Ambiguities

Ambiguities

The wind descended from a cold shift in the north. Harry pulled his cloak close about his shoulders as he waited, trying not to shiver. He looked about, eying the grey and unfamiliar shapes that loomed here and there in the stillness. And there was a silence, heavy and unwieldy. It was a silence that had the taste and texture of noise.

It felt like death here. Perhaps that was why he came. No, he was not dead, but maybe he thought he deserved to be. Or more likely, thought a darker part of Harry's mind, because he knew he soon would be.

Losing his battle with the cold, Harry shivered as he drew out the map, checking once again that he had the right place. Spreading it across a chilled knee he confirmed the twisting gold thread highlighted this desolate Muggle grave yard. So where was he?

The sound of a snapped twig cracked into the frigid air like a knife. In a fluid movement, Harry pushed himself from his crouch into a rigid stance, every sense alert. He was here. Harry could feel it... fuck, he could well nigh taste it.

The air suddenly changed into a paler kind of cold and then there was heat, a wrist against his neck and the point of a wand against his throat.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Harry?"

Slowly, Harry forced his muscles to relax, trying to show that he meant no harm. "Funny, I was going to ask you the same question."

The hold on Harry's neck was loosed slightly but the body behind his remained tense. "Answer me."

Harry brought his hand up to Draco's and deliberately drew his fingers over the back of his hand and down the inside of his wrist. "Free me and I will," he said, his voice a little huskier than he'd intended.

It took but a moment before Draco pushed Harry from him, keeping the wand trained straight at Harry's centre. "Did you come here to kill me?"

"How could you think that after what we...?" Harry faltered and fell silent as a dangerous look passed across Draco's features.

"How can that mean anything to you now?"

Harry took a moment and surveyed what he could see of Draco in the clouded night. Delicate shades of purple bloomed beneath his eyes and his shoulders were hunched with an invisible burden.

Harry sighed. "It still means something to you."

Draco paled. "You can't possibly know that."

Shrugging slightly, Harry tilted his head to the side. "You haven't killed me yet."

Draco dropped his eyes from Harry's for a second, acknowledging defeat. "How did you find me?"

"I found a hair on my cloak from the night we... After you disappeared I used it to enhance my Location Charms. I never could find you though until... It was midnight I couldn't sleep so... and there you were pacing this abandoned Muggle graveyard, apparently alone. I nearly lost my head and came right then and there but Hermione found me and... I kept a kind of vigil from then on. Every night at midnight you come here. Why?"

"There are no ghosts here," Draco replied simply.

"It reeks of death," Harry replied with a glance at the crumbling headstones.

"Death, yes. But no ghosts."

Turning back to Draco, Harry said, "I think you wanted me to find you. You knew I'd never stop looking. Wherever Voldemort is hiding is Unplottable. I would never have been able to find you there and so you came here." Harry paused trying to gauge the effect of his words. "Do they know?"

"Don't be stupid." Those blue eyes flared to anger and in that second Harry realised.

"You came here to die. I was supposed to kill you. Unnamed, unmarked in a forgotten cemetery of forgotten Muggles. Fuck, Draco was that it?"

Draco's face was impassive, unreadable.

"Draco?"

Ignoring the question, Draco pushed his wand back into his sleeve. "If you are not here to kill me then what are you here for?"

Harry paused for a moment assessing the other boy, wanting to be able to figure him out, wanting the impossible. "To offer you asylum. At Hogwarts. Your mother as well."

Draco greeted this with silence, not a flicker of an expression showed upon his face.

"This is an official offer, sanctioned by McGonagle and the Ministry," Harry continued with a sense of urgency. "I have a letter." Harry pulled the roll of parchment from his cloak and handed it to Draco. "Here."

After a slight hesitation, Draco took the paper, unrolling it and perusing it briefly. Harry barely dared to hold his breath.

"You're trying to save me Harry?" Draco's eyes brimmed with tears as they met his. "Why?" The letter suddenly crumbled to ash in Draco's hands.

Harry blinked and ventured a step closer to him, wanting nothing more than to wrap him into reassuring arms. The wind swept up and Harry watched helplessly as the ash was whisked from Draco's trembling hands, into the night.

"Do you really need to ask that?"

