Part Seven : Sky


My mother was not always staunchly against Muggles, you know. In fact, when I was a child, she largely neglected me, and sent me wherever she could to get me out of her hair. Then she would go off to lunch with her friends, out shopping, or the like. Father didn't know. Father didn't care.

(He still doesn't.)

I often found myself left with Muggle children, fighting over toys and pushing each other into the sandbox and every other childish occurrence that children naturally go through. It wasn't a happy experience, no matter what I might pretend. I was all of five years old and had the vocabulary of a child twice my age, not to mention the odd wizard robes. (I think in some way she never knew how to entertain a child and so raised me as a younger version of my father. I shall resent that all of my life.)

Bullies liked me. In fact, they liked pushing me. A lot. I like bullies, in a general sense - in the general sense that they are not bullying me. But these Muggles were, specifically, and the only spell I knew was Lumos.

Mother picked me up from wherever I happened to be whiling away my day, kissed me on the forehead, and tottered off with me in a cloud of alcohol and perfume. (Sickeningly sweet, flower petals and white wine and fluttery laughter. Back then she always seemed ethereal and glamorous, a fairy queen beauty star. Now the only memory I can focus on is the last and she, wilted like a dying flower, beside me, skin gray against the sheets.) She never asked. I never offered. We did not share anything but a fear of my father's wrath, my mother and I. Back then, she was as distant as the sun.

There was a slide at the playground and, in my young eyes, it was enormous. I hated it. I didn't see the point of climbing to the sky only to tumble back earthwards. And the lack of control: on a broomstick, at least, you have control. Not on that slide I so loathed.

There was a bully named Christopher. He made me go down. And I loved it. It was a rush and it was like letting go of everything and it was free fall from the sky and I know that Malfoys crave control and power and domination and must always be proper but at that moment I wasn't really a Malfoy anyway and all I knew was that I was free and that it was fun.

I landed at the bottom and Christopher pummeled me until his knuckles were red and I spiraled into blackness.

I don't know why. Maybe that was his slide experience, his rush, his time to let go and fly and lose control and have fun. Who knows. Maybe he was just a stupid Muggle.

My mother took a more active role in my upbringing. I began to insist on trying magic. And I did not play with Muggles anymore.

I also avoided slides. I didn't want that freedom. I didn't taste that freedom, not until I saw Potter fly and went home for the holidays and raced the clouds. I think I can still feel the gentle, tickling calling of it every time he looks at me.

That doesn't explain why I am flying feverish, precise laps over the Auror Academy's rolling hills, nor does it explain why Potter is rising to meet me with something fluttering in his palm, but maybe it will help. (He is grinning at me, and I think that perhaps the last lingering breaths of clouds disintegrate around us. How cliché of you, Draco.)

"Nice day," he calls, soaring closer. His hand, or rather its contents, glints in the sun.

"What are you doing out here, Potter?"

"Flying," says he, quite cheekily. "What does it look like?"

"Aren't you supposed to be helping Kimball right now? Or something?" I watch the wind toss his hair and snatch at the tiny wings peeking through his fingers and I sigh.

"Stop reminding me," he retorts, rolling his eyes. "You never miss a chance to rub it in, do you?"

I grin. The potion doesn't work, but it's quite an interesting concept, was scribbled on the top of my paper, along with the highest mark in the class. There was nothing written on Potter's, but his failing marks said quite enough. He's been doing as poorly on every assignment since.

"I think all Potions professors hold a grudge against me," Potter muses. "It's like a conspiracy."

"It has absolutely nothing to do with your talent at potions, of course."

Smirk. "Of course." He hovers there for a minute, looking beyond me at the hills dampened with spring's glory, and then just as suddenly is watching me. "Fancy a game?"

The Golden Snitch is fluttering there, teasing me. I cross my arms, a balancing act. "Whatever, Potter. Everybody knows you're the better flyer." Faint grin. "Even if you do suck at Potions."

"You're just afraid," he taunts me. "You could fly just as well if you actually tried."

He tosses the Snitch into the air. It whirs out of our sight. I frown, but he is already speeding across the hills like a beam of prismatic light on his broomstick and I have no choice but to maintain my steady laps behind him. He is grinning, and I wonder exactly how it feels. (Are you still Harry Potter like I'm Draco Malfoy, or when you fly do you lose all of those ties? Can you, too, taste the freedom?)

The wind is a woman and the sky is her home and she tickles my cheek with her hair. There is smoky periwinkle freedom darting just beyond the reach of my fingertips, sky so blue yet like a distant canvas for all that I can touch it. I watch him do a quick loop on his broomstick and listen to the wind.

"Malfoy? Hello?" He frowns at me, pointing to the flash of gold. "Look, if you're not going to do anything but sit there, this is useless."

I blink. Right. I'm supposed to be looking. It has vanished again, and we are both tracing crisscross patterns over the field. The sun beats upon our backs like a drummer in the heat, surprisingly warm for late April. But then, the piquant perfume of spring's blossoms is scattered through the air and the hills are singing of approaching summer. (They are green, like his eyes.)

