Denouement

He stands in the back of the room, half-hidden behind a Gryffindor banner charmed to growl at passers-by and watches as Potter and Malfoy cast sneering looks at each other over their shoulders, feeling dispirited. He has not had enough mead to get into the spirit of the evening.

Where is Zach? He has had quite enough to drink. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that he is loath to move from behind his cunning hiding space, he would consider bribing a house elf to start replacing his glasses with flavored water. He's too smashed by now to know the difference, anyway.

He's not going to move, though. It's too good a spot to pass up. He can see everything from here. Pansy and her rather puckish date stagger past the banner and it mewls pitifully at them. The charm has started to wear off, apparently: that gives the party approximately another hour before things go entirely to pot and everyone leaves for everyone else's bedrooms. It's like watching a play, he thinks. They are somewhere in the third act, nearly to the climax, unable to see the denouement. These thoughts are Millicent's bad influence; she thinks like a thespian, but doesn't act the part.

Sometimes he feels as if he has spent his life watching people. He watched his father turn from a hollowed-out widower into a person filled with something too big to contain; it heated his cheeks and turned his eyes cruel. (That was unfair, he checks himself. It wasn't as if he didn't agree with his father's ideas--on principle. The fact was that Muggles made him itchy and uncomfortable. There were so many of them. They bred like cockroaches. And they were missing something, that indefinable air of mystique that graced the world he had grown up in. He did not put it so in his own mind; he only knew that they didn't look right, and flinched when he passed one in King's Cross. So it was not the ideas he objected to, it was the reality of them. The killings at the World Cup--distasteful and not to the elegant standards of his social rank. The woman who stayed over at his house nights, and spent the time when she was forced to socialize with him helping him practice Unforgivables on dormice--unstable and a little frightening. He thought her eyes were creepy, and that his mother would never have had her son perform an outlawed spell.)

He watched his friends turn teapots into tortoises and meanwhile thread their plotlines through their gazes, as Pansy became too painful to observe and Draco carried on being falsely oblivious. He watched Zabini, when everyone else had stopped bothering, and saw the way his eyes slid down the table to settle in Pansy's cleavage. It wasn't the ordinary homage everyone paid to her chest. He saw Blaise's uncalculating, dangerously open expression and tried not to see. He watched as Harry Potter began to follow Draco with his eyes, and saw the way that Draco didn't stop him, even unconsciously exaggerated his own natural grace to make Potter's eyes linger longer.

And he watched Zach. It was easy in the beginning. When they were fifteen and bumbling and yanking up their caustic facades to ensure that no one saw the children beneath them. Fifteen was not too young to fall in love. And he did, unequivocally. He went absolutely batshit crazy about the boy, and if he'd had any poetry skills whatsoever he would have spent all his time composing sonnets to his hazel eyes. It was exactly the kind of love that Millicent used to fantasize over, when they were seven and sprawled out whispering in the attic. Talk of clasped hands and heaving bosoms that she'd cribbed from the Romantic era of portrait painting, the subjects of which were often severely lacking in propriety, inhibitions, and clothing.

(She'd kissed him once, Millicent. Pressed her slightly sticky lips to his without warning and then promptly blushed and made a face. He hadn't enjoyed it either, but she should have, and in his humiliation--was he any good at kissing? Shouldn't it have been better than that?--he told her that he was worried about the safety of his heirs and left it at that. It was his first brush with failed romance.)

This was the type of epic love with which his heart had thumped for Zacharius Smith. He wrote Theo and Zach in the margins of his History of Magic notes and marveled at the mystic sign that was the matching four letters in their nicknames.

And when Zach had kissed him that time in the dorm--well, there was nothing Theo wouldn't have done to halt the world's inexorable progress and stay right there, lips pressed firmly to Zacharius Smith's.

He tried valiantly to record every moment of it. How one day after Charms they'd skived off Potions and gone down to the lake, and ensconced under a tree, Zach's head resting on his shoulder, he'd moved his head the necessary fraction and captured his mouth, an action that held as much triumph as Waterloo must have. And in sweet capitulation, Zach had kissed him back, threading his fingers through the dark curls at the base of Theo's neck, and they had found sitting far too much to ask of their melting bones and sank down into the long grass together, where they'd stayed almost an hour.

