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alovelylight · 7 years ago

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we will love too many people in one lifetime

Dean and Seamus found secretive roads behind Dean’s house that led to the sea, where they watched the rise and fall of foamy waves with a collectively held breath. His stepdad Gerry flipped steaks and roasted bacon in the afternoons, awkwardly attempted to teach Dean to do so, and regretted it. He did get along with Seamus, though; they played ball in the backyard, and Dean sketched his friend kicking red dust into the air. He held his breath then, too, but he did not know why.

(or: a study of bisexual characters in Harry Potter)

AO3

Harry had learned not to ask for things he wanted. That was what the Dursleys taught him, over leftover, burnt toast and faded hand-me-down jeans. He was a boy who befriended a snake and an owl before other people, but when he did, it was with a boy who also felt too much and had a little less. So imagine his surprise when he went to Ron’s home for the first time, to emerge within the warm glow of the kitchen, to hear and feel the tingle of affectionate laughter on his skin.

He was a boy who hadn’t asked for many things, but he learned how to.

It started with bacon and buttered toast for breakfast, an impromptu game of Quidditch with the Weasley brothers, an extra pair of shoes from Mr. Weasley because the old ones strained his feet. This was a family that built a home out of questions – Are you happy? What do you need? How can I help? Then all too soon, there were anti-Dementor lessons with a world-weary teacher and relying on inextinguishable help from Hermione – and eventually, Ron – for the tournament.

But with them, he didn’t have to ask; they were always there. As Ron’s legs lengthened even further and Hermione got new teeth, Harry blushed at Cho Chang over clammy hands and snuck furtive glances at Cedric Diggory’s unassuming back. At fourteen, feelings still felt misshapen in his stomach, too raw and jumbling for him to bear.

So of course he’d mentioned it to the best friend most attuned to emotions. “So you’re into blokes too now?” Ron scratched his head, then shrugged, “Well, I suppose you and my sister do have something in common after all. I’d be wary of Diggory though, the last person who had teeth that shiny was Lockhart…”

Hermione didn’t seem surprised. “You stared at Bill way too much during the summer,” she said – to Ron’s horror – and returned back to her reading. “I can give you some books about the history of bisexuality from classical societies to contemporary politics, if you’re interested.”

When Cedric fell, Harry would see the delicate outlines of his face in nightmares for a long time to come. Beauty could not protect a person – neither could goodness or honor, and Cedric had all three. That knowledge made the lightning on Harry’s face curl itself into his fists; he was sick of people dying because of him. He had never asked for it. It shouldn’t have been his parents and it shouldn’t have been Cedric, people who believed in the power of sacrifice but also believed in standing your ground.

Ginny Weasley wasn’t interested in dying for him, not really. She said his name in a fond whisper rather than holding it up like a prayer (after Riddle, she would never do that again). Ginny saw him as what he was – a boy of flesh and bones, nerves and sweat, with wind in his hair and sunlight in his heart. They shared laughter and kisses over firewhiskey and took the longest way to get back to Hogwarts from Hogsmeade, her strong yet birdlike hands tucked in his.

Harry was a boy who hadn’t asked for many things, but love wasn’t one of them.

He remembered the curve of Cedric’s smile, how his eyes blinked lazily in the sun, the light hairs on his thighs. Ginny gave him the world in the form of laughter, the way she took him away from the demons lurking behind his scar. Love came to him, yes, but he had learned to reach across the dark to find it.

Since she was small, Lavender Brown viewed her life as a series of stages. She was five and had just became the top student in Miss Ingram’s ballet class, she was eight and was learning to apply her mom’s Russian Red, she was eleven and was finally boarding the Hogwarts Express. Her mom had snuck in a tube of bright lipstick into Lavender’s bag as a parting gift.

Alas, Lavender did not count on striking a conversation with a girl who smelled of peaches and talked of Hindu myths in the train, but that was what happened. Parvati Patil had luxuriously thick black hair and the warmest eyes she had ever seen.

Lavender had friends before, of course – girls who giggled with her over actors and came over for tea, but not girls who shared her clothes and rarely left her side at the hospital wing. Snape even had to separate them when Lavender couldn’t stop playing with Parvati’s hair during Potions, and the next day Parvati went to class with all her coils lopped off so they could stay together.

At the Yule Ball, while Seamus – her date – was distracted by something Dean Thomas was saying, Lavender angled her head to watch as Harry Potter led Parvati around the dancefloor. Both of them were awkward, but she knew Parvati well enough to notice that her friend hid it well. Lavender thought she looked heartbreakingly lovely.

