Masks
Lies of omission and compromises and old wounds.NC-17, for slash and het and people who lived through hell and don't know how to wash off the scent of brimstone.
When he pulled me to him and kissed me, still dirty and sweaty from that last battle, it was the logical outcome. He's my brother's best friend, and marrying me makes him part of the family in truth. My parents adore him, and he basks in it cautiously. He does everything cautiously or quickly, though he tries to hide it under a veil of being just an average bloke. I know, I think, what he'd be as an animagus... a cat, a greeneyed black tom that's scarred under the thick fur, muscles trained by a hard life. He moves like that cat, and sleeps like him too. He's been hit by one too many stones to carelessly relax.
He doesn't even relax with me. I stroke his hair, afterwards, and he strokes my shoulder, but it's absent, a vague sensual pleasure from skin on skin, the ebbing memory of a greater pleasure in my skin. He's quite competent. He brings me to pleasure with the grace he shows leading me through a dance. But I learned a long time ago to shut my eyes when we're having sex, because he's really not there. Present in body, in my body, but not there in his eyes. The black tom jumped down from the wall, and was gone.
She likes to brush my hair. Mum was always too busy, but I don't think it would feel like this, this slow electric thrill of awareness. She's careful not to pull, and I watch her stroke my hair the way she used to stroke the pages of an old book. She brushes my hair, then she moves it over my left shoulder and kisses my neck, as though I were a goddess. And when I turn to her, she worships every inch of my skin.
"Lotus," she said, eyes dark in the candlelight, hair picking up golden glints against the velvet darkness of my bedroom. She was laying between my legs, and her breath made me stop breathing for a moment. She looked at me for a long moment, naked words she won't say to me in her eyes, and then she lowered her head, and I couldn't keep my eyes open any more. She burns me.
She's easy to touch, sunlight and laughter, and easy to please, and when we're together, she's there, and there's nothing I'd like more than to stay there forever, reflecting ourselves in each other's skin like mirrors.
But she has to hurry back to his bed....she's going to London with Ron tomorrow, and they're leaving early. He sleeps like a log, he'll never know she left him. She took off her ring, and forgot it on my table. I stand up, put on my robe, and put it in the bathroom, so she can pretend she took it off to wash her hands. But I see her sometimes, arm around my brother's shoulders on the couch, and she winds her fingers in hair he doesn't have before she remembers, and I know it's just a mask, and that in the darkness she's my sunlight and my truth.
In the end, we're all alive. It seems rather rude to ask for more, considering how close we all came to not being here at all. I think the reason all our classmates are getting married and having kids is a way to flip the bird to Death. Not me, though. I knew Hermione was the one I wanted, I think I've known it forever. It isn't just that she's got a brain and I don't, cause I do. She says I do. But if she's off in the wilds of arithmancy, someone's got to remember to cook dinner, and see the laundry gets done, and I reckon I can manage that. She shines so bright, and I can't believe she's mine. I can't stand to tell her about the pain.
There's fancy words for it...the mediwizards used them... but what it comes down to is that it's going to hurt until it doesn't anymore. It's lots of different kind of hurt, the sharp white pain and the grey-red pain and a sullen green pain that makes me want to just chop the leg off at the hip, and the dull orange pain that makes me reach for the whiskey in the middle of the night. My pain potions ran out a couple months back. And I'd like to whine but, hell, Charlie would probably be grateful to have just an aching leg. I can't stand the way Mum looks at me. So I have another drink, and forget that it hurts. If I drink enough, I forget it all, and sleep without dreaming. Forgetting's nice, right now.
I reckon it's pretty common, guys dealing with the pain with a bottle. And, really, it's not been that long. Harry's still got circles under his eyes, and Ginny is still a little too thin. So I make sure I've got it around, and always use breath-freshening charms so Hermione won't have a fit, and, really, I've not got a problem with it. I'm not the only person that drinks in the morning, after all.
But there's nights, after we've made love and we're drifting off to sleep, that I wonder if I'm missing something, wonder if she's missing something that I could give if I could see it. And I wonder if I should stop drinking and find out. I'll think about it in the morning. My leg hurts. I know there's another bottle around here somewhere.
I don't know when I stopped hating him.
It wasn't when we started fucking, because you can hate someone and fuck them anyway. It might be the times where we've both been patrolling, which is what you call walking out your nightmares when you have a prefect's badge, and we've traded uneasy conversation. I got to recognize the look in his eyes when he didn't sleep. He doesn't sleep more nights than not.
