Never Real

He frowns slightly, mouth turning into a small pout, as the soft rays of moonlight illuminate his features. The lightning bolt that scars his face wrinkles up as well. You reach out to push back a lock of his unruly black hair away, and hold his cheek for a moment. His face relaxes upon your touch, and his dreams are peaceful again.

You wrap your arms around his sleeping figure, and subconsciously he snuggles closer to your embrace, burying his face in your chest. A small smile finds its way to your mouth, and refuses to go away.

Nobody would have guessed it would turn out like this.

You never did, but you're not about to complain.

He is beautiful, inside and out... He is unaware of it, and he becomes even more beautiful because of it. You can't quite remember when you stumbled upon that realization; perhaps you had always known it subconsciously and had only refused to acknowledge it, but it had been startling all the same that day, many years past, when you had looked him in the eye and thought quite suddenly how beautiful his emerald eyes shone the way they did, even if in actuality they only blazed with the anger and hatred he felt for you. You had been brought up to see beauty, and on that day, you truly have.

You spent a good part of the last few years of your stay in Hogwarts mystified by him. If you had seen yourself during those times, you would have given yourself a good smack upside the head. The irony of his arch-nemesis succumbing to his charms was not lost on you, which is probably the reason why you also spent a good part of the last few years of your stay in Hogwarts desperately trying to keep that attraction a secret.

Your growing awareness of his beauty was not the only thing that changed during the last years you were to spend sheltered from the harsh truths of the world. The dark power was growing, and you were meant to be safe from it. All your life you were supposed to stand by the force that continued to threaten your world. It was in your blood. You knew it-- the same way he did, and the same way everyone expected it to be.

Of course, you always knew you were above expectations.

You were proud and arrogant and cruel, but you were never evil. Perhaps you would have gone over to the dark side if only to remain his enemy, but even you realized that there were times when people had to grow up. It was the witness of a family's slaughter, shortly after graduation, which irrevocably turned you away from the path you seemed almost destined to follow. Ironically, that slaughter was supposed to initiate you into the dark's service.

You smile. Through all your life up until that moment, you tormented yourself with the knowledge that your father thought you were never good enough. You were never the smartest, never the best player, never the one who got the power. You suffered under his imposing shadow, his condescending eyes, and the disdain in his voice. When you turned your back away on him, though, you realize that it was he who was never smart or manipulative enough to truly control you. It was he who was to suffer under his master's disdain and contempt. In that moment of your betrayal, you feel most triumphant, for you have been freed, and by your own actions.

And you smile, knowing then what true power is.

Your headmaster, whom once you had been conditioned to see as a Muggle-loving fool, quite unexpectedly knew what you just did. He took you under his wing and trusted you. It was he who first saw the lack of evil in your heart, when most saw only the shallow pretensions you had no trouble putting up. He is wise to have seen an ally in you, you muse now, for if he hadn't, you would have been lost.

Despite this wisdom, though, you wonder now how he could not have seen the loss of another.

Perhaps he knew then. Perhaps he had his reasons. Yet perhaps, just like everybody else, he had not seen it coming. He is human after all; it is only to his nature that he should err in his judgment once in a while. You cannot help thinking, though, how big it was a mistake for him to make.

Nobody knew it then, but your moment of decision occurred the same time someone else's did. Nobody could have known, but at the point when you rejected your upbringing, someone else did too. Poets would call it a twisted justice, but most considered it simply a trade. The Dark turned to Light. The Light turned to Dark.

And just as your decision caused your father a blow, so did his. No one was probably more surprised to hear about his sudden betrayal than his father, Muggle-lover that he is. You could never be certain, though, for as soon as he found out his son had turned against him, he had been killed, along with his whole family. The Grangers were massacred after, and then the Dursleys. You remember the fear that clutched you when you heard about the attacks, and you remember the relief that spread through your whole being when you found out that *he* was able to escape. The Boy Who Lived strikes again, you had thought to yourself with a mixture of amusement and worry.

It was to mark itself in your memory as the most nerve-racking day of your entire life when your alliance was revealed to the Order. Suspicion was all around; it hung thickly in the air and suffocated you. You understood them, though. A traitor had just been revealed among their midst, in the form of their champion's closest friend. What were they to make of his archrival? You remember, too, his emerald eyes studying yours with an intensity that intimidated you for the first time, but you had nothing to hide. It was that knowledge alone that allowed you to stand in front of them as you did then, proud and dignified and challenging.

