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The impending consequence burns like the wind, ashes of trees and people. It doesn't matter: waiting, strategy, whatever the concept has been; power matters. So being red drunk is fine, perfectly fine, as long as it tastes good going down. He'll have none of that salty stuff or rubbery drugs lumbering in his stomach. It makes him sick.

The philosophy of the moral gives way: it's your misfortune and all of mine. Harry's flesh tingles in the fingerprinted spellwork. He can breathe a curse in and it would not matter, because it isn't for him. He is clean, preferring to die in an act of censorship, violence, and disrespect than to sympathize with Voldemort.

*

It won't work, let's talk about it, they croon at him. We're in on this together, Harry, they say and Ron claps his back. He's right, you know. Fifty-fifty, Neville twitters, saying more than he means to, and Harry is startled.

Potter. You should learn your place. Imaginary youth tell no tales.

Malfoy is leering at him.

*

They cannot see each other and expect to see themselves when they are nothing, shadows of empty crowns.

Harry thrusts his hand into Voldemort's mottled gray chest. It's rotting away, his wand, the bones, his skin, and the air sucks at him, eating the pain and sensuality. Harry had planned to execute a muggle death away from the Order. He is right in presuming the absence of another priori incantatum; the curses fly fast and low, and Voldemort deliberates the choreography.

Harry trips over someone-Seamus? Voldemort looms over him, the curtain of Pettigrew behind him. Harry tells himself Pettigrew doesn't exist anymore.

There is another boy, Harry wants to scream, knowing that only he is qualified, has the choice of throwing the final blow or prostrating himself at the world's feet, a martyr in holy green. Why don't you pick him, he gasps and lurches forward. You silly boy! Jealous and raging, words have no conscious place now.

He is expected to be reasonable time and time again, but he wants to scratch at it, tear it, break the sleek handles in his life, catch something with his own flesh, carved out and hanging from a stick, until he's bedridden and incoherent with crucio aftereffects. Ron was safe now, where he should be rather than here. He had to be safe, and Hermione too; they were off with Neville. Neville, Neville, Neville... he died a week ago, didn't he?

Desperate and thriving, Harry moves, asunder with magic. He meets Malfoy-/sectumsepra/-and he's bloody and wailing and a boy again. A purpled gull-catcher caught up in his parent's prating. A crutch of a man, Harry doesn't love him.

Two and twenty days he has lasted since Ron's funeral. He doesn't like death, wants to come away clean and squeaky, water-resistant. Hermione's is next week because the morgue is backwashed with orders.

He feels like he's the only drunk at her funeral.

Then Remus's comes; it's the end of the Marauders, no cyclic generation after Pettigrew died. There will be no sparkling treasure of his father's and Sirius's discoveries after Remus. Glorification is dead and the dull luster of Sirius's hate remains, his heirloom.

*

I know what you want and you can't have it, Draco says.

Are you sure? Harry is terrified and thinks of urns and satin caskets-the dead deserve the best treatment, what is there for the living, he thinks. Draco is laughing and kissing him. Where did the coward go, Harry wonders, and pushes against Draco, soft and angular and fearsome.

He keeps on finding Malfoy: in his hiding spots, in his scouting rounds, in his city, his road, and finally, in his room, on metal and stone and warm wood, burning.

It's only been a year.

One day Draco is gone, Harry doesn't love him, Harry wants to remember the amber of each flame; he can drink it now, unhesitant and yielding, and this makes him feel relieved.

*

Sometimes, it's okay to be selfish, to take everything pretty. It's okay to take the ugly things too, as long as they make you happy.

For the first time, he has decided for himself. And the only one he wants is Draco.

Be confident.

Harry is confident, and unafraid of failure. Voldemort wants him, and he is determined to allow him to finally take a part of him. Voldemort can have his hate and fear. Harry won't lose.

There's no one to say, "Like James," as Harry would have had it once, but Lupin and Sirius should be happy. They're healthy where it's okay to dream for things they can't have.

Draco isn't there, and he guesses that he's with Snape. Harry still doesn't know the truth, and maybe Draco's dead.

Voldemort's gray and rotting; Harry can smell him and he smells like Thestrals and clay.

*

Then another year passes. Harry is tired of living, running, from murderer to savior to human. The furniture has mold growing underneath, and the dishware is broken. He is down to one bottle of beer, and a shot of smooth vodka in a flower jar. Harry finds Draco again, on a normal street with no owls in sight.

It is harder to build and reconstruct than it is to destroy. Harry chooses to cremate himself when he dies. Draco will not (something about the beauty of being embalmed), but two dead bodies in a coffin is too weird for Harry. Besides, he wants his body to be relieved, and be in air rather than in ground.

Harry isn't tired anymore.

Maybe it's just us, he says, and Harry takes his hand. The sky is dull and the sun hurts his eyes.