I can’t but think of what the world would’ve been like, had we not been graced with someone exactly like you. Your infuriating mix of innocent charm, substantial affability, pantherlike dexterity, and bullish persistence… such a wild specimen of the bodily form. I cannot explain even to myself, the journey that it’s taken to get to the point in which I can even allow myself these thoughts, in the privacy of my own mind.
For even there, I cannot be trusted to allow myself to experience full privacy any longer.
But somewhere along then and now, I came to understand several key facets about how mercy and grace are for those worthy, and to be worthy of either you must be cut low to the knee, found wanting, and in the space where the want appears, grace and mercy pour themselves into you.
I was a vessel and they filled my empty soul.
To state that I was found wanting, would’ve been a grievous fallacy, only in that it doesn’t portray a fierce hollowness that was within me after the war; after I had been used and all that remained was a husk of a man who had neither been allowed the freedom to choose, but also had never had the time to pursue what it meant… to live. I was a vessel and anything could’ve enraptured me in that moment.
Maybe that is when it started? I think that must be the case. Anything prior to that, you were an unfortunate tool of war. A heartbreaking reminder that good often finds a way to make itself known in the ashes of pain and innocence. You were a walking reminder every day of the biggest mistake I’d ever made, but at one in the same time, with the softening of nostalgia, I can admit that you were also my souls lament. For how could I have been so deeply flawed, been pivotal in the manufacture of atrocity, been made an entirely willing but wholly unrepentant bastard, and been so ignorant to see you running to your death?
The lowest of scum, beneath the edges of the lowest stones in the most stagnant of waters, that I was.
So a husk I was, a void within me, and there you were… a flame, alight with furious indignation. The full ramifications of my actions within the sphere of the war, coming to light in you – causing you to grow ancient and shed the blinding white light of innocence, while diving head first into naiveté. You believed that it would be easy to make all and sundry see things as they had been – not as they had perceived them.
It didn’t turn out to be so swift, but your bullish tenacity pushed through the wave after wave of public opinion, until one day – the truth was the truth, and it was mine, yours, and theirs, and that was just the way it was.
You wizened foolish boy.
Then there was the time after the Time After. The in between time when you and I were lost puppets with no strings any longer, learning how our limbs worked, starting from atrophy and learning what freedom actually meant, by building it up in our joints, in our very cartilage.
I found peace to be the one thing that I desired with a single-minded determination that could only be credited to having never felt it in my previous 42 years. I needed nothing else, no one else, as long as I could have some peace, I would be ok with dying.
You chose purpose, as of course you did; at 23, had you chosen anything else I would’ve considered myself truly shocked. You chose to turn your back on the Aurors, ‘too much bloodshed already’, you’d been cited as stating – as you made your own decisions for the first time in your life.
My peace was found in odd fits and starts. Choosing to sell all of my worldly possessions, and buying a cottage in the South of France, just along the coast, where it didn’t get cold enough to make my bones ache, and people didn’t know my visage well enough to disparage me in public. This allowed me to flourish as a potions florist… peace was selling plants, making small batch potions, speaking French in the evening summer sunsets, and drinking red grape wine and eating brie and tomatoes on bread.
Purpose for you, was found as becoming the youngest Master of Defense in over four hundred years since the practice of Defense was made into a Mastery. You then shocked absolutely no one, and everyone at the same time when you petitioned to become the youngest Defense Professor in Hogwarts history.
You were of course hired and immediately were unrepentant in dismantling the whole of the system from the bottom, up. Muggle studies and Defense mingling as a dual required course set for all graduates. A heavily updated History of Magic class, that was now a 7 year course that was required for all graduates to achieve an O on their NEWT. Lastly, you astonishing creature… you changed the housing situation for all Hogwarts children. Moving all children into the same tower based on age not on house. Keeping the house system but intermingling all children at appropriate ages. Four groups, with the seventh years being on their own… the achievements that the graduates have accomplished in the ensuing 13 years has been absolutely astonishing. The most noted among the elder generation was the marked lack of hatred aimed at Slytherins in the most recent of years.
There isn’t a lot that I can say for how we came to start circling each other again. I had been a long time supplier of the Ministry and Hogwarts for rare plants that I could grow at cost, and charge a minimum fee for my services. You… had at some point around year five of your Professorial career become the Deputy Headmaster (youngest in history, nothing new for you), and as such you’d been tasked with the budgets of the classes.
You had sent Longbottom to me in the first weeks of your taking on the position, and had attempted to work through the man to update my contract. The first few weeks were absolutely the bane of my on-going thin strain of patience, but I persisted. It was helped, I am sure, by you showing up and relieving Longbottom from his 20th day knocking on my door to discuss my finances.
