Disclaimer:
The characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
The fic title paraphrases Kazuo Ishiguro's wonderful novel title An Artist of the Floating World.
Author's Note:
This is a Secret Santa fic I wrote for Tdei at the Armchair. Her Christmas wish was: "Lucius Malfoy/Gilderoy Lockhart. Nitpick detail: Lockhart has a lot more depth than portrayed in the book; his supposed shallowness is not due to vanity or fame. For example (if you have no idea what I'm talking about), he acts like a fluff because of schziophrenia, multiple-personality disorder, manipulated
memory (someone totally screwed with his mind; I've read a fic like that before O_o), insecurity, incredible acting (maybe he just likes to mess with people's minds, or he's spying, or checking on info), or _something_."
Tdei created an absolutely beautiful piece of fanart for this fic – a gorgeously dreamy-eyed Lucius. You can find it here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Armchair_Slash/files/Fan-Art/penguin_lm.jpg
Many thanks to my beta, Plumeria.
Author: Penguin
Title: A WIZARD OF THE SHINING WORLD
Gilderoy Lockhart stretches out his legs in front of him to savour the heat from the fire. Absent-mindedly he admires the fine wool fabric of his trousers, the shiny leather of his hand-made shoes, the heavy fall of his brand new, midnight blue velvet robes that he hasn't taken off after coming home from a particularly tiring afternoon. He smiles a little as he thinks back on his day. He can't even guess at how many copies of Magical Me he has signed since this morning. It's a wonderful thing to be adored, but so tiring. He flexes the fingers of his right hand and watches the diamond on his little finger sparkle icily in the firelight. Exhaustion is the price he has to pay to be able to afford things like this.
He rubs a hand across his face and massages his temples, closes his eyes and sees red shadows dance on the inside of his eyelids. It's not only the book signing that has made him tired. Before going to Flourish and Blotts, he attended a meeting, or rather an interview. At Hogwarts. He was asked to fill the DADA vacancy.
It was the first time he was back there since he left school. He was unprepared for the emotional impact it would have.
When he was first contacted about the job, he almost laughed at the idea. He, Gilderoy Lockhart, a schoolmaster? Did they really mean for him to spend his days trying to cram some sense and learning into the heads of a bunch of children, children who would probably be stunned and blinded by the very presence of a celebrity? But then he stopped to consider. And he found that handled the right way, this job might not be such a bad thing for him. He needn't stay long, but it will give him publicity and create goodwill.
And.
There is also the fact that a name was mentioned, a name that is enough, even now, to freeze his movements and quicken his heartbeat.
The name of Malfoy.
So. Gilderoy has accepted the job. And now he is having second thoughts. A risky decision, in many ways. He could very well be on his way to ruin everything he has so carefully built up over the years. He could very well be placing everything he owns and loves at risk, this very minute.
A tea tray comes dancing through the air and lands elegantly on the low table beside him with barely a sound, only a faint tinkle of china. Oh, the joy of having capable house elves. The tea is lightly aromatic, sweetly fragrant. Keemun. And there is a plate of the very thin star or heart shaped gingerbread and the sweet saffron-and-raisin rolls that are traditionally made for Christmas in Sweden, and that he learnt to love during his years studying Advanced Memory Charms there. He doesn't care about tradition; he eats them any time of year when he feels like it. The gingerbread is fragrant with cloves, cinnamon, ginger and allspice. He closes his eyes again and inhales the safe, secure smells of woodsmoke and spices and his own expensively discreet aftershave. He listens to the rain against the window panes.
But not even this can disperse the images in his mind. Images from Hogwarts, from long ago. Before he became what he is today.
---
For as long as he can remember, Gilderoy has lived in two worlds. They are not compatible. They interlock but he has never quite managed to make them fit together.
When did his world split up? When exactly did he begin to sense that what he could achieve on his own would not be enough to get him where he wanted? When did he begin to realise that his prettiness and blue eyes were not enough to get him the position, the reputation and the fame, that he craved more than anything?
His collected works are a collection of daydreams. Most people have daydreams, dreams where they are the centre of attention, where they are adored or feared. Where they break hearts, save lives, stun an audience; where they are heroes or princesses or world champions; where they are scathingly witty, blindingly beautiful, or courageous beyond belief. But not many people make daydreaming a way of life. Not many people step into their daydreams and turn them into reality. Reality of a kind.
Gilderoy's two worlds are very different from each other. There is the Trodden Beetle world, where everything is black and menacing and far too big, towering over him and threatening to crush him under its weight, paralyze him with his own uselessness and unworthiness and fear. And then there is the Shining World, where he is Gilderoy the Brave, Gilderoy the Beautiful, Gilderoy the Admired One. He holds on to the Shining World most of the time.
