.. Morning Song ..
Once upon a Saturday afternoon, Arthur Weasley stood in the dusty hole of a shop that was Ollivanders. The shop never changed, and was today as it had always been since Weasley himself had been in with his parents to buy his very first wand. Mounds of slender boxes were piled around on shelves, the desk, that decrepit old chair which had been there always, sitting patiently in the corner, since Weasley was eleven; a fine layer of dust coated everything in a surreal mist of cobwebs.
"Well, well, Arthur, good to see you again so soon," came a thin voice from behind a stack of boxes. A moment later, the great misty eyes of Oliver Ollivander were peering at Weasley, and an old, spindly gentleman who seemed saturated with dust stepped around the boxes, dressed in moth-eaten red velvet trousers and waistcoat, and a yellowed shirt with ruffles at the throat. "Come to replace your wand? Let's see, yes, ten inches of maple and dragon heartstring, is it?"
He scuttled off to find the box, but Weasley stopped him at once, saying, "No, no, it's not for me." His ears turned quite pink, and Ollivander turned back, his craggy white eyebrows raised into his fly-away white hair.
"Oh?"
"It's Molly's birthday - she's tried convincing me we can't afford it, but I know her wand is quite old now, and I thought - "
"Ah, Molly, yes. Holly and unicorn hair, six inches? Of course. She always has had such small hands." Weasley nodded, and Ollivander disappeared from sight in the faint light.
He returned with an especially dusty box in one hand and another box, wooden and polished to reflect the world around it in its wine-colored grain. Weasley took in his breath sharply, and Ollivander smiled proudly as he transferred the wand from the old box to the new.
"Oh, Mr. Ollivander, I couldn't possibly - "
"Nonsense, Arthur, take it. I insist. For a woman such as Molly, presentation is everything." He slipped the beautiful box into a soft black bag.
"How much do I owe you?"
"Six Galleons," replied the old man, busying himself with the great heavy book on his desk. Weasley carefully counted the gold coins in the palm of his hand, closing the money bag tied to his belt securely before dropping the coins into Ollivander's leathery hands.
"I can't begin to thank you, Mr. Ollivander." His wet grey eyes were shining as he took the bag with both hands. "Really."
Ollivander waved a hand. "It's nothing. Tell me, Arthur, how are things at the Ministry?"
At once, Weasley's pleased smile faltered. "We're - holding together." He tucked the bag under his arm and turned to go out. At the door, he paused, and looked back at Ollivander, whose old face was creased with troubled lines. "Between us, sir, be prepared. Something is coming, people are saying. Something quite big," he said darkly, letting the bell on the door tinkle softly on his way out.
Florean Fortescue was a tall man with wiry grey hair combed off of his long, wrinkled face. His ever-present smile curled up under a very large, very bushy handlebar mustache that he could wiggle back and forth quite effectively. He had small blue eyes that sparkled, and most days he wore a white vest with thick red stripes running vertically down the front.
As a young man, Fortescue had studied at a small wizarding school in the States. He was fascinated by the witch burnings of the medieval times, and knew a great deal about them; he believed some of the present work of dark witches and wizards a result of a long-held grudge toward those ignorant Muggles of old. He had also studied in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, though he loved to travel and had been to even the most neglected corners of the world.
Fortescue was also very fond of children, and because of this, he tended to cheerfully dole out free ice cream to any child sitting by him or herself in his parlor.
The ice cream parlor itself was a clean, white building next to Flourish and Blotts in the Alley, with a pretty terrace in front with half a dozen small tables under large red-and-white striped umbrellas.
On Saturday, he was standing at the door of the parlor, watching a family with several small children fondly, when he noticed an older boy walking alone down the street. His hands were empty and shoved deeply into the pockets of his jeans, emerging only to push is glasses up the bridge of his nose every so often.
"Harry! Good afternoon," called Fortescue happily, and the boy looked up in surprise.
"Hello, Mr. Fortescue. How's business?"
So polite, thought the old man. He smiled broadly under his mustache. "Fine, fine, my boy. Say, how would you like an ice cream? We've a new flavor in just for the day, it's called Berry Bramble Boomer, very popular among all the kids your age. Your friends all stopped in this morning for a scoop ."
"No, thank you, Mr. Fortescue." Harry pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, a crease between his eyebrows and a frown dipping his face slightly. "I'll be eating with the Weasleys in just a little while."
"Good, good; but that's too bad, son, the ice cream's a treat. Tell you what, Harry, you can come back later and I'll save you a bowl. How does that sound?"