Zach's eyes had opened at the sound of laughter, far away. Theo told him, "We're in plain view here, you know," a hint of a smile tugging at his lips. At the look on Zach's face, he laughed outright and then bit Zach's lip for him. "Does that bother you?" he murmured into his mouth, and Zach relaxed and kissed him back again. They sat up dizzily sometime in the mid-afternoon.

Zach's blond hair was mussed to the point that it was useless to try to fix it. "We have a test today..." he murmured, still unfocused.

"I'll probably fail," Theo told him, "but goddammit, it was worth it."

And Zach had laughed that open, unfettered laugh, brow smooth, and Theo watched him and wondered if he were real.

He was of the opinion, now, that it had all been real, but simply unfeasible. Happiness like that was not meant to go on forever amongst fifteen-year-olds. Zach was just unwilling to accept this fact. Theo had known it since he started choosing his journals over Zach, trying to escape him in between classes, find an empty corner in which he could pour out his thoughts on the pages. Things slid away from him, and he couldn't reclaim that same feeling.

He wasn't in love with Zach anymore. Only with bits of him: his girlishly tapered fingers, the light on his hair--the laugh. But the whole of Zach escaped him, now. He couldn't force himself back into the role of lover, and stood off to the side as friend, protector, watcher.

Zach is unaware. He's too vulnerable, missing something hard that was essentially Slytherin, something that keeps you from inconvenient things like broken hearts. Zach follows him around like a puppy, trying too hard to recapture that intangible dynamic of lovers. Theo cant bring himself to tell him to go away, and so he keeps up his end of the charade for Zach, because he loves him still, if he isn't in love with him anymore. He wishes he could just erase himself entirely from Zach's life, or at least his immediate presence--become more of a background observer rather than the love interest. Take back all his margin doodles and sly little smiles and the way his shoes met Zach's underneath the Charms table.

He tries to tell Zach this, sometimes, without speaking. I'm afraid of breaking you, his fingers whisper as they trace a gentle line on Zach's palm. He watches Zach close his eyes and knows he is thinking that it is their lives together he traces--the beginning, not the end. You're too fragile, speak his eyes when he pushes Zach's fair hair back from his forehead after an unfortunate accident in Quidditch involving several untoward remarks and one of the smaller Weasleys' collision with the commentary box. Zach smiles in his sleep and Theo knows he does not understand what kind of healing he wishes to communicate. I won't leave you, he thinks hard now, because I'm afraid if I do you will simply snap, and I won't be the one to do that to you.

Theo is faintly jealous as he sees Draco's hand skim over Potter's, and stuff itself quickly in his robes pocket as if ashamed at having gotten away with it. Theo knows that feeling, and wishes devoutly that he could recapture it. All around him the plots are just building up, the music coming to a crescendo. And Theo himself stands hidden behind a banner, thinking too much, as always, locked in his own endless denouement.

His eyes suddenly happen upon Millicent, looking rather pretty in a set of green robes too dark to be true Slytherin colors. Her face has gone the same color it did when she'd kissed him, in the attic at the Nott's old house behind the trunks of ridiculously lacy costume fodder. Theo cranes his neck to see what could possibly be causing tightly laced Millicent to turn that shade of pink, and he freezes.

Zach stands swaying before her, hand out, charm nearly blinding. He does not appear broken at all; on the contrary, he seems to have returned to the rose-tinted boy Theo remembers for an instant, except that it is no longer for Theo.

Millicent nods, and Zach sweeps her into his arms. Theo can practically hear the music swelling.

It should be a relief.

Theo feels as if something has snapped, but it isn't Zach. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps a denouement was better than an ending, after all.

His knees feel rather shaky, and so he slides down the wall to sit underneath a table and puts his face in his hands, lips bloodless and fingers shaking. He got to feel the beginning and the middle; it is only right that he should also suffer an ending.