The Curse of Charon

Chapter One

Something stirred in the trees; a long was up from the mix of living and decomposing foliage on the forest floor. A few branches of flame flickered to the side of him, but Bane ignored the fire that his herd were raving about and turned his attention to the stars. Everything seemed to be normal, or as normal as can be expected for the times, except for the moon. It gleamed unusually brightly, with far more fervour than was to be expected at the time in the lunar calendar. It bothered him immensely. Bright moons were just not meant to happen at the moment. He knew what an unusually bright moon meant: change. Good changes, bad changes, the moon was indiscriminate.

Much as he hated to regard humans in his astronomical trains of thought, Bane had to admit to himself that his first thought had been 'The War.' He also had to admit that he felt a little frightened, and hoped with every ounce of his sinew that the humans and their stupid meddling, with their fumbled divination and rubbish about prophesies and Dark Lords, had not done something drastic.

"Ronan," he called harshly, "Have a look at this moon." Ronan shook his head as he cantered over to look through the clearing in the canopy.

"I saw it earlier, Bane, but I had hoped it was my mistaken vision and not what I thought it really was. But it is true, a change must be occurring, and judging by the intensity of the glow, it will happen soon."

"We can only hope it is not as bad as we have foreseen," said Bane slowly, his gaze never wavering from the shining orb that flooded the night sky with pale and pure light.

Slowly, as they realised that Ronan had left the fireside, the other centaurs turned to look at the two standing in the middle of the grove, noting how clear the moonlight that dappled the faces and torsos of their friends was.

*

In another part of the grounds, which hold the ancient school, of Hogwarts, the beams of the very same moon, over which the centaurs pondered, lapped against the face of another. It was a thin face, with skin so pale that the eerie light seemed almost to give it colour rather than take colour away. The head was covered in soft flicks of feathery blonde hair, so pale and fine that it seemed to have the colour and consistency of moonlight itself. The person's body was thin, too thin, but had a strange look about it, as though it had the potential to be powerful. The shoulders were broader than one would expect for such a thin person, and although overly lean, the arms were toned.

The person's face turned upwards to look at the sky through the gaps in the branches of the tree beneath which it sat. At this moment, any onlooker would have instantly recognised the person who sat, in the cold and the dark, the second they looked into their eyes. Those eyes were rare, deep and silvery, but slightly glazed. They were almost the same colour as the hair, but had an odd quality to them; they seemed to almost connect to the moonbeams, and the light formed a gleaming thread between those soulful yet soulless eyes, caught for a moment in a staring contest with a heavenly body.

Those eyes, the strange eyes, trying to protect the mind and the soul that lay behind them with a cheap and flimsy shield which, in the moody, pensive feel of the night, could be seen straight through. A small protection that was hardly able to conceal the mass of emotion stuffed behind it daily. Luckily, people were so used to Draco's ways that they never noticed the days when he was more vulnerable. He liked it this way, which was why he kept up the image of himself as mean and nasty. It made it easier to trick people.

Sometimes it hurt to know that people hated him, but if they hated him at least they didn't care. And if they didn't care, they couldn't see the tumultuous storm in the ocean of his heart. If they saw that they would realise what he had been hiding for sixteen years. His weakness.

The way, in his earlier youth, he had tried to live up to his father but failed miserably. The way he could never quite match what Lucius had done, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much energy and effort he put into everything he did.

Then, as he got a bit older, the way that he felt like such a weak and useless quitter, how he felt as though he would surely fail to live up to his father's expectations.

And now, much as he despised his father for pressuring him about his future (with the Dark Lord, of course), and for living such an awful life, for killing and torturing so many innocents, he still felt that by being unwilling to follow in his father's footsteps he was a failure as a son.

And even then, it wasn't failing his family that hurt the most. The main reason was that, much as he tried to push the blame for his lack of enthusiasm onto others, mainly his father, it was because of his own weakness. The one thing Draco loved more than anything, the thing he prized above all, was beauty. Beauty and the need to see the beauty in the world around him. That was why he came out here at night, other than to straighten out his head. That was why he kept a single rose in a small glass on his windowsill. That was why he took his penknife to his skin most nights, watching the blood seep into the crevices in his skin and ooze into the porcelain bowl of the sink, leaving a thin red trail behind it.