The boy's smile did not reach his eyes. "That would be very nice of you, sir. Thank you."
"Are you shopping for school supplies today?"
"Yes, with Siri - with my godfather. He went on ahead to the bookstore while I stopped in at Gringotts for spending money." Harry glanced at his watch, then looked back at Fortescue. "I've got to get going, actually, but thank you for the ice cream. I'll come back after I've eaten."
"Oh, yes, of course. Stop by whenever you can make it," Fortescue beamed. "It's always nice to see you, Harry. You're welcome any time, any time at all."
"Good-bye, Mr. Fortescue."
"Good-bye, Harry, and take care of yourself."
"I will."
Fortescue watched the boy make his way back out to the street and disappear amid the plethora of other shoppers milling about. He shook his head; today Harry had seemed more sullen and quiet than usual, much less cheerful.
Perhaps, the old man thought, we should all pay more attention to the boy, and much less to Harry Potter.
When Neville Longbottom was a small boy, he loved to come to Diagon Alley with his Gran and sit at her feet in the tiny bakery facing Eeyelops Owl Emporium as she ordered her bread for the week. She and the owner of the tiny shop were old friends, schoolmates from times long past.
Now the kind old shopkeeper had retired, and his son ran the shop. The son was a ruddy-cheeked young man with a curly mop of blond hair that fell over his face and warm brown eyes, and when Neville and his Gran came in, he would offer them cups of tea and warm muffins or cookies. He asked Neville how school was, and they would talk for a bit while the man wrapped the chosen bread and pastries for them. Sometimes he put an extra treacle tart into the bag for Neville, but more often he would bring up a warm pumpkin pasty, or a fresh doughnut glazed with a fine sugar frost.
Today Neville's Gran left him to be fitted for new school robes in Madam Malkin's comfortable shop while she retrieved the baked goods. As he stood on the little stool, his robes being pinned to the correct length, he watched shoppers through the window as they walked from shop to shop together, laughing and talking amiably.
There was a young girl trailing a toy hippogriff behind her as she held her mother's hand; a pair of elderly witches strolled past, their arms laden with bags from this store or that; a young man pulling a large hooded cage on a trolley beside him; a girl roughly his own age, whose hair was plentiful and bushy brown, holding hands with a tall boy with red hair and a freckled face, Hermione and Ron out for the afternoon. The rest of the Weasleys were probably somewhere nearby, in the bookshop or goggling at the new broom in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
He absently wondered why Harry wasn't with them, but was distracted when one of Madam Malkin's magicked pins stuck him sharply in the ankle.
For the first time in ten years, Bill Weasley cut his hair. It was now clipped neatly below his ears, and he wore it off his face in a tangle of red curls.
Molly Weasley was thrilled. She hovered over him like a shadow, admiring the new length and asking if he wouldn't perhaps consider cutting it even shorter, like Percy's, dear?
"No, Mum," he insisted, shooing her away with one large, freckled hand. "It's too short as it is, I think, and believe me when I say that I'll not cut it again!"
He already regretted cutting his lovely long curls, and it had only been a handful of days; but he had done it for Dahl, who convinced him that shorter hair was by far sexier than a ratty long ponytail.
After all, Bill reasoned unhappily, once he and Dahl broke up (and he was sure that, yes, one day, they would break up), he would be not only without a boyfriend but also without his beloved hair. So why had he agreed to it in the first place? Ah, yes, Dahl's infamous power of . persuasion. Of course.
Dahl was small and American, with sharp dark eyes and short, glossy black hair. They shared a flat in wizarding Cairo, several blocks from the tiny café where Dahl waited tables. The café was also quite close to Gringotts, the towering sand-colored stone building looking as though it had been made with the pyramids (it probably had, Bill often reminded himself), where Bill worked.
Bill liked Dahl because he was small, because he often said the things everyone in a given room was thinking but no one said, and because he was soft and warm between the cool sheets in the dead of night. Dahl said he liked Bill because he was tall and British, because he was quiet, and because he made the best ham-cheese-and-mushroom omelets south of Amsterdam.
For two weeks Bill was on holiday and visiting his parents in Britain, in the ramshackle little house outside of Ottery St. Catchpole where he had grown up. His mother had fixed up his old bedroom, and he slept there. He found himself Apparating every few days to spend time with Dahl at night, when the oppressiveness of the night grew to be too heavy to bear in a bed by himself.
