Insert Standard Disclaimer here. Thanks.

The door should have swung into darkness. Instead, there is a slice of light, that familiar pink radiance of her room, stretching across the runner in the hall. I stand in the doorway, rooted to the threshold, paralysed by the pattern of checks and stripes that I shouldn't be able to see, and, for one moment, I believe she is home. For one sweet second, I only need to round the corner, and there she'll be. But then I hear it. A steady flick and slap. Methodical. Unwavering. It can only be him, and whatever he's doing in her room, my coming home does not figure in. I am secondary, peripheral, as always.

I pull off my cloak and robes, empty my pockets into the bowl beside the door, then walk to the kitchen and grab a bottle from the fridge. I've left my wand, so I find an opener in the drawer and pry off the top, letting the small crimped disc clink to the linoleum floor. I do all this casually, as if every day I come back to the flat, hide in the kitchen, and drink beer in the dark. And, yes, this is indisputably hiding. Leaning on the counter, I am shaking, terrified of approaching the first door on the left, of stepping into that thin illuminated wedge which will inevitably draw me into its origin. I'm not ready for this. I'm not ready to surround myself in the air she used to breathe, or lay eyes on the objects her hands arranged. I can't bear the scent of champa flower and resin lifting from those lurid red sheets. I just can't.

Apparently, he can, though- Oliver Wood. I suppose, when it comes down to it, this is why Katie chose him. He's always been the better man.

I drain the bottle and reach for another, then steel myself and grab a third. I should at least offer him a drink, my guest. Though it seems ludicrous to call him that, now. After everything.

Walking across the sitting room, the sense of déjà vu' is cripplingly heady. I stop outside the open door and peek in, same as the night it all began; only tonight Oliver sits on the floor, surrounded by short stacks of black leather bound photo albums. His eyes graze over each picture and then he turns the page. Flick. Slap. The smooth emptiness of the bed behind him is devastating.

The door swings silently when I nudge it with my shoulder, and then I step inside. One step, one breath, and the thing I've been holding down for the last ten days rears and slashes, and, just that quick, part of me is severed away, gone forever. Oliver raises his head, tosses one album on top of the pile to his left, then picks up another from the stack at his right.

"That first whiff, it tears you," he says, the album flopping open across his legs. I bend forward and set one of the bottles on the carpeting in front of him, then wobble to the floor. It's been a while since we were in this room together. Three weeks. A month, maybe. I look around at all the stuff on the walls, the stuff on the shelves. The magpie's plunder, I call it. Leaves and stones. Bits of colored glass and chain and twisted metal. A jar of buttons. A blue bulb, discarded from a strand of Christmas lights, which she pocketed on the roof top. The beautiful, random flotsam that caught her eye. I feel as if I should be perched on the bottom shelf, right between the tea cup with the hand-painted dancing mice and the owl's skull she pulled from inside a fallen log one day in the woods. I am part of her rubble; a chance, found object she picked up and took home on a quirk.

But then I drop my eyes to Oliver- sought, pored over, deliberated Oliver- and a surge of unmitigated envy rips through my core. I want to grab him. I want to shake the things she left with him right out of his body. I want to destroy the obscene serenity in which he sits on her floor. I want to carve the truth from him, piece by fucking piece, then grab it up and hoard it away.

Instead, I take a sip of my drink, then one shallow breath, and begin.

"You knew," I say. "You knew all along."

He stops flipping pages, leans forward and grasps the neck of the beer bottle between two hooked fingers, then leans back. He tilts the bottle to his lips, takes three long swallows, then sets it at his side. His eyes never leave the spot on the floor in front of him.

"Right. You wanna do this, now? Yeah, I knew."

"'S one hell of a secret. How long, then?"

"Since October." He looks down and to the side. His fingers curl against the cover of the album. "She found out in early October."

Four months. One whole third of a year. She never said a word. To me. This is what it's like to have one's skin stripped off, everything too loose and red-raw. Still, I've set the tone of this conversation, and there's nothing for it now but to attempt to sound hard and press on.

"And all… that," I nod toward the bed, "there were discussions beforehand? Plans?"

Oliver breathes out hard through his nose, staring straight forward. He doesn't want to do this, but I can tell he feels he owes it to me, the truth. Gryffindors and their sodding overblown sense of honour.

"One discussion. One plan. If you can call it that." He slams the album closed and pushes it to the side, then draws his legs up and drapes his arms over his knees. "What would you have done, Dru? The one thing she'd ever asked. Would you have made it happen, or would you have said no?"