It wasn't the way you had stood before them that convinced them of your sincerity, though. It was the man who had stood behind you, the same way he had stood behind countless other suspicious people: an expelled giant, a former enemy, a werewolf, an escaped convict. These were the same people who eyed you warily then, and who saw in you what they were before they were given a second chance. They knew best the helplessness of having no one who believed in them. They knew the joy of gaining trust. They knew, too, of how appearances have nothing to do with what lay within. These were the reasons why it came to pass that you were finally accepted as one with their cause.

His emerald eyes remained guarded, though, until quite a long time after that, and if his mentor, who was yours as well, hadn't spoken with him, perhaps he would never have trusted you at all.

It was to your benefit that he knew when grudges were best left behind. After that, the usual amount of animosity between you (though you felt it came more from his side of the rivalry) diminished, and while he most certainly did not at once take to having deep meaningful conversations with you, you were able to deal with each other in a friendly manner. He had lost his friends, after all, in one way or another, and you...

You never had any.

It was a natural progression. Small talk turned to something friendlier, and having no one else who was around your age pushed you together. Your attraction grew all the more with proximity and time. Dreams would be a cliché to mention, but you cannot deny that they were constantly around whenever night came. Your growing friendship with him only fueled it more. You kept your distance, though, because it would have been too soon.

You knew he was grieving, so you sought to help him. He had no one else to talk to then, so he agreed.

He had been pouring his heart out to you about the immense loss and pain he felt at the betrayal of one of his friends and the death of the other, his first real heart to heart talk with probably anyone since the incident, when the truth finally hit you. You were in love with him. You felt his pain, grieved with him, and you wanted him to be happy. He was all that mattered. It was no longer just his beauty that drove you toward him-- it was who he was. It was the sadness and the longing and the nobility he held inside that you longed to be with. It was the smile on his eyes that you wanted to see. It was not wholly carnal, the way you wanted him. You longed to fill him, complete him, as you knew that only he would fill and complete you, in every way that was possible: a marriage of your souls, your minds, your hearts, your bodies.

You held him then, for that was the only way you could tell him everything would be fine. You held him and you told him you would never leave, and he believed you; you were a Malfoy and Malfoys keep their word. You held him, and as he held on to you as well, you both realized that all you really had left were each other.

You held each other for a long time, and after that, it only seemed natural for you to kiss him. He was shocked; he seemed to go rigid at the contact, but slowly he began to kiss you back.

It was a natural progression from that point on.

It has been months since then. You are together now. You are happy, and he is too. The war isn't over, but somehow he has made it more bearable. You were right then. You know it for certain now, that he truly is all that matters.

He shifts against your naked chest one more time, a muffled word escaping into the night, fluttering eyelids against your skin, and your heart twists itself involuntarily.

He is dreaming again.

All too suddenly, the other memories invade your thoughts, unwelcome and cruel and altogether true. You remember nights like these, when you hold him in your arms but his dreams take him elsewhere. You remember the first night he dreamed-- the first night you realized he could never be wholly yours after all, and that he never really was. He had been troubled, but he had refused to talk about it. He had claimed it was nothing serious, and you had believed him. You had assumed it was simply the trauma of facing off with his former friend again after so long. You had no idea just how right, and how wrong, you were.

That night was the first night of his troubled nights, and the beginning of your troubled days. He had been tossing and turning and it had kept you awake. It had kept you worried. He had begun muttering quiet words you could not catch, and then he had cried out a name with such passion and longing and pain that you had never known.

It was not yours.

The sweetness he held when talking to you was nothing compared to the raw emotion you heard in his voice then. For you he had affection, but his passion was for another.

You had his body, but another held his heart.

It isn't often, but sometimes, on nights like this, when his sleep is deep and his dreams are real, he sees a different face, whispers a different name, remembers a different man... Sometimes, when his true subconscious takes over, he lives in a different reality. He dreams a different memory. And in that reality, there is no place for you. It is a world where you were never real, a world where you are not the one who holds his heart. In the world he knows in his mind, in the memory he keeps in his heart, there is only a red-haired man of brilliant blue eyes. No more.

You know that perfectly well now, and it makes sense. He had him first, long ago, inside that train compartment, sharing shy smiles and chocolate frogs. He had him then, in that tournament, as the one thing he would miss above all. He had him now, despite change and time and distance.

It doesn't matter, though, because when he wakes up tomorrow, he will smile at you as if nothing were wrong. As if you were his world. He remembers nothing of his dreams, or else he ignores them, and if he does, you will too.

It is *this* reality you want.