Every time he looked in the mirror he saw ugliness, like an inverted caricature of a boy of sixteen. The hollows in his cheeks and clavicle, the way his ribs showed trough his skin. And the more scars he got the more marred his skin was, and the more he mutilated it.

It was like self-exorcism. He hated a part of himself so he tried to drain it out of his body, but what he saw afterwards disgusted him, so he hated that part even more.

But since he had discovered this place, a place where he was free to be himself without interference from anyone else, without putting on a show, projecting a false image. Here, he could just be Draco. Nothing less, nothing more. He didn't have to face his father, or his peers, or his future. For a few sweet hours time seemed to stand still. The night was consistent, it neither changed drastically nor stayed entirely the same. Little things happened; animals prowled the edge of the woods, the squid floated to the surface of the lake, and occasionally a cool wind blew through the trees.

The cold and the dark didn't bother Draco, in fact he felt more comfortable sitting under his tree, the crisp night air and almost total darkness enveloping him, he was more at home than he was, well, at his actual home.

He sat back against the trunk of the ancient tree, his arms still clasped around his knees, hugging them tightly to his chest, and felt a soft breeze ruffle through his hair. He was, for a short time, at peace.

*

Harry woke quickly when he felt his face touch the cold, wet pane of the window of his tower dormitory. Jumping off the sill in surprise, he landed on the hard wooden floor with a thud. The sharp jerking movement sent an echo of pain into his shins, a pain that shot through the rest of his body when his stiffened muscles tried to move after hours of uncomfortable inactivity.

He couldn't pinpoint the moment at which he had fallen asleep, but it had to have been at some point during the long darkness of the night. He could spend hours looking out of the window, sometimes thinking about anything and everything, sometimes thinking about nothing. But never before had he fallen asleep there. Usually he forced himself to go to bed, made himself enter the world of nightmares for a little while.

That was the attraction of the window. It allowed him to actively focus on whatever was troubling him without making him relive his experiences and actions like his dreams did. Dreams were unforgiving, but the window was a friend.

He pulled his head off of the floor and levered his body up with the aid of a large oaken chest of drawers and rubbed off a small patch of the condensation that had formed while he had been sleeping. He lowered his head to the patch and glanced to the sky outside. The sun was beginning to rise; edging it's way over the hills that formed the horizon and flooding the sky with soft yellowy light. Then he looked down to the ground, metres below him. Everything was so still and peaceful.

Harry stood for a few minutes, watching the trees and grass below, until something caught his eye. A solitary figure was stealing through the grounds, bright hair gleaming in the early light. He couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. All he knew was that someone was there. Someone else was out there, in the wilderness of the night, the bleak savannah of their soul. Just as he was. And for some reason, Harry felt immensely connected to them.

*

The middle of the night was an angry time for her. She found it impossible to control her rage, impossible to focus her attention on anything other than the huge wave of lava that welled up inside her mind. Nighttimes were not a time of peace, or rest, they were a time of uncontrollable emotion.

Sometimes she just longed to smash her fist through a window, but she knew it would hurt, and Blaise was afraid of pain. She and Draco had gone out for a while, back when he had been less afraid of himself, but even then she had seen his arms, and sometimes even walked in on him when he hadn't locked the door properly. The first time she saw him like that, his skin raw and open to the world, half covered in semi-encrusted blood, she had passed out.

He had laughed at that. That was his way of protecting her when they were together. He laughed when his heart was breaking. He smiled so hard that his face cracked. And still, he could not unload the terrible weight that pressed on him night and day, the weight that caused him to smash a window with his fist, the weight that made him scream out in his sleep.

She hated him for this, hated him for loving her. She knew that it was nothing to do with trust. Trust was unimportant to him. He did trust her, she was certain of that. But he also loved her, loved her so much that she couldn't help feeling that it added to the weight, that it was part of the driving force behind his nightmares.

It couldn't have been easy, being Draco. His father had done things to him that were unthinkable. He hated going home for the holidays because he knew the pain far outweighed the benefits, even though it was the only chance he got to see the mother he loved. And it had not been until Blaise fully understood this that she realised just how bad everything that happened inside of his head must be, for him to slice his own arms up.

But that was why he loved beauty. Because he could see twice the beauty in things that everyone else saw, and he could appreciate it all the more because he knew what it was like to be so far from hope. And he could see beauty in things that no-one else saw. Like Blaise herself for example. She had never been ranked among the attractive, but Draco had seen in her something special. Something that fully encapsulated all of him. This was why he loved her, because he had found something so special, but only he could see it, only he could fully appreciate and treasure it. Draco understood Blaise better than she understood herself.

