Coloured Grey

AN: Feelin' a tad bit inspired today.




*

Harry had wanted to take up some fresh fruit. Fruit was always easiest on the stomach.
It hadn't taken him long to realise that the Black house hadn't seen fresh anything in over a month.

A trip to the store.
Harry swallowed the bile that rose up in his throat at that thought.
Hermione had always been the one to keep them well provisioned.
Eyes like glass.
Brown ringlets of hair mired in the mud, a sick parody of highlights for the battlefield.
Only it wasn't nearly so dramatic.

Hermione Granger.
September 19th 1982 - December 29th 2001
From this world, a great mind has parted.
From this world, a true soul has fled.
From this world, a beating heart is stilled.
May the light of her life serve as a beacon in dark times.

Just another name to be carved into a granite tombstone.
Harry's breath misted in the chill air.
A belated wrapping of a woolen scarf, bled pink with age.
Harry turned and let the void embrace him.

**

Fluorescent lighting hurt his eyes.
He was long way from home, Harry realised whilst people in shorts and gaudy patterned shirts stared at him with unkind thoughts behind shallow eyes.
He's a nutter. A freak. Eccentric.
All deserving, since the fresh summer sun didn't require his outfit.
Not the scarf. Not the coat. Not the boots. Not the tuque.
Harry simply stood there being judged just as he judged the peaches in his hands.

The mechanical ring of the cash register was plebeian. Expected.
Harry stepped out into the shadows of the store front and turned into the blackness once more.

***

Harry whispered the words with downcast eyes.
Dust erupted downwards and lost form.
Harry rather thought the rustle of shopping bags sounded taboo in the empty hallway.

****

The peaches were pitted, sliced and skinned. The apples too.
Harry put the grapes on the table in cut crystal dish.
Two bunches.
He hated grapes.

'You went out.' The voice was drab, soft and flat.

'To the store'

'Grapes?'

'She use to--'

'Green.'

'What.'

'Those aren't green. The only ones.......green.'

The knife paused in mid stroke, the blade half embedded in the soft flesh of a spring strawberry.

'Ah.' Harry murmured. 'Sorry.'
for what
Ron shuffled around behind Harry's turned back.
The rustle of the grocery bag, almost sounding the norm in the kitchen.

Harry heard the low grunt and the sound of the flesh of a firm pear giving way beneath the grind of Ron's teeth.
The knife hit wood as it sliced through the strawberry.

*****

Malfoy was curled up on bloody sheets once more. Shivering.
Grey eyes were half open.
Pain. The pain of not being able to close. The pain of not being able to escape.

'Hungry?'
A shuddering shake of the head, no.

'Will you eat anyways?'
Grey eyes fixed on him. Looking up.

Harry crouched down low and offered the platter of fruit to the trembling lump of a human in his bed.

A
battered...
bruised...
bloodied...
hand reached out...

Malfoy liked blueberries.
Picked every last one off the plate.
Slid each one past pale cracked lips, chewing slowly until his tongue and lips were dyed purple.

Harry left the rest of the platter untouched on the floor beside the bed.
The windowsill held him tenderly.
He dozed for the first time in thirty-odd hours: for the first time since he had first glimpsed the flash of red on white.

******

Consciousness was a flash in the pan.
Startling. Fleeting. Painful.
Footsteps on aged wooden floors,
hardly significant.

And then those sweet memories called Harry to sleep once more.

*******

A true berth of consciousness came in the midst of a fit of coughing.
Sleep was wishful thinking then.
A frustrated toss of the head and a resounding thud.
Harry felt it hit against the wooden window frame belatedly.

A furtive glance Harry spared for Grimmuald Place's newest inhabitant.
Asleep. Or putting up a show of it.
Blood. He had forgotten the sheets were stained........


........and Malfoy too.

Standing. Walking. Perhaps more like stalking the perimeter of the bed.
It wasn't quite his bed anymore.
Not with Malfoy in it.

The fact that there was a distinction, Harry found, was a comforting thought.
Ron had, recently, insistently, repetitively implied that he no longer cared.
About the cause.
About the war.
But mostly about himself.
The condition of his life.

That he cared that Malfoy was lying in his bed meant that Ron was wrong.
He wondered why the revelation was such a relief;
Ron's accusations had never held water for him.
then why?

********

war breaks people

*********

A grim sense of satisfaction tugged at his mind.
The peaches were gone from the platter too.
And the grapes.
[ even though they weren't green ]

The scent of blood was cloying.
Fresh pools of red, fluorescent against the drying maroon of the sheets made his heart race.

Malfoy was turned in against the covers, curled in a semi-tight shell. From this position it was hard to ascertain if he was so much as breathing. But death was a threatening storm cloud in the room....yet to cast down the final downpour, of that much Harry was inherently and acutely aware. But how long could Malfoy's bruised and beaten body stave off the specter....

**********

Essence of dittany. There wasn't much left of it in the house.
But what use was it to leave it bottled up when a man lay bleeding to death.
His logic was true and faultless.
Yet he snuck about his own house like a thief.

***********

On the windowsill once more Harry clenched the resin coloured bottle in trembling hands.
His thumb and forefinger circled the stopper restlessly.
To wake Malfoy in that moment, Harry felt, would have been cruel.
Instead he sat and watched him toss and turn, whimper and plead and bleed and entrench himself in a bundle of stained blankets and sheets.

To wake him would have been cruel.
Instead Harry sat still as a stone and watched Malfoy in the merciful throws of sleep.

************




AN: Many thanks for reading. Yes Hermione = dead. And I know part of the engraving on her tombstone doesn't make sense but eh....I don't know. And a quick note to linagabriev if you're still reading, Dreamscape is a oneshot.

- Incessant_Darkness

PS. I'm a little frustrated that I can't get the coding for the text to work the way I want it to.....

battered, bruised, and bloodied look like a descending staircase in my original and the line 'and Malfoy too' is meant to continue on the next line where the ellipsis from the previous line leaves off.