Title: The Longest Cold
Author: Yr Arwen
Author email:
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Notes: Here's my response to Aja's seasonal fic challenge, and it is an angsty one in the general spirit of things (although I've yet to catch up on the posts from the past two days -- took time off reading to write this). The title is adapted from the line in the Old English
Maxims, quoted below, as OE is my little perversity... ask Ash about it, if you dare.
It's strange to be writing something that isn't for class, and I definitely feel rusty, but damn is it good to write something not involving a grade (uh, this isn't being graded, is it?)
lencten hrimigost he byth lengest ceald
(spring is frostiest -- it is longest cold)
Snow clung to the ends of the branches, lifeless, and in its lifelessness made early spring a mockery. Where leaves should have begun to decorate tree branches snow still dripped, and the fields had turned to vast, sucking morasses of half-frozen mud instead of grass. The equinox was coming, the days growing slowly longer but remaining, perversely, cold; it seemed colder, perhaps, because it should have been so much warmer by rights. Human instinct said that things should be alive now, instead of in half-frozen stasis, and so the cold was more intolerable. Overhead, the sun cast desultory silver light upon the ground, sending streamers of it through the window, and still the chill sat heavily on Draco Malfoy's bones.
Or maybe, he thought abstractly, staring out onto the vast brown expanse of his estate, it was only half the weather that had gotten into him. There was something else, something much deeper... He paused, breath caught in his throat as he reached for a description of
the sensation, and then touched upon it: like the trees and grass outside, he was in a state of semi-thaw, hovering near the brink of some transformation, but unable to fall over it into actual *becoming.*
But something *was* coming... something was going to happen. The ice in Draco's marrow stirred, threatened to crack, solidified as he regained control over the spasm of anxiety and distracted himself with other considerations. Any day, he told himself, trying to ignore the
edge of hysteria present in his own thoughts. Any day now it'll happen.
He could hear the rustling of Crabbe and Goyle near the fire and the crackling of the flames, but they seemed to come from very far off; he felt much closer to the distorted trees, where they writhed fitfully in the wind, than the warmth of his own living room. And that warmth was a distant sort of warmth, small against the pressing knowledge of the ever-present cold just a half-inch beyond the windowpanes. It was the cold, he thought, that could last forever, making warmth little more than a poor memory.
"Do you honestly think he's gonna do it?" Crabbe asked, his voice muffled by swathes of muffler and overcoat, even in such a warm place. But then, after the past year, Crabbe had *always* seemed to be cold no matter where he was.
"Of course," Goyle answered after a long and silent moment. He did not sound convinced of it.
"He wouldn't," Crabbe said, sounding as unsure as Goyle. "He *couldn't*. We went to school with him." There was a silence, then: "Draco, what do you think?"
"I think," Draco said, turning to glare at the two of them, "that we're damn lucky to be alive. Now shut up and let me think some more."
Crabbe and Goyle retreated into obedient silence. Draco found himself wishing they'd say something, just so he could bask in the brief hot flare of irritation at their effrontery and remember, for however short a time, how things had been before times had changed. He swung back around to glare out the window again. The warped limb of an ancient oak tapped its twisted fingers upon the glass, and to Draco's eyes it seemed that the entirety of the tree leaned in his direction, as if looking into the room itself.
/Who else is watching?/ Draco wondered, the thought stirred by the way the gaping knotholes of the tree looked like staring eyes. He peered through the skeletal screen of branches, trying to find where an Auror might be hiding, if the creature flitting through the boundary of the forest was an Animagus. The greater danger, though, was not out there,
but rather just beyond the door of his sitting room, where Harry Potter waited for him.
Once more, the icy substrata of his body warmed a bit. He stirred, caught for a moment in the grip of heat -- a heat like summer, or the real, true spring they'd been denied... like hell, if it came to that (and it probably would), for what had gone and passed between them.
That had been when blood had flowed swiftly, mercurial, red and thick with life, and it had passed to winter with the coming of war, and the war that had taken so many lives took the life of something far more insubstantial as well.
Remember how it used to be? That way he had, how you'd watch him all the time? How you felt alive, watching him?
