shattered

Two Words Remix

Disclaimer: Rowling=successful author who has made more money than any other author in history. Me=poor, struggling student who is practically broke at the moment. Yeah, I can see how you’d get us confused.

A/N: IMPORTANT! PAY ATTENTION! As the more intelligent of you might have guessed from the title, the plot IS NOT MINE. It belongs to kawaiiRose-Silent, who is one of my faithful reviewers, and whose story I really liked. So much, in fact, that I just HAD to rewrite it—my style. Not that I’m criticizing her or that I think I could do it better, but just for the sheer joy of doing so. I am publishing this with her permission.

He stumbled across them lying side by side on the battlefield. She was curled up slightly, her legs having crumpled beneath her when she fell; her robes were parted to show the jeans and T-shirt underneath that she always wore. He was lying beside her, curled tightly in a ball, the way he always slept, unless he was next to her and they were spooning. His blonde hair was spread out around him like a halo of sorts, bright against the grimy ground, covered with ash and blood. At the edges, it intermingled with her red-brown bushy hair in a sort of complex design, platinum strands weaving in and out of copper ones.

In the end, he supposed, it had been almost inevitable. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Mark Antony and Cleopatra: they fit every classic parameter for the doomed couple, and he wasn’t even very surprised at coming across their bodies like this. It fit that they died together, he thought dimly. They would have liked that. The thought was all he allowed himself to think. The grief would come later, he knew. For now, he was numb with the natural anesthetic that keeps us from collapsing, and he knew enough to appreciate it while it lasted.

He should tell Ron, he knew. It had hit the redhead hard that Hermione had loved another, but he had moved on; gotten past it, and he would be devastated to learn that one of his best friends had died, as well as Malfoy. He should tell Remus, and Tonks, and Mrs. Weasley and Ginny, all of whom would need their own time to mourn. But something kept him rooted there, frozen, as he stared at the perfect tableau they made on the Plain of Hogwarts, as the Daily Prophet was calling the ruins of the old school.

Then he saw it, as his logic caught up to his gut instinct.

Malfoy’s chest was moving. Up, down, up, down, with small, shallow breaths that were barely there, each exhalation so faint that it seemed it was the last, his expensive robes fluttering slightly. Harry’s eyes slid to the other chest that had up to now also been presumed dead, but the hope implicated in the action was not fulfilled. Hermione was indeed dead.

But Malfoy—or rather, Draco was not, and the young hero crouched down on his heels to gently shake the Slytherin. “Draco. Draco,” he called softly, even as he checked for any injuries. He found none save the small, shallow cuts that were only to be expected of a fighter, and he shook harder. “Draco.”

The grey eyes opened slowly, pale blond eyelashes almost invisible against his skin fluttering slightly.

“Po—Harry?” he asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me. Are you all right?”

Characteristically, the ex-Death Eater ignored the question and turned to the body of the woman lying beside him. “Hermione?” he asked, the sound oddly loud in the stillness surrounding them, the quiet that comes after every battle, as though all the life has been sucked out of the place in compensation for all the death.

“Hermione?” he asked again, louder, more insistent. Harry could almost spot the moment when the truth sunk in. The boy—no, not a boy, he was a man now, they all were—extended a hand toward her as though he were going to brush the hair off her forehead, but stopped at the last moment, a hand frozen in stasis.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Draco looked up at him, oddly vulnerable.

“Yeah,” said Harry, wishing he could be gentler, but knowing that it would not help, and all the gentleness seemed to have been drained out of him anyway. War tended to do that to you.

Realization hit hard. He doubled over the body of his fiancé, weeping silently. Tears seeped out from under his eyelids, making their way down his cheeks. He cut an odd figure, with two clear tracks running down his begrimed face, shaking so silently that a casual bystander would not have noticed anything amiss.

Harry waited patiently, knowing that he needed this, that he needed to be allowed to mourn. Tears were a catharsis of course. Once he could and did cry, things would be better. It did not strike him how grimly ironic it was that a nineteen-year-old should know the workings of grief so effortlessly. All he knew was that he had been living with it all his life.

