Journey

This

He remembers her dancing and he likes to pretend the little scribbles on his paper are just that.

But they aren't. They're just scribbles, little green-or-black splotches and scratches and dots. Zigzags. They might have once been words, but they were words ages ago in his head and now he has trouble deciphering them into real symbols that stand for something more than nothing.

He thinks maybe he can roll up the parchment and send it to her anyway and she'll see herself dancing and know that he was thinking of her. Then his father takes the parchment and says, What is this? and he mumbles, Nothing, I was just dozing off.

--

He hasn't seen light for a very long time, longer than he likes to admit. Even when he was in the castle and there were jets streaming back and forth, it wasn't really light. It was just the moment's little tricks. And then it wasn't.

He remembers that the little jets were zigzagging too, and then like the ink on his parchment they were gone. The twists and the trials and the midair dances were all gone. He misses every little dance but mostly he misses the kind where light's shining through her black, black hair and she's smiling like the little porcelain doll that used to pirouette in his mother's jewelry box.

He doesn't like remembering that but her dancing elicits a smile. Even in the dark his father can find his face and says, What is this? and Draco doesn't answer. He just feels the stinging from the slap; he just closes his eyes and pictures real light and her laugh and fingers while the damp, slippery wall soaks his robes.

He wishes he could picture himself curled into her chest but that never happened.

--

When they were little she had wanted to be a ballet dancer. He could never forget that, and one day - or maybe it was night, he could never really be sure from this slimy box in the ground - one day... she danced into his dreams or his hallucinations. She kissed him very gently on the cheek and told him she loved him, and that's how he knew it wasn't real. But he let himself hope.

And she picked up the paper he had scribbled on, and she understood what it all meant.

He cried, and he let her put her arms around him. And when she pushed up the sleeves of his robe he saw white, white skin, and they both smiled. They smiled, and they smiled.

There was no smiling now. There was only his father. There was pitch blackness. There was ink on his skin that would never come off.

There was her, dancing away in his mind's eye, dancing and dancing into the light.

--

The blanket was over him and under him and all around. It was that critical time where the light was fading and he would soon be asleep and then she would close her eyes. He knew that morning would be different, and that he would be planning when she would be unaware, and he would never see this kind of light again.

He tried to take it all in: the way their toes touched, the way her fingers moved across his cheek, the way light danced in her hair. What is this? he asked and she said, This?

This... all of this. She shook her head and he realized his explanation didn't really explain anything, just like the meaning of her kisses and her touches and the small ways she danced for him, just for him, meant nothing at all.

This, she whispered later when the light was too bright and she thought he was asleep. This is you and me. This is forever.

--

Forever didn't last the way he thought it would.

Forever was ink on his arm and ink on the scribbled letters he never sent. Forever was the lack of light that never, never let him sleep. Forever was the stones under his feet and the promises he was denied and the master he never saw and the slavery his weakness (or was it strength?) bought him.

Forever was forever, but it didn't dance and it didn't smile and it didn't whisper.

He lived forever but he didn't live at all. And when he smiled or tried to scratch at the ink on his arm with a rock from the ground and just felt something sticky under his fingernails and his father hit him and said, What is this? he thought back to light and dancing.

He thought back to her and maybe, just maybe, all of this did explain something in the end.

She

Sometimes she's sad. Sometimes she likes to put her lips on the boys' skin and feel the stretch of unspoiled sanctity. Sometimes this little act feels holy and it makes her shiver in the dark.

The boys don't ask what's wrong and it makes her smile.

Sometimes she misses him. Most of the time she doesn't but sometimes when the sun rises and spills blood across her bed she remembers and her heart races and she bites her lip while she waits for the moment to pass. But then the blood on her lip reminds her all over again. She tries to sleep through sunrise in the downstairs armchair with the heavy drapes pulled tight, shut tight. Or else she sleeps with candles lit and the flames flicker and dance and skew the shadows on the sheets. She knows there's nothing hiding and harsh light proves her hypothesis.

But still she misses him. Sometimes.

And when it rains she's alive. She laughs and catches the rain in bell jars and lies in the mud in her underwear. Then she raises her arms above her head and her sister doesn't scold anymore because everyone knows it doesn't last. The sun comes up again and Pansy runs by with streaky, dirt-caked legs.

She cries over the boys' skin and remembers until morning when she wishes she could forget...

His legs twined among the sheets. His head buried beneath her pillow. His eyes, and how they peeked out of the darkness. His eyes, and how she memorized their meanings. His eyes.

And how the light reassured their presence.

And she saw the truth, but only in the dark. She saw his words, and she softly caught the sacrosanct haze in her child-fingers: You don't love me, do you? he would ask, as if the idea itself was fermented impossibility.

And she said no, and she let the words go.

But they were still floating, around and around as she ran her fingers over his cheek and his chest. The wondering and the thought and the only word she should have said, and in the dark they were reminders of her stupidity. They still played on her island bed, and he still fell asleep with his hands in her hair. And during night he still curled into himself and held his marked arm to his chest. And during morning she found his eyes.

So the sun would continue to rise while she would continue to hide. The boys would enter and the boys would leave: the boys would distract her with their unstained skin and their saintly kisses and their hesitant hands.

