Shaelune

We do not know, we do not know.

We shall live from day to day... and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego.

We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld... and our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come...

And how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.

-- alan paton, cry, the beloved country

Part IV. " 'What are you so afraid of?' "

Sunday morning found Draco in a separate alcove of that same library, more fatigued than usual, with laconically combed hair spilling cornsilk into his face. He couldn't quite seem to focus on the old, dusty book in his hands, the one that detailed the history of the centuries-old inn; he was sure he would have found it interesting, had he not been half-asleep, unclean (having not taken a shower since the previous morning), and extremely pissed at several people. He, who usually prided himself on being polished and expensively groomed, was wearing a slightly rumpled shirt under an old olive-green jumper-vest, and- horror of horrors- the same trousers he'd had on yesterday. Draco decided that they were all the same charcoal-black, floppy Zaffirocielo classics anyway, and he had about eleven pairs, so who could really tell the difference? It wasn't as though he smelled funny or sweated or anything.

He coughed from the cloud of dust as he closed the book and fumbled for his tea. The inn didn't serve his favourite, an extremely expensive white tea that he ordered imported from China, so he had had to settle for Caravan tea with Russian honey. It was now almost cold from the underground library drafts, although some grey, faint sunlight was filtered through a window across the aisle. The only sounds were the spring-cold wind against the glass outside, and the slight clicking of shoes on stone as they grew nearer to him.

He didn't even need to turn around to know who it was.

--

Harry watched Padma as she switched off the light in the lavatory of the suite they shared and closed the door behind her, smiling ambiguously at him as she sat down in an armchair opposite his. A stack of scrolls and books were balanced on her tweed-skirted lap, her legs crossed, ladylike, at the ankles. Her freshly brushed hair hung loose down her back, blue and ebony against the cream velvet of the chair.

"So did you actually get any research done in the library this morning?" she asked congenially. Without looking at him.

Harry suddenly felt that his shirt collar was a bit tight. "Erm, yes, of course."

Padma met his gaze, her eyes bright and interrogative and slightly amused. "Did you really?"

"Yes," Harry lied indignantly. "Found out a load of stuff about the inn and, you know, other things."

Her hand curled quizzically under her chin. "Oh, really? Do elaborate, I'm so fascinated."

He hated when she did that; he couldn't tell whether she was being sarcastic or just a Ravenclaw. "Er..."

Padma smiled at him encouragingly. Her eyes glittered a very dark, almost sinister black.

"Er... yes... loads of stuff, really..."

Her eyebrows narrowed; she snatched a quill out of her pocket and flipped to the middle of one of her books. "I'm really disappointed in you," she said. "You can defeat Voldemort over and over and set a record for front-page mentions in the Daily Prophet and win "Best Moral Example" three years in a row in Witch Weekly, but you can't take school seriously?" She glared at him in a very Hermione-esque manner. "Honestly! You're taking your O.W.L.S this year, you really can't afford to do badly on them- how do you ever expect to make anything of yourself with terrible scores? I might as well do this project myself for all the help you're going to give me."

"I'm sorry, Padma-"

"Save your breath for someone who cares, right?" Her voice jumped an octave on that last word; she'd either hiccuped or she was crying. Harry wasn't sure what to do. How did you comfort someone who'd just yelled at you as though you'd murdered her family in cold blood?

Don't think like that, Harry.

"Erm, there, there," he said, patting her back as she sobbed into her hands. What was going on with them these days? First Cho, now Padma... if things didn't change, he'd soon have Hermione or Ginny wailing all over him.

Girls, Harry thought exasperatedly, and handed Padma a handkerchief.

--

Hermione let her books down with a thump on the small wooden table, then seated herself across from Draco, challenging him to ask her to go away. "We need to work on our project," she said firmly, gaze cool and sensible. Draco glared at her over the rim of his teacup.

Snatching his book, Hermione took out a quill and inkbottle, dotting the parchment with a droplet of black ink at the top. "The inn was built in 1722," she read aloud, writing b: 1722 next to the bullet in her perfect, copperplate script. "...by the first Madam Farquhar and her consort, Lord Iorwerth Aeneirin."

