Requiem

Title: Requiem

Author: Ellil

Rating: R

Warnings: slash, some angst, weird

Disclaimer: Characters belong to JKR

*

He dreamed about him. How he would be walking down the street one day, and there, right around the corner, he would see that familiar haunted face and lanky black hair. Just a misunderstanding. A wrong turn somewhere along the way. It wasn't important; he'd found him in the end, and that was all that mattered.

The dead never stopped dying.

Every morning, Harry Potter would open his eyes and lose his godfather all over again. Sometimes he lost him during the day, too; once, five times in two hours.

Cedric Diggory was still twitching silently in a roped-off corner of his mind. His parents still screamed in the night.

There were times when everything hurt. Breathing, especially. Sometimes Harry wondered if you could will your heart to stop beating, if it was possible to cut yourself open and crawl out, small and sleek and clean, leaving everything else behind.

Mostly, though, Harry spent the summer wondering about loopholes. Animated pictures, talking portraits, Sorcerer's stones, ghosts, necromancy, vampires, time turners, whispers behind fluttering curtains in the Department of Mysteries.

There were ways to get around death. If he couldn't make the dead stay dead, then maybe he could bring them back to life instead. Harry figured he had enough magic to get the job done. He just needed to find the right loophole.

Loophole. Harry liked that word. It made him think of a circle of rope swinging freely in the breeze. All you had to do was step through it, and you'd be swinging too.

Harry thought it might be nice to swing.

*

Harry didn't break any mirrors when he stayed with the Weasleys the last two weeks before school started. Instead, he quietly took his anger and rage and helplessness and rolled them into a smooth little ball that he kept in the side of his mouth. At night, he would roll it back and forth carefully with his tongue, and during the day he would poke at it to make sure it was still there.

"Is your tooth bothering you, dear?" Mrs. Weasley would ask, and Harry would shake his head, curling his tongue around the sphere, worried that someone would try to take it away from him.

"You all right, mate?" Ron would ask sometimes, and Harry would look up at him and shrug and smile a little crookedly.

No.

"Is there anything you want to...talk about, maybe?" Ron always looked uncomfortable by this point, and Harry couldn't really blame him.

"Like what?"

You can't talk about things like this. The words don't fit.

"Dunno. How're you feeling?"

"All right."

I try my best not to.

"Oh, okay then." And Ron would know that it wasn't okay, not at all, because Harry had never been really good at lying, but he didn't know how to make things better, and being around Harry scared him a little, so he would offer him a chocolate frog and make an inane comment about Quidditch or the weather, and then he would leave Harry alone.

Well, as alone as a sixteen year-old boy with a head full of corpses and ghosts ever could be.

*

Hermione tried the more direct approach.

"You need to talk about what happened, Harry," she told him after their first Transfigurations class. "You can't keep going like this!"

"Like what?" Harry asked, genuinely confused. He thought he'd been doing rather well, all things considered.

"Like you're a zombie of some sort! It's not healthy, Harry!"

Harry smiled at her, a real smile, because zombies were loopholes and loopholes made him happy. "You worry too much, Hermione," he said, and she was still trying to figure out his smile when he walked past her into the Great Hall for dinner.

*

He found him in the library, sitting all by himself in a darkened corner, a large, dusty book propped open in front of him.

"Malfoy."

It took the other boy a few seconds to respond. His mouth was shaped in its usual sneer, but Harry could see the confusion in his eyes. He'd been watching him for a while now, after all.

"Potter."

This wasn't how it worked. They were supposed to run into each other in some crowded hallway, and exchange insults and hexes until a teacher came along to separate them and their friends. This, this private, quiet meeting - this was wrong. Harry was quite adept at being in wrong situations by now, but apparently Malfoy still hadn't had much practice.

"What do you know about death?" Harry asked conversationally, not bothering to keep his voice down. He didn't care what the three Hufflepuffs across the room thought of him. He'd done a lot of that during the summer, too - not caring.

"Excuse me?"

Malfoy was definitely off-balance. That was all right. Harry didn't need Malfoy to be balanced. He just needed him to be Malfoy.

