-The Dragon Variation: Volume One-
In The Light Is Where He Loves Her.
Draco and Ophelia (Olli) collide in all too similar ways without realising. She's new around these parts. But how new is she to Draco?
In a time where the darkness of the impendi...
(Contains a graphic scene. I have marked an asterisk where it begins.)
3 Months later. August 2001
The years drag even harder for Draco.
He lays awake at night, the same as Olli, hoping she hasn't forgotten him. He left her with little to no hope of his return.
He hears her.
She sees him. In the news, standing up in the privacy box at the Derby's. It's as if she's a ghost to him. Unseeable.
But he can hear her.
All the screaming and crying she would do into her pillow at night, knowing he's 300 miles away in the from Devon, stuck in the Lake District: District 7. He can hear her, and it rips his heart out every night. He can hear her doubting him, giving up on him, losing him, slowly falling away from him. She's been holding onto him for so long, he just needs her to hold on a little longer.
'This love that thou hast shown Doth add more grief to too much of mine own. Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears. What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.'
-Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 1
The Horcruxes. That's his only way out. The only way to get them both out.
He promised he would. He promised her he would get her out, but from where she's standing; Draco left her to rot in the gutter.
He just can't afford to reach her, not yet, not until Harry has confirmed the last Horcrux has been found.
Not now, not after having to watch what happened to Pansy when Theo failed a task.
Olli doesn't really know what she's fighting for now. She's got nothing—no one left. She's picked a side, but how exactly do you fight on a side that's practically crumbling. Her head works in overdrive to put puzzle pieces together that don't even originate with the same pattern. She has nothing to work from or with. In her head she's picked her side, but in truth, she's not fighting anymore. She's giving up.
He frowns down at Harry and Ron arguing, who have not even noticed Draco apparating into the tiny cellar room underneath the pub. A room lit only by the light coming through the cellar windows lined with iron bars and lined with wooden floors and a bare concrete floor. A place they all agreed to meet in when new information arises or a horcrux has been located.
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Hands shoved deep into his pockets, he just watches Harry and Ron square up to each other and bicker between them like children and not the 20-year-olds that they are.