Of course, he wasn't perfect. By being human, he was, in essence, fatally flawed. Like an insightful Muggle friend had once told her, just a little time before she had gotten her Hogwarts letter, life was ironic because oxygen was slowly killing everyone. What we need most to survive will eventually be our downfall. And Draco's demons made him erratic, he had been cruel and cold, he had been an ostracised child. But Blaise couldn't see any of this. To her, Draco had been loving and consistent. The only fault she had seen was his fear. His fear that one day someone would realise he was not actually the picture he had painted of himself. The fear that led him to try and hide the screaming in his mind and soul, to try and hide his nightmares, his ritualistic self-torture, his weaknesses and oddness.

And she had been so blind! How could she have made that mistake, that fatal mistake? How could she have believed his all-consuming love to be mistrust? How could she have only learnt what she knew about the man that was like oxygen to her, fresh and reviving, in hindsight? It was only now, now that it was too late too rectify her mistake, too late to rekindle his love, that she realised how much damage she had done. Where was Draco now? What was he doing in his despair? What if he lay dying in a remote corner of the school? What if, minute by agonising minute, his life was draining from his veins? How much was this hurting his acute sensitivity, both in his body and in his mind? How could she have been so stupid?

He hadn't forced a break-up, that had been almost entirely her fault, but he had made sure it was clear that, once she had made her decision, there was no going back. He had been so reasonable it made her heart break to think of it. There had been no slanging match, no shouting, no scene. She had gone to him, her eyes blazing to match her name, her shoulders twitching like they did when she was angry, insisting that he took 'a serious look at our relationship'. He had just looked at her, the shield over his silvery eyes fully in place, and told her that it was entirely up to her what happened to them.

It had made her so angry; she put all of his feelings down to lack of affection, lack of care, lack of any real trust. She really had been stupid. If Draco was able to see things so clearly, she must be blind. To have thought that a love so deep that he was willing to let her be free if she desired it was actually just another guy who couldn't care less was possibly both the most stupid and the most tragic thing she had ever done.

They hadn't spoken since; she had consciously tried to ignore him and he had just been silent. He couldn't have what he wanted, needed, craved most. She couldn't have it either.

It was sad really. Two people, so perfect for each other, a girl who loved a boy very much, and a boy who loved a girl more than even he could know. What was worse was that the idea that constantly echoed in her mind was not that she had lost something so good, but that she had cost Draco all he had ever wanted to know, possible even his salvation.

She was definitely like Draco's oxygen, the thing that made him function and the thing that eventually broke him. They were the spiritual version of nature's greatest irony. She was haunted now, whilst before she had been blind, now she was suddenly open to everything, but so very raw she could hardly cope with what she saw. She felt the pain he felt, saw the terrible things he saw. Her mind was poisoning itself in a form of twisted revenge with gruesome images. She saw Draco, lying cold and dead in a forest, and herself the same, a lifeless corpse, but in a different sector of reality, so even in death they were prevented from being together. When she breathed in, she felt not the sweet and guiltless relief of air being forced through her cellular material, but a bitter and stale odour tainting her very lifeblood. When she shut her eyes the demons inside of her skull forced themselves into view. She had vivid hallucinations, blood pouring down Professor Snape's face as he talked in class from some unseen wound, Pansy Parkinson's eyes writhing in their sockets, white hot. Brand marks on the skin of everyone except herself and Draco, marking them unmarked, unmarked by the depths that the human consciousness could fall to, unmarked by the twisted view of reality that in separation they now shared, unmarked by the frantic electrical impulses of their own minds.

This was insanity. She knew it was. This was what made Draco so special. He was normal on the outside but deranged within, and by understanding how much he hurt she had led herself to feel the same. Would things have been the same if they had stayed together? Would she have remained the same, blissfully unaware of the hell that he lived through? Was this new understanding of an entirely different way of functioning actually useful to her? Shouldn't she use it to do good? But how? How could she put the chaos of her own mind to good use if she couldn't control it?

Where was Draco now, and what damage was he doing to himself?

*

Draco sat outside under the tree, breathing the cold air in slowly, air so sharp it stung the sensitive tissues of his nostrils. H felt calm.