Awakening

Awakening

He often thought about the girl in the Muggle fairy tale, the one who cut her finger on a spinning wheel and slept for a hundred years. It made him wonder.

Maybe he too had been cursed. An evil fairy with a grudge seemed almost likely; his father had had grudges with everyone. Perhaps what had happened had been foretold, inevitable. Inevitable that he would be both desired and abandoned.

Inevitable that he would run, thirsting for something...unreachable.

Inevitable that he would be swallowed whole by this strange tortured city of dreams and nightmares.

Inevitable that he would prick his arm (not his finger) with the needle.

Did the story girl feel this ecstasy of pure honeyed light in her veins, like she was being infused with the soul she had lost? For Draco Malfoy, that was all there was.

*

He had fled his home, the only home he had ever known, on a dark night. A night that was supposed to be an initiation. His mother had held him, crying silently. She had cried a lot recently. His father had watched him with hooded eyes, touching him in small quick pats, possessively. His mother had not wanted to let him go.

But she had. And he had walked down the dark hall into the room filled with robed figures. He had walked up to the leader, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, feeling the others' eyes on his back. He had knelt and bowed and said all the right words. There had been no fear, only cold. He had been filled with cold ever since the night he had returned from Hogwarts. The night his father had come into his bedroom. He didn't like to think about it. There had been a fight. Words. Anger. Blood. Hands that pushed him roughly onto the bed. And...

It didn't matter. Things had happened. So in that crowded hall, he had pulled up his left sleeve feeling nothing.

And than Draco had panicked. He had seen long, spidery fingers with cruel nails reaching for his arm, and he had screamed once, "No!"

Events blurred after that. He had backed up, his wand was out, hands were once more grabbing at him...and he was outside, outside the Manor. And he was running and running and running. He was good at running, even than. Not because he was strong or running towards something, but because he had learned to run away.

He got some money, couldn't remember how, Apparated sometimes, didn't matter to where, and he kept going until he arrived here. America. California. Los Angeles. A place of dreams, as far as he had known. Some half-forgotten memory of Mudblood girls saying, Los Angeles. Hollywood. A special place.

A place where he had hidden for the past six years.

A tortured city, Draco thought. Cursed, like I am cursed. Sleeping, like I sleep. Tear-flooded and fever-scorched, quaking and bloodied with nightmares. Constantly wracked with floods and fires and earthquakes and death.

He often went out into the city at night. He was glad, in a vague way, that he was no longer forced to walk its streets, but went of his own free will. His first years here had been bad. Very bad. He had lost his wand somewhere. Or it had been broken. He didn't remember. Those years had left him with little more than horrific memories and a thin scar that traveled from his left cheekbone down to his jaw. He had smiled when he had seen the scar in a mirror. He had wondered wryly what the Boy Who Lived To Whine would have thought of it.

*

Now things were better. Maybe. He had a house outside the city. It was a canyon house with vines growing through the cracks in the walls. It smelled of eucalyptus and cigarettes, and the television was always on.

Mike came by in his dark glasses, leather pants, and long purple dreadlocks. He gave Draco what he wanted in a needle in exchange for the photographs Mike took of him. And sometimes they fucked. Draco didn't mind. Any pride that he'd had left had vanished long ago, along with his wand.

Mike liked to watch him afterwards, as Draco wandered through the house. His eyes roamed up and down Draco's body, admiring the white skin, sharp bones, and pewter eyes.

He smiled at Draco. "I like you this way," he said. "You have opium eyes."

Opium eyes. He closed his heavy lids over them, wanting to sleep. Instead he answered Mike with a snarl: "And your eyes look like bloody pissholes in the snow."

Mike only laughed.

He photographed him all over the place. Peeling carousels and garden walls and fountains. "It's like you're from nowhere," Mike sometimes said. "It's like you live inside my head. I made you just the way I wanted you to be."

Draco wondered if he was right. Where am I from? he questioned. Maybe he was only in Mike's head. But there had been something before.

There had been magic. There had been a castle. There had been laughter and ghosts and dungeons and good food and owls and snow. He had ridden on trains and broomsticks and had seen dragons and Dementors. There had been a girl...but he could not, though he tried, remember her face.

But that was long ago. His parents had abandoned him in every way that mattered. And so he had run.