On Trodden Beetle days he is unable to move. He stays in bed with the duvet pulled up over his head, cowering under the dark forms leaning over him. The Trodden Beetle knows he is a fraud and a coward and an absolute nobody. The Trodden Beetle knows he is not worth anything to anyone, and he falls down into the dungeons of his soul, where the ugly beasts of Self-Loathing and Low Self-Esteem live. If they are not constantly fed with glamour, with praise and fame, they won't leave him alone. They won't let him sleep for noise, they will break their chains, and they will eat him.
So he has to feed them. He climbs up into the Shining World and finds food.
He needs other people for this. He needs to incorporate their achievements into his own life. So he steals their actions, steals their courage, and repays them with nothingness, placing white spots on their memory maps. Memory Charms are his stronghold, his forte. The Trodden Beetle may be a near-Squib, but the Shining One only has to lift his hand, and his Memory Charms will prove his power and his magical skills.
All these witches who worship him. All these witches who are ready to fall at his feet, to look up at him and to him, to swoon at his florid signature carelessly scribbled in a book or on a photograph. They will never guess. They only see the Shining One and they never guess at the Trodden Beetle. They melt under the warmth of his smile, and never guess that he doesn't want them.
There is only one person he has ever wanted. Just one.
* * *
Gilderoy sits on his bed in the Slytherin fifth-year boys' dorm, his back against the headboard, his chin on his knees. He is alone. The others are at dinner but he isn't hungry. The mere thought of having to go to the Great Hall and meet those icy blue eyes replaces any hunger he might have felt with a vague, uncomfortable nausea.
He shudders, and not only because the dorm is cold.
He has always been a bright child, pretty and smiling, the kind who can get away with anything if he only gets his timing right. Timing is something he learnt early. He can't even remember when he first realised that he could use his smile to his advantage, realised that the way he holds people's eyes with his own as he flashes his radiant smile makes them respond and drop their defences. He can't remember when he first learnt to smile at exactly the right moment. To let the smile start in his eyes, and then move it on to the corners of his mouth, and only then turn it on full blast. Not too soon, and not a fraction of a second too late. Another thing he learnt early is that blondness strikes a chord with most people. They connect it with an angelic personality, with beauty and light and light-heartedness. And blue eyes seem so honest. As if the colour of the sky in someone's eyes would guarantee the purity of his soul.
What is a pure soul? Is it one that has never been spattered with the black ink of a lie?
Gilderoy is fifteen years old, and he doesn't understand the word "lie". Reality is fickle – that is something he understands. That everyone has their own perception of reality, and this perception is what they call truth. And if truth is fickle, lying must be an equally arbitrary concept. What is a lie?
Many, many years later, as he sits in front of the fire thinking of his new job at Hogwarts, he still hasn't found a satisfactory definition.
---
Gilderoy is on his way from his last class for the week, Divination, to the Slytherin Common Room. He is still glowing from the praise that was lavished on him for his latest chart. He knows very well that the chart is proof of his vivid imagination rather than of any ability to see the future, but it seems to have impressed Professor Staehr. Gilderoy takes her praise for what it is – praise of his creative mind.
He walks fast; it's cold and he wants the fire in the Common Room. He rounds a corner, and collides headlong with a haughty, elegant upper-sixth student from his own House. The tall boy throws him a contemptuous glance and then stays to watch , with folded arms, as Gilderoy kneels to pick up the books that are scattered over the floor.
Gilderoy does not like Lucius Malfoy. Not that he knows him very well. But Lucius' sharp tongue and uncanny ability to be everywhere at once is feared by most students, and Gilderoy senses that Lucius is even better at using his looks to his advantage than Gilderoy is himself. They are both blond and blue-eyed, but not in the least alike. Lucius doesn't have Gilderoy's warm golden curls or the directness of his bright blue eyes. He is poised and sleek and elegant. His hair is straight and silvery blond, with rarely a strand out of place. It falls to his shoulders and frames a pale, narrow, pointed face with arched eyebrows over pale blue, relentless eyes. Gilderoy's smile is wide and dazzling with a practised warmth, but Lucius can smile like an insult. The corners of his mouth are turned up, or down, just a little. His eyes never smile. They are forever watchful, intent on not missing a single movement.
Gilderoy is afraid of Lucius, and yet something about him goes straight to the centre of Gilderoy's very being. Perhaps it is the sensation that he can't hide, that those pale eyes see everything, down to the beasts in the dungeons. Gilderoy only knows that when Lucius' lips curl, his own stomach goes liquid and his hands begin to tremble. And he wonders how someone so icy can send a spear of heat into him with just a slight turn of his head.
"Done for the week, Lockhart?"
"Yes. Divination. Staehr, you know... she is..." He makes a face. "I was just on my way to the Common Room."