"Death. D'you know any way to get around it? Dark spells or something like that?" He kept his tone friendly, and on his face was a sort of blank hopeful curiosity that seemed to be unnerving Malfoy.

"Potter, have you completely gone round the deep end?" Malfoy was getting some of his snarkiness back. Harry waited quietly, holding his hands in his pockets. Malfoy was pointing at him with one of his razor-sharp quills, and it was making him feel itchy.

"Listen, Potter, I don't know what you think Malfoys do in their spare time, but we don't go traipsing through cemeteries and raising the dead." Malfoy stood up and lifted his book with both arms, tucking the quill inside it. "Ask your friend Weasley. He's spent enough time in the dirt; he might be able to help you out." He stalked away, leaving Harry alone by the table.

Harry smiled. Malfoy had never said no.

*

Harry spent all of September and October staring at Malfoy during mealtimes. He liked looking at him. His white skin, his pale yellow hair, his gray eyes. He didn't look alive. He was a vampire; a ghost; all washed out and drained but still going through the motions.

A loophole. Harry liked that.

Looking at Malfoy made it quiet inside. Here was proof that life and death weren't so different, that you could have both at the same time.

Malfoy was safe. He was already dead, so Harry couldn't kill him. It didn't matter that blood seeped out of the wound on his head when he was hit by a Bludger during a match against Ravenclaw, or that the gray eyes flashed silver and the white skin flushed a pale pink when he noticed Harry staring at him. All it meant was that Malfoy was good at pretending, but Harry knew better.

*

They tried. They really, really did. Harry could see how they saved up the funniest parts of their days to give to him, how they laughed more loudly than they wanted to at the jokes somebody was always telling, how their sad eyes followed him across the common room. They let him have the softest armchair, the best place near the fire. Ron pretended he had to work to beat him at chess, and Ginny left him little scraps of parchment in his bag covered with pictures of snitches and lions and butterflies. Smile, one of them had said, and Harry had looked at her and smiled, thinking about blood magic and effusions of unicorn horns. She'd never asked him to smile again.

They were all so careful with him, as if he were some sort of fragile glass creature who would break with the faintest of pressures. Harry didn't know how to tell them that people had been trying to break him for longer than he could remember, that he'd even tried breaking himself once or twice, but that, in the end, he was still here. A little fractured, perhaps, and he sometimes thought that certain parts were in the wrong places, or not quite there altogether, but he was still here.

*

"Shouldn't you be off saving somebody?"

Harry didn't turn around, but his mouth quirked up a little at the sound of that familiar, condescending voice.

"What makes you think I'm not?" he replied easily. He pulled his knees in tighter against his body, staring out the window at the night.

"What would all your precious little fans think of you if they could see you right now, Potter? Sitting on a windowsill, sad and lonely and pathetic, waiting for Mummy to come tuck you in again. It's sickening, really."

"Whatever you say, Malfoy," Harry whispered, and leaned his forehead against the cool glass.

"You can't, you know."

The statement hung in the still night air, and Harry, who had never heard Malfoy's voice sound quite like that, finally turned his head and faced him.

"You can't bring them back. Not entirely. All you can get is bits and pieces, and they never fit together the way they're supposed to."

Harry blinked. In the faint light of the moon, Malfoy was almost glowing, a soft white light that didn't belong.

"I don't care how they turn out," he said slowly and carefully, the words struggling past the little ball under his tongue. "I just want them to leave me alone."

*

Harry talked to his ghosts sometimes.

With his parents, the conversations tended to be one-sided, because he couldn't hear their voices without hearing their screams, and they seemed to take that into consideration and stayed silent. He couldn't talk to them for very long, because no matter what he said or confessed to, they still waved and beamed at him as if everything were fine, and Harry could never manage to convince them that it wasn't.

He wasn't quite sure what Cedric did when he talked to him, as he avoided looking at him when they spoke, but their conversations didn't last very long, either, since Harry couldn't talk to him about anything besides graveyards and death, or, even worse, wet kisses and Quidditch, and Cedric could only whimper and moan in response, and Harry heard that often enough in his dreams.