Draco bit down hard on his lip, felt a pain sharper than the cold as a tooth pierced the soft skin. There was a brief, warm trickle of blood -- he was surprised at that -- and then nothing more. Quick, over, done, stop, just like that, there was nothing more.
Nothing more. He listened for sounds beyond the door, but whatever sounds there were could not be made out past Crabbe's heavy, congested wheezing. Compassion, a foreign sensation, filtered into Draco, and he turned to look at his old schoolmate with something very nearly approaching sorrow. Vincent had been going downhill in the six months
since their house arrest; now he sat hunched over in his layers of coats and scarves, still unable to get warm, although Gregory had the fire built up to an inferno.
Gregory himself was as close as he could get to the blaze, jabbing at it wildly with the poker. Embers and sparks flew off, glowed briefly on the black fabric of his robe, then vanished. Whether Gregory was doing this for Vincent, or because he was going insane, was an utter mystery. Crabbe seemed oblivious of his friend's activity; he sat nearly motionless in the embrace of his armchair, huddled in on himself, his body shaking with the occasional cough. The bulkiness of his form was now wholly due to his clothes; all the flesh had dripped
off him, an incongruity in the cold weather -- that the body of Vincent Crabbe had melted like an icicle.
Don't waste time feeling pity for him... he's better off dead. And it was true. Soon, assuming the Ministry had its way, it would become true, and Vincent Crabbe wouldn't have to cough and shiver any more. Gregory would tear himself away from the fire, and not have to worry about keeping it built up for the Cruciatus-shattered wreck of a young man who sat in the chair behind him.
And he, Draco Malfoy, wouldn't have to stand in his corner and think. He wouldn't have to stare out at the same expanse, watch it drift from autumn to winter and finally to this half-state where winter hung on with claws of ice to spring's flesh, not letting go.
He shivered, brought his robe more closely around himself. As he shifted, he caught a faint reflection of his own face in the glass, saw with some horror the unnatural paleness of it. The dark circles below his eyes were bruises, testaments to unhappy nights. Exhaustion
rode him hard, a product of having little to do besides pace the cage of his own house and try to think, plan, salvage something of the disaster war had brought on him.
Or that you brought on yourself, he thought bitterly. You've dug your own grave, now you'll bloody well sleep in it. Well, it was his own fault after all, that he'd gotten caught. He hadn't been unwilling in following Voldemort -- in a fit of youthful hubris he had confessed
that for all the wizarding world to hear, spoken the words with a crueller intent as well, watched them strike home in the subtle grimace that crossed Harry Potter's face.
And now he was paying for it, with interest. Eight months ago he'd made that confession, three months spent in an overcrowded and understaffed Azkaban until his family's money -- very nearly the last of it -- had bought him and his friends a stint of house arrest throughout the series of Death Eater trials. It had given him time to sit in this room day in and day out, over five months of imperceptible change (the time had moved so slowly), hearing every now and then of allies who had died, or one who had been caught, and wondering when his time would come.
Draco looked around once more, although the features of the room hadn't changed for the past twenty-odd years. His parents never redecorated, so the sitting room remained much as it was when he had been a child. Thick drapes and huge, clunky furniture, the standard
fare. Unchanging, it collected dust and memories, and three men waited in it, an anteroom to eternity, beyond whose windows the dead trees mourned in the wind.
There was a sudden scraping outside the door. Vincent jerked upright and coughed in surprise. Gregory's dead black eyes swiveled from the fire to the door. Draco did not move, although his heart jumped inside him. Is this it?
After a moment, the door opened and Harry Potter stepped through.
Momentary fire burned along the fringes of Draco's veins, seeing that familiar face. Of a time, he would have rejoiced at seeing those eyes, the elegant gauntness of the bones underneath pale skin, the preternatural flame in green eyes. Even Potter's hair, that wild,
impossible hair... He remembered playing his fingers through it, wondering at the sensation of it, feeling Harry's body burning hotly against his own.
Later, that face had been drawn into a mask of indifference or hostility, so far from that of the breathing and vital boy Draco had once known. And that had been after the whole war had begun, after one path had split irrevocably. Now, after years of separation, Harry
Potter's face was still beautiful, glassine, immobile like some rare creature caught in ice, but utterly without life.