Presently he sprawled in a chair in a tiny café not unlike Dahl's in Cairo, cradling a cup of hot coffee between his long fingers. Somewhere, a clock announced the hour in high, brassy tones, and he sighed into his coffee steam.
His mum would be expecting him at the Leaky Cauldron soon, where the family was eating with Harry Potter and Ron's girlfriend. He should have been able to remember her name, but it had been years since he had last seen any of Ron's classmates, let alone one specific girl he happened to fancy.
As Bill gulped the last of his coffee and shrugged into his jacket, he looked around the little café carelessly, his grey eyes trailing over old lady couples stirring at their tea, balding men playing chess alone, young witches and wizards like himself who drank their coffee alone and shut the rest of the place out of their mind. Nothing very remarkable for a little café such as this.
There was one table far off in a corner, however, which caught his eye. With his back to Bill, a well-groomed man with a poker-straight back was conversing heatedly, though in very low tones, with what must have been his son, the pair looked so alike. The father figure seemed vaguely familiar to Bill, but he couldn't name that pale and pointed face.
He dropped several coins onto his table and left.
"Sugar for your tea, Harry?"
Harry blinked down the table at Molly Weasley, who was holding out the yellow sugar bowl toward him with a blankly cheerful expression in her warm eyes. It took him a moment to force a smile to his chapped lips, saying, "No, thank you, Mrs Weasley."
They had been brought their supper, vegetable soup with rich broth and tender hunks of meat, in a tarnished old pot, fresh loaves of bread on thick slabs of some unrecognizable grey stone, and iced tea in wooden goblets carved with little owls and cats and brooms. It smelled delicious, but Harry's appetite was somewhat lacking for some nagging reason he could not place.
"How was everyone's day?" asked Arthur, a twitchy smile pinned beneath his nose. There was an unenthused collective murmur among those seated at the long wooden table in a corner of the Leaky Cauldron, but Arthur seemed satisfied with this.
At one end, Bill dipped his spoon idly into his soup again and again, paying little heed to the excited chatter between the twins around him; Percy polished his glasses in between spoonfuls, scowling as he did at the "absolute grime of this place" compared to his sterile flat in London, into which he had moved the previous spring. Arthur twitched through meal, pausing now and again to look around at everyone with that careful smile in place.
The other end of the table was host to Molly, who was caught up in tales of Ron and Hermione's afternoon in the Alley (including a detailed account of their encounter with Draco Malfoy, who had been studying the newest racing broom in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies until they came in), and Ginny, who sat up very straight and ate very little as she asked Harry to pass this or that to her, seeming quite thrilled when he did without a word.
And somewhere in between, Charlie devoured bowl after bowl of the steaming soup, a bright pink new burn stretching from his knuckle to well beyond his wrist on one arm, occasionally looking up to nudge Percy and say, "Steady on, there, Perce, if you keep that up, you'll wipe away the very lenses on those things," and start in on his fourth bowl of soup or sevent hunk of delicious thick white bread. And Harry, sitting on the rough bench between George and Ron, listened quietly to Ron's excited monologue, spattered with corrections from Hermione across the table.
".You should have seen the look on his face, it was priceless. Say, Harry, it reminded me of the time I got Malfoy outside of the Great Hall after breakfast that day, the day it was raining?" Ron's cheeks where pink with excitement as he spoke, his eyes like chips of sunlight as the candle flames reflected in their wet depths. "I told him off that day, it's a shame you weren't there then, either."
"I was there," said Harry, a crease appearing in his brow. "I told him he was bound to go to hell, and - "
"Oh, but it was great," babbled Ron, looking at Hermione with a simpering and dazed expression. "Hey, remember when."
Harry sighed into his half-eaten bowl of soup. In a moment of sudden self- conciousness, he pressed a hand to his stomach below the table. He had lost a lot of weight this summer, he realized, for one reason or the next. Between completing his Dursley-given chores, studying late into the night, and practicing Quidditch alone in the park just before the sun rose, he often forgot to eat, or chose not to for an extra twenty minutes on his broom. Surely if he took off his shirt he would be able to easily count every rib he had, and fully clothed he knew his face appeared gaunt and hollow. Not that any of the Weasleys would have noticed, of course, but Harry had.
He was glad the fall term would soon be starting, and he would be back in the castle before he knew it. It was difficult for him to sleep without the heavy shadow of the canopy above his bed, its long curtains draping around him in a safe tent of red velvet and gold ribbon along the bottom. At the Dursleys, he could ignore the lack of curtains, facing the wall instead; but in Ron's bedroom, the tangerine explosion of wallpaper was an eyesore, much too bright even in the darkest of nights. He missed the throb of noises at meals, and the dry, antique smell of the place, as though the morter between each brick was rotting away into nothing under his very nostrils.