His talks with Sirius went slightly better, and they would discuss school and life and magic until the older man would inevitably start coming apart in front of him, coughing up his organs in pools of bright red blood and wiping his hands on the hem of Harry's robes, telling him not to worry, that he'd just be a minute, and Harry would nod and wait, watching as pieces of flesh slipped off his bones and fell to the ground with loud wet smacking sounds, watching him crumble away, folding in on himself, disappearing.

He would watch until there was nothing left but a small pile of finely crushed powder where his godfather had been, and then he would wait while the wind carried the powder into his lungs, making them burn.

*

Please.

The word echoed in his mind, bouncing off the sides of his skull and making its way through all the empty places inside.

I can't, he tried to explain. I'm sorry; I can't. I can't. I'm sorry.

Please, they whispered.

I didn't want it to happen. I never wanted any of it to happen. I'm sorry, I'm trying, but I can't, he would whisper back.

Help us, they asked him.

Help me, he pleaded.

Please.

*

There were rumors. Unannounced Ministry searches of the Manor, interrogations under Veritaserum, Narcissa Malfoy's subsequent flight to France, the new wards placed around the prisoners at Azkaban as a safety measure against Dementor desertion, the suicide of Theodore Nott's father.

It was whispered that the only sounds to ever come from Lucius Malfoy's cell were low, raspy chuckles that scared even the rats away. That The-Boy-Who-Lived had torn through his mind, leaving him broken and insane. That the only reason Draco Malfoy still went to Hogwarts was to exact his revenge.

Harry let the whispers wash over him, white noise that soothed more than annoyed. As long as people were busy talking about him, they left him relatively alone, and that was fine by Harry. He didn't bother correcting them; didn't tell them that he hadn't cursed Lucius and that Draco's reason for coming back to Hogwarts had nothing to do with revenge.

He knew the truth, and for once that was enough for him.

*

The first time they kissed it was an accident. Malfoy was in the library again, surrounded by more dusty books and dim lighting. Harry walked up to his table and slipped into the chair next to his.

"Well?" he asked.

The blonde boy tensed, and gripped his quill more tightly. The parchment under his elbow was covered with odd diagrams and scribbled footnotes. "Don't," he bit out, refusing to look up.

Harry tilted his head, trying to see under Malfoy's soft pale fringe, then shrugged and slid closer, placing a hand under the boy's chin, forcing his head up and meeting his gaze.

"Don't," the other boy whispered, but stayed still as Harry moved his face even closer to his, trying to read the look in those cool gray eyes.

There was something in them, something fluid and quick that Harry couldn't quite catch. Giving up for the time being, he closed his own eyes and started to turn away, but his glasses bumped into Malfoy's nose and one of them shifted slightly and their lips met, soft and dry, pressed together in a moment of stillness, and before Harry's brain could process what was going on and his eyes could blink open, Malfoy was gone, leaving Harry and the parchment he'd been working on behind.

Harry glanced down at the parchment and grinned. Draco had drawn him a loophole.

*

"You look better," Hermione said cautiously at breakfast.

"If this is what you look like when you're better, Harry, I'd hate to see you looking worse!" Seamus joked from his other side.

"I didn't mean it like that," Hermione glared. "I meant he looked happier. But Seamus is right, Harry. You've got circles under your eyes and your hair looks even more mussed than usual. Have you been having trouble sleeping?"

"No," Harry said, which wasn't technically a lie since he hadn't been sleeping all that much lately and therefore wasn't having any trouble with it.

"Leave him alone, 'Mione," Ron said, pausing in his attempt to eat a fifth serving of eggs. "Honestly, you're worse than my mother sometimes."

Hermione, of course, had a few choice things to say about Ron's last statement, and Harry left them to their bickering, tucking into his own meal with a slight smile on his face. He didn't look at Draco quite as much anymore, he didn't need to; not when there was a loophole carefully folded up in the inner pocket of his robes, swinging as he walked.

