Tainted Love

North

DRACO

I wonder if you would see me for New Year's, Draco had asked Iris over the mirrors one night, standing out on his back porch.

Her room hummed in the dead space following his question, like the air was afraid to be silent. She had her mirror propped up at an odd angle so that he could barely see her face.

"Where would we go?" She eventually asked.

"Paris?"

"No." She shook her head. "Not there. And not London, either."

"So you would see me?"

Silence again. She sighed. "Yes."

"I could come to you," Draco said. His breath was shallow.

"No. I don't want... my things here to remind me of you."

"Somewhere random, then," he suggested. The sentiment stung, but he understood it. The things that reminded Draco of Iris were painful; they stunk of lost love. So maybe it was flattering, her wanting him to be separate from her world. Maybe it meant she still loved him.

Iris agreed to somewhere random and hung up soon after. That was her way. Whenever it got too serious, when they started talking the way they used to, she would leave. It made him sad. So he thought of her in bed, the glow of their conversation nestled in her chest like an ember, mirror locked away, his voice the last thing she would hear before sleeping. That made him happy, or at least hopeful.

When he rented the hotel room up north, he made sure to tell her in a detached way -- just information, no emotion. No expectations. He knew it would make it easier on her, knew it would make her less scared.

He programmed the Portkey for her, gave her the address.

Now he was sitting, on New Year's Eve, at the end of a hotel bed, gaze fixed on the glass balcony doors, or through them, rather, where he could see a sliver of the street below. It was raining and the cobblestones were slick and silver, reflecting the moon.

The world rattled with joyful noise. Muggles bounced around the streets, glittery and joyful, pockets stiff with money for the coat checks. Perhaps there were some wizards among them. As a child, it seemed to Draco like there was an intrinsic difference between muggles and wizards -- something interior yet obvious from the outside. Now it was hidden from him. Many things were hidden from him.

Draco turned to glance at the suit jacket he had hung on the back of the closet door. He didn't know what to wear, didn't know if Iris would dress up or not.

Everything hinged on Iris. He filtered his every action through the grain of her mind; her voice in his head made his choices for him, all designed to walk him down a path where at the end she would appear to him, whole and real, and he wouldn't need the voice anymore.

When he could see her, everything aligned. Even when she was angry, sad -- to have her face in front of him sharpened the version of her inside him. The way her hand felt in his, the brush of her jacket on his shoulder, the feeling of her magic in his body. Her form in bed beside him, naked and clothed -- he thought about it so often that it felt true. He could play it in his mind even when he was looking at something else so that they would be together simultaneously, the candles in the basement, the cauldron and the curve of Iris's back when she sat up in bed, hair hanging on naked shoulders, her scattered freckles. Everything else was mundane; Iris was real.

Draco walked onto the balcony. It was cold. He had been getting cold more lately. It used to be that he never needed a Heating Charm, even outside the Leaky in December. But then, he would usually be drunk if he was outside the Leaky in December. And smoking. And around others.