I do not know how you pulled information from me that morning, even looking back on it through many means – it was as if I was a sieve and you were a gentle breeze blowing the dust off my ability to share pieces of myself with others.
I found myself signing a new contract, making double my previous pay, and doing only one thing more than I had been previously.
Having dinner with you once a month.
Those first few dinners were something from the fever dream of a man’s vague notion of a romance novel. Heated glares bordering on blatant distrust, followed by screaming matches about anything and all things that crossed either of our minds, to be finished every time, by a fierce embrace by the door as I turned my back on the castle grounds and portkeyed to my home.
To sit and think of little else other than the way you smelled as you would wrap your arms around me, until when next it would happen again. How you would fit so rightly just under my arms. My chin able to rest just atop that mop of curls you leave so artfully in disarray.
Then you had your accident.
The bloody day that my world opened up to me as only a fragile interpretation of what peace was. The moment Minerva’s patronus crashed through my stained glass window leaving no damage other than to my tenuous grasp on peace, which laid shattered amidst the floor at my feet.
You had been out for a drink at a pub, her cat form said, and you had been walking home and seen old man Olivanders shop aflame, and you with your impertinent need to protect, to act first and think later – ran into the burning building and saved the old man from his sleep and sure death. Then greedily, if altruistically, you attempted to save his entire wand stock. You achieved quite a bit before your temptation to fate was made complete and the beam landed squarely atop your head, leaving you paralyzed for 94 long days. Your skull and spinal skeleton regrow, was exhausting for everyone around you as much as it was for you. Of that I can assure you.
Those long nights in Mungo’s in the first couple days, waiting for you to wake up so that everyone would know you would make it, were achingly slow.
At some point between your first moments awake in the hospital, to the following year when you accepted the position of Headmaster of Hogwarts and Ginevra Weasley took over the role of Defense Professor in your absence; I found I could no longer hide from myself the blindingly obvious.
I was somehow, in love with you.
Every morning I would awake amid the collision of meteorites of thoughts, cascading through my mind, foggy around the edges with dreams, and aching with sleep to feel your warmth. Our monthly dinners turned to weekly, and at some point became almost nightly. Our first row in years being when I could not refrain from commenting on Ms. Weasley’s hiring into your old position. You had openly laughed at me, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that your laugh was in response to a genuine shock you’d experienced.
You were gay, you had said. So openly, with such a compellingly genuine confused look laying plain across that handsome face.
And in its wake, lay my last vestige of control.
You see, I had been homosexual my whole life. And while under the service of that atrocious, odious, noseless abomination, I’d been required to on many occasion defile myself with that of a female body, I had always found my desires laid at the foot of beautiful, masculine, unrefined features. Bullish jaws, sharp cheekbones, thick necks, broad shoulders, firm and tone and lean… Regulus had been the first to steal my breath, but he’d not been the last.
The last, had been you, and had been you only for some time.
I had put some space between us for some months while I had to relearn how to shutter my thoughts around you. For so long, I had been allowing myself to be willfully and blatantly open when we were in each other’s presence. Your aura like a soothing balm to my tired defenses.
But building my walls back up had proven difficult, and after a couple months where I had been scarcely seen in your home for meals and conversation you had shown up at my cottage resplendent in your anger.
I don’t consider myself to be a man of many talents outside of what most people know. I am not artistic in that my creations are purely for their purpose and never their design. But you make me ache with unspent longing. You make me brim forth with poetic mumblings as I lament my need for you in the first place. You require the sun to be pulled from my very veins and to be shown on you, where you bask in its burning blaze, while I spill my life to do so.
So having you be filled with rage at my absence in your life, was a warm bath to my aching ego. It was a spot of cream in my earl grey. It was the comfort I needed after trying to close myself into cold walls again.
It was… peace.
You are in my bed now. Asleep still, after so many hours of conversation, emotion, embrace, culminating in an explosive and all-encompassing night of passion at the touch of each other. I am only awake now, I am sure, because my mind refuses to allow the truth so plane to see, to be true. The fear of closing my eyes and waking up to another dream, keeping me staring at your body as you lay with the sunlight cresting over the hill and slowly warming you up from your toes as it filters in through the window.
I cannot imagine in my almost 60 years, that I have ever really done anything to deserve you. But in the last near twenty years, I have come to understand that when I was made whole with the grace and mercy that you paved in the path that I have walked, in my wake I left nothing but life and moments of happiness.
So maybe, you are my reward for sowing whatever peace and light I could in my recent history.
Maybe you are just a fever dream.
Maybe you are my hell as I float in a void, long dead in the grave from my wounds the night of the battle. But what I do know, is that if this is a dream, or if this is real, no matter the case; I am going to luxuriate in it with you.
Of that, my dearest, my sweet, my love…
I can be completely sure.