*

Draco's table at the library was empty again, so Harry went down to the dungeons to find him.

He wasn't quite sure why, except that it had something to do with the way Draco looked when he was confused and the feel of eyelashes brushing against his cheek and the smell of crumbling parchment and, of course, loopholes, and that in itself was enough of a reason for Harry to spend so much time and effort getting into the other boy's room.

Draco had seen his door opening and closing for apparently no reason, but he didn't seem to believe it was happening, and Harry wondered if Draco had always been this easy to fluster or if it was a recent development.

Harry took off his cloak and hung it on a nearby chair. He sat down on the silk-covered bed and smiled.

"Hello," he said.

"Get out." Draco seemed to have shaken off his stupor, and advanced towards Harry, eyes flashing. "Get the fuck out right now, or I'll make what the Dark Lord did to your parents look like a mercy killing!"

His whole body was quivering slightly, and his wand was held tightly in his right hand, aimed straight at Harry.

Harry looked at it, then at Draco, and he sighed, flopping down on the bed, spreading his arms wide. "Put that away," he said mildly. "No one's around. You don't have to be like that."

The silence that followed stretched out for so long that Harry was starting to doze before he felt the mattress shift beside him. Draco sat down a few inches away from him, facing the wall, still holding his wand.

Harry glanced at it. "You always were a coward," he said.

"Fuck off, Potter," Draco answered, but there was no venom in it, just a tired resignation.

More silence, softened by the whispers that stole in under the crack of the door.

"Well?" Draco asked.

*

Harry spent the nights he was alone going over the parchment Draco had given him, memorizing the words and the pictures. He had gone over both hundreds of times with his fingers, trying to imprint them onto his skin.

He didn't do anything more than read and touch the parchment. The magic was complicated, perhaps beyond even Hermione's skill, but not beyond Harry's talent. There were potions involved, potions that needed ingredients he doubted he would find in Snape's cupboard or the Forbidden Forest. There was blood involved, too, quite a bit of it, and Harry wouldn't be able to supply all of it and still have the strength to perform the spell.

But Harry didn't worry about difficulties and improbabilities. He muttered the incantation under his breath and swept his fingers over the ink on the parchment, pressing hard, as if he were a blind man trying to read Braille in a language other than his own.

*

"I'm worried, Harry," Hermione told him. Ron stood next to her, looking awkward and nervous.

"What? Last week you said I looked better," Harry said, keeping his hands in the pockets of his robes. He didn't like people looking at them.

"I know what I said, Harry. It's just..."

"What?" Harry asked, already walking away, towards their Charms classroom.

"I don't know," Hermione said faintly.

But Harry heard her, and he smiled over his shoulder. "Well, that's a first, isn't it?" he said, and continued walking.

"What's wrong with him, Ron?" she asked quietly as Harry turned the corner and disappeared from their view.

"Nothing," he said, looking aggravated. He didn't need Hermione's constant sighs and prodding to "just go talk to him".

"Nothing we can fix, anyway," he added, "And that's pretty much the same thing when it comes to Harry, isn't it?"

*

"I'll tell you a story, Potter," he whispered. The words washed over his ear, blowing cool wisps of air over his neck. "Are you listening, Harry?"

White, even teeth scraped over his neck and Harry leaned his head against the wall, baring his throat.

"Yes," he answered.

Yes.

Hands gripped his shoulders and slid down his arms and that sandpaper tongue moved over his chest, smoothing down rough edges and making odd choking noises stick in his throat.

The sound of knees softly hitting the carpet reached his ears and he looked down to see pale golden hair brush against his navel.

"The - the story?" he managed to ask as one hand made its way behind him and fingers spread him apart, slowly making their way inside.

The body kneeling before his stilled, and grays eyes, inscrutable as always, peered up at him.

"I thought you said you were listening, Harry?"

Fingers and mouth resumed their motions and Harry bit back a moan and leaned heavily against the wall, falling, drowning, and never wanting it to stop.

*

Dumbledore's office was the same as always, much like the man himself, and Harry stared at his desk and tried to figure out if the things he had broken before had been fixed or replaced.