The question is redundant. We both remember I didn't say no. How could I? Katie stood at my bedroom door in that white terry cloth dressing gown. The one with the stupid little cat and its bowl of milk embroidered on the back. Katie. Sweet. So damn sweet. Absolutely guileless. Care to join us, Dru? As if I'd only walked in on the two of them sitting on the sofa, scarfing a take-away. She was nervous when she took my hands. Shaking. But she pulled me down the hall and into her room. She undressed me with her hot, trembling fingers, then led me to her bed where Oliver waited. You don't have to do anything. Just let me…and then she put her lips on my chest, her slow molten tongue.

I should have seen then, only unfathomable circumstances could allow such liberty. But my brilliant arse didn't work it all out until I was Flooing to St. Mungo's, Katie's rag doll body burning through mine.

I rub my hands over my face, then glance up to find him looking at me. This in itself is unsettling. Oliver and I don't look at each other. At least, not so the other one knows it. We both look at Katie or just squeeze our eyes shut. We don't talk, we don't touch if we can help it, and we don't gaze at each other. Those are the rules.

Even so, across Katie's shoulder, I have learnt many things about Oliver Wood. I know the way his cheeks hollow over his jaws when he's kissing Katie deep. I can plot the scars on his torso and predict which ones will grow florid and which will wash out white when his skin is flushed. I've watched the same muscles that flex solid, gathering enough force to launch a Quaffle clear across the pitch, swell in slow, sinuous rhythm with the subtle motion of his fingers. I've felt his breath rush over my shoulders and neck as Katie makes him come.

Images, sounds. I know he has his own store, and I can only assume that, like me, he's not quite sure what to do with them, yet. It's a relief when he turns back to the photos. I am ill-equipped to deal with the weight of Oliver's eyes.

He stops flipping and I look to see why. The photo, a group in Quidditch robes, is creased down the middle, crinkled all across. I can't make out the faces, but he's staring, so it must be one of the old Gryffindor teams. "You in that one?" I take a drink.

"My last year. We won the cup." His voice is flat, the initial glory of the feat faded, lost. But there's also the scant undercurrent of something else, something like regret, and because I'm a resentful bastard, I just can't let it pass.

"Did you ever think of her after you'd gone?" I'm twisting the knife, but I need to know how long ago this began for him, if he could possibly have loved her longer than I have.

He takes the picture from its corner mounts and brings it closer to his face. "She was just a kid when I left."

"Just a kid," I take another drink, "but a kid who fancied you."

He raises his head, looks straight into my eyes. "What's on your mind ,Dru? Spit it out."

"Nothing. Just, a bloke like you, Quidditch captain, Big Man in the Tower, and you couldn't tell when some fourth year had a crush on you?"

"She was never just 'some fourth year'. She was my teammate, my friend." He picks up his bottle and gives it a swirl. "And, yeah, I thought about her."

"So the first time she was in St. Mungo's, you must have flown right over, then?" I am truly an insufferable prick.

His eyes narrow, and I brace myself for the impact, but then he just clamps his lips together and shakes his head. "Fuck you, Dru." He turns his face from me. I watch the knot in his jaw jump and twitch.

He can't see where this is coming from, can't know that he has been the bane of my days for the last two years. Ever since she and her camera took the position in Sports and she first mentioned his name. That day, I kept reminding myself of old Flitwick's lecture on the theory of Summoning; that humans, as sentient, soulful beings could not be charmed to come at the will of another. I kept telling myself he wouldn't necessarily show up just because his name held the sound of something sacred as it slipped through her lips. Still, I lived in dread. And then it happened, and it was so much worse than I thought it would be. They completely skipped the pub-and-getting-to-know-you bit. Instead, she was suddenly gone round his for days at a time, and when she came home, she was different. She smelled different. Not in the superficial way of soap or perfume, but molecularly, more her, as if being with Oliver concentrated her down to the essence- a Katie absolute. I never said a word to her about the two of them, except once, joking, but not really- So, is it love or Stockholm syndrome? Ha ha. Perhaps a bit of both, she'd said, and I just smiled along with her and wished I'd never asked.

I look at him while he's turned away; take in his sheer breadth, the distinct, corded anatomy of his neck, the faint, wet shine of his eyes. And I realise, hurting him, it doesn't feel the way I wanted it to. There's no triumph here, no release, only a sense of being very far from anything good.

I've felt this way before. After the Battle, I dropped out of this world to skid along the fringes of the other. I was well close to slipping away completely, but then Katie, this girl I had once worked with for a few months at the Prophet, found me under a gazebo in Regent's Park and shook me awake. One day, she turned out my pockets and dropped my pipe to the ground. Say goodbye to your little glass cock. And then there was a grinding noise, and the tsk of healers, and my mum weeping, and a long stay in the Institutional Green room, and then Katie brought me here, and this is where I stayed.

