Shades of Grey

AN: I just couldn't resist a part 2 :)






Fuck.

Bloody fucking shit tosser ponce prick.

I’m smoking at the scene of my crime. I know you won’t come back here if you can help it. I can see your face turning scarlet every time you think about it involuntarily when you look at me. I can imagine thinly veiled disgust in your eyes.

I don’t remember when I took up this dirty muggle habit. Sometime during that barely pubescent rebellious phase, I suppose. I never stopped. I became addicted to the nicotine. There are, of course, spells that would put me right in a moment, but I can’t seem to bring myself to give it up. Perhaps it’s more than the tobacco, more than the poisonous desire for a slow suicide I doubt I’ll live to see. It’s nice to want something I can have. And it keeps me from doing more shameful things with my hands, at this late hour, in the same window I saw you sitting all those mornings ago.

The light of the moon is sifting through the statues and the trees, briars and thickets, casting a harsh glow. It catches on the smoke as it drifts through the caliginous night and dissipates into the cooling air.

Winter is coming, cold as it’s ever been. The pressure in my chest, so hard and painful that I cannot seem to stand it, is getting worse. I know that my time is running out. But then, that’s all that time ever does. There’s a dark armoire moving, hidden, through the walls of this castle. And I know I can’t coax it to betray us all. Oh, the dark and horrible things I’ve whispered to that obelisk in the dead of night, the promises and the threats, the insidious spells. The potions I’ve brewed in the awful, stifling quiet of that very obliging room. The sleep I’ve lost in the heart of this enchanted castle that I’m so feverishly working to destroy.

I let my finger trail lightly down the cool marble of the tower wall, and I gaze out at the parapet.

“It’s you or me.” I whisper to it. But my voice sounds dead already.

I can’t stand it. You wanker. I’ve spent every waking hour I can spare imagining the myriad ways we could collide. I can’t afford to have you crowding my mind. I think about the cabinet, the nooks and crannies I know I’ll never find, the spells I haven’t tried, but it’s always you, walking from within it, or breathing down the back of my neck like a ghost. Harry fucking Potter. An entity of tousled hair, a shockwave glare, filtered through your crooked glasses. Why do you wear those muggle things, Potter? It can’t be because you like them. How many times have they broken, alongside your face, crushed into blood and bone? How many times have I wanted to crumble them to fine silica, cripple you somehow, scuff the perfect surface and maybe pull you closer to my rung of the ladder.

I keep coming back here, to where it happened. Going over what I did. What I didn’t do. Every night, I’m staring out at these accursed grounds, blowing smoke, trying to contend with the aching heat of my adolescent body in the cold air, and the panic-pain that is taking over my torso and creeping into my nightmares. I can feel myself drifting as I stare at the gamekeeper’s hut, a dreary smudge on the inky blue vista. I feel tired, drowsy, for the first time in a while. My breathing seems slower than it should be. This is so welcome, something I haven’t even been able to achieve through the litany of Binns’ lectures, or on my cold coverlet with the hangings around me like suffocating wraiths. The cigarette drops from my fingers into the abyss. I watch the tiny light, like a falling star, drifting down, down, down into the possible infinity below. All is hazy. My eyes close.

Darkness.

A sound in the dark.

My eyes are open again. I’m still sluggish and prone, but I force myself to scan the tower. There is nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief…too soon.

Reality shivers before me.

And you, you, Potter, are stepping out of nothing, out of a cloak of shimmering air and into this…dream. I can barely hold onto your face. I wonder at the cruelty of the universe. Imagine, being this deadly exhausted, even in my own sparse sleep phantasms. And this even seems like it might be a good dream. For a change.

You’re stepping closer and I can’t even lift my hands to grab you, though I want to, because you came out of the air with such a look of surrealism. I can’t believe you’re substantial, that you won’t just fade back into nothingness. Your face is close to mine. You grab the hair at the nape of my neck and pull my head back so I’m looking up at you. Your eyes are so angry, such a bloody familiar rage, tinged with abject confusion.

“Why?” You hiss. It takes me a while to formulate a slurred response.

“Does…it…matter?” I can feel the corner of my face twitching up into a familiar smirk.