Hermione had said something to someone, he was sure of it. There was no other explanation for it. McGonagall had herded him into her office before lunch for "a little chat," Flitwick had walked over to him between classes and asked him how he was doing, and now Dumbledore had invited him up for some tea.

He gave the Headmaster the same answers he gave everyone else, leaving his tea untouched and never taking his eyes off the objects strewn across the desk.

He was fine.

He didn't need a potion to help him sleep at night.

Yes, he missed Sirius; no, he wasn't obsessing over it.

He knew he could talk to them. He knew he could trust them.

No, he didn't have anything else to say.

Dumbledore finally let him go, and if Harry had looked up he would have seen the sadness and worry etched in his face, but Harry didn't; he merely mumbled his thanks for the tea and made his way out, fingernails digging into the palms of his hands.

It was too much. Too many lies and half-truths and sympathetic looks and disappointed frowns and those hesitant touches on his arm, his shoulder, the edge of his robes.

Wrapping his ghosts closer around himself, wishing Draco was there, Harry made his way to Gryffindor tower, lightly tracing his fingers over the parchment in his pocket.

He'd learned his lesson about what he could show his friends.

*

"Watch it, Malfoy!"

"Oh, I suppose it's my fault that you tripped over yourself and smashed into the wall? Honestly, Weasel, the rather pitiful amount of wits you started out with seems to be diminishing day by day."

"You - I can't - Listen, you insufferable prat - "

"Drop it, Ron."

"Yes, Weasel, listen to your master, there's a good pet. I'm sure Potter'll give you a treat afterwards."

"How dare you, you - "

"No, Hermione."

"Harry, he - "

"I'm not deaf, Hermione. Make sure to mention that during your little weekly update to Dumbledore and McGonagall, will you?"

"Harry?"

"Harry, where are you going? Harry!"

"Merlin, you Gryffindors get more hopeless by the minute."

*

Harry didn't sleep in the tower anymore. Instead, every evening, he took his cloak and his map and made his way down to the dungeons, where Draco, coming back from patrolling the hallways, would let him in without a word.

Harry liked sleeping next to Draco. Draco's body was an odd assortment of sensations, of coolness and warmth, softness and sharp edges. Harry liked pressing his hand against Draco's, twining their fingers together, and looking out at the dark heavy curtains that surrounded the whole bed during the night. Draco never moved after he fell asleep, never shifted no matter how many times Harry swept his lips over one shoulder or tickled at a rib.

He was sleeping inside a coffin, holding a corpse.

Harry couldn't sleep anywhere else.

*

It was hard, having the two people he'd depended on most and perhaps even loved glance at him awkwardly and shuffle out of his way. But everything was hard now, and Harry didn't feel the need to apologize and he knew Hermione would never admit she'd done anything wrong, and although Ron looked at him sometimes like he wanted to say something he'd always turn away in the end and Harry would let him because the ball under his tongue was getting smaller, melting away and sending all that loathing and anger and desperation back into his bloodstream, and it would have to be soon, he knew, no matter how difficult or dangerous it would be; it would have to be soon; and who needed friends when you had a loophole, anyway?

*

Draco's sheets were softer than cotton but rougher than silk, and Harry liked rubbing his cheek against them and the way Draco looked at him when he did.

He was curled up beside him, heavy but empty for now. Draco stroked a lazy hand through his hair, and Harry sighed, closing his eyes and moving until he was pressed up as much as possible against the pale cool body next to his.

"How'd you die?" The question slipped out, unbidden, and Harry wondered where it had come from, if it had been hiding all this time.

The long fingers stilled. "Pardon?"

"Who killed you?" Harry asked softly, pushing his nose into the side of Draco's neck, inhaling him. He wasn't sure why it mattered, but he supposed he might as well get an answer. His own hand rested lightly on Draco's stomach, feeling the slight rise and fall of the other boy's abdomen that was almost believable.

It was quiet for a minute, and Harry could feel the weight of Draco's gaze on him, calculating. He turned his head slightly and opened his eyes, staring back.

