He walked. He talked. He worked. He breathed. But he never lived.
Living is an impossibility when one loses all one lives for.
Pansy gave up on him years ago. He understood and still understands. He was never worth her time anyway. She married Blaise and they moved to Italy and started a family. She wrote him every week, but he hardly ever wrote back.
Days passed. Weeks, month. Years. They soared past him with lovely wings, but he was left behind. In the past. A better place than the present, if only because she was there.
He lost track of the years. He stopped celebrating his birthday, and soon forgot the date altogether. Is it the fifteenth? The sixth? Before he knew it, he was old. His hair started falling out. His skin became wrinkled. His back curved and his hands began to hurt even when he was performing an act as simple as buttoning his shirt.
Now, when he is as close to death as he ever will be before greeting it, he thinks about death a lot more frequently.
When he was younger, Draco once entertained the notion that humans have many different lives. That they spend them as different people, in different times, in different places. He wondered, if this is true, will he remember Hermione when he gains his new life? And if not, if there is some sort of afterlife and no one is ever reborn, will she be waiting for him there? He never came to believe in Heaven.
Sometimes he had dreams. They were beautiful dreams, brimming with vibrant colours and sounds. He liked dreaming, because it was the only way he felt alive without remembering her.
He thinks it's a dream now. He opens his eyes and he's in a bare, white-washed hospital room, even though he doesn't remember getting out of bed. He simply opens his eyes and he's there. Standing in the corner of the room.
She's on the bed, covers drawn up to her chest, and her face or her body is not aged by the cancer. It is healthy and young and absolutely breath-taking.
Her eyes are open.
"Hello, love," she says.
Her voice.
He hasn't heard it in at least seventy-five years. Three quarters of a century. But he remembers it. Gods above, he remembers it, and it sounded just like that.
"I've been waiting for you."
She climbs out of the bed, and it's then that he realises she's not wearing a hospital gown. She's wearing a simple sun dress. Yellow. Her favourite colour.
She walks toward him and takes his hand. When he looks down at their fingers, intertwined, his are no longer wrinkled or gnarled. They are smooth and pale, as they were back when he was young and the love he felt for her was unfettered by grief.
"The envelope," he says, and his voice is no longer tired. No longer cracked or creaky, no longer as wrinkled as his skin had been. "I opened it the morning after you died."
"I know," she says softly, smiling. "I know."
And then she leads them out of the room, through the door and into a garden that is darkened with night and softened by moonlight.
There, amongst the trees. Small and white. Clean and bright. Edelweiss.
The stars smile and wave at them from their posts in the dark sky as she leads him to a clear spot of grass that rolls its shoulders under the cool night breeze. She sits, and he lies down beside her. She settles herself back against the grass, grabbing hold of his arm and nuzzling her face into his neck. Placing a tender kiss on his shoulder. Next, on his lips, slow and chaste and perfect. So utterly perfect.
And he tastes it and smells it and feels it.
Cinnamon.
It's then that Draco realises this is the afterlife he has been waiting for, this is the reincarnation he has been hoping for, and, in some way or another, this is the Heaven he has never dared to expect. This is him, this is her, this is the rest of their existence, here in this garden, here in this world, here with each other.
And there is the scent of cinnamon, Edelweiss underneath the trees, and her eyes. Open.
- THANK YOU FOR READING
i cried so much reading this story
Remember THIS IS NOT MY BOOK
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Eyes Open by: orphan_account
Fanfiction[ COMPLETE] Granger corners him one last time, pulling that bloody envelope from her robes. He lets it fall into his open palm. "You know the rules, don't you?" "Only for when I'm at my lowest point," he says. "And after I open it, I go straight to...