“You’re mad.” You say. You look even more pissed off than before. There is a struggle in your face, and sometimes your eyes flicker. Every time they do, I glimpse a startling vulnerability, a wild sadness you’re trying to keep. It makes me want to hold on to you, not like I’ve wanted to before. For once I don’t want to just feel safe under the guise of your protection. I just want to cling to something that might crush me back.

You lean your forehead on my shoulder. “What the hell am I doing?” You mutter into my robes. Your voice is rough and gritty, like you haven’t used it for hours.

“I ask myself that every day.” I blurt. I immediately regret it. You look up, surprised.

“Really?”

“No, Potter, I’m making shameful admissions just for your bloody amusement.” You don’t look angry, anymore, though, even as I say this.

“You know…Malfoy….it doesn’t have to be this way.”

I’m thinking of my father’s face, as face I know as well as yours. He is looking at me right now, as omniscient as a God’s. He is watching me with disgust.

Your eyes are curious, luminous in the darkling night that permeates this tower. You’re wondering who I am. I wish I knew myself so I could tell you.

I want to hurt you for making this even harder than it was.

“Fuck you, Potter.” I snarl. I swing my fist before you register my words. It catches you off, guard, and I grin in satisfaction as your glasses hit the floor with a tinkle of breaking glass. You look up from below me, your eyes deadly and dangerous, blood running down your face.

You lunge at me.

You’re crushing me to the wall, our positions reversed. Your face is so close.

“Is that what you want, Malfoy?” You spit back.

I am silent. The wind is the only sound apart from heavy breathing. Your mouth is closed, and then you lean forward, hesitant and vicious.

It starts out slow, cautious, biting kisses like needles meant to hurt, and then they lengthen, my mouth opens under yours. Our teeth crack together, I can taste the metallic flavor of the blood I’m causing you to lose.

The whole world is pain; even as I enjoy it I’m thinking betrayal, I’m bloody finished, I’m sealing my death warrant with a wicked kiss.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Your hands are under my shirt now, moving over my skin drawn taut with too many missed meals and muscles tense with agony. Your lips are on my throat and the sound of gasping is around us. I dimly register it must be me; your mouth is otherwise occupied. Your nails scrape across my ribs. You return to my lips hungrily, a carnivore desperate, you take from me everything. I have never hated you more than I do right now. I have never wanted anything as much as I do right now.

You push me away again, except you’re really pushing yourself away. I am still up against the wall.

Your breathing is ragged, your hair disheveled, you’re bleeding and a mess. I am perversely proud that I have done this to you. I have finally brought you to this by the road less traveled.

“Listen. You’re a prick, Malfoy. But you can scream every bad thing you can think of at me, because I’ve heard them all, and most from you already.” You run a hand through your tangled hair, making it worse. “I know you’re up to something. I know it’s for Voldemort. But things don’t have to be this way. I meant it. If you aren’t sure about whatever it is you’re doing…come see me sometime again.”

You turn, your shoulders tense, as though expecting a word or a blow to hit you in the back.

You’re walking away, and I wonder if I look even worse than you. I can’t seem to stop gulping in air. Like I actually want to live for once.

My father’s face sneers. It is like looking in a distorted funhouse mirror.

I turn away.

I am walking, walking down stairs and through corridors. The familiar entryway is right where I left it in my mind, though in a completely different part of the castle. I walk through.

The vanishing cabinet is right where I left it, too. It gleams teasingly, like a prostitute smiling at a homeless man.

I hate it even more than I have ever hated you. Perhaps what I have felt for you has always been something other than hate. I can hear my father echoing through the years, telling me things. “You hate mudbloods, Draco. You hate muggles.” But I’ve never felt much of anything about either.
I’ve always felt…something. For you.

I can see my face reflected in the cabinet doors.

“You asshole.” I tell the reflection. But it doesn’t look like me. It looks like a face that hates mudbloods, and giants, and blood-traitors, and muggles, and life. It looks like you, father.

I take my wand with fastidious grace from the pocket of my robes. I point it squarely at the forehead.

“Incendio.”

I watch the flames beginning to spread for a few moments. Then, I take out a cigarette, and light it on the blaze.