Several rounds of punch later, Parvati and Lavender were sprawled in the gardens, ballet flats abandoned in the grass and layers of hairdo coming undone. They were giggling about something – Durmstrang boys hoping to impress, the shape of that particular cluster of stars, the dire quality of both their dates – when Lavender realized how much she liked this, this feeling of coming alive with the universe whenever she’s with Parvati.

She continued to date boys – boys who carried her books to class, boys who acted offended when she wouldn’t let them feel her up. Ron Weasley was, embarrassingly, the high point of her love life; she ignored that most of their displays of affection were made in public, and that his eyes followed Hermione Granger around constantly.

Parvati frowned whenever she mentioned him, but never really said anything. She was this way: composed and cool until pushed over, then the fire would come spitting out. That came when Lavender was moaning about her boyfriend’s inattentions, how she put in so much more effort –

“Do you even love him?” Parvati’s sharp voice broke through her lamentation.

“Parv, he’s my boyfriend.”

“So?”

“So, I like him a lot. Merlin, I might even love him. I don’t know. Why does this matter?”

“Lavender, you know what to name your firstborn, which paintings to hang in your future five-storey house, when and where your early spring wedding in Brittany will be, so don’t you dare offend me by saying that you don’t know.”

“Well, I –” She had thought about it, sure – he had cute freckles and a nice smile, and she liked how competitive he can get over chess. That he didn’t have a career plan worried her a bit, and his further disregard for her divination studies riled her up, but people have their faults. “I suppose I don’t, but I can learn how to.”

“You can’t learn to love someone. And Ron certainly doesn’t give a shit,” Parvati’s unexpected expletive stunned her. “It makes me mad, to see you like this. Fretting and fussing over him, and he would still take you for granted,” she sighed, kicking her bag from the foot of her bed to the floor. “I say this as your dearest best friend: grow a bloody spine.”

“You’re being a bitch. Go to sleep.”

“I’m not a bitch, I’m just honest!”

“You’re rude when you’re tired. Sleep.”

She did take Parvati’s advice to heart, though. When she told her friend of the breakup (Ron looked relieved, so Lavender turned his hair purple for dramatic effect), Parvati looked like she was struggling not to reveal a satisfied smirk, which should annoy Lavender but it really didn’t.

“I have news too,” Parvati said. The way she bit her nails suggested that this was serious.

“Oh yeah? What is it that I don’t know about you by now?” Lavender grinned, leaning forward. “Hey – your nails – stop.”

“Well, you know how I’ve never…shown interest in guys?” Lavender nodded, feeling the same age-old suspicion rise at the tip of her tongue, the inkling she had not dared ask Parvati to confirm. It’s not that she feared her friend would get mad or offended; even at Lavender’s most clueless, Parvati would still look at her with warm eyes. She just didn’t want to make the issue of those eyes appearing in her dreams bigger than it should be.

“The short of it is that I fancy girls,” Parvati said, glancing at Lavender. “What, you’re not surprised? Huh, neither was Padma, so I guess I was not so good at hiding it.”

“You know I support you. I’m kind of offended it took you this long to tell me, really.”

“I thought it was a phase, no need to make a big deal,” Parvati smiled wryly. “How wrong I was. Anyways, I only told Padma, because she’s my sister and she’s got more wisdom than me.”

“And what did Padma say?”

Parvati seemed to face an internal struggle, darting her eyes to her lap and then at Lavender��s hands. She squeezed them, breathed this and pressed a shy, soft kiss against the other girl’s mouth. It took Lavender a few long heart-racing moments to comprehend the situation – her best mate, who was a lesbian, was snogging her. Snogging!

When Parvati made the move to pull away, Lavender closed her eyes and pressed forward, because damn all this – the ceaseless planning, the tiresome dating, the obsession with perfection – this was the girl she has been loving and laughing with for seven years and this was coming alive. And if being alive meant spilling past the lines and the conventions, your heart in another girl’s mouth and your desires going both ways, then so be it.

The first girl Percy Weasley ever fell in love with was Penelope Clearwater. He wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly when and where, and he hated such neglect of important details, but he was mostly sure it happened along nightly school corridors around the last two months of their fifth year.

He had seen her reading Muggle classics, all fiction, which baffled him. Why a smart Ravenclaw like Penelope would bother with imaginary worlds was beyond Percy, who believed in the supreme importance of facts and numbers. He asked her about it during one of their patrols, and listened as she rambled on about courageous heroines and dashing antiheroes and tension-charged romances, her eyes housing such fire that it left him speechless.

Before he knew it, she was loaning him classic novels that they discussed and debated over during their prefect patrols. Penelope preferred Bildungsroman stories of defiant girls growing up and finding a place in the world (Northanger Abbey, Anne of Green Gables), Percy preferred novels that intertwined history and politics with fiction (War & Peace, Les Misérables). Moreover, he liked to see the flame in her eyes, the testy look she gets when they disagreed. Soon enough book discussions spurred towards the personal, and they verged on something like real friendship.

