people that she had felt as if her breathing was getting heavier and more laboured, she would appreciate some comforting, healing silence. And so, just six hours ago, whilst having lunch with the rest of the Weasley family, and Harry, and Hermione, and Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Tonks, and Lupin, and Ernie MacMillan, and Luna Lovegood, and Michael Corner, and Cho Chang, and - she forgot who else, but she remembered at least a good twenty people - she had, in between the charmed flying projectiles and heated arguments about things she had forgotten what of, she had calmly placed down her fork and knife, and had calmly pushed back her chair, walking away from the table.

She had only taken five steps before Harry had noticed. Predictably, he had asked, "Gin - where're you going?"

She sincerely hated it when he called her that. Before she would have brushed it aside, taking it in her stride, smiling indulgently because it was so much Harry to forget such things, but this time - she had turned, and replied, weary, "I'll be going away for a while."

She had almost smirked - an old, almost forgotten bad habit, learned from studying someone she'd much rather forget as well - when Harry returned her remark with the blank look which so characterized him when he could not understand something (even though he was still beautiful - how could he not be with his dark green eyes and tousled hair, and his pale narrow features?). "Where?" he had blurted, but she had not answered. Instead she had turned to the twins, who were by now like quite a few of the others watching the exchange with either interest or curiosity. Or trepidation.

"Fred, George - mind if I borrow some money from the vault?" she ignored Fred's immediate shrewd look and George's look of concern, knowing that they wouldn't really mind her taking a few hundred Galleons for a while anyway. And before anyone could have said anything - she had Apparated.

She hadn't brought anything along with her - she'd simply Summoned them in her usual complacent manner half an hour ago. And she'd settled on the first decrepit grey-brown bricked apartment she had seen, after making sure it was in a tolerable condition. She had, after all, almost forgotten what it was to be pampered. And with the bad property rates due to the current situation, the owner had been obviously eager to rent out this ugly thing of an empty house.

And what, exactly, had she been doing for the three and half hours between receiving the keys to her first apartment and Summoning her things over?

She had simply stared into the stained ceiling, admiring the paled would-be gold embossed wallpaper, with as much aim and purpose as she was now staring at the water dripping off the rim of the water faucet.

Painfully, she realized, after trying so hard to run away, she had still come back to her favourite therapy - aimless procrastination - only, of course, this time she did not have the luxury of her fellow patient.

Closing her eyes, she remembers, how they used to stare, their backs on the floor and their bodies, fully clothed, next to each other, just watching the endless midnight sky, in the cold frigid winter wind, listening to each other's companionable silence.

She knew that no one else would ever be able to do the same thing as they did, not together and not fruitfully despite of how unfruitful it seemed to be.

Perhaps even then they had known the incredible weight of things and their own unbearable lightness of being. She was certainly feeling it now.

She had been sitting in the same position for a full half hour. Recklessly some part of her mind wished that he was here as well...Sighing, not wanting to let her thoughts float further into supposedly forbidden territory, she got up slowly, feeling the lukewarm water slide and kiss her skin reluctantly, and immediately feeling the cold draught of mid-autumn hitting her like a slap in the face. She did not want to think of him, especially not now that she had Harry --

Or at least Harry had her, she thought sardonically, then caught herself.

It was never as if they - if she could even qualify herself and Malfoy (there, she'd said it) as a collective pronoun - had been in any kind relationship.

She felt her lips quirk into a wry smile. No - all they had were silent studying sessions (after hissing rows where both parties declared that they had studied at that particular table all their lives in Hogwarts and weren't about to move because of the other), and then he had helped her (with a sneer and a condescendingly offered hankerchief) when she had almost broke down not being able to solve the infuriating Arithmacy question Professor Vector had set them, and then when she had been at her spot in the abandoned East Tower that night, which Tom had showed her, lying straight on the floor, and for some reason he had come there as well, and had lain there, as if he had always simply understood why she did so.

She hadn't said anything. She hadn't known what to say. And everytime she had returned - he would be there, waiting, or otherwise he would come a few minutes behind. And when she stopped going, she wondered whether, if she started going again, he would be there.

She had never dared look at him, when she had finally returned to find him already there, even though somewhere in an obscure backfile of her mind she wondered why she didn't do something, like any Weasley with their head screwed on the right way around would.

He had been the first to speak.

"Good game you played, today, against Hufflepuff."

She had responded without thinking, the words falling out of her mouth, and when they did she had known that she had sounded very much sarcastic. "You mean the one I lost?"

His voice, miraculously, had remained steady. "I meant the one where you caught the Snitch but that oaf of a brother of yours flailed about like a disjointed windmill, thus causing you to lose it."

She had remained quiet, not knowing exactly what to say because she had, firstly, been shocked by the veiled compliment (or was it a congratulation?), secondly, surprised that he had actually had the decency to analyse the entire situation with any semblance of a discerning eye, and, thirdly, because she could not help but secretly agree with him on Ron's count. Even if she loved her brother, and even if he were much, much more than an oaf.

"The quill you were using - how old is it?" had come his sudden obtrusive question into the midnight velvet silence.

"What - looking for new material to insult us with?" she had immediately returned. This time she did push upwards, turning sideways so she was glaring fully down at him.

He had simply stared at her, grey eyes dark and shaded in the reflection of the weak moonlight. And then, finally, he had said, "No...just...never mind."

And then he had got up, and in the moments that it had taken for her shock to sink in properly he had dusted himself off and had very nearly scarpered (if she could somehow attach such a verb to such a personality) down the rickety staircase of the East Tower.