Was the curse that he was born too beautiful? So many people had told him he was beautiful. His father had whispered it to him that bad night. His mother had breathed it in his ear the night he ran away, the last thing she said to him.

Was that why his father's hands, and so many others, had reached for him? Was that why he was taught to be cold, uncaring, why Muggles with cameras attempted to suck away his soul in little sips? Did these things happen because any form that lovely must remain soulless so as not to stun them impotent?

Draco chuckled, the laughter of the damned.

*

Mike picked him up one night and they drove to a small white villa. It belonged to an actress. Mike led Draco upstairs, past the sleek flashy smoky people who were drinking punch out of an aquarium. They went into white bedroom painted to look like the inside of a shell. There were vases of blood-red roses. Draco took off all his clothes, and Mike arranged his limbs on the big white bed, tied and slapped his arm, tucking the needle into the least bruised vein.

Then three other men climbed onto the bed with him and Mike hovered around them snapping pictures.

Draco made no sound. He lay still and let the heroin be his soul. It was better than having a soul. It did not wail or writhe with pain. Than a voice rang out.

"What the hell's going on?!? Get off of him!" the voice screamed like the soul Draco no longer had. A young woman stood in the doorway. Her hands were on her hips and her shorn hair was blue-black.

"Oh chill, Janet," said one of the men.

"Leave now! All of you. Get the fuck out of my house," she said.

Another man spoke up. "Does she want to join the party? I think she wants to join the party."

Draco felt his empty insides try to jump out of him, as if to prove their was no soul there, nothing left for them to want to have. His emptiness came up the back of his throat, bitter and burning. The woman held up a small sharp knife, and the other men reluctantly moved away. Draco watched from the bed as they filed past the woman, out of the bedroom.

The woman turned to look at him expectantly. When he made no move to get off the bed, her eyes narrowed and she studied him more closely. She seemed shocked by what she saw. There was concern on her face and than it changed into something else. Something like pity, but gentler and more understanding. It had been so long since someone had looked at Draco with compassion that he did not recognize it when he saw it.

The woman helped him off the bed and led him into the bathroom, where she wiped his face with a wet cloth. Draco saw his reflection in the mirror. He had dark shadows beneath his eyes, but nothing had changed. He still bore the curse.

"You're going to be okay," the woman said gently. He could only stare at her. He didn't think he had ever been okay. She stared back at him and repeated herself. She used a harder voice the second time, like she was saying: you have to be. He nodded wordlessly, hopelessly, and she said, "I know."

She ran a bath for Draco and lit the candles that were arranged around the tub. He noticed she had a small black lizard tattooed on the back of her neck. She filled the bath water with oils that smelled like bark, leaves and summer flowers. The mirrors became blurred with steam like a mystic fog so that he could no longer see his image. He was thankful.

While Draco bathed the woman went to the other room and stripped the sheets from the bed. She put on new ones, and opened the windows overlooking a courtyard full of trees and flowers. She lit the incense in the sconces around the room and played a tape of Tibetan monks chanting.

Draco climbed out of the bath and dried himself with the clean towel the woman had left him. He put on the heavy white robe that had been stolen from some fancy hotel and walked barefoot into the bedroom. The carpet was soft and thick under his feet. His wet hair hung in his eyes.

The woman stared at him thoughtfully, and chewed her finger.

"Are you hungry?" she asked, and he shook his head.

"Do you want to sleep here tonight?" He nodded. Sleep sleep sleep. That was definitely what he wanted.

He woke the next night. The woman was sitting at his bedside with a plastic tray. There was a meal on the tray of jasmine rice, coconut milk, fresh mint, and chiles. There were tall glasses of mineral water with slices of lime like green moons rising above clear bubbling pools. There was a glass bowl full of roses.

"Can you eat now?" The expression on the woman face seemed familiar to Draco. In fact, her whole face seemed familiar, but it was the expression he recognized. She reminded him of another woman, one with wet eyes.

"My mother," he said suddenly. "You remind me of her."

"How?"

He was chagrined by his uncharacteristic outburst. But now it was too late to stop.

"Because of your eyes now."

She cocked her head, puzzled. "What happened? Why was she crying?"

Draco looked away, his thoughts wandering.

"I used to think she abandoned me because I was cursed."

"Cursed?" she asked.