"Boy, Malfoy won't be able to live this one down ."
He even missed Malfoy, and the thrills of animosity which ran between them at every meeting. He missed the constant sparring, the wordplay and bickering they shared. He certainly missed the hours of detention made worthwhile because he, Harry Potter, had won the battle that day.
Harry felt suddenly very ill, and asked to be excused.
Late that night, in his bedroom in the Malfoy's summer house, Lucius Draco Malfoy IV lay across the width of his enormous bed, his pale feet flat on the cold marble floor. His eyes were closed, his fringe ruffled by a breeze wafting through the pair of glass doors across the room, which stood open in the moonlight. His shirt, a pristine white confection with pearl buttons and scads of ruffles down the front, was unbuttoned, its tails untucked and wrinkled on the silken green spread. As he breathed, the length of his milk- white torso heaved lightly, his nipples a strangely pink contrast to all the white surrounding them.
Farther up on the bed, beneath the summer-weight spread, lay a nameless youth with a quite unremarkable face dusted with pale freckles, naked as the day he was born and his face in the shadows, turned away from the doors and their pirouetting gauzy curtains. Draco had chosen him from all the rest of the guests, whose names he had not bothered to remember, because of his curls, sweetly brown ringlets hanging over his eyes, quite unruly. He had chosen him, this little cherub whose cheeks were still round with youth, whose eyes had not yet beheld the cruelness of this world or any other, because he knew the child could not have turned him down. Sticky, sweaty palms of hands, a blank and nervous smile; pink flesh beneath it all, waiting for Draco's lips.
Draco forever enjoyed the parties his mother put on for him, for beyond the traditional list of simpering Slytherins in his own year, his father sent out gilded invitations to every beautifully sculpted young pureblood witch and wizard of reputable age he could find, from handfuls of countries across Europe, and several from the States, as well; and from these pretty little things, Draco could take his pick. Years ago, he had chosen a girl his own age, whose blushing pink complexion and pretty yellow hair tied up in ribbons made her look much younger than she was, and the year before last it had been a thin Slovakian child with round blue eyes and dark hair.
Last year, he had surprised his father and taken a Scandanavian chap nearly twice his age, tall and blond and lithe. Lucius had been expecting him to choose a fellow he had invited in particular, a boy Draco's age, because he was from a family just as powerful and perhaps just as feared as Lucius' own. And also because he was pretty, with red hair pulled up in curls behind his ears, dazzling eyes so blue they seemed violet in most lights, and a delicious, contemptuously mean look smeared beneath his brow. Especially candlelight, it seemed, the boy was pretty, and Lucius had requested the house-elves fix candles around in every room.
Draco thought about this as he lay across his bed, listening to the boy at the other end of the mattress draw breath into his lungs and exhale again, wondering if this child from Burmingham would ever amount to anything as substantial as being heir to the Malfoy fortunes. He sat up, his shirt slipping over his flesh like silk, though it was not, and pooling at his waist; he looked at the boy, whose curls fell across his face in a strangely tragic mask of light and shadow, and he wondered very carefully why this of all creatures downstairs had caught his eye.
He allowed himself to steal toward the boy on the silken spread, melting into the moonlight from the high windows and open doors, one hand spreading flat before the next, retracting and clawing forward before spreading flat again, again, again. It struck him just how large his bed truly was.
Innocence, he decided, holding himself delicately over the sleeping cherub. Bone structure, birdlike, within such softly infantile skin - an unobtrusive nose, but masculine and striking. This light, pliable frame, which Draco had surely seen somewhere before and admired from afar, though now he could not place it. The hair, the unruly curls, which were still unmarred and fine, a trait Draco admired and still posessed himself; but the importance was the untidy sprawl of every last ring in the halo -
The boy was awake. His eyes had opened slowly, lethargicly, blinking with fatigue and confusion. Wet, green, fringed with dark lashes any girl would envy.
"Oh, but your eyes, cherub." Draco sighed, his pallid eyelids fluttering as he blanketed himself over the child, whose precious damp lips pressed hotly against Draco's high cheekbones, the corner of Draco's mouth.
And Draco, slipping into the tingling, dizzy heat of his arousal, forgot about those velvet eyes which had so vehemently reminded him.
[from my computer to yours, with love] .
