Harry Potter Unison

He was waiting for me in the darkness of the empty storeroom, looking like a ghost of himself in shades of blue and pallor, the bronze and gold washed out by wandlight. His eyes were hidden behind the reflected shield of his glasses, but he pushed his hair behind his ear no less than four times as I settled my bag, barred the door. I must have bitten my lips as many times if not twice that.

His breath rattled around an intake, he pushed the hair back again. Shot his cuffs. Left the wand hovering as he checked the door and turned around again, holding it with his back. "We shouldn't be doing this."

I scoffed, trying to sound cocky enough that he might believe I at least hoped I could fool him. "Now? You say that now, after all these months leading up to this?" A step forward, and I had my hands on either side of his shoulders against the door, using it to brace us both as I leaned close. "It'll be fine."

His eyes were visible. Wide and long-lashed and so blue in sunlight alone that this light made them something inhuman. He reached up. Put a hand against my chest, bracing back on me. He was shaking. I could feel it. "I just…there's no going back from this."

"Of course not." I was shaking too. He could feel it. "There's no going back from anything. Life generally does move in a forward direction."

"Don't be - " He stopped as something in my face told him no, that wasn't meant to be flippant or irreverent. It was an observation, not a mockery, an attempt to capture the momentum of inevitability, an offer of an excuse.

He didn't take it. Broke away from it and away from me, an underarm turn on the flat of his foot that hissed on the stone floor like a cornered cat. He wouldn't meet my eyes now. The hair behind the ear again. "I'm sorry. I can't. I'll lose you."

There was such conviction to his tone that I frowned, suddenly worried, scrambling back mentally along the hours of discussion, calculation, research, debate. I found nothing, and that worried me all the more, because I knew we were in deeper waters than boys our age were supposed to navigate, and what if we had made a mistake? But no. That was impossible. We'd double checked our cross-references, been so very meticulous down to the last detail. "We've done everything right, I'm sure of it. I know there's a certain inherent risk of brain damage but I thought we agreed it was mini —"

"No, not that way."

He sounded petulant, frustrated, and I didn't mean to echo it back but I had been building to this all day, all night before, all week, all year, perhaps since I first met him or even the day I was born. My fingertips throbbed, my throat was dry. "Then for Merlin's sake how?"

"You'll…" He hesitated, drew it out, slipped it in as a whisper behind a hard swallow that barely carried the arms' length between us. "…See me."

I tilted my head, reached out to catch the turn of his jaw on the side of my forefinger and slide it down to cup his chin and raise his eyes to mine. I would have him seen indeed. See the crease between his brows, the shining spot on the frame of his glasses where his finger brushed when he worried at his hair, see the two freckles - only two - on the bridge of his nose. "If you thought you were under some kind of Disillusionment now, Terry, I hate to be the bearer of ill tidings…"

"I'm a fraud." I expected him to pull back at that, wrap himself as he usually did at times like this in a cage and armor of his own limbs. It caught me completely off guard when he pushed my hand away to bring his arms up inside mine and grip my shoulders so tightly in the claws of his hands that it made me gasp. "An utter charlatan. Everything I am, everything I do is just mimicry, mostly of you." Every syllable was enunciated like testimony on a gallows. "I'm a parrot, Michael, at the most generous assessment. You dance and elide past the every dissonant note of what seems to me a whirling, incoherent mass of simian babble and posturing in the halls as if it were nothing, you expect the world to love you and it does and how could it not? You extend it your love openly and unconditionally and —"

I laid a fingertip against his mouth, hushing him. "Falsely."

"Hardly." He turned his mouth away from my hand but let me have his cheek, still smooth even where mine had begun to roughen in just the past few weeks. "Even at home, nothing changes. This Christmas, you had some forty people enraptured by the fire while I slipped off to hide in a bloody closet."

"You think too highly of me and too poorly of yourself. I knew three years ago I gave you your first hug, and you think I'd judge your heart by your social graces?" There was no use trying to explain now that tea and snitched biscuits on the floor of that closet with the coats mussing our hair had been the part of the holiday I held most dear. If we succeeded at this, perhaps he'd understand. "I already know what you are better than it seems you do."

It wasn't a laugh, not even a chuckle, just a sharp huff of air that didn't have enough humor for sound. "Your project, as your mother says?"

"My brother, as I say." I corrected firmly, pulling his hand from my shoulder and turning to draw him down to the floor with me. "Now come." I nodded as he followed without complaint, unfolding the parchment neither of us needed because we'd memorized it weeks ago, drawing the little vial from my pocket and setting it between us with a hopeful smile. "They say if all goes well and we work long enough, we could learn to speak without words."