Draco lowered his eyes, and pulled the blanket further up, covering his bare chest. He seemed to have lost his glibness. The woman was so intense. Like she was reading his soul.

"Blessed," said the woman. "She was crying because you were blessed and because..." She hesitated. "Because she had to give you up?" He nodded, still unsure. How much difference was there between a curse and a blessing?

The woman was wearing a gray men's T-shirt and her face had been scrubbed clean of make-up. She had a few freckles over the bridge of her nose. A memory nagged at Draco, but he could not summon it up.

"What's your name?" he asked. She hesitated again. Her eyes flickered.

"Janet. Eat something now."

He found that he was actually hungry. He ate the sweet and spicy, creamy minty rice and drank the fizzing lime-stung mineral water. It made him think of Fizzing Whizzbees, and he smiled. He watched the woman's eyes. They were dark and resembled the eyes of old-time movie stars, always lambent, as though the screen were slicked with water.

"You can stay here as long as you want to," she said.

"But I'm going to need..." Draco began.

"If you need it I'll get it for you. Unless you decide you want to stop. I stopped."

He stared at her, and nodded. His pale hair fell into his face.

"If you need me I'll be sleeping in the next room," she added.

"But this is your bed, isn't it?" said Draco.

"It's yours for now." She stroked his hand, touching him lightly. Than left the room.

*

Draco slept for days and days and days. Sometimes he woke kicking and struggling until the comforter fell off the bed. Than he would feel someone covering him with satin and down again, touching his clammy forehead with dry, soft fingertips that smelled like roses. Or gingerbread. Sometimes he woke shivering, sweating, quaking, or parched. Always the hands would be there to warm or cool or still him, to hold a cool glass of water to his cracked lips.

Sometimes he dreamed. He dreamed he was in a forest gathering flowers that bit at him with venomous mouths. He dreamed he was running away from savage creatures who bared needles instead of teeth, who were made entirely of hands and tentacles, who called to him with his father's voice. One of them caught him and pierced his neck. He was falling down a staircase into darkness. He was lying in a coffin that was a castle, suffocating under roses. A red-haired woman came and knelt beside him, to stitch up his wounds with a silver needle and golden thread.

One night Draco woke up and heard the soft muffled sounds of someone crying. He got out of bed like a sleepwalker. His legs felt shaky. He walked through the dark hall, the night warm and soft on his bare skin. It clothed him like the robe the cursed princess had dreamed of making when she found the spinning wheel in the attic - a magnificent cloak of silver.

He stood in the hall. The real world had vanished and he walked in a land of shadows, thoughts twisting like tangled vines. He continued moving.

How many years had the princess dreamed of spinning such a garment? But there had never been any spinning wheels to be found in the whole kingdom. And finally, when her chance had come to ornament her beauty the way she wished, for the forbidden lover with the small high breasts and gentle eyes, she had pricked herself. And fallen into the death sleep.

Perhaps it was what she deserved for wanting what she could not have.

Draco walked into the dark bedroom where the woman lay crying. He had to find his way to the bed by touch. His hands touched something warm and curved and fragile-feeling. It was the woman's hipbone jutting out from beneath the blankets.

"What's wrong?" Draco asked. His hand slid carefully down over the hipbone, across the woman's tight abdomen working with sobs. The woman reached up and pulled back the curtains. Moonlight flooded the room. She handed Draco a small battered photograph.

The figures on it were moving, and he was not surprised. He had known somehow, all along.

"Do you remember?" she asked. He stared at the photograph. There were five children in it. Four were scowling darkly, and shoving at each other, three against one. He recognized himself, and the girl who stood in the background, watching emotionlessly.

"Ginny," he said quietly. "Janet, Janie, Ginny."

Ginny laughed. Or sobbed. "Colin Creevey took the picture, and I stole it from him. Do you remember?"

The two of them. Of course he remembered. Him in the foreground; the loud one, the exhibitionist. Always talking or fighting or both. Always mouthing off. Her in the background; shy, quiet, an observer. They had both been hiding, Draco in the spotlight and Ginny in the shadows. They had both been completely miserable.

Until one night in the Astronomy Tower during his fifth year. She was watching the stars. He had stood in the doorway, had watched the starlight glint off her hair, and could not think of a single insult. She had walked over and kissed him on the mouth, than asked why he was so sad.

