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H/D Ficlet - The March Potion


Sometimes he forgets that he’s in exile.

Sometimes he thinks he belongs in this place, with these people. Especially when he convinces himself he’s in love, and there are voice messages on his mobile, and another man’s shirts in his wardrobe, and the sun is shining in this land that is so much sunnier than the England of his memories ever was.

But then along comes March.

There is a potion that he’d read about once in one of his father’s banned books, a long time ago. It’s akin to Muggle acid in many of its properties, but like all things magical – and more precisely, all things Dark – where it differs is in the personal nature of its effect. The intimate catastrophe it wreaks. Just a drop will do the trick. Absorbed in undetectable increments, it eats away whatever it is in the human body that recognises beauty, whatever region of the brain, or impulse along the optic nerve, or pea-sized endocrinal gland that makes us see a picture in what would otherwise be meaningless splotches of paint. That makes us see the light in the old woman’s eyes rather than the spit drying in the creases at the corners of her mouth. That makes us glad for those few stolen moments with the lover we cannot forget rather than curse the memories they bequeathed us.

There is no antidote. Not even a Bezoar will stay its corrosive progress. He doubts that it kills, but every March he finds himself hoping that it does.

Because who could live like that forever? Otherwise healthy and hale, but with a soul as brittle as rusted steel? Walking home this evening, he knows for sure that he could not. After all, he can barely survive this finite time, this not-yet-cruellest month, this no man’s land between winter and spring, when every day the snow retreats a little further to reveal the detritus of last year, the things we could bear to live without. The empty crisp bags and sweets wrappers and old newspapers and stained mattresses and dented hubcaps and broken suitcases filled with frozen leaves and cigarette butts and half-empty bottles of cheap vodka and the single trainer and the torn playbill and the pink comb and the child’s toy bear, which, if you have to see it one. more. time, will surely bring to an end your tenuous hold on sanity.

Every day the ground thaws, bleeding mud and slush and the iridescent sheen of gasoline, and every night the frost plunges its long fingers back in like winter’s gardener, like an Inferius scrabbling blindly between rib and muscle for the living heart beneath. For weeks, the whole world feels like nothing more than a length of rope in a game of tug o’ war between the seasons.

He hates it. Almost as much as he hates the way the morning light shows the lines on his face. Almost as much as he hates the way the mail pools on the stairs, and the new telephone books sit unclaimed in the foyer, and his hands shake sometimes when he holds up the paper – so much that the tiny words swarm like gnats.

His lovers are young and Muggle and they wouldn’t understand, so he doesn’t even begin to try to explain why, for this one month at least, he won’t return their calls or answer their bloody endless text messages or reciprocate when they go down on him. It’s just too much fucking work, and he is just so tired.

So tired.

Severus once told him, in a rare and fleeting moment of candor, that exile is a state of mind, not a fact, or even a status. It’s the soul clinging to its past, like milk residue clings to a bottle that is otherwise empty. At the time, he hadn’t given a shit. He’d been focused on surviving another day, another week, in his own house. In the rooms where he’d grown up rendered uninhabitable by the acts their walls had been forced to witness and contain. The thought of exile had seemed like a draught of fresh air in a slaughterhouse of rotting meat, and he hadn’t cared that his soul would cling like milk, or that he’d learn to remember the light on his mother’s roses as a taste, or that no lover would ever cause him to forget his loneliness – even for a moment, or that every year the month of March would seep a little deeper into his heart and creep a little further outward.

Last year March hadn’t ended until May.

It’s like a preview of old age, he’d told the latest-man-who-wasn’t-Harry. What is? the handsome stranger who’d shared his bed for the last six weeks had asked. March, he’d replied. But not-Harry had merely rolled his eyes and shouted for the check in that terrible accent that everyone in this place has and which has not grown any less terrible for all the years he’s endured it. And they’d walked out of the café into the rain, and there’d been a piece of cardboard decomposing in the leaf-clogged gutter, and the dirty snow had clung tenaciously to the curbs, and everyone had been walking with their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on the ugly ground, and he’d decided that he’d rather be in bed with a hot water bottle, and so he’d left Mr. He-Looked-Like-Harry-From-The-Back on the sidewalk and began the long trek home.

It was on days like this when he felt his inability to Apparate like physical pain.

In March there is simply no hiding from the fact of humanity’s tawdriness. Mercilessly, it strips away all that winter’s finery concealed. All the buried and discarded things. The rags and the bones and the disposable oddments. It is the cloth that wipes the rouge from the cheeks of the aging prostitute. It is the hand of the coroner pulling back the tarpaulin. It is the Janus-faced friend. The spiteful lover. The bystanders who turn away, pretending they don’t notice when you slip in the mud and spill your groceries and reach instinctively for the wand that was taken from you so long ago you can only remember the way it felt in your hand in dreams.

He has heard that things are peaceful now. He has heard that cases have been reopened and pardons extended and fortunes remade. But he has also heard that the only person whose good opinion had ever mattered, the only person whose love he’d ever craved like oxygen, is married. The father of children almost as old as they had been. And he has lived too many years and through too many Marches to believe any longer in the myth that you can always go home again.

The beauty of that potion, his misguided father had told him before the full extent of his misguidedness had been discovered, when he’d noticed the book in his son’s hands and thought that here was a curiosity worth encouraging, is that it kills the soul but leaves the body still intact. It is the scalpel to the sledge-hammer of the Dementor’s Kiss. Your victim will not be a useless bag of drooling flesh, but an empty vessel waiting to be filled. A building gutted by fire waiting to be rebuilt. Give the victim of that potion something to live for, and you will have a willing slave for life.

Turning the key in the door to his empty flat, the grit from the street streaking his shoes and the flicker of the telly through his neighbour’s window illuminating nothing in its staccato light, he thinks he knows just what his father meant.

And wonders when it was that Harry had slipped him a drop.