Excuses

You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children. It's blood screaming inside you to work its will. -Spike, James Marsters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Lover's Walk"

Excuses

We could be the perfect couple. But we're not.

Romance.

Her brown eyes linger on his blond hair. She looks back at her book and he glances up at her, trying to hide his softening eyes with a sneer.

From blue eyes another boy watches Draco watch her, and he sighs. His thigh squeezed by his lover who he doesn't love.

Through a curtain of red hair she watches her hero as he tosses his arm around his girlfriend. And if Hermione weren't her best friend she would be jealous.

Luna's eyes settle on the empty seat next to Harry.

There are a haunting number of similarities between us; even our sins are the same. The virtues we have forgotten we lost on the face of the same clock. But we can't tell time in war.

Disposition.

Blaise brushes Teddy's hand away, the bell is about to ring and he wants to get a good seat in potions. Teddy understands and goes back to his conversation with Millie even though she hates that name. Rising Blaise hauls his bag on to his lap, flipping through folders and parchment rolls to check for his homework. The essay is there; just where he nestled it between the notes he borrowed from Pansy and the quill Draco dropped with teeth marks on the bare tip. He gets to the classroom first and chooses the seat where he will have just the right view.

The mass of intelligence, raw brilliance, primitive talent between us could power an electric storm, and our combined magics would echo in stunning effect as the thunder. We could shake the world into realization. But we won't.

Power.

The potion whistles as she tosses the last handful of seed into the thin bile scornfully. He tries not to let his hand linger as they both reach for the flask at the same time and jump back as if shocked. Grumbling he moves back to grasp the flask and deftly pour the mystery liquid into it. Snape quickly scrawls a grade on it and hands it back. The showdown that follows is quite discouraging to Blaise. Hermione cursing Draco and receiving a hex in return, points plummeting so early in the seventh year, and both end up on bed rest in the infirmary.

The morals we live by are radically different, and radically unsound in their ideology, there can be on good without evil, there has to be a balance. No extreme can exist peacefully. We can't exist without the other. So we'll kill one another.

Battle.

Ear pressed to infirmary door Harry listens to Hermione and Draco having a go at one another. Silently he curses before throwing the doors open to see a very familiar sight from three years previous with some definitive alterations. Leaning on her bedside table feebly Hermione yells at Draco, hair straggling down in her eyes, alight with fury. From ten feet away Draco replies vehemently, cheeks vividly pink, but not red.

The passion we live life with is exhausting, and if we don't end one another it will end us. No one can live with conviction like us, it would be their finale, but we keep walking on. Trying to claim the horizon even though we know we can't, we're smart enough to kill hope. We have the patience to let the horizon find us, but we can't find each other.

Hopelessness.

Humming keeps the yells and shouts out from the other end of the ward, but Luna doesn't mind, her voice might lead Ron home from wherever it is he has gone. He's not dead, no, Luna knows dead, to be dead you have to stop breathing, and Ron is breathing. His eyes are closed limply, cheeks gaunt, freckles are pale, but he is not dead. Lost, Luna thinks he is lost, he must be lost, and if he's not then maybe she is.

All the emotion we keep bottled up could launch the next full-scale attack on the castle. Our emotions rule us, but we inflict them only upon others. They could save us all, but in the end we all fall down.

Inevitability.

Turning quickly Harry locks his jaw and leaves them to each other. Rocketing around a corner he slams into a lithe bobble of red on black.

Ron wouldn't want flowers right now, but he keeps getting them in the mail so Ginny takes them to his bed every night. She scrambles to get there before Madame Pomfrey closes off the ward doors. When she jams into something solid she knows she's not going to make it.

No use anyway as the vase shattered into thousands of glass shards.

There is a blanket of fear hanging over the entire populace of our world, a world built by the rarities like us. The special ones who defy certain reason. Terror unties the masses, however we cower to none. The monster and the abyss that suck at the corners of the heart won't possess us. Its questionable as to weather we even have hearts anymore. Maybe we don't. But we have appearances.

Repute.

Stuffing her hair behind her ear Ginny recalls the charm to fix the vase and Harry fills it with new water. But the flowers no longer have stem enough to reach it with and they both sigh as they trudge back up to the common room where he immediately falls on to a chair the picture of lost legend. She chucks the vase into the fire where it begins to melt under her glare, the epitome of brutal vixen.

Masks can be worn by any and all, and we dance to a mask of extravagant proportions. A fairytale runs its course as we sit in class and try to pay attention to facts we already know. It begins with the same phrase, then there our tales split painfully, shattering party rotations. But we haven't reached ever after yet. And will it be happy?

Facades.