"It's yor-wayrth," Draco muttered, keeping his gaze down at the dust-inlaid cover of the book on the top of his stack.

Hermione started. "What?"

"You heard me."

"How would you know whether my pronunciation was wrong or not?"

Draco looked up at her finally, smirking. "Well, I am half-Welsh myself, and it happens that my old tutor was named Iorwerth."

Hermione pursed her lips, trying to devise a comeback. "Fine," she said after a while. "All right, Iorwerth Aeneirin."

Draco leaned back in his chair without attempting to hold back his triumphant grin.

"In 1747," she continued stonily, "Lord Aeneirin resigned his proprietorship after an incident that called into question the integrity and safety of the inn and its owners. Madam Farquhar continued to allow guests into the inn, but no longer welcomed students from any magical school to vacation or stay here." Hermione looked up, but not at him. "I wonder why."

"Do you really?" Draco asked, feigning interest.

She glared and kept reading. "It was then that Shaelune was registered as a Class Four magical area by the Irish Ministry of Magic, and made Unplottable by the famous wizarding topographer Amerigo Vespucci the Third, whose critically acclaimed work also includes the Beauxbatons Academie de Enchantement and the Irish Ministry headquarters in Dublin. When Madam Farquhar died in 1804, her daughter by Lord Aeneirin, Deirbhile Farquhar, took over the property. Under her control, the inn became less and less of an attraction for Scottish and English travelers, and took in more long-term residential patrons rather than vacationing witches and wizards." Hermione's dark eyes were wide and interested. "How fascinating."

As she dipped her quill into the inkpot, Draco saw the bright glint of the gold ring on her third finger (she was left-handed, he noticed suddenly as she began writing again; and her hair wasn't straightened today, falling in a dark spiraling mass over her shoulders and brushing the bookjackets in the pile beside her).

He fumbled for his teacup and was not best pleased to find it empty. "I'm going for more tea," he announced.

Hermione glanced at her watch, a thin green leather band with a glass face, and marked her page before closing the book. "Actually, I think I'd like some coffee," she said lightly, picking up her books and bag and straightening her skirt, and then she walked off without waiting for him.

--

"One cappuccino, please," Hermione told the house-elf that came to serve them in the café. She patted it on its sheet-draped shoulder sympathetically. "I don't mind if it's a bit cold, take your time."

"Well, I do," Draco said, looking distinctly unhappy with the seating arrangement. "Caravan, with Rusian honey." Just to set her off, he omitted the 'please' and the 'thank-you' when the house-elf returned a few moments later, setting their steaming cups on the table between them.

"All right," Hermione said, pulling a second volume from the depths of her black canvas bag, along with the quill, inkbottle, and parchment she'd used earlier. "Where were we? 1804?"

"Don't ask me, you're the one monopolizing the only books about it in the entire library," Draco replied with a surly glare.

"I should think you'd be happy," Hermione retorted. "I mean, we wouldn't want Harry and Padma taking them all, would we?"

"Er, no, of course not," Draco said, trying to remember who this Padma person was.

Hermione nodded, satisfied, and turned a page in the book. "Now, in 1827 the inn's beach resort was shut down due to a north-Atlantic hurricane that flooded the shores and left the property with barely a meter of usable beach. After this, travelers stayed at Shaelune less and less frequently, and even in the usual peak times of vacation (summer and the deep-winter holidays), the average number of patrons here was between ten and fifteen. Had it not been for the Aeneirin fortune left to her by her father, the second Madam Farquhar would have been forced to shut the inn down." Hermione took a sip of her coffee, her eyes widening at the heat. "It must be awful to be so dependent on someone else's money in your adult life."

She hadn't meant it to be directed at him, but Draco's eyes narrowed anyway. "What's awful about that?"

"I didn't mean-" Hermione stopped and reconsidered. "Actually, I did. I know I want to make my own way and be independent in the world, to be remembered for who I was and my personal accomplishments, not that I relied on someone else for support-"

"It's not as though you have any other options, really," Draco retorted. "I mean, Mudbloods aren't renowned for their wealth or position in society, are they?"