Once upon a Saturday afternoon, Arthur Weasley stood in the dusty hole of a shop that was Ollivanders. The shop never changed, and was today as it had always been since Weasley himself had been in with his parents to buy his very first wand. Mounds of slender boxes were piled around on shelves, the desk, that decrepit old chair which had been there always, sitting patiently in the corner, since Weasley was eleven; a fine layer of dust coated everything in a surreal mist of cobwebs.
"Well, well, Arthur, good to see you again so soon," came a thin voice from behind a stack of boxes. A moment later, the great misty eyes of Oliver Ollivander were peering at Weasley, and an old, spindly gentleman who seemed saturated with dust stepped around the boxes, dressed in moth-eaten red velvet trousers and waistcoat, and a yellowed shirt with ruffles at the throat. "Come to replace your wand? Let's see, yes, ten inches of maple and dragon heartstring, is it?"
He scuttled off to find the box, but Weasley stopped him at once, saying, "No, no, it's not for me." His ears turned quite pink, and Ollivander turned back, his craggy white eyebrows raised into his fly-away white hair.
"Oh?"
"It's Molly's birthday - she's tried convincing me we can't afford it, but I know her wand is quite old now, and I thought - "
"Ah, Molly, yes. Holly and unicorn hair, six inches? Of course. She always has had such small hands." Weasley nodded, and Ollivander disappeared from sight in the faint light.
He returned with an especially dusty box in one hand and another box, wooden and polished to reflect the world around it in its wine-colored grain. Weasley took in his breath sharply, and Ollivander smiled proudly as he transferred the wand from the old box to the new.
"Oh, Mr. Ollivander, I couldn't possibly - "
"Nonsense, Arthur, take it. I insist. For a woman such as Molly, presentation is everything." He slipped the beautiful box into a soft black bag.
"How much do I owe you?"
"Six Galleons," replied the old man, busying himself with the great heavy book on his desk. Weasley carefully counted the gold coins in the palm of his hand, closing the money bag tied to his belt securely before dropping the coins into Ollivander's leathery hands.
"I can't begin to thank you, Mr. Ollivander." His wet grey eyes were shining as he took the bag with both hands. "Really."
Ollivander waved a hand. "It's nothing. Tell me, Arthur, how are things at the Ministry?"
At once, Weasley's pleased smile faltered. "We're - holding together." He tucked the bag under his arm and turned to go out. At the door, he paused, and looked back at Ollivander, whose old face was creased with troubled lines. "Between us, sir, be prepared. Something is coming, people are saying. Something quite big," he said darkly, letting the bell on the door tinkle softly on his way out.
Florean Fortescue was a tall man with wiry grey hair combed off of his long, wrinkled face. His ever-present smile curled up under a very large, very bushy handlebar mustache that he could wiggle back and forth quite effectively. He had small blue eyes that sparkled, and most days he wore a white vest with thick red stripes running vertically down the front.
As a young man, Fortescue had studied at a small wizarding school in the States. He was fascinated by the witch burnings of the medieval times, and knew a great deal about them; he believed some of the present work of dark witches and wizards a result of a long-held grudge toward those ignorant Muggles of old. He had also studied in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, though he loved to travel and had been to even the most neglected corners of the world.
Fortescue was also very fond of children, and because of this, he tended to cheerfully dole out free ice cream to any child sitting by him or herself in his parlor.
The ice cream parlor itself was a clean, white building next to Flourish and Blotts in the Alley, with a pretty terrace in front with half a dozen small tables under large red-and-white striped umbrellas.
On Saturday, he was standing at the door of the parlor, watching a family with several small children fondly, when he noticed an older boy walking alone down the street. His hands were empty and shoved deeply into the pockets of his jeans, emerging only to push is glasses up the bridge of his nose every so often.
"Harry! Good afternoon," called Fortescue happily, and the boy looked up in surprise.
"Hello, Mr. Fortescue. How's business?"
So polite, thought the old man. He smiled broadly under his mustache. "Fine, fine, my boy. Say, how would you like an ice cream? We've a new flavor in just for the day, it's called Berry Bramble Boomer, very popular among all the kids your age. Your friends all stopped in this morning for a scoop ."
"No, thank you, Mr. Fortescue." Harry pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, a crease between his eyebrows and a frown dipping his face slightly. "I'll be eating with the Weasleys in just a little while."
"Good, good; but that's too bad, son, the ice cream's a treat. Tell you what, Harry, you can come back later and I'll save you a bowl. How does that sound?"
