*sticks pencil through brain*

*

That was the winter her body sprouted a new geometry: lines of collarbone surfaced. Interior angles of rib and elbow came to light, and the curve of her skull came out through the hair, pale and sharp. They had been living on the coast, and to Harry, watching Hermione die that winter was like watching the sea pull back into itself and show more and more of the black rock underneath. It was an ebbing tide that went on forever until even the islands in the bay and the wrecked ships were exposed.

In this one dream Harry has, he's standing on the cliff when the tide pulls back over this old shipwreck that's gone black from age and rot. The wood is rotten, he's sure, and the main mast is snapped in two. He's been seeing the tip of it for days, but when Hermione gives this rattle of breath in her sleep, Harry dreams that the water finally pulls back far enough for him to see that there's still somebody trapped down in the wreck after all these years.

*

Harry is twenty-eight now. He's been married to Hermione for eight years now, but the summer when he was seventeen, he fucked Malfoy on an almost daily basis in a flat on Diagon Alley that he'd rented after the Dursleys kicked him out for good. They'd always do it in the middle of the afternoon with the lights out. Malfoy would be naked underneath him, and Harry would have Malfoy's arms pinned up over his head against the headboard. Draco's robe wasalways hanging on the rack next to the door, but the two of them would be on the bed with the curtains drawn.

This one afternoon, Draco had one leg wrapped around Harry's waist to pull him in deeper than he wanted to go. Harry was hanging on to the edge of his self-control by a thread as thin as one of Draco's hairs, and he finally just pulled Malfoy back against the headboard and slammed into him with all his strength.

Draco didn't exactly scream, but he did choke and kick. He gritted his teeth and tried to sit up, but Harry took one hand off Draco's wrists and put it on his cock, then moved his mouth from Draco's shoulder to his mout. After that, Draco was too busy fucking Harry's hand and kissing him back to struggle anymore.

Face-to-face. That's the only way he ever fucked Malfoy.

*

Hermione is getting as skinny as Malfoy used to be.

*

The end of his relationship with Draco came about like this: Harry lived on the third floor of the building that the Leaky Cauldron was in. Draco was due to come by Harry's flat. He was late, which was pretty unusual, and Harry risked looking out the window to see if he was coming down the street yet. And there he was, just rounding the corner, but he didn't go around the building to the back to take the fire-escape up. Instead, he continued down on the main street, and when he got to Harry's window, Draco sort of looked up a blank, tight sort of smile, and then Lucius Malfoy stepped out of the shadows and tapped the inside of his son's forearm.

*

The Dark Mark was a living thing that moved underneath your skin with a life of its own, so even though you got it on the inside of the forearm, it might migrate to the outside. It might shift up your arm, or it might move onto your palm, spreading out onto your fingertips with the eyes of the skull on the heel of your palm. Proximity to Voldemort seemed to have some connection to how much it moved around under your skin, and Hermione had shown him autopsy photographs of Death Eaters who had it on their shoulders or on their legs. One person even had it in the middle of his chest, though it was much, much larger than the other Death Marks and strangely faded, as if it hadn't been that big originally and had sort of spread underneath the skin. It was a brownish-gry sort of color and as large as a dinner plate and went from his collarbone down to the top of the ribs. Harry rested his fingertips on the photograph as if to feel just how skinny Draco had gotten.

"Do you recognize who it is?" Hermione said, after a moment.

Harry did not want to admit that he knew, that he recognized the pattern of bones and the small white scar at the base of the throat. "No," he said. "Who is it?"

Hermione looked at him for a moment. They had been married for two years, then, and she was wearing glasses from having spent too much time poring over ancient scripts looking for ways to kill the unkillable. "Malfoy," she said, quietly, then slipped the photograph back into the pile.

*

They had been living in London, originally, to make it easier to get to the clinic, and Harry supposes that when Hermione gets worse, they'll have to leave the cottage by the sea and go closer, but she's still well enough to Portkey around, and she really loves this house by the coast. It was a wedding present from her parents to her, and now that they're both gone, the place is decked out in all the furniture of her childhood house. The couch she used to watch movies with her father on. The watercolours her mother painted when she was in college, and Crookshanks likes to sleep on a pillow that Hermione made in home arts class back when she still went to Muggle schools.

Hermione has Crooks in her lap now. Her hand is resting on his back, between her fingers hanging down the side parallel to his ribs They're both drowsing in the sunshine, but Crookshank's hair is longer than hers is now since it's cropped so terribly short to hide how thin it's gotten. The official Muggle word is that she's got a genetic predisposition for the stuff.

It's a good thing that she's Muggleborn, in fact, because wizards still don't know about cancer. And while he's willing to wait in the hallway for her and hold her hair when she dry-heaves in the bathroom for hours, Harry knows the prognosis isn't good because they caught it so late. It's in her bones, it's in her blood. It's killing her the same way the Mark killed Draco, and sometimes, Harry imagines sometimes that he can see it spreading out in her body, a vague brownish-grey shadow that moves underneath the skin but doesn't ever stop at arbitrary points like her collarbone or the top of her ribs or the transition between flesh and bone or bone and blood. It's a futile sort of battle, but Hermione doesn't ever like to admit that it is, and sometimes, Harry will be with her in the bathroom, holding her while she leans against the wall, panting. He'll listen to her breathing hard and press his lips against the sharp angle of her shoulderblade and almost feel it leaking into him.

Sometimes, he can feel it pressing against her skin in an effort to get to him, and other times -- well, other times, Harry knows that it's been him the whole time, that he's been the source of it for both Hermione and Draco. His skin is porous in only one direction. It goes from him to them. And in those moments, the only comfort that he has is that he can't possibly be the boy trapped in the old shipwreck down at the bottom of the sea from his dream. He can't be, because if he'd turn anything black if he touched it that long. The coastline is black, but the water that washes over the wreck is still green, and sometimes, Harry fantasizes about diving down into the sea and going after that boy.

He never has that dream, though. Harry never goes swimming in the sea, and after a few more months, they move back to London, with its thin little river and paved streets that smell like exhaust all the time. It's as if the sea has disappeared completely, and in the chaos of trying to arrange everything for Hermione before she dies, Harry never realizes that the boy at the bottom of the sea is screaming and kicking and trying to be saved.

*

Yeah. More cancerfic. I'm sort of fixated, OK?

First paragraph borrowed from the first stanza of December 1998 by Nicole Dixon. The original reads like this:

That was the winter
your body grew a new geometry --
the surfacing rays of collarbone,
angles of rib, elbow,
shoulders more acute.
Everything became a plane.
Or it was like standing
by the ocean, watching the tide of your flesh
pull out. In the ebb,
your cheeks made hollow grottoes.
You had tidepools filled
with starfish, urchins, crabs:
everything visible was skeleton.