The clock ticks and the violins swell with emotion and their shells crack, flooding the room with a cacophany of sound. Everyone sits squarely on their chairs, poised, hands clutched on their laps. Every left leg is flung haphazardly over the right leg; they twitch only at the final break of orchestra. The musicians ramble on eerily, their arms thrusting in the air emphatically, their fingers pirouetting over the busy bows of violin.

Draco stretches lazily at the back of the room, a cracking sound as he rotates his neck in the silence. Everyone pointedly turns their attention away as Draco takes the arm of the person next to him -- Harry Potter. "Potter," he says in a stage whisper, "Time to go." He taps at his bony wrist, where a watch does not exist.

Hary continues to stiffly stare ahead. His messy black hair sticks out in tufts, where he hasn't brushed. A sunburn has started on the side of his forehead, flaking into his scar; he has never tanned pretty. Only the sporadic twitching of his fingers belie the outward calm of his exterior; the darting of his nervous green eyes. Pizzicato, pizzicato.

Up front, the maestro heals the violins' shells and the bows dance upon the strings again. Music bleeds brightly. From the window, the light changes, the room is flooded with sun, and Harry's hair turns a shade less jet-black, so tiny a change that noticing it makes your mouth hurt. Draco glares; he rubs his mouth.

In the pause, the musicians rustle their papers. Their fingers ready for the next measure. "Harry," Draco purrs, changing his tactics. He leans in so he faces Harry's face, and then softly brushes his lips against them. His arm snakes under Harry's. Harry jolts away from the blockade of angles, and his glasses, already disrupted by Draco's bump of nose, tumble off his face and rattles onto the floor.

The music becomes sad. A lady near the back starts to cry, dabbing her eyes and cheeks with the handkerchief of the person seated next to her. Nobody ever wants to leave this room. Nobody. Except Draco, who is bored now, who is sullenly kicking around Harry's pair of glasses, hoping that the sharp toe of his shoes might scratch the lenses, discolate a screw, break the handle. He wants Harry to cry out for them. If not for him, then for the circles of glass between Draco's feet. He'll leave some imprint on Harry's world, some blight on the perfection of aided sight. You'll see.

Of course. One could always mend the glasses with a flick of a wand, a whispered incantation... but Draco doesn't like to think about that, about how easy it is for all of Them to restore and remake. No. He likes to take what he can get, like this --he kicks viciously, the glasses scrape and squeak--and this. The glasses break.

He doesn't know that Harry likes the sight of fuzzy images; of everyone's outlines softening into muted colors and murmurs. He doesn't know that Harry has considered the quiet peace of not having to focus. The clunk of notes shifting against notes fill every inch of the air, till everyone is left agasp for breath, clutching the arms of their chairs like it is their last life.

His fingers are cold, Draco realizes. His eyebrows draw together and he slumps in his chair, interrupting the perfection of the room's posture. Next to him, Harry breathes.