In due role Harry finds his seat in the very shadiest corner of the very back row of class and adjusts his chair so his vantage of the fog covered grounds is appropriate. Midway through the lesson Hermione comes in, leaning too heavily on the doorsill, but the ghost hardly spares her note. Next to Harry she slides her hand in his limp one and pokes her tongue out as she begins to spin her ink into notes that tell a story, but she stops at the point where he dares to speak of the goblin princess and her end. Closing her ears to the world Hermione looks abjectly out the window, her view partially blocked by jets of ebony reaching for the clouds.

Expressions come in the ways we manage to throw miracles into light. Our means are quite different, and not both can play devil's advocate. One has a left shoulder that riots, the other a right ear tilted to their guardian. So maybe our sources of guidance differ. But we both do nothing alone.

Occupation.

She walks out of her class stiffly, leaning on her boyfriend who supports her graciously, glad to be doing something more than waiting and thinking, and maybe in his thinking he was overreacting. The gray eyes puncture at his soul as she watches her feet moving slowly one foot in front of the other, dragging them.

A hand pushes Draco into class from behind.

The physiques we carry hover just out of reach of perfection. The arrogance we use to part the corridor walks next to the ignorance we continually try to cure. We are perfect in our imperfections, in our skewed reflections of refection. Conceit runs through our veins. But the blood is so powerfully different.

Pride.

Blaise glares at Draco full on with his back turned to the board, and Draco knows he can't do anything to stop it from continuing. Teddy intervenes, understanding something neither of the others do. He lurches his lover around in his seat, knowing he likes it rough. Teddy idly taps Draco on the head with his knuckles and rattles pieces into places. The puzzle of never ever falling regretfully into place like it does every single goddamned morning and in every nightmare he survives.

Hungry are our stomachs for some small table scrap of diligence to be rewarded by anything but a fate we didn't choose. Destiny came first and she was a bitch, harboring a longing to escape our end is the way our souls work. Our souls cry on the same octave, but we don't hear each other.

Selflessness.

Harry gets Hermione to her library where she requests to stay. Alone. In good faith Harry wanders back upstairs to his half-done, won't-be-finished, essay on...um...something. Finding a bag of somebody's else's jellybeans he sits back in a corner of the common room and watches other people's lives go by until the blurs stop all together because they've all gone to lay in their beds and stare at the canopy worriedly. One lone quill scratches from across the room and he looks at the shadow.

Red on black stills for a moment and looks up to smile wryly at him over the lip of her new diary, a slightly painful reminder of a time when everything was so much simpler.

Opinions cannot be changed, but facts can move out. We are the ones who walk to the beats of our own symphonies, conducting the masters in their arts. All we have to do is convince the audience that they aren't hearing nails on a chalkboard even though blood trickles from their ears. Persuasion is a gift we have to cherish, but we never use it for the right reasons, only for derived theories of self-survival.

History.

Luna finishes her spell with a tug and sinks down on the slight bit of bed Ron does not consume. It was a sinister thing to do; humming and weaving that spell, but it had to be done. The woman wasn't listening to her. She didn't seem to understand that she had to go find him, bring him back, stop history from repeating its mantra mockingly.

There is everything to be gained between us. In our flaws are our shared resources. In the perfections we differ and forget that there will be a day we have to reach up to be pulled up. But will be have little enough loath to take the life handed to us?

Penalty.

It is past curfew, but Blaise is up anyway, he needs some bedtime reading. Padding quietly through the halls he stops fast when he hears the snuffling up ahead, whimpering and a dragging sound like the time Draco had hauled a tapestry down to the dungeons from the west tower.

The sobs get louder and Blaise covertly ignites his wand to illuminate a huddle of robes crawling on the floor, struggling with a bag of books too big. Her head creaks around and her eyes squint in the light as she tries to slip way. She's been forgotten and can't get up.

Blaise stretches a hand out to help Hermione up.

We wake up at the same time in opposite parts of the castle, panting in denial of what our subconscious has just realized. Seeing the won't be, hearing the howls of never, feeling the little tingles of dim possibility, smelling the future we could have it we reached for our wands at this very moment, and we taste the green light that would be the only thing to follow. We could stop so much, but we only reach out to our bedside table to sip water laced with time for excuses.

Disbelief.

Harry bolts awake, his hand still in the bag of jellybeans to see red on black has left the building and the opening for his girlfriend who collapses with need once she gets both feet in the commons.

Fitfully Ginny clambers out of bed after a particularly bad dream. Pulling on her black robes, as they are warmer than her housecoat she wanders down the stairs only to turn around as she hears them quietly quarreling.

In a fit of insomnia Draco pokes his head out of his curtains for the glass of water he always keeps there. He hears the door open and nearly spills his drink on himself as the toe of Blaise's boot sneaks in through the door. Not wanting to be seen like this he folds back into his bed quickly.

Blaise glances half-heartedly at Draco's bed, he's asleep. Sighing he unlaces his boots. His hand catches his eye and for a moment he can feel her still clutching at it before he climbs into Teddy's bed.

We could be the perfect couple. But we aren't.