DISCLAIMER: I do not own Harry Potter.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes my art

- Rumi

III

The next night he did not come out, but she could feel him standing in the shadows at the lip of the opening.

Like the tentative flicker of one more, barely noticeable star in the night sky, his presence hovered beyond the slate, beckoning her, the way the stained leaves of a leather-bound diary once had.

In the privacy of her head, Ginny smiled wide and free, and she did not know why.

Opening her mouth, she let the wary caution of a thousand warnings weave through, and disappear, in the tentative cadence of words.

Her voice floated softly across the dense emptiness between them, beginning a climb over the generations-old walls that held him up. With halting, harmless words, she tossed her stones to measure the depth of the plummeting walls, silently falling onto the distant, lined roofs below them, between them.

She told him about the forest, a safe topic, and other little nothings that she could spare throwing into the chasm- in case they should cross. With those tumbling words, she forged a leash of her own: spinning, and flexing; gaining strength and whipping through the tangible cold like a rope.

Her voice never rose from a whisper and sometimes her hair would flow around her, and hide the corners of her eyes that sought for him.

But, resisting the tickling temptation in her fingers, she would not bind it, or brush it away. Like the roaring bonfire of one stranded on an island, Ginny used its blaze to call him out to her.

He started coming every night, but ashamed of every little mask, every little dance, song and act that he had to stage in the day, he hid in the shadows.

She spoke, and he felt the manacles on his feet give a sharp tug. His muscles coiled under his clammy skin, ready to turn, ready to step away, change his mind, go back, go away and escape the words before they took meaning. But a dormant will in his soul seemed to roll in its sleep, hand fastening around the reigns, and refusing his limbs the authority to act.

Confused at first by his own unexplainable behavior, Draco secretly felt the shame blossoming in him at being trapped by the common beauty of a Weasley. He wondered at his vanity, and when his standards had dropped so low, but the sentiment fell uncomfortably on his conscience, and Draco felt even more baffled.

The years of animosity sat like poison in his veins, chilling him in the mild air, probing his mind for answers as he battled with himself about leaving.

But her voice, faint and intermittently cut off, curled around the constant, scaly anger inside him, and soothed it like lapping waves over jagged stone. If he had to do what he was assigned, then he needed this catharsis.

Draco continued to stay, returning night after night. Even when there were too many students in the common room, their questioning, plotting eyes following him to the door, he came. Even when he passed her by in the halls during the day, laughing as Goyle bumped into her, sprawling her books all over the stones—

"Fuck off, Malfoy."

"Watch it, Weasel, or there will be 10 points off Gryffindor… Oh, did I just do that?"

"And yet we're still leading Slytherin in points…"

At night, the countless defenses, excuses and glittering badges of hollow pride rust and strip away, pulling on him like a fallen angel in need of salvation, to crawl up the steps, one way or another, to see her on her tower once more.

Like this, slowly the agitation and embitterment began to loosen, and an even stranger exhilaration began to take its place.

Like an invalid learning to walk again, Draco allowed the liberation to sink in with small steps. Someday, perhaps, he would question it, but in his hopeful and naive unconscious, Draco hoped that by then he would have learned to dance.

For now, it did not matter.

For now, it was enough that he had one secret to covet from his father.

And when it ceased to matter, his gaze became more daring. As time crept past, it flitted over to her perched seat more resolutely.

Her vision calmed him and thrilled him.

As he watched her from where she could not see, a silent wind tossed and looped in the folds of her hair, and tried to carry her speech across; the words, reaching him only in flaky wisps: full of dearth and unconscious caresses. Draco felt his heart strum feebly, inside him.

All that she threw, he watched bouncing in the sparkling, dewy slate of the ledge. He did not catch any of her attempts, and stepped always a little away when they reached too close.

But when the azure breath of the sleepless hours brought him the scent of her hair, he leaned out, the watery light of the moon touching his nose and chin. And, a dying man, he drank from the air.

One day, she noticed him at the Slytherin table during breakfast. There was no one in the whole hall that was paying him any attention, and as he idly played with the fork between his fingers, across the tables, she saw him come alive.

Ginny blinked.

A clear, phantom scent of the night sky brushed her nose, then, and Ginny stopped eating to stare, her heart filled with wonder.

It was a flash of sparkling silver in his hands that had caught her attention. But immediately after looking, Ginny found herself distracted by the much quieter sparkle of hoary shutters falling, as something cold and formidable slipped away from his unusual eyes. Lying unassumingly before him, and subjected to his ashen scrutiny was a folded slip of paper, hanging precariously from the edge of his plate.

The fork in his hand twirled smoothly on the dark green tablecloth and Draco stared on.

Ginny wished she could reach out into his thoughts. Peering at the clear eyes, so much brighter, so much harder to see in the daylight, Ginny wished that she could step through their clarity, and feel all the little breaks and flaws just beyond.

Ginny felt her head tilt to the side, and something above her diaphragm clenched twice, leaving a dull aching in its wake. Seeing him so tarnished, with the cry lodged so plainly behind his eyes, Ginny had to bite her lips to keep from letting the soft words pushing against the back of her throat from coming out.

The moving fork in his hands caught at one corner of the folded parchment and there was a clatter as his fingers let go immediately, as if they would burn. Ginny looked up just in time to catch his lids widening- just barely, before his gaze flickered up, and met hers, and then the heads nearby were turning, inquiring-.