That summer, he wrote so many letters his fingers were sore and read so many novels he needed new glasses. He met up with her at Diagon Alley and impulsively kissed her over banana sundaes. A few weeks later, he told his parents he’d be at Oliver Wood’s but accompanied Penelope to her house in a Muggle college town, where they bicycled to the public library and stargazed with her parents. He even took her to her elder sister’s wedding, where he whirled her around in a pretty yellow dress, the music and the champagne and the girl making his head spin.

But first loves often came to an end, and even with this Percy wasn’t able to pinpoint exactly when and where.

It started with this, though: Oliver Wood’s blunt finger twirling a stray hair behind his ear, both boys bathed in the low light of the deserted common room. He was looking at Percy like he was the answer, and he couldn’t be. But a question he hadn’t thought of since seeing her, as confusing and shameful as it was, reformed in his mind.

Then N.E.W.T.s rolled around, and he became too busy for kisses and moonlight trysts, ink dotting his hands as stress climbed his stomach. One day she just kissed him in resolution, and he knew her well enough to know that it wasn’t one made of love and continuity.

The second time he fell in love, he was a different man. He collected more scars and burdens, wearing the imprint of hubris in pinstriped suits and wondering where he went wrong. He didn’t fall in love with a socially advantageous daughter of a Ministry official that would elevate him – no, the real thing was far more wondrous and terrifying than that.

Percy worked alongside Oliver Wood in the Order’s Recruitment Department after he came back. In many ways, Oliver’s disappointment was worse than his family’s; he knew Percy in colors and layers that no-one else would’ve dreamed of, seen him laugh and cry and curse the world. By their seventh year, Percy knew theirs was a skinny love, driven by his own fears of the unknown – but if the past two years of estrangement taught him anything, it was that he was tired of fear and pride meddling in the way of happiness.

They fell into bed before falling in love, learning the lines and edges of each other’s bodies that they didn’t get to see in their dorm at Hogwarts. It was only meant to be sex, a solace in the midst of war, but soon enough he was staying at Oliver’s overnight, holding his hand beneath the table at headquarters, sneaking in kisses and caresses when they thought nobody was watching. Oliver lacked Penelope’s softness, but had all of her brightness.

“Perce?” he said one night, his hair trailing inside Percy’s mass of curls. They were lying in Percy’s old bed in the Burrow, recovering after a dinner Tonks messed up and Molly had to fix at the last minute. Six months into their love affair, or whatever this was, and they still marveled at the way their bodies fit together like weathered puzzle pieces.

“Hmm?”

“Did you ever love Penelope?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Yes. I did,” he sighed, pushing his nose against Oliver’s neck. “I still think about how she’s doing every once in a while.”

“So she wasn’t a cover.”

“Ol,” he looked at his lover pointedly. “I was so traumatized when she got Petrified in sixth year, I couldn’t even go to class. Yes, I loved that girl.”

“That’s good. She made you less of an uptight git.”

“While no amount of romantic sensitivities could turn you into any less of a prig.”

Percy yelped when Oliver bit his earlobe. “Look, Percy,” he said suddenly, his voice low and serious, “this thing we have is…great. I want to continue it. I want to be with you, you know?” Percy slowly nodded, watching Oliver as he fumbled with words – not his most able area. “I don’t want to be just your experimental phase, so if that’s –”

“Oliver, you are not a phase.” His tone was soft but firm. “I’m bisexual, I’ve read plenty of books and pamphlets about it. And I know I love you.”

“Yeah?” they grinned at each other. “I’m quite fond of you too, you git.”

Dean Thomas never knew his father. He couldn’t get his mom to tell him stories of the man either, as she always pursed her lips when he asked, and so he resorted to Muggle photographs. His father was tall and wiry and black, much like Dean himself, but his eyes blinked with amused mirth – like he knew something you didn’t.

And he did know a few things Dean didn’t. One, that he was a wizard, and two, that he was killed by Death Eaters in the First Wizarding War. In his first year, he and Seamus Finnigan tracked down books that mentioned his father, who was often described as a self-made martyr, a Gryffindor dying in a blaze of glory – someone whose strength of will never festered even in the face of death.

“If he wasn’t playing the hero he might’ve been able to live and take care of his family,” Dean grumbled, pushing a thick volume of history away.

“He was brave,” Seamus said, bumping his shoulder against Dean’s.

“Didn’t even tell his wife that he was a wizard, leaving her to find out eleven years later after his death,” he snorted. “You call that brave?”

“He was trying to protect, I think,” Seamus said uneasily. “At least your old man left for noble reasons.”