Sometime I want to get him to my room on a Hogsmeade weekend, sometime when everyone thinks he's somewhere else, and do more than just blow him in a stall. I know what he needs. He needs to relax, to let go. I bet at first the ropes would panic him, the blindfold confuse him, but he might manage to let go, then. He might manage to cry and scream and rage in a way no one's ever let him do, because heroes go onward, nobly.
I say, fuck nobility. His eyes go a strange shade when he's sucking me off, and I always have to work hard not to come when I look down and see my cock in the mouth of The Boy Who Lived. And then I go back and shower and know that we're both putting on our pretty straight faces and pretending that we don't both love the taste of cock.
My father would Imperio me long enough to get an heir off me, and then kill me slow if he knew. I don't know what he thinks he'll lose, but it must be something big to make him play it so straight that he falls on me like a starving man on food, these nights.
I don't know what I'm going to do when we leave school. Pay for it, I suppose, somewhere discreet, as is proper for someone of my blood and standing...and make sure the boy I choose doesn't have dark hair that won't lie flat, doesn't have green eyes, doesn't look up at me with that look of purgatory in his face when he's sucking my cock. And pretend.
He's not a bad lover, now. At least he's eager to learn this subject. And it helps that I'm not a conventional girl, not willing to blame him for the fact that he's not had a chance to learn. Some subjects are best learned by experience.
And I'll put up with all the fumbling to lay there afterward, skin to skin, and have the delicate illusion of shelter from the world in his arms. He grounds me and stabilizes me, and loves me without much fuss, and it's like coming home to kiss him. And my body responds to him like earth to the rain, and I open to him and it's simple and joyous and laughter, and something that's only going to get better with time. He's my shelter, my ground, my balance. I don't know when it happened, but it's grown into me deep as my magic.
I don't suppose it's fair to him that sometimes I see red hair so long I can twine my hands in it, and brown eyes that look like their father, not their mother, and I want to run my hands over curves and softnesses, not planes and angles. To hold someone shorter than me, not be the one held, to feel her hair on my skin...I need it like air.
She always seems surprised by her own passion, but she's always known what to do with my body, just as I've always known what to do with hers. We coil around each other like serpents, and our hair mingles when we kiss, soft sharpnesses that say more than words about needs and compromises. Touching her is like touching myself in the mirror, and now I know why women were goddesses once. My breath on the inside of her thigh makes her quiver, and she tastes like the sea, like tears, like absolution.
I leave the candle lit so I can see her face, whisper words of wonder over her body. She doesn't know what to do with them, and it makes me want to shake Harry and wake him up, wake him up and make him see the goddess he has, the woman I can never have except in the stolen silences of the night.
I sometimes think that I'm dreaming. Somewhere out there Voldemort still lurks, and when I close my eyes in this dream of engagement and normality I'll wake again to the grinding fears and the sheer fucking weight of being everyone's salvation.
The hero isn't supposed to survive. And if he does, he's supposed to walk away into the sunset and not look back. Happily ever after, the music swells, and the house lights come up. You can come off stage, the audience has gone.
And if it weren't for memories, I suppose I could, maybe. No one knows. Ginny's brown eyes are innocent as newly-turned earth, and I try to bury myself in her, in them, bury it six feet deep and let it rot, and never rise again. No flowers, no funeral, no one to know how I got through the nights, and no one to know where that last bit of intelligence came from. I still remember him getting into a fight with me, whispering "Second floor left boys' midnight" in my ear just before rabbitpunching me over one kidney, and taking the point deduction from a very annoyed Snape with the same dignity that he bore his black eye.
He told me that night in the deserted restroom, tense words echoing in the silence, and then he knelt to me and swallowed my cock as if it would save him from death and the corruption that had eaten his father alive, and I didn't dare look at him because the one glance I got was too naked for words. I wonder what could have been, between us. But we couldn't let our guards down, couldn't relax. Ever. So we'll never know. Heroes don't fuck the villain's son, except in stolen moments off camera between the battles. At all costs, one must follow the script.
And the battles are over. The war's over. At least I'm not the only one of my generation that has their wand out when someone coughs behind them.
I suppose my nerves will let me relax, eventually. If Ginny touches me enough, I won't flinch anymore. But I touch her and my hands remember skin that's not girl-soft, the roughness of a man's kiss, and the way his face flushes when he's close, and the way he tastes....
I carry my own baggage. She'll never know. Maybe if you play at normal long enough, you shape to fit your mask. I hope so. Sometimes at night the chafing seems unbearable, and I stare at the uncaring stars, and weep.
Sometimes my mask is too tight for living.
to author's notes
back to Harry Potter fanfiction
Email: bellagia@hotmail.com