Ginny did her best to not look away from the naked wretchedness of his gaze. She wished she could reach out and draw a hand down over his lids.

Don't look at me like that.

Then a sly, white hand appeared; sliding long, red-tipped fingers on his shoulder, over the rounded, tense bend and down his arm.

Ginny's breath hitched, the movement so sensual that a prickling heat enflamed her cheeks.

Ginny blinked, willing herself to look away. When she opened her eyes, she found herself staring into the flat greys of a seventh year Slytherin whom she barely knew.

The first time he had caught her, he fervently wished he hadn't. It was so much harder climbing the endless stairs, heading for the astronomy tower night after night, when he could no longer pretend that she didn't know. That she watched him through his ridiculous deceits, every day, and simply humored him.

He did not know what he had hoped. That she would not recognize who her midnight visitor was during the day? That she would dismiss it for a night-time delusion?

That she would not know that he stood there, behind the tiled opening, every night, even though she chose to speak to him?

That…

No.

Draco firmly closed the door to that particular closet shut. It did not matter what he hoped.

All that mattered was that she knew. And unlike him, she obviously had no qualms about their little charade, and, it suddenly occurred to him, nor was she likely to, since making peace with those morally inferior to them is the ultimate Gryffindor dream. Feeling a surge of anger, Draco felt the corner of his lip curl in distaste.

And there he was, every night just filling her with charitable joy.

But then he remembered her serene gaze from across the table, sitting in the midst of all of her fellow Gryffindors, looking just as alone as she did on her perch against the night sky, and Draco felt a twinge of shame.

He had been in the Great Hall for breakfast that morning. A letter from his father neatly folded before him. His mind had been on the substance of his hopes that he could not give words to. Closing his eyes against the gaiety around him, he had peeled open the letter.

The parchment showed blank at first before the familiar green ink crawled across its surface.

Draco, it began, and he felt a twinge in his arm. His hand closed around the fork on the table.

Time is wasting, and we are still waiting. Draco could hear the threat, but he was used to these reminders. Then:

I want a full report of your progress. My messenger will visit you in a fortnight.

L.V.M.

He stared at the letter, refusing to read the words of warning twice, and waited for its edges to curl up and hiss with its enchanted flame. But instead the ink began to travel inwards to the center of the parchment, and there was a dizzying swirl of green before it coagulated into the form of a skull.

L.V.M. Lucius Vàclav Malfoy, or Lord Voldemort?

A piercing pain shot through the mark in his arm, as if the coiling snake was stretching his very skin with its movement- he should not have read the letter in such a public place. The fork he had been holding slipped and clattered. Draco's eyes shot up.

And there she was.

The green imprint of his father's treacherous words was still burning behind his eyes. His knees below the table had been shaking, and biting the inside of his cheek, Draco willed the masses of droning students around him to not notice. Only for a moment. And in that intense suspension of time, he held onto that curious brown gaze, while he scrambled to recollect himself.

Through the cloud of pain, the hovering imprint of the Death Mark shadowed her face. Brown eyes peered at him through a green skull mask.

As if hearing a summons, he had felt Pansy shift in her seat beside him. Fighting the coil around his throat, Draco willed himself to breathe. He heard the sugary voice change direction as her head turned, and through sheer spontaneity of habit, the forlorn, sagging muscles of his face had tightened up, and lifted. The false hauteur returned in the form of an imperceptible pull on the corner of his mouth, a slight drooping of his lids, and like a flood, the courage spawned by relief infused the rigid muscles of his face once more.

Heart thumping in chest, Draco braced himself as Pansy's heavily scented hand lifted from her side and landing on the sensitive base of his spine, snaking its way up- candy voice still speaking-

"...Draco, darling, don't you quite agree? I really think this is the first time Goyle has come up with anything worth hearing…"

And then the hand had slid over his shoulder and gave a very small, but very intentional squeeze, her nails digging painfully into his flesh, and he swallowed, tying the loose ends of his mask firmly into place, and finally looked up.

Stunned brown eyes stared from over the huddled benches, across the Great Hall. They were not looking at him, but the grazing long fingers stroking his upper arm. Gut twisting, Draco wondered if, from the distance, she could see the glinting ring on the white finger.

Fighting to keep his breathing as regular as possible under the scrutiny of his peers, as they turned one by one, awaiting his reply, he wondered if she could see the engraved M, shimmering just below the diamond.

Desperate to detect any change in her expression, Draco wondered since when it had started to matter if she did.

Below untamed, angry hair, her calm brown eyes blinked. When she opened them again, they looked straight back at him.

Meeting her gaze at last, Draco fought a cramp in his chest.

It didn't, he told himself again, bringing the shutters down.

Caught up in her own thoughts, she did not manage to look away fast enough, and before she had blinked the dark orifices away again, Draco managed to catch a brewing stain of hurt dawning behind them.

Wrenching his own gaze away in a sudden, suffocating plunge of panic, Draco turned to his fellow Slytherins at last, plastering on an arrogant, dirty smile on his cracking face, and opened his mouth.

Behind drawling words, and a stiff, scornful mask, his little lying heart insisted: it didn't, it didn't.

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