He is blushing slightly and he doesn't know why. He never blushes.
"Coming to Hogsmeade tomorrow?" Lucius says in an off-hand manner.
"Yes."
Gilderoy looks straight at the other boy now, tries to switch on his smile but finds he can't. Lucius is looking him up and down in a way that makes him feel hot and cold and awkward and absolutely wonderful. As if he has never existed until now, until Lucius' eyes tell him the shape of his body.
"I hear you are brilliant with Memory Charms, Lockhart." Those lips curl, oh Merlin they curl. And Gilderoy's body responds with heat and shivers. "Memory Charms interest me. They are very... useful. I'd like to talk to you about it. I think we could both perhaps benefit from each other's knowledge. Care to meet me in Hogsmeade tomorrow – at The Three Broomsticks perhaps? Say at four?"
Gilderoy's confused brain tries to imagine looking into the icy blue eyes across the satiny surface of an old, scrubbed wood table at The Three Broomsticks, tries to imagine the cool white skin and silvery hair in connection with the warmth of Butterbeer. He fails. He only says something about yes, of course, that's fine, four tomorrow.
They walk down to the dungeons together, Lucius making observant and amusing comments about the latest Quidditch game and Gilderoy only too aware of the fluid movement of the other boy's body next to his.
When he comes into the dorm to put his books away he collapses on his bed, books falling to the floor again. He closes the curtains and just lies there with his hands over his face, wondering what has come over him and why the past five minutes feel like the most important ones in his life. His body is hot and hard and alive and he has to relieve the tension quickly before going down to the Common Room.
And when he enters the room fifteen minutes later he doesn't feel any shame; he sees Lucius Malfoy's hair shimmer in the firelight and thinks about what he has just done with the image of that hair and those eyes dancing before him. He is scared out of his wits and it excites him. He watches the long, slender white hands draw up shapes and figures in the air as Lucius explains something. The flush on his cheeks is not only from the warmth in the room.
---
At The Three Broomsticks the next day, at five minutes to four, Gilderoy sips his Butterbeer and knows that he has never been this nervous in his life. There is a crawling anthill in his stomach and he tries to drown it in hot liquid. It doesn't work. He concentrates on breathing.
The pub is busy and noisy and laden with Christmas decorations. In the enormous Christmas tree in the far corner, tiny tree fairies sit on the branches dangling their legs and waving sparklers, and their giggles carry across the room.
Having crushes is normal, so Gilderoy has been told. But having a crush on a boy isn't normal, it can't be. It's madness. And a crush on Lucius Malfoy is suicide. What if he sees it? What if he realises that Gilderoy's shaking hands are indeed proof of excitement, not only the quite natural excitement at talking to an older and very influential boy, but also excitement at the proximity of hair and skin and those curling lips?
Gilderoy suddenly feels very sick and looks around to locate the lavatory, but just as he is about to get up from his chair, the door opens and there he is, Lucius Malfoy, at four o'clock sharp. The anthill in Gilderoy's stomach is swarming. He quickly downs the rest of his Butterbeer and it helps, it does, and when Lucius sits down opposite him he turns on his smile, practised, from his eyes to the corners of his mouth, and then full blast.
Lucius' eyes widen almost imperceptibly at this welcome, and then there is a smile on his lips, too, not an insult this time, but a cat-like smile of satisfaction. And Gilderoy suddenly understands. Lucius has asked for something, and by smiling just now, Gilderoy has granted it. The pounding of his heart drenches the noise around him, and he almost misses Lucius' question:
"Can I get you another Butterbeer, Lockhart?"
"Yes, please."
When Lucius returns with their glasses and holds one out to Gilderoy, their fingers brush when he takes it. Smiles meet again, the warm one and the feline. Gilderoy is unsure of what he has agreed to. But as they start talking, and as they ask questions where the words mean nothing and the undercurrents everything, he begins to understand. And he wants it, despite the humiliation and pain he knows will be the price to pay.
Some dwarves begin to sing carols in squawky voices, and for the first time Gilderoy sees Lucius laugh. He feels that laugh in his entire body and he is practically squirming in his seat, and he knows that this afternoon is something he will remember all his life, knows that from now on Christmas carols will remind him of silvery hair, pale blue eyes, a straight nose and a laughing mouth that could have belonged to an angel but don't, but definitely don't. And later he also knows that this contrast, the cool, white beauty harbouring so much darkness, this contradiction and this double nature, is something that has always appealed to him and always will, because it speaks to the two worlds within himself, to the Trodden Beetle and the Shining One.
Lucius Malfoy is the only one who has ever touched both, and this afternoon in December is where it all begins. For Lucius it will also end. For Gilderoy, it never quite does.