Uninvited Commentary

There would always be that catch in your throat, walking into a place like this and drawing the first curious breath. Your windpipe's as wide as a child's and it's hard to breathe and harder to care that you're so close to suffocating. The thought crosses your mind that you could die, but you know it's only an idle fantasy, and you're not worried. It's easy here. It's easy to live, because you're shutting off those parts of your mind that interfere with dancing and drinking and shagging. It's easy. It's like breathing while you sleep.

So there's never any room for worry as you crush into this club, the smell of sweat and booze and rut and weed clinging to you hungrily. It will claim you before you can even decide to run out and seek the cold fresh air. It marks you and sets you spinning and floating over the heads of the crowd. Your feet are stuck to the ground, best not to think about it all the way down there, and your head is unattached and ballooning away. Muscles tense and twitch in the green light, light you hate, why can't they ever have it blue or red, damn them? Threats here, danger and enemies and sickness and disease but you're so far gone that it's all you can do to let your thrumming chest carry you through the harsh light and endless gloom.

You walk on, pressed against bodies and live things as you search for the very deepest corner and the most confining refuge. Sweaty skin is slick against your own as shoulders bump and arms wave and when was the last time you actually held someone? It could have been another lifetime. It could have been a million years ago, the memories are too jumbled to remember much. Go on, feel that flash of guilt right now, that little stab in the guts. Now forget it, because anyone who would mourn the loss of your memories is dead, anyhow. Below your ribs and heart, that flash of self pity reflects off the surface of a stagnant pond and a clammy, close stench rises. It's as volatile as methane.

Booze at the bar, and you're stumbling into a corner, acid, thumping trance pumping out and setting clubbers into absolute dervishes. They're not connected, you think, body and mind and soul and attention, as they leap and move as best they can. Thank god, you think, this isn't outside, because if it was then they'd surely dance to death with no walls to hold them in. You'll join them later, and enjoy it, and you won't feel anything other than the thumping and the movement. But that's more than enough.

Here, in the grey smoky haze of the tightest corner, you slink back and light up. It's harsh and strong and you didn't roll properly again, silly child. It's heavy in your throat but light in your head. There's a slight pain over the crown of your head, but you really don't care, it gets worse. You know it'll kill you, clog up your lungs and make them filthy and dirty and disgusting. You run a hand through long hair matted down with sweat and drying rain water. You're sure it stinks, but you don't care. No one ever notices here anyway. Your rivulets of sweat are little medals of honour, marking you as one of the veterans of this mass of bodies. They all drain into that pool at the end of the night as well, all the exhaustion and despair and empty thrills.

The disease festering in it pulls at everything around you. Constantly drawing and scrambling to try and grab all that it can. Never once realised that anything it could want is never to be found. There's three of you there now, form where I'm looking. One is sitting smoking and drinking and collapsing loose limbed to the chair she's in and letting her head loll, apathy and tiredness all consuming. Another is screaming at her to get up and live, to stop this shit and get on with her life. She's angry and furious, but she's hoarse from screaming and she's even more tired than the first. She's begging for help, and it will never come. She is your memory and your past, maybe even the future, if she isn't killed with passive smoking. She's vivacious and wonderful, the hind leaping over moonlit mountains. A salmon in endlessly clear rivers. She hates you.

And you, you're standing here beside me, so close we could share the same skin, my dear. You can't touch either of them. Their antics irritate you, and you hate them. If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be able to see them at all, you know? A long time ago, you let me into dream and wish and hope and wonder. It was pleasant there, but now you find this more fulfilling. You think you deserve it. Maybe you do, I'm not one to judge. It pulls beneath your heart, like with a port key.