I never thought that being still would lead me to where I now sit; sick with grief on a dead girl's floor, tearing at Oliver because she loved him, because he loved her back.

He folds the picture he took from the album, then leans to the side and stuffs it into the back pocket of his trousers. He pushes himself up, kneels, then hesitates one moment before shoving the first bunch of albums back into the darkness under the bed. I know if I let him go, he'll never come back. Katie. She wouldn't want me to leave it like this.

I don't want to leave it like this.

"I know what you came for," I say, my voice so low he has to listen. I gesture at the albums. "They're not in here."

He stops, still crouching, fingers spread taut and sinking into the carpeting. His tongue darts over his lips. "You have them?" He says, his eyes frozen to the floor.

I stand and walk blindly to my room. Away from her doorway, the dark is impenetrable, but I know the envelope lies on the seat of my desk chair, just inside the door. I reach down. The paper is cool and smooth and silent, the contents inside packed tight. At the end of my arm, the weight of it is my own rope for the gallows, my axe for the executioner. I stumble back down the hallway and step into the light.

Oliver stands next to the bed, the floor around him clear but for the bottle I offered earlier. I move dumbly across the room to stand at his side then hold the envelope out for him to take. He lifts it from my hand, turns it over, and sees it's unsealed.

"Have you seen these?" He asks, and even though he's not looking at me, I shake my head 'no'. He opens the flap and plunges his fingers inside. He pulls all the prints out in one stack, and then, dealing from the top, slowly spreads them over the bed.

She had hidden the cameras amongst the most innocuous things; on the windowsill beside a ball of yarn, draped with a half-knitted mitten, on the dresser beneath a wadded night shirt, in the lap of a black teddy bear, propped on a stack of books at the back of her desk. We knew they were there, but disguised in her bits of chicanery, they somehow seemed less ominous, less like parental eyes boring down. Still, when she crawled onto Oliver then reached back for me, I think we all felt a little shy, as if it were the first time all over again.

I stare as he throws down print after print. I stare at her hands clutching his neck and waist, at a tangle of knees and thighs, at her hair plummeting over my shoulder. I stare at his fingers stroking her neck, mine curling against her stomach, hers pushing into my hair. Hips and chests. The swift, coy appearance of one pale pink nipple. Bodies. Bodies in black and grey. Bodies in gauzy, unsaturated colour. No faces. Not until the very last print. Oliver pauses over it, lets out one wavering breath, then drops it down onto the centre of the bed.

It's us, all of us. Katie in the middle, eyes closed, Oliver's bottom lip caught gently between her teeth. His head tips back, hair glistening, dark with sweat, his half open eyes locked onto hers, while I lean forward, my fingers threading through her hair, holding it away so I can lay my lips on her spine.

And we are ensnared. As captivated as Narcissus on the edge of the still, reflective water. We look and look and look. Forever, we look. Until I can feel the damp hair drawing up against my neck. Until I have to open my mouth to catch a proper breath. Until Oliver pulls at his collar and tilts his head to one side fast, his spine grinding against the base of his skull. We look until we are nothing but two febrile, pulsing skins- instinct driven animals sniffing the air, and finding the familiar fused scent of the three of us: the herbal mint of the shampoo she and I shared, the trapped smoke and flowers of her incense, the green tang of his soap.

He moves, and the backs of our hands bump together. His fingers twitch against mine and, before I can think on it, I've turned my palm and pressed it to the inside of his wrist, needing to feel the Katie-rich blood beat beneath his skin.

He's still for a four count, and then we turn at the same time, our chests thumping together. And then Oliver's face is buried in my hairline, and his breath is burning my neck, and my shirt is coming over my head, and there's a lot of pushing that feels like pulling until I'm pinned against the window, and still he's pushing, pushing until the February night is slicing through the glass, and we're going to bust through, so I arch and push back, grabbing his hair and pulling until I can take his lips and his bread and water tongue and extract every last kiss that Katie wouldn't give me- because there are no rules now, no rules for where our hands may go, no rules for fingers so deft at buckles, and buttons, and zips- and we both grasp and tug, missing the gentle, fragrant body that should be between us, but still pulling each other closer and closer, trying to close this abyss that's opened up, pulling until my head cracks hard against the window pane, pulling until his teeth sink into my shoulder and his stomach clenches tight behind my knuckles.

Our chests slide together, and I can feel his ribs vibrate with every punch of his heart. I would open my eyes, but I don't want to see how far we've come from the place where all this started.

Finally, he lifts his head and leans his neck into mine. A bead of warmth drips onto my back, once, then twice, and then I feel all the air leave his body in one big shuddering breath. And we stay like this for a long time, leaned against each other, both knowing it's truly over, both feeling the futility of this last failed ritual to raise the dead.