The boy's smile did not reach his eyes. "That would be very nice of you, sir. Thank you."
"Are you shopping for school supplies today?"
"Yes, with Siri - with my godfather. He went on ahead to the bookstore while I stopped in at Gringotts for spending money." Harry glanced at his watch, then looked back at Fortescue. "I've got to get going, actually, but thank you for the ice cream. I'll come back after I've eaten."
"Oh, yes, of course. Stop by whenever you can make it," Fortescue beamed. "It's always nice to see you, Harry. You're welcome any time, any time at all."
"Good-bye, Mr. Fortescue."
"Good-bye, Harry, and take care of yourself."
"I will."
Fortescue watched the boy make his way back out to the street and disappear amid the plethora of other shoppers milling about. He shook his head; today Harry had seemed more sullen and quiet than usual, much less cheerful.
Perhaps, the old man thought, we should all pay more attention to the boy, and much less to Harry Potter.
When Neville Longbottom was a small boy, he loved to come to Diagon Alley with his Gran and sit at her feet in the tiny bakery facing Eeyelops Owl Emporium as she ordered her bread for the week. She and the owner of the tiny shop were old friends, schoolmates from times long past.
Now the kind old shopkeeper had retired, and his son ran the shop. The son was a ruddy-cheeked young man with a curly mop of blond hair that fell over his face and warm brown eyes, and when Neville and his Gran came in, he would offer them cups of tea and warm muffins or cookies. He asked Neville how school was, and they would talk for a bit while the man wrapped the chosen bread and pastries for them. Sometimes he put an extra treacle tart into the bag for Neville, but more often he would bring up a warm pumpkin pasty, or a fresh doughnut glazed with a fine sugar frost.
Today Neville's Gran left him to be fitted for new school robes in Madam Malkin's comfortable shop while she retrieved the baked goods. As he stood on the little stool, his robes being pinned to the correct length, he watched shoppers through the window as they walked from shop to shop together, laughing and talking amiably.
There was a young girl trailing a toy hippogriff behind her as she held her mother's hand; a pair of elderly witches strolled past, their arms laden with bags from this store or that; a young man pulling a large hooded cage on a trolley beside him; a girl roughly his own age, whose hair was plentiful and bushy brown, holding hands with a tall boy with red hair and a freckled face, Hermione and Ron out for the afternoon. The rest of the Weasleys were probably somewhere nearby, in the bookshop or goggling at the new broom in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
He absently wondered why Harry wasn't with them, but was distracted when one of Madam Malkin's magicked pins stuck him sharply in the ankle.
For the first time in ten years, Bill Weasley cut his hair. It was now clipped neatly below his ears, and he wore it off his face in a tangle of red curls.
Molly Weasley was thrilled. She hovered over him like a shadow, admiring the new length and asking if he wouldn't perhaps consider cutting it even shorter, like Percy's, dear?
"No, Mum," he insisted, shooing her away with one large, freckled hand. "It's too short as it is, I think, and believe me when I say that I'll not cut it again!"
He already regretted cutting his lovely long curls, and it had only been a handful of days; but he had done it for Dahl, who convinced him that shorter hair was by far sexier than a ratty long ponytail.
After all, Bill reasoned unhappily, once he and Dahl broke up (and he was sure that, yes, one day, they would break up), he would be not only without a boyfriend but also without his beloved hair. So why had he agreed to it in the first place? Ah, yes, Dahl's infamous power of . persuasion. Of course.
Dahl was small and American, with sharp dark eyes and short, glossy black hair. They shared a flat in wizarding Cairo, several blocks from the tiny café where Dahl waited tables. The café was also quite close to Gringotts, the towering sand-colored stone building looking as though it had been made with the pyramids (it probably had, Bill often reminded himself), where Bill worked.
Bill liked Dahl because he was small, because he often said the things everyone in a given room was thinking but no one said, and because he was soft and warm between the cool sheets in the dead of night. Dahl said he liked Bill because he was tall and British, because he was quiet, and because he made the best ham-cheese-and-mushroom omelets south of Amsterdam.
For two weeks Bill was on holiday and visiting his parents in Britain, in the ramshackle little house outside of Ottery St. Catchpole where he had grown up. His mother had fixed up his old bedroom, and he slept there. He found himself Apparating every few days to spend time with Dahl at night, when the oppressiveness of the night grew to be too heavy to bear in a bed by himself.
