Part II – Storm Clouds and Bare Feet
The forecast in the morning of sunny, clear skies for the remainder of the day turned out to be as false as any prediction dribbled off Trelawney's lips.
Harry settled his chin in his hand and watched the stain glass windows in the Astronomy Tower darken as a wash of rain fell. Occasionally, he'd drift back to catch a few misty words, attempt to store away some random facts, realize how little fact there was to be had, and turn his chin back to the window.
The rain didn't quit. It poured down, cold and without mercy, even as Harry once again heard Trelawney gasp and predict a terrifying account of death, though he was too far out of this place to tell if it was his own once again. It coursed down the Tower's dark stones, made curtains on the white and blood red and misty gray window designs. It followed the students as they reached the bottom of the stairwell and scattered into the surrounding corridors. It followed close and relentless—it was rather Malfoy-ish cloud, the more he thought about it and grimaced at the flinty sky.
"They said it should let up soon," Ron was commenting as Harry turned back, slinging his books under his arm. "I hope it'll least last until tomorrow. It'd give us more of an advantage over Slytherin, seeing as we'll have another chance to practice before the game and they won't after today."
Hermione soon caught them at the atrium where three corridors met. Immediately, her eyes snapped to Harry and he resisted a grimace. It was the same expression he'd received the moment he'd attempted to glean something from her parchment that morning, and from the particular twitch of her eyebrow, he suspected she had an idea as to why he hadn't finished his own scroll and earned himself extra work from Flitwick. But she didn't say another word of it, disapprove as she did, and instead joined into Ron's fervent stratagem, just as eager to see Slytherin House trampled in the upcoming match.
They began the trek back to the Gryffindor Tower, as lunch and the menace of more storm clouds fast approached.
Harry watched the first crack of lightning break, white hot and delicate, over the Black Lake as he chewed a mouthful of roast beef, and then tilted his head to watch a magical echo split the ceiling over the Great Hall. The illusion of clouds were considerably more enjoyable than the real thing, glowing violet and black, artistic and nothing else. He turned around and watched every Quidditch player's head lift and droop when thunder rolled over the school. Those at the Slytherin table choose to sneer, instead, and one in particular caught his eye and grimaced with extra dislike.
He turned around, smiling at the intense, smoky color Malfoy's eyes had been, looking rather rubbed by situation.
"Maybe the rain isn't so bad after all," he muttered, reaching forward for a roll.
"Huh?" Ron lifted his head across the table. His mouth was filled with a slice of pumpkin pie and rimmed with bits of cream. Hermione winced at the sight, sitting beside Harry.
"Please, Ron, eat that before you decorate us with it."
Harry decided to continue, giving Ron time to comply with her wish, elaborating, "The Slytherins need this last practice together to coordinate their team before our match, rain or no rain. Ever since Flint finished school, they've been swinging from Captain to Captain, and as far as I can tell, they haven't been able to decently work on strategies or team coordination because of it."
"It's only their fault, bickering as they do whenever a position of power makes itself available—or they force it available, anyway," Hermione added. "But I don't think it'll make any difference, Harry. Their only strategy is deceit and force. You know what they'll do as soon as you get to the Pitch. They'll try to harass you off your broom and break Ron's arm, or Malfoy'll try to hex you. It's not a complicated thing to play dirty."
"Yeah, speaking of the devil," said Ron when the mouthful finally landed in his stomach and he'd licked off the cream, "isn't he supposed to be Captain this year?"
"Probably," Harry said. He looked down at his plate of food, cocking an eyebrow. "I suppose I never really thought about it. He's got almost as much experience as I do, so I'd think it'd be their first choice."
"His father bullied his way into the position." Ron was so sure of it, he didn't even need to look up as he reached for his cup. "You know that, Harry."
"No, I don't."
"That's how he got on the team. His father's bloody contribution. What's to stop him from using that influence again?"
"Talent?"
The newly appointed Gryffindor Keeper challenged Harry's answer with a fervor in his eye of which he was sure only Malfoy had been on the receiving end. "I don't think so," he said firmly. "Even if he had it, would it make him stop manipulating people?"
It was a good point, but Harry had a gut instinct that told him otherwise. He could not see Malfoy's confident and disdainful face curling into an expression of hesitance and pleading. What he could see was a furious desire to get it, pulling back the corners of his mouth into a grimace of determination. And he had seen it, watching him tautly in his emerald green robes as he lead the Gryffindor team out to the center for the coin toss and Draco stood and glared behind Flint's replacement. As a Seeker only—as less. Malfoy would earn it himself, because Harry had.
