Harry Potter - Bonekeeper and Morningstar
Mar. 1st, 2008 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charybdisTitle: Bonekeeper and the Morningstar
Pairing: Draco/Harry
Summary: Harry got a new prophecy; Draco got one for the first time. What they didn't know was that they'd got the same one. PG, 740 words
You will live for as long as you love.
He'd thought the prophecy a blessing when he first received it -- nineteen years young and trying too hard to carry on a vast legacy that was no one's but his own. He'd thought he needed more time.
Now the world is more than a century older, and all his love is in the ground. His sons -- by now old enough to have sons and grandsons of their own -- don't even know that he's alive, and to tell the truth, he prefers this.
His days are spent making rounds of graveyards all across the country. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he hitch-hikes, once or twice he's rented a bicycle. He never travels by magic.
Along his way, he works Muggle jobs for money. He hasn't touched his Gringotts account in decades, except for the postage to correct them when he receives another "pending closure for reasons of demise" notice.
He stopped aging when Ginny and Lily died -- both of them far too soon -- in the dragonpox epidemic. Molly, distraught by the death of her only daughter, seemed to age ten years in the space of a day. How typical and bitter it is that his grief keeps him young.
But he's also realized that grief is one of the driving forces in his life; grief for his parents fueled his need for revenge, grief for those lost to darkness led him to his first career with the Aurors. The idea that it is only his grief that drives him from cemetery to cemetery, remembering the dead, is horrible. But as the blessing turns into a curse, it is easier and easier to accept it. His love and his grief have become so entwined that he cannot say which he memorializes in his endless journey from grave to grave.
He tries to imagine what love might be like, untainted by this mourning that seems determined to haunt him for eternity. He knows what he wants it to be -- an emotion with a grip so tight that it becomes a part of his very soul, until this travesty of love is squeezed right out of him, until the viscous grey streams of it leave him and seep into the ground where they belong. Does that kind of love exist?
Does it matter?
He goes to the tiny graveyard in Godric's Hollow and finds his parents' graves (bewildered, as always, by how he can love two people that he cannot even remember), and he knows that he'll never die, for he is the Bonekeeper, and though all his love is underground, he has not stopped loving.
***
You will not live until you love.
This is his prophecy, and he has carried it with him for ages -- days, decades, eternities; he neither knows nor cares to know the exact duration of his punishment. But he knows that it is real.
He has been alive too long, carrying his fate and searching for his love as the waking world turns past him, all garish colors and sunshine where his eyes crave twilight.
This is his curse, his disease to which he knows no cure, though he's tried every trick he can imagine -- marriage, friendship, even children. Everything but True Love.
At first, he was too proud to admit that the one thing he'd always laughed at, always scorned, was the one thing he needed. Now he's afraid it's too late to find it.
This is his poison that not even a beozar can counteract, and every day he feels it burn a little closer to his soul, and it seems like he lives in a dream of silent, moribund hope.
He has become perhaps a little crazy these days, now reduced to wandering graveyards, scouring headstones for dates that should rightfully belong to him, and wondering which name was meant to be linked with his. Which one of them was his True Love?
It is a shock when he hauls his destiny into a tiny cemetery -- just a cluster of graves, really -- and finds it already there, waiting for him. Against all reason, the familiar silhouette before the graves, the first person he's recognized in twenty years, at least, is all it takes to reawaken his hope.
He reaches out tentatively, unconsciously. And unaware, Harry Potter stands before the graves of his parents, not praying, not weeping, not even looking at the stones, but waiting, with his face lifted towards the sun, a damned soul expecting deliverance at any moment.
Beneath Draco's feet, the world tips ever so slightly, like waking from a long nap, or like a life just beginning.
Pairing: Draco/Harry
Summary: Harry got a new prophecy; Draco got one for the first time. What they didn't know was that they'd got the same one. PG, 740 words
You will live for as long as you love.
He'd thought the prophecy a blessing when he first received it -- nineteen years young and trying too hard to carry on a vast legacy that was no one's but his own. He'd thought he needed more time.
Now the world is more than a century older, and all his love is in the ground. His sons -- by now old enough to have sons and grandsons of their own -- don't even know that he's alive, and to tell the truth, he prefers this.
His days are spent making rounds of graveyards all across the country. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he hitch-hikes, once or twice he's rented a bicycle. He never travels by magic.
Along his way, he works Muggle jobs for money. He hasn't touched his Gringotts account in decades, except for the postage to correct them when he receives another "pending closure for reasons of demise" notice.
He stopped aging when Ginny and Lily died -- both of them far too soon -- in the dragonpox epidemic. Molly, distraught by the death of her only daughter, seemed to age ten years in the space of a day. How typical and bitter it is that his grief keeps him young.
But he's also realized that grief is one of the driving forces in his life; grief for his parents fueled his need for revenge, grief for those lost to darkness led him to his first career with the Aurors. The idea that it is only his grief that drives him from cemetery to cemetery, remembering the dead, is horrible. But as the blessing turns into a curse, it is easier and easier to accept it. His love and his grief have become so entwined that he cannot say which he memorializes in his endless journey from grave to grave.
He tries to imagine what love might be like, untainted by this mourning that seems determined to haunt him for eternity. He knows what he wants it to be -- an emotion with a grip so tight that it becomes a part of his very soul, until this travesty of love is squeezed right out of him, until the viscous grey streams of it leave him and seep into the ground where they belong. Does that kind of love exist?
Does it matter?
He goes to the tiny graveyard in Godric's Hollow and finds his parents' graves (bewildered, as always, by how he can love two people that he cannot even remember), and he knows that he'll never die, for he is the Bonekeeper, and though all his love is underground, he has not stopped loving.
***
You will not live until you love.
This is his prophecy, and he has carried it with him for ages -- days, decades, eternities; he neither knows nor cares to know the exact duration of his punishment. But he knows that it is real.
He has been alive too long, carrying his fate and searching for his love as the waking world turns past him, all garish colors and sunshine where his eyes crave twilight.
This is his curse, his disease to which he knows no cure, though he's tried every trick he can imagine -- marriage, friendship, even children. Everything but True Love.
At first, he was too proud to admit that the one thing he'd always laughed at, always scorned, was the one thing he needed. Now he's afraid it's too late to find it.
This is his poison that not even a beozar can counteract, and every day he feels it burn a little closer to his soul, and it seems like he lives in a dream of silent, moribund hope.
He has become perhaps a little crazy these days, now reduced to wandering graveyards, scouring headstones for dates that should rightfully belong to him, and wondering which name was meant to be linked with his. Which one of them was his True Love?
It is a shock when he hauls his destiny into a tiny cemetery -- just a cluster of graves, really -- and finds it already there, waiting for him. Against all reason, the familiar silhouette before the graves, the first person he's recognized in twenty years, at least, is all it takes to reawaken his hope.
He reaches out tentatively, unconsciously. And unaware, Harry Potter stands before the graves of his parents, not praying, not weeping, not even looking at the stones, but waiting, with his face lifted towards the sun, a damned soul expecting deliverance at any moment.
Beneath Draco's feet, the world tips ever so slightly, like waking from a long nap, or like a life just beginning.