"Are you ready to go?" Harry asked now. "They're waiting."
Vincent nodded jerkily and swayed to his feet, supported by Goyle, who materialized at his elbow to help him up. Crabbe nearly fell in his eagerness, but Gregory saved him and the two, moving like some freakish four-legged animal, stumbled through the door. Potter turned
to watch them go, the expression on his face unreadable. There was a dim shuffle and squeak of soles on the tile of the hallway; Gregory's voice raised in brief protest, but silenced immediately. Then there was nothing.
Harry turned those lifeless eyes upon Draco now, and Draco fought against the chill, deeper than that of the fugitive spring, that leeched through him.
"Are you coming, Draco?" a stranger asked with Harry's voice. The words were colder yet.
"In a minute," Draco said with the most off-handed air he could manage. "Let me enjoy just a bit more of my life as a free man."
No answer was offered for that, and none was required. Draco carefully hid the smile his own words had conjured up. Free, he snorted inwardly, looking around the room. Free! He would be free as soon as he stepped out of his house, free for however long it took for the
Ministry to take him into the back woods and AK him out of the sight of decent people. Free.
Harry remained quiet, hovering silently by the door.
"Will it be quick for them?" Draco asked.
"Yes," Harry said.
"Good. I don't think Vincent could take much more."
"I'm surprised to hear that you're so concerned about him." The flatness of Harry's voice suggested that he was anything but surprised. "It's not like you cared about how long it took any of your... victims to die." The words held little force on their own.
"You're right," Draco agreed, "I didn't. I still don't. But then, I don't think you do, either."
Anger this time, low and banked, but there: "Don't even think of suggesting I'm like you, Malfoy." The name was spoken with significantly more hate than the teenaged Potter had managed to invest it with... and significantly less passion. "Don't even think it," he
repeated, somewhat more forcefully.
"Really?" There was a real, true burn inside Draco now. Maybe it was cold burn, raw and aching, or maybe it was finally, improbably, long-frozen blood beginning to boil, but vitality sparked deep within him. "You've been watching us for eight months, you've watched people
die -- your worst enemies die... and damn, but you... you..." Words failed him for a moment, and he examined Harry from the corner of his eye. So pale, unnaturally so in the golden light of the fire -- dying now too, like the fire, its fury spent long ago.
"I what?" Harry asked.
"You just sent my two best friends to their executions without blinking. I'm impressed."
"And I'm going to do the same for you. Now come on."
Draco straightened his robes deliberately and moved out of his corner. The tree outside his window tapped its arthritic fingers against the glass as the wind picked up, howling mournfully. He saw that the sky had become slate, slate gray like his eyes, flat and lifeless. Snow was in those clouds, and a strange light.
Harry waited impatiently by the door. "Are you coming on your own or not?" he demanded.
"Coming, coming..." Draco let his tongue caress the words. He saw Harry fidget a little, wondered how ill at ease his old lover was. What does he remember about us two together? How does he remember it?
His mind played over those days, brief and heady in the time before battle -- high off sex and their own antagonism, how glorious it'd been, possessing the body of the boy who'd seen and done so much, who'd been beloved by everybody and had by none of them. He'd managed to forget that time for awhile, pressed by the demands of other duties, and when he'd finally seen Harry again it had been like seeing an impostor in the guise of the bright, passionate young man he'd known, mocked, and loved.
How did Harry see him? How had Harry seen him? Somehow, the long litanies of muttered endearments escaped Draco's memory. He tried to put himself in Harry's place, there by the door, and failed utterly for lack of sympathy.
Slowly, he paced across the floor, footsteps made ghostly and muffled by the thick carpet. Harry was turned slightly away from him, studying some point in the middle distance.
"I'm ready to go," he said softly.
Harry spun around, blinked, the expression on his face wide and vital, startled into a moment of humanity. For a moment everything was there, everything Draco had not seen for years, buried underneath ice and glass. You sent my best friends -- could you send your lover?
"You are?" Harry asked, his voice not much louder than Draco's.
"As ready as I'll ever be."
Surprisingly, Harry looked away, but not before Draco saw doubt and fear flicker in his eyes.
