The Beguiling

Tears sprang from her eyes in a torrent of uncontrollable emotion and they stood facing one another, soul-bared, laid open.

He watched her react to his words and his heart cramped down behind his ribs. She was backing away from him, her eyes wide with pain and tears flowing, her hands covering her bruised lips, bruised to fullness he knew from his own ministrations in loving her for two days.

She shook her head, her hands still clasped over her mouth. Slowly she brought them up to her eyes and wiped away her tears, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t, do you?”

“I believed,” she faltered, “I thought…”

He cut her off with a raised hand, his voice low but fierce, “What was it that you thought, Vivian? And I cannot comprehend what it was that you believed. I have tried for seven years now and find that it defies me.”

She lowered her hands to her sides, her mouth set in a smooth line, her eyes blazing, “I thought and I believed. I thought I had no other choice for myself, for you. I believed that I had sho shown a door and I had to walk through it.” The look in her eyes softened, “I believed in my dreams.”

“You believed in your dreams?” he raised a cynical eyebrow at her, but his voice was pleading.

“Not daydreams, Albus, real dreams, the dreams that haunt my days. The dreams that I dream nightly. About you and I. The dreams that have come to define me my whole life long.”

“Your whole life long?”

“Since I can first remember. I think,” her voice was filled with wonder, “that my first memory is a dream of you. I have cast my thoughts back into my life, trying to separate the dream from the waking,” she looked at him, her eyes filled with longing and despair, “and I cannot. The dreams are as real to me as the waking. You ask me how I think you felt when I first arrived here and you realized that I was not a dream. I can ask the same of you, more forcefully, when I arrived here and I first saw you I thought I was dreaming. But you werel. Al. And my dreams folded themselves into the shape of a bird that took flight from sleep and unfolded into my days.” She looked away from him, “The only difference between us would appear to be that when you found me again I was a child, but I had to go back in time to find you as a young man because in my dreams you are exactly as you are now. Exactly as you are right now.”

“Exactly as I am now? I am Headmaster of this school; you are a student here and have been since you were eleven years old.”

“I am no longer eleven years old.”

“No, you are not.” He took in the figure of the young woman, his lover in the dream that had become his life, her long black hair still wet and dripping on the floor, the clear dark eyes burning with desire for him and her lips set with strength and will. He took another step closer to her, but still held himself away from her, “Do not forget that you are now just hours returned from a time that is a hundred years in the past for me. Vivian, I am over a century older than you and yet daily I come to believe more and more that I would not be who I am if it were not for you. I have been called the most powerful wizard alive today and I wonder of your role in the bestowing of such a title. Exactly as I am now is how you shaped me.”

“If it was I who shaped you, then the Fates wanted you so shaped.”


~***~

It had been over one week and Vivian was sick, her heart ached, her head ached, her body ached. He had studiously avoided her and she had to content herself with the healing draught of seeing him three times a day in the Great Hall. And during those times she found herself more and more lost in the space that separated them, the space across the cavernous room, over the heads of students, past the eyes of staff, the space that seemed to stretch out between the two of them far more than the decades of time that had kept them away from one another.

She sighed and looked up again, he was watching her. She tried a small smile and he looked away.

She looked pale and drawn, circles around her beautiful eyes, her hair pulled off her face in a severe plait. He could not bear to look at her exposed neck, the curved edges of the tops of her ears peeking out from between thick strands of dark hair. Unbidden a memory surfaced, he had taken her ears into his mouth, whispering to her, his tongue following his words down, down, down. He stood immediately and left the Great Hall, between the tables, nodding at students, passing behind her, her head bent, her shoulders slumped as though his presence came as a physical blow.

He saw her hands tremble as she brought a goblet of pumpkin juice up to her lips.

~***~

She was under the Scots pine again. The Leaving Feast was less than a month’s time away and she felt it looming on the horizon, the setting sun of her day. She had stopped looking towards the distance as though it were a promised land to be reached. She had grown soul sick.

A soft whispering, the rustle of robes and he was seated beneath the tree, his back pressed against the trunk, legs crossed, hands held together in his lap. She did not turn to him and her heart called to him but she was deaf to the pleadings of it.

“Vivian,” he whispered in his dusky voice. She shook her head.

“Vivian,” he called to her, the divining rod of his voice finding the tears inside her throat, her lungs, behind her eyes. “Oh, my sweet thing, do not cry.” And his voice found the hidden water and she brought the back of one hand up to her mouth and muffled a sob. “Come here. Come to me.”

She shook her head again.

“We will find our way. We will. You must be patient, you cannot rush the gates. You must discipline your desire.”

“My dreams showed me my desire, and that desire made my dreams become reality. My discipline was in the achieving. I have recognized, I have let it rule my life, I accepted what I was being offered and if it were not mine for the taking I would not have been given it.”

“But this involves two people, a destiny interwoven. Do you think that I have not accepted what has been offered me?”

“We have begun at the two farthest ends, this is the middle, you see? You waited for me for a hundred years and I, also, will have to live without you. This is our time, now. I am anxious for that time to begin. I do not understand the discipline you have had to learn, that is not for me now.”

He was silent for a long time turning her words over and over in his mind. And he thought of Fawknd tnd the teaching of the Phoenix. He needed to let go and rise again, with her. “Come,” he said quietly.

She stood and looked down at him, she took the three steps towards him that kept them apart and she fell to her knees and buried her face in his lap.