if we could love
Malfoy Manor, in the early hours of May 2nd, 1998.
✶
“But we can break it. We can reverse it.”
His eyes are bloodshot and shocked wide, his lack of sleep certainly catching up to him, and it’s the first time Snape has seen him so certain. He’s grasping onto answers like a young boy searching for plants that have never been sewn; less watered, and as he briefly stretches a weary hand to his temple, Snape knows the truth is settling in.
“It cannot be changed. The prophecy was always reserved for Aurora,” he says, wondering if Malfoy has blocked these words out too. “You know the options, Draco.”
Where the boy’s eyes had been fixed to the floor, he flicks them to Snape’s – only stares for a few moments before catching something from across the atrium.
There’s something peculiar about how something so small can win his attention, can suspend the daze of exhaustion for a heartbeat. His world... their world is at war, ruining towers and buildings, collapsing arches and bridges and crushing bones with the same ease as one might bray a Sopophorous bean. They’re brewing death at the masses, expelling it out the tips of their wands in bright emerald flashes, but Malfoy can only wander towards the window.
There, just outside the pane, is a magnolia; its leaves drying in their purity, its petals growing pinker with each coming day. He hasn’t seen this particular magnolia before, finds it odd that it’s only now – as the world starts to cave in – that he notices it.
“You don’t have much time,” Snape warns, and Malfoy knows he’s right.
Time had always been against him, always moving its wretched hands and ticking along quite happily in its rhythm. It was always either too fast or too slow, and almost nothing could fit into that space in between. It was torture.
There were barely any just rights, but when time had been generous with its hours and seconds, it had always been with Aurora. Anything surrounding that was close to unbearable, and whenever he had returned from late-night meetings in the Manor, he could tell she had felt as though he had disappeared for days, too.
And now, as each second moves painfully quickly and slowly all at once; all senses of time colliding, scratching over whatever was left in between; he becomes more aware that this is the longest he has been away.
“Dawn can stay,” he breathes, his attention curving to the crescent moon now, matched with only a few dimly-lit stars. ”Dawn can stay," he says again, and it’s such an empty promise, but something about it comforts him, and Merlin knows comforting should be the very least of his concerns.
When he turns from the window, Snape is gone, and soon enough, Malfoy is launching down the steps of the Manor, turning away from this house for what he hopes will be his last time. The hedges he had watched gardeners tend to are dying, the grass faded and grey, and the whole place reeks of blood. Memories have faded, and he no longer feels that pang of nostalgia deep in his stomach, but more of an emptiness. A piece missing, one that’s bent at the corners and severed of its keys. It’s neglected and worn, and it won’t fit anymore, but maybe it was never meant to.
He stops somewhere down the middle of the path and cranes his head towards the sky, a midnight chill creeping across his neck. He says another promise, and this promise is true. It will always be true.
“The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?”
It’s just those six words that he whispers, all in their simplicity. The six words Aurora had once sworn to him as they sat on Brighton’s shoreline, her head nestled against his shoulder, their breaths ghosting the air, and though he’d no idea what it had meant at the time, he realised it now. It’s effective poetry, and no matter how unfamiliar muggle literature is to him, he finds beauty in it, sees the six words the same as Aurora had. The phrase was theirs to keep, theirs to use.
But he never had the chance to say it back.
And somehow, he fears he never will.
- An Astronomer’s Promise
❛There’s fire, wreckage and stone
amongst all the things you break.
The shattered glass on your bedroom floor,
the broken shards of plates.
The rip in the carpet below your chair,
the seams your anger breaks.
But nothing could ever come close, compare,
to the heart you loved too late.❜