Port key? No, I haven't heard it in a while either. Maybe never with you. You've done your best to forget all that. A tugging under your ribs, around your spine and belly, hmm? It's empty and it's greedy and it's impossible to live with. There, beneath your heart and joy is that pit where an entire world festers and roils and broils, and you fill it daily with everything you have, don't you? Every morning when you wake up, those dreams that are now closed off from your waking mind are sent straight there. It's like a black hole, it can be filled and it gets bigger, but it's always empty. It has substance, but it's selfish and consuming.

My interest is diverted to your body as I search for any outward signs of this pit, and you stiffen defensively. I don't see why. You're very beautiful, to me. You are thin, but not emaciated. You're grubby, but only because you're here. Your clothes are well cared for, and I suspect you are too. You don't eat much, but what you do eat is prepared by people who care greatly for you. They wash your clothes too, since you have so few, and there are many of them. They feed you and they love you. They know you are not normal, they are aware there is a whole world they can only glimpse through the mumblings in your sleep and trips. They adore you, and I am sure you want to adore them too. They are good people, and they constantly try to heal you. But they can never, because their healings can never be complete. They have their own pools and pits of darkness, ones which they will not share. They will heal you to a point, and then fail to fully mend you, leaving that little knot in the back of your kidneys. So you shy away from them, knowing it will never be enough.

They give you dope, and mushrooms and sometimes a little bit of acid. Acid is too dark. Acid may be His invention. You did not take it after the first two trips. You worry sometimes about flashbacks. You like mushrooms, sometimes. You will be in a good mood and your emptiness will be covered over, like a dangerous garden pond, and you will spin off away from this world and into one of your own creation, laughing and crying the whole way there. Sometimes you go inside, and are caught in the mire of that pond. You do not like this.

Dope numbs you. Apart from the headache that's been building for eight years, you feel no pain. You forget everything. You become untethered and float far from this life and world. Sometimes you sink, but it's only a foot or a leg. Never your everything. Alcohol too. Yum yum.

And you're sitting there in a dark corner on a stained cushioned seat, getting drunk and high and letting all that music surround you and lift you away from all the bullshit (bullshit that you love, like your friends? You're such a bitch). And a figure stumbles in, trembling and sits beside you. You know her, from long ago. Red eyes see hers glancing around, and you nod. She's spent a long time searching for you, since the others left this land. They left you behind, you know. They couldn't stand the memories of death and so they left. They may come back some time, for many left house elves and other creatures to do their bidding, but most will not. Most of all, they couldn't stand the sight of you, the knowledge of all you did conflicts with the knowledge of who you were. This unnerves then, and they do not want you to upset their fragile notions. She is here, you think, because the loss and the emptiness that they all feel in this land, she feels in another.

"You're Fleur Delacour, Aren't you?"

She snaps around, and you see her eyes are as red and as black and pitiless as yours. They're probably equally desperate, just as lonely and lost. She will not admit to searching for you. It was not difficult, you kept your name and it is unique. But she searched, because you both knew each other long ago, when it was all simple and this pool wasn't even a drop of condensation.

"Hermione Granger. You, you were a friend of Potter's. I am sorry for your loss."

You nod. "I'm sorry too." From the pit comes a vague memory of hearing about her entire family. Sister, mother, father and grandmother Veela all in one.

She nods and sips some piss cheap pint of lager and you offer her the joint, and she takes it, dragging furtively. You're not sure what happens next. You're high as a kite, and you're drunk. The world spins around you, and only the top half of your skull is staying still and you feel sick, and you've felt sick for months now. You sometimes wonder if vomiting it all up in one go would solve everything. The food, the alcohol, your filthy lungs and dying liver, the bits you couldn't name, but must be black and shrivelled and disgusting. Fleur probably wouldn't appreciate that. She hands the joint back and you finish it, stubbing it out.

She turns to look at you, and you can see the drowning there and you wonder if she doesn't have a little voice screaming for her to kick up from here. She's taller than you, and much skinnier. The fullness of her curves, the beautiful slope of her breast that even you noticed in school are all diminished. Her hair flows only to her shoulders, and her eyes are piss holes in the snow. But she's still gorgeous, and you wonder if it you can still be attracted to other people. You wonder if you'd even be able to touch her. You're out of practice and self-conscious. You have found yourself warming women's beds more often than men's, and you used to wonder at that.

