Touch

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Touch

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Charlie takes the middle again, leading them both through the streets of London, one arm around either of them and Harry feels a bit like a giggly girl but not really because he’s just happy and happy doesn’t care about anything else. He’s holding hands with Buffy behind the red head’s back. Later maybe, he decides, he might try to wrap the two of them around himself tight enough that they’ll never be able to let go again.

He touches Ron sometimes, pat on the back, smack on the head and hugs Hermione for Christmas and her birthday and the yearly apocalypse but always, always he remembers using his hands, his bare hands, to turn Quirrel to cinders, to kill a man and a ghost. He remembers the power sleeping just under his skin. He can kill with his touch and it scares him every time he puts a hand on someone because he waits for them to scream and writhe in pain. But Buffy’s a child of prophecy and Charlie’s written in skin. He can’t harm them. He is safe with them. But they are also safe with him. He cannot harm them and they will never lie dead in a cemetery. They will never fall through an arch into darkness. He knows that.

Knows it as well as he knows the scarred back of his hand. They are written in stone, Buffy said.

In some dark corner of his mind he’d like to believe that she meant not him and herself, but them. There is a difference, he knows that as well.

Buffy pulls on his fingers, steering all three of them down a long line of waiting people. Harry might never have been to a nightclub, but even he knows that you don’t just walk up to the door. And yet that’s what they do, tiny blonde walking up to the bouncer with big steps, throwing him a big smile. Got room fort three more? She inquires.

He looks down at her, head cocked to one side, before muttering, Neutral?

She nods, letting go of Harry to hold both hands in the air, palms to the front. Fun, she confirms, not business.

The bouncer gives Harry a once over that makes his skin tingle and his face flush. Fun? Buffy nods again. He lifts the red rope to the indignant call of the people standing in line and Harry lets himself be pulled into the den of iniquity by his left hand.

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