Icarus Flying - HP fic - PG13

[tigriswolf]

Title: Icarus Flying
Fandom: Harry Potter
Disclaimer: Not my characters.  Just for fun.
Warnings:  I haven’t read HBP. I don’t know where this fits in the timeline, but probably after seventh year. 
Pairings: Slash, although I never use any names. 
Wordcount: 1070
Rating: PG-13
Point of view: third

I do believe I love you.

How shocking. How completely astounding and unexpected.

Love.

I was sure I hated you.

-

It was not my fault, you know. You must know. Nothing was ever my fault, or yours, really. Things were far out of our control. Far beyond us. We were not yet born, not even a glimmer of stardust when the first plans were made, when all this began.

I will not call us innocent, for we never truly have been.

Well, you, perhaps, that first year of your life. But after… after, my dear, your innocence was torn from you in a flash of emerald light.

-

I offered you my hand, my friendship, my loyalty.

We both played right into their plans that day.

We have never truly been free of the machinations of others; I doubt we ever will be. We are pawns, created for one purpose—how foolish of us to ever want more.

Foolish. Naïve. Useless dreaming of beautiful puppets on golden strings.

And yet—I’ve noticed we keep on dreaming.

-

Your fragile silver wings flap uselessly against the cold bars.

My eyes darken with every failed rebellion and muffled laughter at my expense.

We are children, despite how we appear. We are children, despite our pain and knowledge. We are children who never had a childhood. We are children in the bodies of men, boys who have too many scars and not enough smiles.

We are children in the guise of warriors, in the midst of a war that has no end.

-

I was taught to hate you.

In my early years, I learned you were the enemy, the bane of my existence.

When I offered you my hand, I was taking a chance, willing to turn my back on everything I knew.

You refused me. You chose another.

I hated you because you casually tossed aside any chance I had for freedom.

We played right into their plans. We still play.

-

It was never my fault, nor my father’s. He, too, is a pawn. We all stand on a chess board and cannot see who moves the pieces.

It is our lives, but to others a magnificent game. A game with no start or finish, a game that remains fun in spite of the blood flowing or tears shed. A game we will never fully escape because of how entwined our base cores are with it.

All I am is a pawn. I wish that I could blame you.

-

I dream of warmth. Of the sun and a light breeze and an endless sky. I dream of flying, with wings of my own, above the clouds, far from Britain and all her shattered folk.

I dream of black hair and green eyes and gentle hands. I dream of snakes and hissing and my father dead. I dream in crimson and midnight and emerald and silver.

In spite of myself, of all I know, I dream of you.

-

We never had a chance, you and I. We never had a choice or hope.

We are puppets, playthings. We are beautiful and broken, majestic and flawed. We are the culmination of magic; all our masters have sought since the beginning.

Your mentor and my father’s lord dream of us, you know. They control us and long for us.

We are powerful, you and I. We are more powerful than they shall ever fathom.

And it has no meaning, anything we know. It has no point. Just as we have no point.

Can you imagine how much I wish that weren’t so? Can you begin to imagine how I long for another life, to be anyone instead of who I am?

But we have no chance, either of us. We have no options. We are who we are, what we are. We can be no one else. We can be nothing else.

I was cast as a villain and you a hero. We both shall play our parts well, and you will win.

You must win. There is no other ending.

-

And after everything, the story has come unraveled.

I do not think I was supposed to love you. I doubt that was in the plan.

I am meant to hate you, despise you, loathe you till the end of time.

And I don’t. I can’t.

So much of who I am is tied up with you. In you. And I know you feel it. I read it in your face, hear it in your voice. I feel it in the air around you. The things we do not, dare not say, fill the halls around us, making me wonder—

But I don’t have the privilege of wondering.

I cannot escape the web woven around us, the chains that bind us, the script written for us since before we existed.

And neither can you.

-

I love you. For whatever reason, for good or ill, till we both are dead and gone.

And it does not matter. It changes nothing.

Nothing we do will ever change anything.

Don’t look at me like that, with your sad emerald gaze.

Your eyes are like the killing curse, did you know? And your hair like the sky in the early, early morning, when no one is awake but ghosts and villains and heroes who watch the stars.

Don’t look at me like that. Don’t shake your head and even think about crying, you bastard, because there is nothing we can do.

We are pawns. That’s all we’ve ever been, all we ever could be.

I should hate you.

Don’t look at me like there’s hope left. We don’t have any hope.

I offered you my hand, years ago. That was my one chance. I’ll never have another.

Don’t look at me like that.

-

I do believe I love you.

And I would offer my hand… but I can’t take another rejection.

And you are a hero. That’s all you know how to give to the sad, sorry villain.

We are what we are. Taught, trained, raised to be. You have the adoring masses and I have a demented lord who only hands out pain.

This was not in the script, nowhere in the plans, but it changes nothing.

In the end, nothing is changed.

I love you. Please kill me.

-

And don’t you dare look at me like that.

Comments

[papered.livejournal.com]

Absolutely gorgeous. It's heartbreaking to read this from Draco's perspective.

[tigriswolf]

Thank you!