And sometimes she's sad and sometimes she laughs; sometimes she cries, and sometimes she forgets.

But she always saves him sunlight and searches for his eyes.

Spectrum

There used to be a light. Her skin, so pale. Paler than his, almost transparent when she turned her face towards the sun, and it was then that he could see all the thoughts floating around inside of her. Swimming near the surface, little tendrils of truth wispily touching the whiteness of her, almost afraid to press too hard and color her chinadoll skin.

Castles and daydreams and pink coral lipstick smudges on some boy's collar: that's what he would have liked to give her, back where there used to be a light.

She so seldom goes out in the sun now and ever. And he tries to trace her skin in the dark but he doesn't see where it hurts her most and she whimpers. She whimpers, and he can't hold her close.

Castles and daydreams and pink coral lipstick, and Draco closes his eyes and finds perfect blackness. It makes no difference.

--

The room is dark and there is a slickness on the floor that is nameless, and if it has a name Draco is thankful he doesn't know it. He doesn't know anything.

He's thankful, and his head is close to implosion. Emerald green ink spills across the page and blots his hands and his brain and almost writes a story but then it ignites.

He wants to tell her that he understands something, anything, everything but everything is burning his touch, the parchment, the quill, the ink like his skin.

Emerald green ink spills across his skin but he's learned not to cry. No one cries, not anymore: understanding and the unknown are equidistant from choice. A shot in the dark, like emerald green ink.

--

Sometimes he will glance at her picture and feel something inside him move but it always passes and he goes to other girls. He can touch them; they won't recoil. It isn't the same and their skin isn't as white but it will do. It will.

And when he isn't with the girls he speaks to his father, with his father, tells his father he wants to wear a black hood. His father says he is proud; that's all Draco ever wanted to hear. It doesn't feel as good as he expected but it still feels good.

So the training continues and he thinks he's smart. The sparks and incantations are vindication, the sparks and the incantations and the unanticipated sense of belonging. His father teaches him before indoctrination begins. His father is teaching.

And one day eyes peer through white curtains of hair and are raised over the morning newspaper and his father tells him the time has come to prove himself. With a sneer... without words but with a sneer... Draco says he is ready. He will prove himself and he is ready.

The night is dark. Fog plays across the masks around him like clouds play across the moon. Then the faces are uncovered, pallid grey and moving closer and his father's smirk like a branding, this is a branding. He is learning, please let him be learning something because this mark on his skin hurts so much.

The night is dark but the sky is purple-pink promise beneath the clouds. Sometimes he will glance at her picture and feel something inside him move but he always goes to other girls.

--

The letter is sent. In it all the things he never said poke and prod in a frenzied queue, fighting for prominence in her mind. His letters are hasty, just illegibly legible; his fragments are blotched. Little glimpses of frightened meaning hide, twined through his half-truths.

How the floor is cold under his cheek. How the stone echoes announce hard footsteps that make his heart race. How he reaches out to touch her skin, hair, lips, laugh and she's not there. How it feels as if she was never there

He is sorry, sorry, a million times sorry. The absence of her face is infinite penance, and hazy absolution evades him. Now he will believe in God. Now he will take out his eyes if it means being able to smell her, or hear her, or touch her. He wonders if this stems from non-choice or is rooted in love but all he knows are shots in the dark.

All he knows is his wish for her: Castles and daydreams and pink coral lipstick.

--

It was an arrogant summer and he experienced it all.

Now she takes on his demeanor and strokes his hair and only smiles when they're alone. He misses her smile and wishes he had caught it before when something was possible but now admittance is a fault. She strokes his hair.

Her fingertips are seldom and the perfect dark flees. Instead he chases pink promise and the horizon tells a story of maybes. He tells himself that she can wait for someday, and she can wait for something, and she can.

But she is planning. Planning, planning, she talks of family and flight and future. She talks of pearls around her neck and pearl skin, flawless; she talks of a million nights together, a million kisses in her hair. Her fingertips sweep his cheek and when they are alone, she talks.

And he can't tell her about the nights he leaves her sleeping and the way his heart beats in the hall and the completion of his sinister purpose. There is a future before togetherness and that future is now.

She is planning for the last time. Soundlessly he steals the dawn, puts it in his cloak pocket and postpones her pink coral lipstick. Soundlessly, he cries for the last time.

He misses her for the first and she never knows.

--

Mistakes. This was never meant to happen. He wouldn't have chosen this prison, this insurmountable loneliness that leaves him blank, blank, emerald green ink setting fire to his skin. But he is not a Seer. He is a stupid-little-boy.

And stupid-little-boys make stupid-little-boy choices.

He sits in a corner and focuses on her easy, floating thoughts. Maybe he will read them someday in a letter but maybe is an empty word. Maybe she is still alive.

Outside is an impossibility but he imagines. There is a war and there is hate, there is enough hate to destroy everything beautiful and she loves him. She is beautiful. In his mind's eye he can see her pale skin and its lattice of dark bruises and he hopes she's dead, he hopes she escaped. He hopes she escaped through death.

And when he reaches for the light... when he closes his eyes and finds perfect blackness for the last time...