Hermione's jaw tightened. "You don't know anything about my family's finances!"

His gaze swept over her conservative, dull attire, lack of jewelry, unstraightened hair, and much-used, faded black bookbag, raising his eyebrows in implication.

"Why do I even try to get you to co-operate with me?" she fumed, rolling up her notes, hands shaking, and shoving her books back into the bag. "You're- you're just insufferable!"

"Why, thank you, Miss Granger," he sang, satisfied, barely managing to block the cup of coffee she threw in his face as she stomped off.

And then, just as this was about to turn into another one of his triumphant attempts to annoy her into leaving him alone, she stopped moving and her hands stopped trembling and she turned around and walked back toward him. She was only slightly taller than he, even when she was standing and he was sitting; so she didn't take her seat, just placed one steady hand on the table and looked directly into his eyes in a way that let him know all too clearly that she was not afraid.

When she spoke, her voice was as calm as his leaden eyes.

"Have you ever heard of something called apartheid, Malfoy?"

"Apar-what?"

"A-par-theid. It's Dutch. Afrikaans, actually."

"Is this some Muggle term you're throwing at me so you can look smarter than I am?"

She bit her lip and crossed her arms, as though trying to keep from bursting with anger. "Yes, it's Muggle, Malfoy, but I would have expected you, whose intelligence is unspeakably superior to mine, to know what it was anyway."

He rolled his eyes. "No, I don't know what it is. Go on, demonstrate your omniscient knowledge of all things Mudblood."

"Apartheid," she began, now looking as though she really would hit him, "was the eighty-year reign of white supremacist government in Muggle South Africa. Black people suffered the cruelest segregation- they had to have identification cards and permissive passes wherever they went and couldn't live, eat, even visit the zoo in the same places that white people could. Did you even know it was overthrown three years ago? No, I suppose you didn't- you're really not all that intelligent after all, since you limit yourself to the happenings and information available in your own narrow little world."

"Granger-"

"Shut up, you know I'm right, and it's rude to interrupt people- don't call me a hypocrite, don't you dare- how about the antebellum period before the American Civil War? Hmm? Thousands of Africans and African-Americans captured and thrown into slavery and horrible conditions over a hundred years, sold and worked like- like animals or something-" her words were a bit choked now, and Draco almost felt something like sympathy for her before he remembered that she was yelling at him.

Too late. "Don't touch me, you- you bigot! What about the Holocaust? Surely- oh, my god, you're- oh god. World War II? Hitler? Nazism?" Dismay rounded her eyes and mouth and creased her brow in horrified shock. "Nothing?"

He started to stand, weary of her righteous tirade on human rights. "Well, I'm sorry if I'm not schooled to your liking in Muggle politics, but-"

"Malfoy!" She reached out and shoved him back into his seat with both hands, hands that had started to shake again with anger. "Millions of people just like you died because people just like your father were so prejudiced, so ignorant, so scared of the unknown that they were ready to kill their fellow human beings because of their religion or their skin color or their purity of blood or something equally pointless!" Tears really were welling up in her eyes now, like some cliché of an impassioned activist, but she was so close that he would swear he could smell the salt in them.

"Don't you see that there is only one way this can end, and that's with

your failure and the death of thousands?"

Her voice was soft and choked with water. "What are you so afraid of?"

He was suddenly overwhelmed with the sound and shadows of her hair around them, the strength of her small pale hands, the brightness of her tears. The room seemed to have gone silent with sunlight: she was all he could see and the echo of her whisper was all he could hear.

What are you so afraid of?

"Nothing," he hissed, and kissed her because it was inevitable and because he wanted- more than anything- to prove her wrong.

