Endurance

Endurance

~*~

She endures the day. She bears through every Order Council and every secret meeting, she trains for hours in combat, shouts curses and hexes at her partner, and she goes to classes, even though there are so few of them anymore.

She's only seventeen.

She eats with classmates and Aurors and family and Ministry officials, because they're all a mix now. She drinks her pumpkin juice and distantly, only distantly, thinks that it has lost its taste, that it's not cool anymore.

She endures the day.

She endures it with no complaints, not even a shadow of pain in her eyes, not a single clue that things are not quite as they appear. And during her regular patrols in the Hogwarts grounds, she talks with her partner about small things, and sometimes others too, secrets and guilty pleasures. She shares, and cloaks her pair with an illusion made of truths that are too small to be detected.

No one knows.

When you share small secrets with a stranger, he doesn't know they're small and unimportant. He feels special, gifted, honoured guardian of a legendary treasure. He thinks you've befriended him, in a way, and people need that, even more during wars. She finds it so naïve, so easy. How willingly blind they all are.

She lives for the night.

No one could ever imagine what happens when they all fall asleep. How she creeps out of her cold, uninviting bed clad in a flannel nightgown, white to match her lost innocence, they do not know. They never could. Probably never will. How she never has to knock to enter his room, because he's waiting for her as much as she's waiting for him.

It is unspoken and unnamed.

They never talk during the day. They don't have to name or speak of it. When they sit next to each other at the Councils, they never touch, never look at each other, never acknowledge that every night she crawls to his room and enters without having to knock. When they train, neither of them turns their heads to the other, and when they are wounded, neither runs to the other to tend to them. When their patrols meet, their eyes meet, glazed, blank, their heads bow in formal nods that are well rehearsed.

She endures all for the night.

But when the door opens with no creaks - spells put with no words - and her ghost-like form enters, they talk; talk with no stopping and no holding back. They cry and they're not naming it, because they don't have to. And when they embrace, it's tight and strong and they touch each other's bodies slowly, tenderly. They peel their clothes off and then he kisses her bruises softly and whispers words against her flesh. And their eyes meet and they let the sweet pain wash over them and they let their hearts open to ache, ache almost too much.

The day is between the nights.

They pour their selves into each other, and their bodies meet and move and when flesh is against flesh, she forgets everything. When his lips are on her, his hands hold hers, she doesn't think. And she always wakes back at her room, and never wonders how she got there, because she doesn't have to. She never thinks of what happened the night before.

There is no yesterday.

She doesn't remember what happened last night. Every night is the first and the last night, the only one. Every time they share their souls again and again, and every time they make love and kiss and touch, and they never think of each other again until the next kiss and the next time and the next touch of fingers in the dark and the whispers on her skin.

It all began.

She can't remember when or where it began, and doesn't wish to remember. It simply happened, and she has learnt to accept things and not fight them or question them. It is too thought-consuming to analyse, and there are so few things she still believes in.

Every time he touches her.

Every time they touch, she loses herself in everything and nothing, every time they make love she never knows it if she has cried out or searched for his hand in the dark. She is plunged in a sweet oblivion where nothing exists, not even her own heartbeats. And when they lie together, tangled into each other with sweat glistening on their bodies, she holds on to her forgetfulness and thinks only of his arms around her and the way his fingers caress the small of her back.

They part in oblivion.

She never realises it when they part, when she crawls back in her own bed. She never remembers. Only before she falls asleep, a single feeling of yearning runs through her body, a pang of regret. Because she left his bed for hers, and escaped his warmth for her numb morning loneliness.

This night.

Tonight she crawls into his room and they talk and cry and kiss. Sometime in the night, they make love and touch each other and whisper words of strange meanings. And when they lie awake with every inch of their bodies in full, pressing contact, she melts the last barrier and lets herself sleep in his arms, not caring enough to go back anymore. He understands, and silently, they make, once again, their irreversible agreement.

He closes her arms around her and their bodies curl together in a single mass, her figure protected by his. He pulls the thin sheets around them and covers the both of them carefully, softly. Her warmth envelops him and he kisses her hair. He knows that she will still be pressed to his flesh when he wakes up, and her heartbeats will be beating, still, the same rhythm as his. And as he surrenders to sleep, he knows with much more certainty that he will endure the day.

~~~