Outside, the wind forced the trees to a lament, howling low over the moors and there was the rattle of frozen rain against the windows, the agonized beating of the oak tree on the panes.
"Not chickening out on me, are you, Potter?"
"It's not every day that I get to watch a former... former lover be executed," Harry said, flushing a little. He made no move to go through the half-open door, and didn't seem to concerned about who would be listening in on their conversation.
"One would hope not," Draco said. He smirked. "But being your lover was never a safe proposition to begin with."
Harry looked up at him. "Why me, then, if it wasn't safe? I don't suppose it was because you actually liked me, or by default because we were the only two gay kids at school."
"Do you mind if I not answer that question?" Draco asked. "I think there might not be enough time between here and there to give you the answer. And besides... well, you know, I honestly don't know."
Strangely, Harry appeared to accept this. "But it wasn't enough. You still ended up with Voldemort and you killed all those people -- my friends."
"And you still ended up with Dumbledore." Draco was secretly pleased at being able to mimic Harry's put-upon, sadly-wondering tone to perfection. But haven't you wondered? What it would be like to just be with him... not to twist him around or convert him, but to just
be? He shook his head, determined not to follow that path. Life's too short for regrets, he reminded himself. Especially right now, when I've got twenty minutes, tops.
Harry opened his mouth, ostensibly to say something, but then closed it without a word. Draco squelched his curiosity and forced himself to resignation. "Lead on," he said wryly, gesturing to the door. "We've got places to go and people to see."
"How can you be so calm?" Harry asked, the words desperate.
And there it was, the brief flash of warmth and light, more substantial than the fire and more meaningful than the sun, something rare and long-awaited, beautiful for its simple feeling. There was nothing in it that was false, only the echo of the long-ago words of a
boy who no longer existed, holding onto Draco with a grip surprising for his slender frame, fingers pressed into his arm as though to assure him of his companion's reality, so real in his desperation that Draco, who thought his heart had long ago been dead, felt it ache.
"I'm not," Draco confessed, "but it's better than freaking out, isn't it?"
Harry nodded and said nothing, but his face gave everything away.
And it was like it was in the old days, when Harry's face told him everything, when each movement, no matter how subtle, had its own wealth of meaning, when he moved with grace and passion, and called up in Draco something very much like those things. They were strange to him and did not sit well with him, so he found himself watching and loving even as he knew he could not be what Harry was. And it was this memory that was like a long-lost summer, blood flowing like hot mercury, and Draco felt alive.
"Can we go?" he asked, stepping forward, using his body to push Harry into action. Harry moved automatically, striding ahead of him with shoulders thrown defiantly back. Draco followed, alive with memory of how Harry once was, fighting back the regret that was nipping at him. You loved that about him, how he hid and ducked and challenged you,
and you hate what he's become... you hate that there were things that drove him to this.
I do, he acknowledged quickly. He didn't resist as a few faceless
Ministry officials nodded at him, bound his wrists with an
incantation.
What would you do if these weren't the last moments of your life?
Tell him that.
Then do it.
No. Then, pre-empting the question: Because he needs to move past this. Once I'm gone, the war's over... He, at least, can move on.
The door of the main hall was open, and the mercilessly cold air swirled in. It pulled with ghostly fingers at the edge of Draco's robe and made the torchlight flicker. A disembodied voice moaned in the atrium. Was it Vincent? Gregory? His parents?
"Come on, Malfoy," an official instructed, nudging him with an elbow.
In a small knot of humanity, they stepped outside into the false spring. Frozen rain stung Draco's face and he almost slipped in the churned-up mud. The cold worked straight through his robe but he ignored it, kept moving, aware of Harry walking resolutely beside him,
thinking that although Harry could not follow him past the threshold there would at least be some comfort in having him at the edge of it.
And so, when he stood finally, thoughts coursing back over the paths of years, it was with realization that he remembered... like the trees and grass outside, he was in a state of semi-thaw, hovering near the brink of some transformation, but unable to fall over it into actual becoming... but becoming what, in the little time he had left as the executioner raised his wand, formed his lips to shape the curse, he could not say -- he could, instead, only offer Harry his first smile in years, bright, warm, true, becoming something other than the cold.
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