"I am a murderer, Harry," Draco replied, his voice full of self-loathing. "Well near a Death Eater. How can you offer me this?"

"How can I not?"

"Fuck, Harry." Draco's hand closed around the last blackened scrap of letter.

"You are not a murderer, Draco," Harry said quietly, moving closer still and watching the storm swirl of blue in Draco's eyes. "And I will kill Voldemort before I see him turn you into a Death Eater." Reaching out, Harry placed a hand over Draco's fist and unfurled his unresisting fingers. The remainder of the charred paper flew unheeded into the darkness. "Dumbledore's death was not your fault. Given the same choices, faced with the same circumstances, even I would not have done things any differently."

Draco pulled his gaze from Harry but not his hand. "You would have found a way. You always do," he said bitterly.

Harry was silent for a moment. "There is a difference between us." Slowly, Harry threaded his fingers through Draco's. "You were raised with a belief in Voldemort's absolute power. I was raised with the belief in his absolute destruction. In the end, I think they are both fantasies. Other people's fantasies. Regardless of which reality comes to pass, it will not herald an end. People will continue to desire power, wars will continue to be fought, and ideas of good and evil will ever be confused."

Draco gave him a long, intense look. "What if it had been Hermione or Ron that Snape had killed?"

"It wasn't."

"Yes, but imagine that it had."

Harry paused for a moment. "Then right now I really would be here to kill you."

Draco's eyes flickered. "Then notions of good and evil aren't as confused as you'd like them to be."

"No, that's where you're wrong. If good was a fixed entity then my reaction to your action should not change depending on the person. Don't you see? I made a decision based on my personal relationship to the victim. Not based on what is fundamentally right. In many ways I am no better than Voldemort."

"You're wrong," Draco said flatly.

"Am I? Sometimes I really have no idea. Hermione and Ron are furious with me for betraying Dumbledore by offering you sanctuary. And honestly, I think they are probably right. Offering you sanctuary is a betrayal; one that I do not deserve to be forgiven for."

For a long while, Draco didn't respond. Harry realised with a jolt that his eyes were focused on their twined hands. "And yet, here you are," the boy whispered so quietly that Harry nearly missed it.

"I am." Harry focussed all of his yearning into the two syllables willing Draco to meet his eyes with the strength of his emotions.

Draco met his gaze but briefly. Harry watched as Draco drew in his lower lip and bit it. A manner so child-like that Harry nearly laughed. "This whole thing is so fucked," he said almost hysterically. "We're both just schoolboys and we're playing realities of heroes and monsters."

"I know," Draco said quietly. "And there is no way out."

Harry was struck into silence by Draco's deathly cold tone. "I cannot take your offer of asylum, Harry."

Harry had been prepared to argue. He had been prepared to cry, to beg, plead and bargain into getting Draco to come to him. But he had not countered on Draco, with his eyes as blank as the cloudless, starless sky and a voice to match the freezing north winds.

"I-" Harry faltered, reassessing Draco and drawing nothing. "Why not?" he said in a tone that should have sounded resigned but showed up anguish.

"I'm sorry, Harry. I know that... getting McGonagle and the Ministry on board for something like this... I really don't know how you did it. And I'm not ungrateful. God, that you would do this for me... I can't tell you how much it means to me. But I cannot accept it." And there were tears in his eyes. Before Harry could stop himself he'd wrapped the other boy into his arms, rocking him in a vain effort at comfort.

Chilled through though he was, it chilled him more to hear the words that Draco uttered then. "You want to save me, Harry, there is only one way. If you care for me at all you have to kill me. Please, I don't want to beg but I will if it has a chance of making you listen."

"Draco, there is much that I would do for you. There is much that I have done for you but kill you? That I cannot do. You must come to me. You must. It is all that I am able to offer."

"Then you condemn me to die a Death Eater. With the blood of countless people on my hands."

"No, Draco. By refusing me you condemn yourself."

"Harry, you cannot know what you ask of me."

"No, but you know exactly what it is that you ask of me."

Draco fell silent at that and pulled his hand from Harry's. "I should be going," he said softly.

"No, Draco, please."

"Harry, you're right. I am a coward for asking you to do something that I cannot even do myself... I thought this would be easy. I thought that you would want to...but seeing you again... I should never have..."