And it wasn't to say he was a poor player, either. Just a Slytherin with atrocious ethics, disproportionate investments of self-importance, and his family's intolerance.
"Pride," Harry answered finally. He picked up the knife beside his plate and asked Dean to pass the plate of butter without paying much attention to Ron's vexed, thinking-of-Malfoy-is-excruciating expression or Hermione's thoughtful hum.
Draco Malfoy was a whirlwind that no Slytherin dared to approach when he stomped through the dungeons in sopping green Quidditch robes. The storm clouds had prevailed on the Pitch, throwing most of the unseasoned players about like paper kites, and greatly harassing those who could manage a broom. His jade green goggles were shoved up onto his forehead, worsening the creases of frustration there, and threw his wet, white-blonde hair into rather unbecoming angles. His father's sneer pulled at his face and he indulged it, adding his own scowl to it as he stormed past the Common Room and up the stairs.
His carefully maintained superiority could not always gloss over his emotions. And the thought of even the slightest possibility of a chance of losing to Potter was more than enough to rend any higher breeding asunder. In his rather understandable frustration, he had forgotten the Drying Spell and left a long trail of silvery water on the floor as he moved.
The rains battered and howled outside relentlessly. It sounded more like the terrible laughter of some Gryffindor cloud, come to ruin the Slytherin chances in the upcoming Snake and Lion match. Ignoring the fact that rain had drown out both the Slytherin and Gryffindor practices in his hurry to brood, he threw open the door to his dormitory like a furious burst of wind. It slammed against the wall and would have swung back to strike him in anger if he had not been already to the side of his bed, throwing his broom onto his bed and ripping the goggles from his head.
His eyes fixated on the window, staring out into the raging storm, for an indeterminable amount of time before the sensation of cold, wet robes clinging all over his body brought him out of the clutch of his emotions, which had been tumbling through his brain, too turbulent for a structure.
He blinked rapidly as if he were coming out of a daze. And then he realized just how unbecoming he had been, and promptly dried his clothes and smoothed down his hair.
Only Pansy dared to speak to him when he finally reemerged from the dormitory to go fetch something to soothe his stomach and his mind. Anyone else would have received a rather unwelcome expression and clipped reply. But she was much more refined than most of his Housemates—and he'd known her before he'd really even known himself.
So he didn't sneer at her. But he couldn't help but retain the grimace.
"Weather has never agreed with man when it doesn't feel like it, Draco," she reminded him in such a calm, wise tone he might have accused her of imitating his mother purposely. She was lying on the couch, with a book in her lap. "Even wizards can't touch the wind. Don't fall from your broom chasing a Snitch that's already been caught."
He hesitated, and almost considered telling her of the resemblance. "Quite the pearls of advice, Pansy. Did you steal them from that book just to tell to me?"
She smirked and looked more herself, crinkling up her nose in her smile. "No," she giggled. "But it doesn't matter where I got it, does it? The wisdom remains." Draco was sure some of that smirk had come from many years of extended family status with the Parkinsons and having only one playmate his age, but the scrunched nose was her own.
"Would you like something from the kitchens?" he asked, indicating the pearl of advice with a lift of his eyebrow and a smirk.
"Of course not," she answered, lifting the book and her nose. She was trying to be as poised as her mother, as regal and reserved, but her short black bob took a little away from that growing illusion. One day she'd be there, but it was not today. "It's far too late for a lady to be eating."
He smiled at her and bid her goodnight, since ladies were best to keep to their beauty sleep early, and slunk out of the Dungeons.
His good mood, though, seemed to slip and give way to the hostility that lay beneath, still provoked by the flinty sky and the laughter of lightning. The house elf before him wrung his small hands, lit by the red-orange flame cradled in the Hand of Glory but unable to see that light, and denied him. The very idea inflamed him so he barely caught the reasoning for such denial through the flare of his emotions.
"Do you not have food in the kitchens?" Draco demanded.
"Yes, young master, but—"
"Then what is the problem?"
"Rules forbid us to simply hand over food to students at such hours of the night," the elf explained, looking rather anxious to disappear underneath his sharp, gray gaze and pretend that he was not there at all. Which was the appropriate sentiment, he knew, but such cowardice served only to frustrate him.