Presently he sprawled in a chair in a tiny café not unlike Dahl's in Cairo, cradling a cup of hot coffee between his long fingers. Somewhere, a clock announced the hour in high, brassy tones, and he sighed into his coffee steam.
His mum would be expecting him at the Leaky Cauldron soon, where the family was eating with Harry Potter and Ron's girlfriend. He should have been able to remember her name, but it had been years since he had last seen any of Ron's classmates, let alone one specific girl he happened to fancy.
As Bill gulped the last of his coffee and shrugged into his jacket, he looked around the little café carelessly, his grey eyes trailing over old lady couples stirring at their tea, balding men playing chess alone, young witches and wizards like himself who drank their coffee alone and shut the rest of the place out of their mind. Nothing very remarkable for a little café such as this.
There was one table far off in a corner, however, which caught his eye. With his back to Bill, a well-groomed man with a poker-straight back was conversing heatedly, though in very low tones, with what must have been his son, the pair looked so alike. The father figure seemed vaguely familiar to Bill, but he couldn't name that pale and pointed face.
He dropped several coins onto his table and left.
"Sugar for your tea, Harry?"
Harry blinked down the table at Molly Weasley, who was holding out the yellow sugar bowl toward him with a blankly cheerful expression in her warm eyes. It took him a moment to force a smile to his chapped lips, saying, "No, thank you, Mrs Weasley."
They had been brought their supper, vegetable soup with rich broth and tender hunks of meat, in a tarnished old pot, fresh loaves of bread on thick slabs of some unrecognizable grey stone, and iced tea in wooden goblets carved with little owls and cats and brooms. It smelled delicious, but Harry's appetite was somewhat lacking for some nagging reason he could not place.
"How was everyone's day?" asked Arthur, a twitchy smile pinned beneath his nose. There was an unenthused collective murmur among those seated at the long wooden table in a corner of the Leaky Cauldron, but Arthur seemed satisfied with this.
At one end, Bill dipped his spoon idly into his soup again and again, paying little heed to the excited chatter between the twins around him; Percy polished his glasses in between spoonfuls, scowling as he did at the "absolute grime of this place" compared to his sterile flat in London, into which he had moved the previous spring. Arthur twitched through meal, pausing now and again to look around at everyone with that careful smile in place.
The other end of the table was host to Molly, who was caught up in tales of Ron and Hermione's afternoon in the Alley (including a detailed account of their encounter with Draco Malfoy, who had been studying the newest racing broom in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies until they came in), and Ginny, who sat up very straight and ate very little as she asked Harry to pass this or that to her, seeming quite thrilled when he did without a word.
And somewhere in between, Charlie devoured bowl after bowl of the steaming soup, a bright pink new burn stretching from his knuckle to well beyond his wrist on one arm, occasionally looking up to nudge Percy and say, "Steady on, there, Perce, if you keep that up, you'll wipe away the very lenses on those things," and start in on his fourth bowl of soup or sevent hunk of delicious thick white bread. And Harry, sitting on the rough bench between George and Ron, listened quietly to Ron's excited monologue, spattered with corrections from Hermione across the table.
".You should have seen the look on his face, it was priceless. Say, Harry, it reminded me of the time I got Malfoy outside of the Great Hall after breakfast that day, the day it was raining?" Ron's cheeks where pink with excitement as he spoke, his eyes like chips of sunlight as the candle flames reflected in their wet depths. "I told him off that day, it's a shame you weren't there then, either."
"I was there," said Harry, a crease appearing in his brow. "I told him he was bound to go to hell, and - "
"Oh, but it was great," babbled Ron, looking at Hermione with a simpering and dazed expression. "Hey, remember when."
Harry sighed into his half-eaten bowl of soup. In a moment of sudden self- conciousness, he pressed a hand to his stomach below the table. He had lost a lot of weight this summer, he realized, for one reason or the next. Between completing his Dursley-given chores, studying late into the night, and practicing Quidditch alone in the park just before the sun rose, he often forgot to eat, or chose not to for an extra twenty minutes on his broom. Surely if he took off his shirt he would be able to easily count every rib he had, and fully clothed he knew his face appeared gaunt and hollow. Not that any of the Weasleys would have noticed, of course, but Harry had.
He was glad the fall term would soon be starting, and he would be back in the castle before he knew it. It was difficult for him to sleep without the heavy shadow of the canopy above his bed, its long curtains draping around him in a safe tent of red velvet and gold ribbon along the bottom. At the Dursleys, he could ignore the lack of curtains, facing the wall instead; but in Ron's bedroom, the tangerine explosion of wallpaper was an eyesore, much too bright even in the darkest of nights. He missed the throb of noises at meals, and the dry, antique smell of the place, as though the morter between each brick was rotting away into nothing under his very nostrils.
