Title: The Summer King
Author: Ashura ()
Rating: PG-13
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: Next time I'm bloody well having them go out for ice cream. Or to a carnival. Something so sweet it makes your teeth hurt. But for now...
I was eight the first time I saw the fires. My parents are not really interested in the old rituals, for all their supposed respect for tradition and old things, so it was my aunt Lucia, my mother's sister, who took me that first time. She said it was something every wizard-child had to see. I have never been sure, before, whether to hate her for it, or thank her.
That night, that Beltaine, was the first time I ever saw someone die. He was burnt alive, there in front of me, standing proud, majestic, atop a stone pillar in the centre of a field. He had black hair, and he was naked. There were people everywhere. A woman in white with a crescent-moon scar on her forehead raised her hands and called something out into the air, and fire sprang from the pillar and surrounded the man in the centre of it.
I thought he would scream, but he just stood there, burning, motionless. I saw his lips move, but he didn't seem upset or afraid. The throng, all the people on the grass, they were dancing.
Aunt Lucia told me that night that fire is alive. It is born, it dies, it breathes, it feeds and consumes. I told her I didn't think that was right, and she smiled, like she were sharing a very special secret, and said that everything is alive, Draco, in its own way. I was not sure that I believed her, the wild beaming aunt that made my mother sigh and shake her head, but I was eight, and it was all so much to take in. She held me up and danced me around the meadow in her arms, and sometimes people brushed against us and we would throw back our heads and laugh, and I threw my arms wide and could almost take the whole of the universe in. When we got so close to the pillar that the heat from the bonfire was turning my skin pink, I could hear the black-haired man singing as he faded into the fire. He was singing, weak but clear, words so old I couldn't understand them but they sank into my soul through my skin and I know that the deep parts of my mind will never forget them.
The fires stretched higher and higher, reaching crimson fingers into the sky. The singing grew, too, as the dancers took up the words, even the ones who didn?t understand them, bellowing out the Old Things at the tops of their voices. The man, the one who died, he never turned black or crumbled the way other things do when you burn them. He just faded, as if he were becoming part of the flames, until he was no longer there.
The dancers began to slip away, grow quiet, in pairs and threes and fours they disappeared into the woods. I asked Aunt Lucia where they were going, and she laughed. They are going to show themselves that they are alive, she told me, and in my childish wisdom I drank the magic out of the air and wondered, how could they doubt it? She laughed again and kissed me on the forehead, and before long we went back home.
I am seventeen now, and this will be my tenth Beltaine festival. Every year since that first one I have gone, I always manage to get there somehow, because there is so much magic in the air on that night, raw and primal and inescapable. I know now what the revelers do to prove they are alive, and sometimes I join them, and sometimes I lie on the grass and watch the fading flames die into silence. Rarely, there are faces I recognise, whirling through the dance, but we do not acknowledge one another, because that is not the way things are done.
And this year in the crowd I found another familiar face, and I wondered if I had never really seen it before. I watched him, wide-eyed, staring into the fire with a horror that slowly turned to joy when he finally /understood/; I saw the crowd melt around him til he was alone in the darkness.
He has black hair. The scar on his forehead is a lightning bolt instead of a crescent-moon, but is heavenly anyway; the moon is too mellow for him, there is too much passion there. He is alone, hands clenched into fists at his sides, feet bare in the grass, his head thrown back to stare up at the stars. Firelight still glows on him, clinging to him even as it is dying.
I touch his hand, it startles him; I cup his cheek and draw my fingers down his neck. This is my invitation, and I will not use another. He will accept if he truly understands. There are no rules tonight, that is the way it has always been. The fires of Beltaine are outside time, outside the world, and tonight I will be the one to touch him.
He throws himself into me, unhesitating, and his lips are fervent and hungry. Maybe it is the firelight that makes his eyes bottomless and makes his skin glow. I pull him to the ground with me, above me, and he is strong and sweaty and smooth and beautiful. Magic lingers in his kiss, his fingertips, in every arc and angle of his body and of my body because there is no way now to tell us from each other. There is magic, and it is intoxicating.
It is Beltaine. It is words that have no language whispered into flushed and tingling skin, it is rhythm and passion and the dance of grass and starlight, music that makes you tremble and permeates everything. It is promises and beginnings, and it is pleasures that fade with the dawn. It is knowing that somewhere beyond the furthest reach of understanding this was all meant to be, and my fate so entwined with his that there will never be any escape for either of us.
And there is the scent of smoke in his hair, and summer on his breath, and a night that can only last forever if we let it.
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