When he took Seamus to meet his mom, his stepdad Gerry, and their set of triplets that summer, Seamus brought his ability to talk about anything with anyone along with him. “He was stunned by the simplest things,” said Dean’s mom with a small smile, sad and fond. “Took him awhile to get a hang of the telephone and the car. He also seemed to get from place to place far faster than I could, and at times, things seem to fall and crack whenever he’s in a temper.”

She made Dean tell her stories of Hogwarts, of moving staircases and sentient portraits, colorful ghosts and Quidditch matches. The triplets, although had shown no evidence of magic, listened to Seamus’ animated stories with wide eyes and begged him to do some spells. “Can’t,” he said, glancing at Dean with an indulgent grin, “we’re not allowed to do any in the summer.”

When Dean accompanied Seamus and his mother to the Quidditch Cup, he also brought his Muggle half-siblings along. His mom and Gerry were worried at first, but they had grown fond of Seamus and his spirited mother. (Seamus was truly his mother’s son; both shared the same troublesome grin and sandy curls of hair).

In the midst of re-explaining the rules to one of his little sisters, Dean watched as Viktor Krum performed the Wronski Feint with such strength and intensity that he paused to gape. He was a fan of Quidditch, of course, practically everyone was – but there had been more that caught Dean’s eye. Krum loomed overhead like a god, unassuming in his own glory, like he knew he was born to perch the skyline. It was, put quite simply, the most attractive thing.

(He was glad that Seamus was too distracted cursing the air around him blue to notice).

When he asked Ginny Weasley out for a bottle of butterbeer at the end of fifth year, he wasn’t sure what he expected her to say. He knew he fancied her; she gave him a similar feeling Krum had when he was fourteen – a stomach full of nerves that came out of watching someone larger than life.

Whenever they kissed, she gave him bite and tongue and fire. His hands clasped on her hips, wisps of hair escaped from her long braid, he knew it should be the stuff of a teenage boy’s fantasies, which should make up for the occasional awkward pauses in their conversation. Not that Ginny was boring – no, quite the opposite, but sometimes he felt so overwhelmed by her energy that his mind went blank.

Seamus was unusually high-strung after his dates with Ginny, and Dean had to worm responses out of him, usually through tickling or annoying persistence.

“I don’t know why you hate her,” he grumbled, slumping down on the patch of grass beside his friend. They were lying on the grounds outside Hagrid’s hut, their books and quills forming a clumsy ring around their sprawled bodies.

“It’s not that I hate her,” said Seamus. At Dean’s doubtful look: “I just hate her stupid hair. And her laugh. And her smile. And her bloody…fingers.”

“Her fingers?”

“Yeah! Oh, sod off –” Dean threw his head back and laughed. Seamus was struggling not to grin, and lost badly.

“Her fucking fingers, Seamus?”

“It just gets on my nerves. She’s always touching you with them, and they’re so…bony – how is she a Chaser, anyways? Does she have replacement fingers? Can you find out for me?”

“Ah,” Dean smiled, propping himself up by the elbow. “Do you fancy my girlfriend?”

“No,” he said, with such finality that Dean dropped the issue. “Are you happy, Dean?”

He didn’t meet Seamus’ eyes, but felt them on him as clearly as the pale sunlight. “Eh, reckon I’ll be alright. You?”

“With such contagious enthusiasm, how could I not be?”

“Shut it,” he sat up, observed Seamus beneath the canopy of leaves. “Stay where you are. I want to draw you.”

When she broke up with him, he spluttered with indignity at her accusation and tried to get her to change her mind. But what was done was done, and he let her go with a glare. It was hard to forget Ginny Weasley, but well, there were brighter shores. There had to be.

So while the undercurrents of war and slaughter brewed around them, Dean spent summer nights listening to Seamus’ heartbeat because it was both life and music to him. He knew he had to pack and leave soon; his father’s alleged bravery had left no proof of Dean’s being half-blood.

“Hey, Dean,” Seamus said to him one day, running his hand through Dean’s hair. They were watching the ocean waves, huddled in the darkness. “I love you.”

It was not a revelation; it had been a long time coming. “And I love you,” said Dean. “But you know that I have to leave, right? I can’t go to Hogwarts and keep my life at the same time. I can’t love you and have you watch me suffer, it’s not fair.”

He felt the wetness of Seamus’ tears. The shorter boy curled himself around Dean like a question mark, his face tucked against his neck. “Now you understand your dad’s plight, right?”

Dean sighed. “I guess so. We all have to pick our battles.”

They kissed for a long time, tracing each other’s cheekbones, ears, foreheads with the delicacy of a quill. Dean reckoned he should show Seamus that sketch he made of him.

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