Kissing him was like being drowned in poison, Hermione thought; or strangled with silk and velvet, or bitten through by a pair of soft inverted fangs that pierced painlessly and opened her against her will, with her hands clinging with such terrible impotence to his shoulders and his palms on her waist, crushing her to him with the peculiar febrile strength given to those with a purpose. When he released her, the sudden absence of heat and darkness was enough to make her almost faint as he backed away against the wall, staring at his own hands as though they had been branded by the skin of her hips. Hermione could see one of her tears glistening as it lay in a mangled puddle on his cheek.

Her own hands were on fire with friction, and she was still crying, her eyes were still filled with saltwater whose escape had been blocked by his face against hers. Hermione hated it, but she felt as though her legs couldn't support her anymore, and she collapsed onto the floor. Malfoy didn't move to help her.

"I'm not afraid of anything, Granger," he said quietly, reassuringly, almost to himself. She couldn't bring herself to look away from him.

--

No one knew it. Sometimes she wasn't sure why herself; but Melaina Klaas was afraid of sleeping. Perhaps this was why she always looked so colorless and lackluster, the skin under her eyes sagging and grey, old before her time.

She resented the dreams with a unique ferocity, unmatched even by her hatred for Ginny Weasley or her predictable, inescapable envy of Pansy Parkinson. After all, she might have been known for her beauty, were it not for the dreams that kept her eyes latched open, staring at the dark velvet above; she might have been known for her cleverness, were it not for the dreams that forced her awake and tranquilized her into silence. She might have, despite her plain features and dull personality, captured the attention of anyone- almost anyone would do, except Colin Creevey- were it not for the dreams.

In Melaina's dreams Draco Malfoy loved her. He kissed her and clasped her by the hands and arms as though he couldn't bear to let her go, and slipped golden rings onto her fingers and touched her in places and ways she had never even touched herself. She knew it was naïve and immature, and she loathed the dreams for that; but even more, she ated the way she ached with heartbreak and emptiness when the dream-hands touched hers and he stared past her eyes, like he was looking down into the darkness inside her, and whispered someone else's name.

Melaina looked down at the horrible barren skin of her fingers and suddenly felt cold with guilt and despair. Auguries and portents plagued melodramatic self-named Seers like Aisling O'Reilly, not plain, chubby little Dutch girls. What had she done to deserve this?

--

She sighed into Draco's fingers as they worked at her corset, their cool tips grazing her skin as he unfastened the dozen metal hooks. Heaps of Prussian silk pooled at their feet; she didn't care right now, but she knew she would later, when she had to relace herself into the elaborate robes, which had taken half an hour this morning and were always more difficult to handle when she was rushed. But now the feel of lips on her jawline and hands on her back and his satin whiteblond hair grazing her neck overwhelmed the little details life presented to her, and she succumbed and let him kiss her full on.

She liked to think she had memorized the way he tasted; like smoke and mint and wine-grapes, and sometimes uncharacteristically mellow honeyed tea. Mostly tea, today, she thought wildly, idly, hating herself for letting silly observations like this drag her away from his practiced, confident lips and serpentine tongue and fingers pulling out her pins and dragging down her hair so he could run calm unmerciful hands through it. He murmured something inaudible into the junction of her shoulder and neck and clutched her hips so forcefully that she knew he would leave ten identical red indents along the pale skin; it was vaguely, morbidly satisfying, to wake in the morning with his fingerprints imprinted on her, like a brand, like his name written on her to let the world know to whom she belonged.

When he was gone and she stood in the faint torchlight, refastening her corset and robes, hands fairer on the blue silk, she noticed a bruised, darkening mark on her neck, where the slope inverted and curved down toward her collarbone like the hand of a distant lover. It ached when she trailed two fingers over it, but she didn't cast a healing spell or try to cover it with makeup. These were the only scars she was proud to wear.

--

We do not know, we do not know. We wait and sigh and dream of glances and touch and flight, of the darkness and mystery of the deep secrets of the world, of the paradoxes of love: the weight of a ring, the sting of a scar, the ardor of a kiss. We dive and sink and drown and pass away, grains in the endless desert of worlds and lives, meaningless. But we dream in the language of illusions, so that what seems the least significant can be the crux of life and death; and when this decision breaks, and how it shall come upon us, we shall not think about at all.