Ah, the rules. The rules were not a beast, staring him down, with teeth and jaws that would instantly take its punishment—it was not even the watchful eye of a professor with the ability to take his Captain's badge from him. Right now it was merely a word in the mouth of a servant, and did not frighten him. A true Malfoy did not flee from words.
"I said, I'd like something to eat." He wrapped the influence of his voice in silk, as to make it easier for the elf to stomach. The large, dull eyes blinked up at him quietly, then bowed before him and asked if he had a preference.
"Something sweet," he answered, remembering that it was better not to show the smile of victory a few minutes after it had already spread across his face.
When a small bowl of toffee was presented to him in the quivering hands of an elf, he glanced up at the small, scrubbed windows and saw clear fields of stars overhead.
He grimaced, letting frustration rise up, but instead found himself more eager to get to the Pitch than fume about the damned weather. Nearly forgetting himself, he turned back around to take the ruby-red toffees and left the kitchens without another word.
The flinty clouds that had plagued all of Hogwarts that day seemed to lose interest and wander away exactly at the hour all the students had been ushered to bed and the grounds grew quiet and dark. Harry felt it in his bones the moment it quit as starkly as if he'd been standing in the rain the moment it stopped falling.
It was late. He was lounging on his bed, trying to pick through a rather indecipherable Charms book detailing the physical repercussions of Levitation Charms on creatures weighing more than three hundred pounds for his extra work, while everyone else snored happily. The empty white light of his Lumos incantation cast shadows across the sleeping faces of his fellow Gryffindors. Ron squinted in his sleep and rolled over.
Harry glanced up over his glowing wand and out the window, lying on his stomach and arching his back uncomfortably to so do. The windows were wet, but it wasn't raining.
He threw himself off his bed, into warmer clothes, and underneath his cloak as quietly and as fast as was humanly possible. It would have been completely silent had he not nearly tripped over his own trainers in his hurry to grab his Firebolt. But otherwise, not even Ms. Norris would have heard him as he made his way out to the pitch.
He didn't have to wait to travel as far as the pitch cramped around his broomstick to find out he wasn't alone in his illicit actions. Looking through the iridescent fabric, he could see the dark figure slink out into the corridor in front of him from the Dungeon corridor and dart ahead of him, clutching a polished broom and a twisted old Hand of Glory. A grin split Harry's face before he even registered it and he found himself unable to resist lifting his Firebolt, pressing it painfully into his ribs, and hurrying forward in stalking silence. There was only one person it could be.
Draco Malfoy did not give signal that he knew he was no longer alone in the corridor, let alone that an invisible Harry Potter was strolling beside him, observing him through a grin.
And without a dim-witted crony flanking either side to offset his true image and just the right influence of the moon, he seemed something completely different, at least from what Harry could see. In the torchlight of the Dungeons, he was a pale and depraved reflection of his father, a caricature of the Malfoy lineage, and beneath the stare of sunlight above the Pitch, he was a white and bothersome crow. Without Crabbe and Goyle standing as brainless columns of allegiance at his sides, he seemed smaller, of course, but in a way that made Harry tilt his head thoughtfully. He looked deflated, somehow free of the insufferable air of loathing superiority that repelled any reasonable being in a five-foot radius. Of course, he was still visibly thick with prejudice and proud in his step, but his eyes were not loaded with spears of hateful defense as they watched the Pitch come around the bend. They looked bright and young. Harry was pretty sure it was not a very Malfoy thing to look so enthused about a game.
His pale hands, neck, and face stood out against his dark clothing like warm ice and his hair, normally slicked back or combed to pompous perfection, was loose and unrestrained, falling over his forehead freely. It was a warm cream color, and Harry would have snickered at the image of Malfoy, doused in whipped cream, if it wouldn't have alerted Draco to his presence, walking in matching strides.
With ashen eyes fixated on the approaching Pitch, Harry found himself disagreeing even more strongly than ever with Ron's accusation in the Great Hall. In Draco he saw an authentic hunger to fly, not a boy who'd been bullied into the sport by the influence of his father. Not someone who could stomach being bought into something he truly wanted. Not someone who would risk his neck, risk his chances for shining glory and victory come game day to practice in the dead of night, when he could be sleeping soundly in his bed.
Or maybe he was the same loathsome git, and he was simply a very bored and very capable night owl. But Harry wouldn't have liked to be proven wrong.
He smiled as he looked down and saw Malfoy's bare feet. It looked as if sharing the Pitch again might not be so bad after all. He decided to walk the rest of the way with Malfoy, not yet revealing he was there.