After that, they were always together. But at night, only at night. In the daytime they ignored each other, but at night...They were together. They did many things, although they never actually had sex. She always stopped him when they went too far. Maybe she had sensed that it would have made it all too actual, too real. It didn't matter, anyway. When they were together, everything was different. There was nothing to hide. They were young and totally free. They would go to the Astronomy Tower and kiss and touch and explore. Or they would sneak out to the Forbidden Forest, where they would run and scream and wrestle. No one could touch them. They could fight in the dirt and grass. They could rip up flowers and shrubs. They would be covered with scratches and twigs; their aching nails filled with soil. They took a razor blade and carved each other initials into their palms, and held hands until the blood was one. Sometimes they would find a quiet spot and talk. They would talk about everything.

And every once in a while they would just sit and hold each other. He would stroke her long red hair gently, gently. She would hold his hand, and trace designs on it with her fingers. They would forget, for a little while. They would forget about school, about Quidditch and homework and Gryffindor vs. Slytherin. She would forget about Harry Potter's green eyes and he wouldn't remember his arranged marriage with Pansy Parkinson. They would forget about You-Know-Who, about purebloods and Muggle-lovers, about parents who expected so much and gave so little. They would forget that they could never never never be together in the sunlight.

The nights were their own - they could look at each other anywhere and be back, free and untouched by anyone but each other.

Until the summer after his sixth year, when things had happened, when he had run and not looked back. When he had left her behind. He had stopped remembering the past, because the present was shitty enough by itself.

So now he saw her again. And said, "Ginny."

The word fell from his lips like a caress. She pointed to the others in the photograph. He had barely acknowledged them at the time, but he realized that he recognized them as well.

Potter and his two sidekicks. Of course. Who else would I have been fighting with?

"They're dead," she choked out. "All of them. They died in the final battle against You-Know-Who. Th-they killed him, together they somehow killed him, but it killed them too and-" Her voice disintegrated into sobs. He reached out, tentatively, and touched her shoulder. He was shocked somehow, unsure of what to feel. Potter dead? Granger and Weasley dead? It seemed impossible. To him they would be forever sixteen, fifteen, eleven...children and teenagers, shining and immortal. Hate or love, it made no difference. They were another part of his childhood that was gone.

His thoughts were spinning faster now. Heroes' deaths for them, no surprise there. Perhaps he had intuited that it was so, that they were the heroes and he was the coward. Perhaps he had felt it with a child's sense of unfairness.

He scowled, and hugged Ginny tightly. This was no time for bitterness. They were dead and he was alive and life went on. Ginny spoke again in a whisper.

"And I wasn't there. They asked me to come with them, to fight beside them, but I didn't. I couldn't. I was just so scared. I kept remembering Tom, and the blood on my hands, and... I didn't want to die." A sob. "I was sixteen. I didn't want to die. And you weren't there!" The last four words a wail of anguish. He pulled her closer.

"So they went, and they died, and I was so ashamed. I should have gone with them. But I didn't. I felt so empty. Like I failed everyone. Every time I went out in public I could feel the glares and hear the whispers. Like first year all over again. So I left, ran away from what was left of Hogwarts. Came here to the U.S., the land of opportunity, right? Changed what I could, my hair, my nose. I wanted to be someone else..." She cried and cried. Draco rubbed her back. He didn't know what to say. He had had little experience at comfort. He was feeling, and it was terrible. His chest ached fiercely and his eyes were suddenly filled with tears.

"I shouldn't have asked you to stay," she said suddenly. "I shouldn't have made us remember."

"I'll go then, if you want." His voice cracked.

Her voice was like a piece of broken jewellery. "I don't want you to go. I've been waiting for you for so long."

He reached out, and wiped the tears from her cheeks, and then from his own. "I thought they had taken my soul," he confessed, whispering. She smiled shakily. Her hands touched his face, trailing across his lips and tracing his scar.

"I thought mine had been taken too. But that's a lie. It's just been sleeping," she said.

When Ginny kissed him, Draco felt as if all the fierce blossoms were shuddering open. The castle was opening. They were breathing into each other's body something lost and almost forgotten. It was, he knew, the only drug either of them would need now.

And tomorrow, tomorrow they would go out into the sunlight. Together.