"Boy, Malfoy won't be able to live this one down ."
He even missed Malfoy, and the thrills of animosity which ran between them at every meeting. He missed the constant sparring, the wordplay and bickering they shared. He certainly missed the hours of detention made worthwhile because he, Harry Potter, had won the battle that day.
Harry felt suddenly very ill, and asked to be excused.
Late that night, in his bedroom in the Malfoy's summer house, Lucius Draco Malfoy IV lay across the width of his enormous bed, his pale feet flat on the cold marble floor. His eyes were closed, his fringe ruffled by a breeze wafting through the pair of glass doors across the room, which stood open in the moonlight. His shirt, a pristine white confection with pearl buttons and scads of ruffles down the front, was unbuttoned, its tails untucked and wrinkled on the silken green spread. As he breathed, the length of his milk- white torso heaved lightly, his nipples a strangely pink contrast to all the white surrounding them.
Farther up on the bed, beneath the summer-weight spread, lay a nameless youth with a quite unremarkable face dusted with pale freckles, naked as the day he was born and his face in the shadows, turned away from the doors and their pirouetting gauzy curtains. Draco had chosen him from all the rest of the guests, whose names he had not bothered to remember, because of his curls, sweetly brown ringlets hanging over his eyes, quite unruly. He had chosen him, this little cherub whose cheeks were still round with youth, whose eyes had not yet beheld the cruelness of this world or any other, because he knew the child could not have turned him down. Sticky, sweaty palms of hands, a blank and nervous smile; pink flesh beneath it all, waiting for Draco's lips.
Draco forever enjoyed the parties his mother put on for him, for beyond the traditional list of simpering Slytherins in his own year, his father sent out gilded invitations to every beautifully sculpted young pureblood witch and wizard of reputable age he could find, from handfuls of countries across Europe, and several from the States, as well; and from these pretty little things, Draco could take his pick. Years ago, he had chosen a girl his own age, whose blushing pink complexion and pretty yellow hair tied up in ribbons made her look much younger than she was, and the year before last it had been a thin Slovakian child with round blue eyes and dark hair.
Last year, he had surprised his father and taken a Scandanavian chap nearly twice his age, tall and blond and lithe. Lucius had been expecting him to choose a fellow he had invited in particular, a boy Draco's age, because he was from a family just as powerful and perhaps just as feared as Lucius' own. And also because he was pretty, with red hair pulled up in curls behind his ears, dazzling eyes so blue they seemed violet in most lights, and a delicious, contemptuously mean look smeared beneath his brow. Especially candlelight, it seemed, the boy was pretty, and Lucius had requested the house-elves fix candles around in every room.
Draco thought about this as he lay across his bed, listening to the boy at the other end of the mattress draw breath into his lungs and exhale again, wondering if this child from Burmingham would ever amount to anything as substantial as being heir to the Malfoy fortunes. He sat up, his shirt slipping over his flesh like silk, though it was not, and pooling at his waist; he looked at the boy, whose curls fell across his face in a strangely tragic mask of light and shadow, and he wondered very carefully why this of all creatures downstairs had caught his eye.
He allowed himself to steal toward the boy on the silken spread, melting into the moonlight from the high windows and open doors, one hand spreading flat before the next, retracting and clawing forward before spreading flat again, again, again. It struck him just how large his bed truly was.
Innocence, he decided, holding himself delicately over the sleeping cherub. Bone structure, birdlike, within such softly infantile skin - an unobtrusive nose, but masculine and striking. This light, pliable frame, which Draco had surely seen somewhere before and admired from afar, though now he could not place it. The hair, the unruly curls, which were still unmarred and fine, a trait Draco admired and still posessed himself; but the importance was the untidy sprawl of every last ring in the halo -
The boy was awake. His eyes had opened slowly, lethargicly, blinking with fatigue and confusion. Wet, green, fringed with dark lashes any girl would envy.
"Oh, but your eyes, cherub." Draco sighed, his pallid eyelids fluttering as he blanketed himself over the child, whose precious damp lips pressed hotly against Draco's high cheekbones, the corner of Draco's mouth.
And Draco, slipping into the tingling, dizzy heat of his arousal, forgot about those velvet eyes which had so vehemently reminded him.
[from my computer to yours, with love] .