And as he watched the other boy cry, Harry Potter was finally able to cry himself—cry for Hermione, dead so young; for Draco, lost without his lover who had been his life; for Fred, left behind when his twin was struck by a Killing Curse; for Minerva McGonagall, taken down by no less than four Death Eaters as she covered Harry’s escape; for Sirius, lost behind the Veil by Harry’s own foolish mistakes; for Cedric, dead these five years but still fresh in his memory.

Hours might have passed, or minutes, or maybe only a few seconds. Time seemed irrelevant in this sanctuary of tears, a moment shared by both boys. Finally, Draco’s shuddering stopped, and he looked up at Harry, and Harry, with that flash of intuition in which you know you are right but for which you can offer no proof, knew that now was the telling moment, and it would come in two words.

He had no proof, but that was okay. Logic isn’t advanced enough to explain the complex workings of a human mind; it’s nothing more than an excuse for gut feelings. Proved when you think about the fact that there has never been a person who used logic to disprove his thesis.

If Draco said, “It’s nothing,” Harry swore to Merlin he would hex the boy himself. “It’s nothing” was what Draco said when he had been hexed by three Gryffindors at once and had had to be helped to the Infirmary by two other Slytherins. “It’s nothing” was what Draco said when he retreated behind his Slytherin mask, refusing to let anyone in. “It’s nothing” meant that Draco would revert to his cold, annoying, cruel former self, forever denying his grief, refusing to think that he could ever feel again. “It’s nothing” meant that all this had been nothing more than a fling.

Or he could say, “I’m okay,” and then Harry would only slap him. “I’m okay” would mean that he could admit the grief but was refusing to deal with it. “I’m okay” would mean that this moment of healing had not been enough. That Draco would spend the rest of his life with a smiling mask on—a different and more likable one than the Slytherin one, but a mask nevertheless. But that maybe, just maybe there was hope ahead. Long painful years with one step at a time, but hope nevertheless.

And finally, the words Harry was hoping to hear: “Go away.” “Go away” would mean that this time had not been enough; of course it hadn’t been enough, it couldn’t be enough, not to deal with this, the death of a soul-mate. “Go away” would mean that he needed time to cope, by himself, the way the proud and stubborn Slytherin always did. Alone. It would hurt, he would rage, but he would vent, and it would pass, and he could be whole again.

Harry was rooting for “Go away,” but he knew the possibility of hearing either of the other two was strong. Bracing himself for it, he gritted his teeth in preparation for the agony of waiting and—perhaps—the agony of a painful answer.

So it was that when Draco finally spoke, the two words he actually said caught the Gryffindor totally by surprise.

His jaw dropped, and green eyes met silver in a burst of surprise. Harry had never been good at reading Draco; the mask the Slytherin customarily wore had been almost perfected, and only Hermione had ever been good at knowing what he was about. But this time, the grey eyes were unprotected, totally devoid of all barriers, and in a flash, Harry knew what this boded for the future, and a sudden surge of anger and pity welled up in him.

How could he? Where was the Draco he knew? The Draco who had chased after the Snitch in whole-hearted enjoyment, the game not ruined for once by competition, but simply for the sheer pleasure of flying? The Draco who was turned into a ferret and bounced up and down by a mad Death Eater, and still managed to get right back up and threaten him? The Draco who had annoyed them all for days by singing an annoying little ditty the first time Harry lost a Quidditch match to him? The Draco who had kissed Hermione so hard that she had almost passed out, and made the air charged with electricity as he laughed in pure ecstasy? The Draco who loved life as much as Hermione?

The Draco he knew would never have said those words.

Then again, the Draco he knew had died with Hermione.

So after all, Harry thought as he stared, mesmerized, at the pools of silver, perhaps this had come as no surprise after all. Maybe it had just ended as he had always known it would, as he had thought it had when he first came upon them. He couldn’t do it—but if he didn’t, he knew Draco would himself. And he had come a long way from the little boy who couldn’t cast Crucio on a insane witch.

He raised his wand and shot a jet of green light at the wizard beneath him and watched almost dispassionately as the grey eyes lost their luster, and the body toppled over slowly, half onto Hermione, as he complied with Draco Malfoy’s last request, the two words he had never expected to hear from him.

Kill me.