A commotion at the mouth of your little annex, and two men stumble in. They touch her, and she shudders. You can see the resignation in her eyes, and the way she shrinks back, a feeble plea. Where's the proud girl now? one of you calls, and one is unhappy with this, and the other wonders why she just doesn't find somewhere with no people. You loop an arm over her shoulders and pull her back, glaring at the men and they don't like the harsh lines of your face or the scar over your eyebrow, ugly, and they slink off. They want action. And it's only girl-on-girl if the girls are both pretty, you know.

You are both now in your seat, crushed uncomfortably close and sticky and sweaty in the darkness. You can't look her in the eye after that, afraid to see shock or thanks. You look everywhere but her face, and notice scars over her breast where it dips gently into her décolletage. On her wrists too, around the edges and in such wide bands that you know no blade cut her there. You wonder if her legs and backside are scarred too. You wonder if she did it all to save her sister, like they said she did. You don't doubt it.

Her arm snakes around you, and she's breathing heavily beside you, trying to calm down. Her breath is sweet and hot, slightly stale and heavy from the resin. Her hand is twitching convulsively on your bare back, but it's so long since you've had contact that you lean in anyway. She's shaking now, like a leaf, and you reach around to smooth her hair away from her face. She's terrified.

"You were the one, in the end, that killed him," she whispers.

It's you she's terrified of, you know? She's terrified of powerful people now. She, who was once the most powerful of all.

But you nod. You did, didn't you? After he'd killed them all. He'd wanted to save you and Harry, thinking you were lovers, till the very end. You were meant to be the second last. But you weren't. He was the last, and you never knew where such power could spring from. From Ron, you think. From Him knowing that the weak, whipped boy would die easier than the insane witch, bleeding from her eyes. He stabbed him, and you can still smell the blood. It was then that the hole opened in you. Power spewed forth and killed him. You felt him die, and you laughed at it. But then you ran to Harry in triumph and he was cold and fetid already, eyes staring and empty. Everyone had seen you stagger back, dead in the eyes and tell them that he was dead and gone.

No one wanted to speak to you after that. You'd killed three Aurors in that moment as well, though you were never publicly blamed. You were a hero. You were offered this and that and the other, and in the end you broke your wand and went to Muggle university. You'd not been asked in three years, about it all. They all left, soon after that, to holiday homes and foreign family members.

Your eyes sweep to hers, and her gaze is tremulous, but will not waver. She's clearly scared, and you know she's been through worse that anyone will ever fully know. But she's still strong. You can feel it as she touches your back and how the nervousness in her eyes fades at the warmth there. Maybe it's just the weed and booze. She draws herself up straighter, and she is a step closer to being the goddess you remember her to be. She is glorious in her misery, you think, and you wonder what she'd be like with more food in her belly and a hot bath. You realise that your housemates are wearing off on you. You think you're pleased with that. They're good people.

Her arm grows hot and expectant, and your hand that toyed with her hair comes back up and slides around her waist. One of your legs is trapped between hers, her arm pulls you in and you're flush against her warm side. She clings to you, and you curl into her, and you feel closer to loosing your mind that you ever have. In her fragrant breasts, you bury your tired face and sigh, and she pulls you closer and shivers. Her hand strokes your hair and suddenly you're weeping. Weeping, and shouting that it's perfect, that it's what you need to do and irritated that it took so long. The boundaries between the crying girl and the shouting girl are growing indistinct, and you're starting to mumble and consider shouting yourself.

It's very quite in that nook, really. Apart from all your head noise, and the speakers and the people, it's peaceful there, two girls sobbing with each other. You lift your head and she wipes your tears and you kiss her cheeks and lick her tears away and she captures your lips. Many minutes pass as you remember the feel of another person's lips on your own, and she tilts her face and nudges your lips with her warm tongue.