Harry put a hand on Draco's shoulder as he turned away. "I cannot force you to stay," he said a little desperately. "I cannot force you to accept the offer of asylum. But please know that if you go now, it may well be the last time we see one another."

The body beneath his palms suddenly stilled. "You don't know how many times I woke with your name on my lips. Or dreamt of your hands in my hair." Draco was trembling as Harry stroked soothing fingers down the side of his face. Blue eyes shining with hopelessness raised themselves to his.

"If it were half as many times as I, it still would number enough to swallow up the sun," Harry replied gently in a voice that shook not a little.

"We can't..." Draco glanced at him beneath his lashes, his expression full of sorrow. "We can't do this, Harry. Not again. I barely survived the first time."

"We seem to be forever saying goodbye," Harry answered trying to keep the pain out of his voice.

"There is nothing more to say, nothing can be undone, you must let me go."

"Not yet. Please, Draco. Promise that you will come to me."

"I... I can't."

"Promise."

"My mother will never accept asylum. Least of all from Hogwarts. I will not leave her."

"Fuck." Harry was close to tears himself.

"I'm sorry, Harry." Draco comforted him this time, brushing dark hair from his eyes. "If I could I would, please know that."

A glance at Draco's face proved the veracity of his words. "I do."

Harry copied Draco's motion, brushing blonde strands from a pale cheek. Their foreheads bumped together and suddenly all the cold air in the cemetery wasn't enough to keep him from feeling the heat of Draco's body.

"You're cold," Draco whispered against his cheek.

Harry risked nuzzling a kiss into Draco's hair. "I've been waiting for a while."

"So have I," Draco replied, pulling Harry close. "I tried so hard to convince myself that it was death that I was waiting for... and not you."

"Did you succeed?"

"Fuck no. I didn't even come close."

"And now?"

"And now I have no idea how I'm going to go back to... it's like living in a tomb. No where to go, no way out and every day you suffocate just a little more."

"I thought that I could save you."

"Not everything can be saved, Harry. And not everyone deserves to be."

"Don't say that."

"Why not? Even you had to admit that offering me asylum was a betrayal of your ideals."

Harry stiffened, frightened by the bitterness in Draco's voice. "This war is not worth winning if I lose you to it," he said quietly.

Draco pulled back to study Harry's face. "Do you really mean that?"

"I don't say things that I don't mean," Harry said tightly.

"Then it seems that I must find a way to come to you," Draco said slowly.

"Then you-" Harry could barely contain the burst of hope that flooded his being from top to toe.

"You are necessary, Harry. As a symbol of Voldemort's mortality if nothing else. Without you resistance to the Death Eaters will be meaningless and the power of the Dark Arts will spread. You cannot give up this fight. It is worth more than your life or my life; it is worth more than my mother's life."

"So you will come to me?"

"I- I will try. But I will not accept asylum. Neither will my mother..."

"You will have the protection of Hogwarts regardless."

"Your world will never accept me, Harry, with or without your protection."

"Since when have you needed to be accepted, Draco?"

"I don't. But you on the other hand... this move is going to earn you a lot of enemies. Strategically speaking-"

"Forget strategy, forget society and structure, forget the fucking war." Harry grabbed Draco's hand and placed it over his heart. "Listen to this... and then tell me how I am supposed to ignore it."

Draco's eyes reflected his own feelings back at him, magnifying them a thousand fold. "I can't."

"Then you will come to me, before the week is out?" It was a plea and Harry was not ashamed of it.

Drawing his hand from Harry's, Draco turned towards the cemetery gates. "If I do not come I will be dead or under the Imperius... or worse. Do not look for me or hesitate to kill me if we meet again in battle."

With a half-turn, Draco reached back and flicked the back of his fingers softly over Harry's cheek before he disappeared, Apparating to a darker place and leaving Harry alone. A wind swept along the unkempt lawns as the moon was slowly obscured by cloud.

Harry cast a glance around himself as he pulled out his wand. Draco was wrong about this place. There were ghosts here; lurking on the edges of sight and sound. Harry shivered for reasons other than the cold. Ultimately, Harry preferred the kind that you could see.