What's wrong? Harry wanted to ask, but was afraid to. Why do you look so sad?

"My father," Draco finally answered. He rose up on one elbow and brushed Harry's bangs out of his face, kissing the scar underneath. His lips trailed down to Harry's chin, past his neck, and paused briefly over his chest, biting gently at the spot where Harry's heart was starting to hammer wildly again.

"It - it wasn't because of me, was it?" Harry managed, arching up as Draco's nails dragged down his sides.

Draco lifted his mouth from Harry's hipbone and looked up briefly, a sad smile on his face that Harry couldn't understand. "No," he said simply, and lowered his head again, blowing cold puffs of air over Harry's skin.

"Oh. Well, that's all right then."

Harry could feel the laugh that escaped near his thigh, but didn't have time to wonder about it, as Draco chose that moment to swallow him whole, taking him in until Harry was drowning again, suffocating under thick waves of heat and trying to go down further, deeper, all the way down. He screamed his release, an incoherent mix of "Fuck!" and "Draco!" and something that had started out as a sob and ended as a broken moan that he was in no state to notice.

And if he noticed that Draco held him more tightly than usual that night, he blamed it on the chilly night, because there was no room in his head for any thought that wasn't some variation of soon.

*

He heard the gasp too late; too late to stop what happened next.

Hermione grabbed the parchment from where Harry had been studying it on the bed, holding it with one hand and looking at Harry with wide, disbelieving eyes.

"Harry, this is...do you know what this is?" she said, voice no higher than a whisper.

He ignored her question. "Give it back, Hermione." His voice was flat and empty, and it seemed to scare her more than what she was holding.

"No," she said, and then a little louder, "No. You can't do this, Harry."

Harry watched, still and unblinking, as she muttered a few quick words and the parchment crumbled in her hand. He could have stopped her, he knew. All he had to do was say a quick few words of his own, and the parchment would be whole again and Hermione would be...

She was hugging him, too warm and too close, whispering things he didn't bother to listen to, looking at the small pile of dust that was being scattered around the room.

Hermione pulled back enough to look at his face, and she was crying when she asked, "Why?"

Harry shrugged, fingering the pocket where he'd held his loophole, closing his eyes so he wouldn't see the last of the dust disappear.

"They won't go away," he said, and his voice was still hollow but there was a tremble there now as everything he'd pushed away and aside started to rise up again, all sharp teeth and claws, and he was tired enough to just let it happen, tired enough to just stand there with his eyes closed and let the world do whatever it wanted it with him.

"You're not letting them leave, Harry," he heard, and felt her press a soft kiss to his forehead.

"It hurts too much," he whispered, and it was another one of those things he hadn't meant to say, hadn't known he was capable of saying, and he pushed her away, opening his eyes and turning to leave.

"Harry, you can't get through this alone," she said, not trying to stop him. "You need to talk to someone."

"It's not that simple."

"Sometimes it is."

Harry smiled because she couldn't see it and walked out the door, not caring where he ended up as long as it was somewhere else.

*

He found him on the roof of the highest tower, sitting on the wall and dangling his legs over the edge.

"You'd better get down from there," he said. "Voldermort won't be too pleased if a strong gust of wind manages to do what he couldn't."

"It's gone."

Draco almost didn't hear him, but climbed up next to him nonetheless, close enough to be touching but still worlds away from the sad, dark-haired boy staring out at nothing.

"I wouldn't have let you do it, anyway," he said, because it was easier to be honest when there was darkness everywhere and those bright green eyes weren't focused on him.

"I know," Harry answered, and picked up his hand. Draco let him, sighing when he felt short, bitten nails graze over his palm.

"I can't fix you, Harry." He didn't have to say anything else.

"That's all right. Just...be where I can find you. I'll manage the rest on my own."

Draco didn't mention the uncertainty in his voice. Instead, he slipped their intertwined hands into the pocket of Harry's robe and Harry had a sudden, bizarre urge to laugh, and from the brief squeeze Draco gave his fingers, he knew the other boy understood.

*