I had dampened my finger from the vial, but he recoiled again before I could touch his temple, shaking his head and bringing the hair forward to hang like a veil as he stared at the floor, worried at the stitching that edged the sole of his shoe. "You'll see things you don't want to. Sometimes I imagine hurting people."

"I'm going to be a Healer, Terry, and I've grown up with tales of medicine my whole life." It surprised him that I had no air of confession, only impatience, but I knew that seeming to coddle him any further would only backfire. I knew him well. Better than anyone. "Do you think I've never idly wondered on the pitch what sort of fascinating injuries would ensue if someone fell from those heights?"

He startled, hesitated, but he could see I had told the truth, and his fear had to seek another point of debate. "I hate the girls who always flutter around you."

Despite myself, I did laugh at that, but it was a sound as bitter as Terry's own mirthless bark. "Hardly as much as I do, I wonder."

"That's absurd." A touch of accusation on that, but fair. "You charm them like -"

"A performer. I don't know what else to do." It was more embarrassing to confess than I'd expected, and I felt my cheeks heat as I looked away. Shrugged. Wiped my finger clean on the knee of my trousers for something to do with my hands. There was more potion anyway. "I've been dancing since I was two, studying medicine since I was six. The body - MY body - should be no mystery to me and yet they have a hold on me that…."

How to explain when I didn't understand myself? How they had been pursuing me now for a year fully, almost two, and it grew worse every day. Not just the girls, but women too, and even once a man at the dance studio. How they whispered, insinuated, offered, pinched, grabbed, looked, _watched_. That most of it I just tried to ignore but worse were the times my body answered and my instincts acquiesced, even as my mind and heart recoiled. How I wasn't being tempted away from him, not at all, but driven more to his comfort with each passing day. There were no words. Maybe if this worked. I spread my hands helplessly. "I swear I don't want what it looks like I want."

A long silence. Fifteen breaths. He spun the vial without touching it in a slow, wobbling circle on the stone, the glass making an eerie sound. "I'm afraid."

"So am I. Of so many things."

The vial stopped. The crease between his brows deepened. He pushed his hair back. "What could you ever fear?"

"Falling."

From grace.

From my pedestal.

In love.

Too late and he knew it for all of them and I couldn't breathe. The vial lifted, uncapped, tilted to dampen his finger, all still untouched. His wand was still on the floor somewhere behind us both, glowing and casting its ghosts' light. Oh, but he was so astoundingly gifted in ways I could barely comprehend. I could never. How could he not see it? Maybe if this worked.

He touched my temples with the potion; first one, then the other. "I'd catch you."

"I know." I had to take the glass in hand. It was warm and thrummed like a living thing, and I could feel his magic still shivering in it. "That's why I trust you to do this with me. Even though you'll find out." I pushed his hair back for him as I anointed his temples, smiling softly into his quizzical look.

"Me?"

"That it's all been a lie." I moved in closer, settling back on my heels until our heights were perfectly even, laying my forehead against his, my left hand where he had touched me, my right where I had touched him. We had matched our breathing without even meaning to. "Everything you've believed, that my parents say, that the girls sigh, that the boys sneer." It should have been hard, even terrifying to say. It wasn't. It felt like a kiss. Like holding each other beneath a half dozen blankets during a storm that rocked the tower. Like the moment before the curtain. "I'm so very, very far from perfect." Like when you hit the wings and can breathe ugly deep. Like when the ball crosses the rim of the hoop and the side in blue stands and screams. "In fact, I think I've only ever done two perfect things in my life."

"Only two?" His left hand on his face now as well, his right on mine. Our pulses had come to match. I felt light headed and didn't even know if it was beginning. I closed my eyes. We were too young, they said. It was too dangerous. We didn't have the maturity, the control, the capacity for the necessary level of responsible intimacy, much less to handle the complexities and abstracts of it all. Blocking, maybe, under the direst need, but never probing, penetrating, accepting, inviting, receiving. It could change who you were if it happened too young. Never before seventeen, surely. Not for children. Not for us.

Rules were made to be broken by the exceptions. Or the exceptional.

"Finding you, and now letting you in." Every hair on my body stood on end. The light had gone out. Utter darkness. Utter silence. No time for fear. "Aspicis? Arma iacent: en sum tibi nudus, inermis: si potes, in nudum spicula mitte, neca." I took a breath, focused everything I'd learned and feared and hoped and knew, gathered the power and the spell and the resolve potent on the cusp of my will and grinned into the blackness. "Come on, Terry. I dare you."

"Ok."

And the world changed.

FIN

_The Latin translates "All naked I unarm me - if thou canst, now shoot and harm me!" from a madrigal by Thomas Morley_


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Harry Potter