Winter Morning Elegy

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WINTER MORNING ELEGY

----- Harry watches Draco sleep -------

So this is it, again. Another cold, early morning where we lie among thrashed, damp sheets as dawn slowly wakes outside the high windows. We have made love – or maybe that’s just a figure of speech. I don’t know what to call it. I would like it to be love but I think for him at least it is something else, something very far from anything I’ve ever imagined love to be.

We never talk. We never say anything except maybe "harder". No vows, no claims, no requests, no small soft words mumbled against skin. There’s just our ripped, ragged breathing and the occasional moan. And when we are both emptied and wet and freed from the hot, dark urge he sinks back against the pillows and smiles lazily up at me in a way that makes me shudder. He looks sated and smug; he smiles at some secret joke I’m sure is on me. And then he drifts into sleep while I lie uneasily, shivering as the sweat dries on my body, watching his pale, beautiful face where I can still see the faint trace of his smile, left behind like a shed skin, as his mind wanders off into echoing halls where I can’t follow.

Isn’t it ironic that he should look so angelic when he sleeps? Isn’t it ironic that I should want him so? He represents everything that, in the daylight world, I back away from. But night after night I lie here and look at his closed, soft lips and remember myself gently biting them, slowly devouring them, wanting to fit all of him into my mouth at once. I touch his beauty with reverence.

I’ve always marvelled that he can slip into sleep so easily with me. I never sleep when we are together. It would be like curling up to a dragon, expecting it to use its fire to warm you, not scorch you. But apparently he trusts me. Or, at least, he is not afraid of me, which is a fact that both comforts me and hurts me. I wish he was afraid of me. I feel that fear is the only means to really get to him.

To me he is the evening star, beckoning me with chill beauty through the darkness, but I am nothing more to him than a sometime, night-time toy, only slightly more titillating than a stuffed animal. Sometimes I think the one reason why he prefers me to the stuffed animal is that the toy will not bleed when he cuts it. The toy will never show fear or hurt or helpless love, and I do all of those things, gazing into his strange, silvery eyes as they cloud with desire. And this is also the reason why he prefers me to any other lover. He will never hurt them as deeply as he hurts me, because no one loves him or fears him like I do.

We are not intimate. By now we know every inch of each other’s bodies; we have studied and memorized them like topographic maps of an often explored country. We know the taste and smell and feel on tongue or fingertip or palm of every little skin crease and jutting bone and hot hollow. Some nights our embraces are curiously gentle, and perhaps it is the fact that there is gentleness on his part, too, not only on mine, that makes me continue to welcome his silent visits. But intimacy is not part of our world. If we had a language, that word would not be in it.

I have always been the kind of person who wants intimacy, craves it, yearns for it. I wonder if he even knows the concept of intimacy. If I placed it before him he would view it with faint disgust and throw it away, as if I were a cat who had just proudly brought him a dead mouse. And at this stage of our relationship, perhaps intimacy would really be a sad, ugly little thing like a dead mouse, lying there between us like an embarrassment. I can’t picture what intimacy between us would be like. I can’t imagine what kind of gestures he would make towards me, what words he would say or what confidences he would give. It occurs to me that I might actually be fighting intimacy as hard as he is. Because somehow, now, I would be afraid to hear him speak. The image of him I have created in my mind is so clear and stark; he is distant, independent, surprising. And, assuming he thinks of me at all when he is outside this room, what image does he have of me? What if we spoke, and I was to find that underneath that exquisitely perfect surface there was nothing but banality and need?

I feel him stir beside me, slowly inching his way up from a deep well of sleep, opening his eyes into mine. And in the brief moment before he knows where he is, before the shutter of consciousness comes down and makes his eyes opaque, I glimpse a world I had not guessed at. I see his fear. I see his cruelty and I see his love. I see his violence and I know his tenderness. It frightens me so much I feel myself go cold and numb, but the numbness is followed by a rush of heat that makes me blush all over. I know he sees all this and understands it, and I also know suddenly that now, at last, he is afraid of me.

He sits up and his straight silky hair falls forward to hide his face. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and yanks at his clothes that he has left in a heap on the floor. When he is dressed he starts walking towards the door, still swaying with sleep, but he doesn’t leave. He halts by the window and stares out at the whirling snow flakes. He stands there for a while, his pale hair shimmering in the gloom, and then he turns around and walks back to the bed. I say nothing and he does not look at me. He just stands there, towering over me, and I wonder for a moment if I should roll out of bed and run. But he does not move. We stay frozen in our positions for what feels like an eternity. Then he bends down, close to my face. His breath is hot on my skin and I close my eyes. The pounding of my blood makes a strange, hushed music. I feel his lips brush my forehead, my left eyelid and my mouth. Then his footsteps cross the floor and the door closes behind him with a soft whoosh.

I open my eyes to the grey dawn and I stay in the same position, shivering, until it is full daylight.