She is wet and hot and slippery and sweet as you kiss, and you tear at each other in desperation and desire. You've never even thought of her like this before. You've never really thought of anyone like this before. It's easier not to. It's a surprise, the tastes and feelings and the goosepimples she draws when she sneaks a hand under your top and scratches lightly there. She wants you, you realise, and you press closer to her, breasts pushing against each other. She wants you, and you want her.

You are kissing, and you are silent, and you are engrossed. I can't see each of you as clearly. There seem to be five now, and one, and none and six or seven and two and one. I wish I could see the Veela like I see you, I wonder how many of her there are.

Comfort and need and isolation and desire and frustration tear at you both, and if I could see the Veela, I would see her dissolve into you. She slips a hand between you, where no one can see, and you gasp, rubbing up to her. Breasts are crushed together, and you raise your left hand, the one against the wall, and cup her gently through her top. I can see colours flare and spark around you, a glorious corona in this dank pit. The colours behind your closed eyes cover you both, Technicolor and saturated in the rank darkness, explode around you both. It's quite wonderful.

You bite your lip and then kiss hers, more passion and life and vigour in you than you can ever remember. You pull back and stare at her, her eyes dark with skunk and lust, and yours are the same. You stand and pull her up, whisper into her ear and you hold her hand and lead her away through the crowd. You will caress her all night long, won't you? And she'll return the favour and you'll explode into each other.

There are three of you, Hermione, standing over a pool with different expressions on their faces. One screams. One hates. One just can't care. In that pool you can drown in your memories and the death you've seen and doled out. It will kill you.

But maybe she has the same. And maybe those pools are beads along a necklace to each other. Maybe you can both drown in those memories, and emerge clean and cleansed of that past.

I see you again now, writhing beneath her on your cheap college room bed. It's sweaty and desperate and rushed, but it's still beautiful. Whatever fumblings you've shared before, it is nothing like this. You've had gentler lovers, or course, and many that were even more rushed and violent. But she consecrates you as she touches you, and your hands trace her scars and will them blend into her soft skin in the half light.

It's beautiful when you let her take control and it's an epiphany when she remembers what that's like. She draws it from you, and then seconds later herself, and collapses on top of you, tangled limbs and hair. She has beautiful hair. She seems to like yours better though. She kisses your collar bone, and you stroke her back, gently flipping her over. Neither of you have ever believed in any higher forces, but it is a ceremony and holy as you touch her with your hands and mouth. She tastes glorious.

And as you flop back in bed, sated and curled around each other and with no intention of leaving, you think of the past, for the first time in nearly forever, and you remember the Yule Ball and you remember how happy you were when you were a child in school. You're fourteen again, and it's a lazy day in the common room. You have her sweat on your body and her taste in your mouth, but you are a child again.

Those memories are precious to you, you realise. Very precious. She asks you what you're thinking about, and you tell her all about the Yule Ball and Viktor. She listens and tells you all about Davies and the wonderful dancing. You tell her how sure you were you were in love with Ron. She tells you how he denied it to himself. You tell her how, the next year, a simple kiss in the halls left you not speaking for weeks. She tells you how a drunken tryst in the gardens of her home led to her capture. You tell her of seeing them all die. She does the same. You both collapse asleep in an untidy heap, breathing each other's breath and clutched together.

I wonder, my dear, if tonight I will see your dreams again. Will you let them awaken here? In the arms of a kindred spirit, and the last person you can remember from your childhood? Or will the morning be awkward and hesitant. Will you leave her and sink back? Will she go and fade away? Or will your river bead hearts drip together in the morning sun? Will the despair and heartless resignation sink out the bottom of that pit, leaving joy and happiness to float to the top?

I hope for the last, for in this realm of yours, I am a reluctant and unwelcome guest.