She really, really wanted to laugh right now. She remembered - she remembered how, two weeks later, she had found an innocent new quill in her bookbag, and for some inexplicable reason she had suddenly remembered his strange question and his equally strange answer, and she had looked up, searching for him from across the room. And he had been writing something down on what looked like a piece of homework, an identical quill poised in his fingers, his grey eyes on Blaise Zabini, who was muttering something in his direction.

And how one habit, one question and its accompanying answer, one quill had all lead to everything that had been nothing.

They had spent each night religiously by each other's side, staring at everywhere else but at each other.

But she had begun to watch him in the day hours, staring at him, understanding each quirk, each manner of behaviour as he had gone about his breakfast, his lunch, his dinner, his homework, his Quidditch games, his conversations, his Prefect duties, his walking down the corridors, his very existence. And slowly, very slowly, he had somehow begun to become a real person to her - very far from a pleasant one, but she had become accustomed to his failings, accustomed to his weaknesses, and to his pride and to his insecurity. And slowly, very slowly, it had begun to feel as if he were someone she had known all her life, like he was the childhood friend she had never known, the one whom she could almost believe to be ashamed of because of what she knew about him and yet also the one whom she could almost believe she loved because he appeared devastatingly real to her. And because it felt as if he were identical to herself, because for some reason she kept seeing all of his own failings in herself.

Even then she should not have thought of him that way. She had had Michael, then; Michael with his excess of tenderness and apprehension. But then again she supposed she could justify herself, somehow: she had never thought it would have been anything more than just a very, very strange relationship which could not even quite hinge on the intimacy of friendship, much less romance.

When the first kiss had come, as his lips had come over hers just hours before the Department of Mysteries affair, she had been completely taken by surprise. But then the kiss had become velvet and metal and right and wrong and --

And then he had whispered, "Don't you leave Hogwarts tomorrow." And then he had left.

She remembered. The next day at Umbridge's office, she had remembered. And, just before she had Hexed him, he had spoken into her ear, softly so that no one else heard, "Don't leave Hogwarts."

Just twelve hours later, he would never speak or go near her again.

And now, four years on and out of Hogwarts, she was still feeling that sense of lost, as if there had been anything to lose in the first place.

So when she had seen him that morning, at her new job as an Unspeakable at the Department of Mysteries (ironically, she thought, then feeling her lips shift into a smirk), due to Fudge's clumsy attempts to promote more "transparency" within the Ministry, she had, for all of fifteen seconds which she had glimpsed his face in Croaker's brief introduction of the one other Unspeakable within the Department, been, at best, disconcerted.

At worst, she knew, she had looked disgustingly traumatized.

She reached for her old towel, rubbing herself dry with it with a ferocity that she had almost forgotten she'd had.

~

"Gin." She recognized that voice. In fact, from her fourth year, she had begun to recognize it not from familiarity over the years but because of how much the owner of this voice sounded so ironically identical to Draco Malfoy.

Harry Potter was sitting perched on the drape-covered loveseat, his knees bent and brought up so that his chin could position itself on folded arms which rested on them. He was staring at her, watching her without blinking, a cautiously non-judgemental look on his face. Exactly the one he must have learnt from her, four years ago, the summer after his fifth year.

Either irony was a particularly vicious beast, or her life was the celebration of William Shakespeare.

Four years ago, in a selfish attempt to forget Draco Malfoy and the emptiness that had been their non-relationship (and the bigger emptiness that had been the aftermath of their non-relationship), she had sat, at a small armchair night after night opposite an equally disturbed Harry. Either the lack of sleep must have got to his head, or - she really knew not what, because Harry, after a spell of such nights, had seemed to fall under the misconception that that had been her own original, unpretentious, valiant way of bringing him back from the edge of the precipice, and had consequently developed feelings for her.

That she had stayed up with him, night after night, had made him look at her in a different light, he had whispered, hoarsely, after his first stolen kiss when they had been sorting through Sirius's things in his old bedroom, by themselves. The whisper, and the narrow intensity of the green eyes had taken her, and --

She had not wanted to continue. After that mistake, she had told him firmly that he had mistaken, and that he had misinterpreted everything.

But she had forgotten that this was Harry Potter, and that she, unwittingly, had helped in making him see there was more yet to fight for.

And so had begun the intense looks at breakfast, lunch and dinner, the extra tenderness and concern at every Quidditch practice and at every game, the brushes of skin as he passed her Pig or jam or the quill from Draco Malfoy which she had accidentally rolled over. The attempts at getting to know her friends, her likes, her dislikes - the simple attempts which she could not help but notice, because it felt like more than anyone had tried to give her.

So she had relented. And she had been happy. But that was before she had seen the bent blonde head before a long desk across from her, and now, watching Harry on the loveseat, with his insistence in believing in what he would believe, she suddenly felt as if he were still very much a boy, at his nineteen years, and for all the world that she was exactly eleven months younger it felt jarringly that she was very, very old. And used. And tired.

"Yes, Harry?" she mumbled, already knowing what he would say.

"Why did you sudenly just leave like that?" he asked, right on cue, and it caught her painfully how beautiful he was, sitting down there like that, with his messy black hair and dark green eyes and pale narrow features and long slender limbs. And it felt surrealistically tragic, the image before her - but why she felt this way she could not quite fathom.

"I'm tired, Harry," the words sounding foolish and selflish and idiotic even to herself. "I wanted --- I wanted some room to myself."

"You...you could always have some room with me, in Grimmauld Place, I mean -- " Harry struggled with his words, and from the way his hands are shaking (they always did so when he was nervous or anxious or upset) she suddenly very much wanted to be tried and charged as the Most Self-Centred Person in the World.

"Gin." Harry repeated again, as she continued to stand, unmoving, looking down on him. "I love you."

And she really could not say how much she felt like crying then, because the look in his eyes mirrored the one she so well remembered: the look in grey eyes she had not then understood.

~