We both glimpse it at the same instant and shoot forward, leaning down as we streak towards it. His eyes are intense and I stop looking at him and focus instead on the tiny orb, seeing the wings flutter. There is warmth on my back, spring's breath in my ear, and we are both reaching, stretching, straining -

The Snitch vanishes, and we have to jerk away before a sudden collision renders us unable to play.

I look up, surprised, to see him laughing. There is true joy in his eyes and he glances at me, as if wondering why I am not even showing the hint of a smile. Teasing, maybe. Questions I can't answer.

He shoots down towards me, twists in the air, and his broomstick carries him nimbly away on the breeze. I don't know when I've last seen such agile flying. Not that I frequent Quidditch games, not unless Father insists. But he could be the next Krum, probably, if he really tried.

"Why don't you ever fly?" He frowns, having spun back to me. "You could be good at it, you know."

"I am good at it, thank you very much. And not everyone is like you."

"Don't you enjoy it at all?" He is hovering next to me and spring is blooming in his eyes. "You'd have to be crazy not to feel it. The whole adrenaline rush, the feel of being airborne, just free?"

My expression is blank. "Not every bird wants freedom, Potter. Sometimes it's better inside the cage."

"It's never-" he begins, but I flash him the grin that has eluded me for so long and shoot up past him as the Snitch flickers just beyond his head. He is a hair behind me, having jerked at the last second, and I can still hear his delighted laughter in my ears as I reach for it.

Tan fingers close belatedly around my own fist, and I can feel the Snitch tangled in my grip. He looks down at me with my triumphant smile.

"It's never better in the cage," he says softly and releases my hand. Then he is grinning, reluctantly, and he complains, "You only won because I was talking. That's not fair."

"You should know that Malfoys don't play fair," I retort, waving the glittering ball at him. There is something jolting in my stomach, the same feeling that jumped and danced and roiled through my veins when I leaned over his shoulder and reached for the Snitch. When I flew, and felt the rush, and the taste of elusive freedom. "Besides, you should know better than to give in to distractions. Even ones as distracting as me." Smirk, and, "Concentration is everything, Potter."

He laughs. "You sound just like Oliver. And I was only giving you an advantage. You wouldn't have won otherwise."

"Aw, Potter, I never knew you were such a sore loser."

I watch him grin and see the sky reflected in his eyes. (Shame that spring is not home to skies of sunny green, absorbing the grass and the trees and the verdant paradise blooming below. Clouds of palest jade mist drift by my line of sight.) "All right, you caught the Snitch. But," and he winks, "I bet you can't catch up to me. Being that I am the superior flyer."

"A-" I begin, but my breath is stolen by the breeze as he shoots off down the field and leaves me no choice but to follow. There is something gut wrenching and stomach flipping about cavorting around the hills at this breakneck speed, but at the same time there is a rush unmatchable by anything else.

Well. Almost anything else, I suppose. (Is that the way you smile at your friends? Is that the way you laugh with them? Or am I but a substitute whose company you suffer? Occasionally I think I'm more, the way you look sometimes.)

Somewhere in our chase while the wind shrieks past our ears in a trembling melody and the shocking azure of the sky spins in a drunken haze all around us, it has morphed into less of a competition and more of a flying free for all. I realize only belatedly when he zooms past me so near that I've kept the Snitch in my hand, and I am already startled into releasing it. He catches it effortlessly before it can whir away over the field, grins ebulliently at me, and lazily loops away.

"Potter!" I kick my broomstick forward and zoom up beside him, barely noticing when he ups the speed and I keep up. We lap the field at a feverish pace, neither really paying attention. "That wasn't-"

"Fair? I must be spending too much time with you. All that dishonesty rubbing off on me."

"We weren't playing."

He grins. "Well, it's mine now."

"Bollocks for you." We both swerve in a sharp turn and I watch the wind tug his hair in twenty different directions at once. He is laughing and I wonder when I stopped making him tense with anger and started making him smile. (I remember his face at the Three Broomsticks, eyes nervous but chin resolute, torn between pity and loathing and possibly even amusement at times. He fought it, I know. But-)

"You're smiling," he observes, and I find too late that he is right. "I guess the thought of a civil conversation with me no longer makes you want to rip out your ears?"

"A torment I force myself to live through. I've got incredible willpower, you know."

He snorts, but is already halfway across the field by that time, swerving in an almost impossible dive that I follow him into without thought. And the wind is tearing my face and the ground is rushing wildly towards me in a sea of all too familiar dizzying green and then I pull up and the sky is spinning around me and I have to laugh because otherwise the not unpleasant thudding of my heart is going to make me yell or do something drunkenly joyous that is most definitely not a Malfoy thing to do.

He's watching me, and he's laughing too, a bit smug. "I told you."

"Told me what?" I fly in a circle around his momentary still form, a swift circle that's rather like riding a dragon. Not that I have. (Maybe the sky doesn't spin but we do instead, creating our own tidal whirlpool skyline of giddy cerulean spring. I can't pretend that I can't hear the wind singing her jocund melodies in my ear.)

He smirks. "You can fly."

"Of course I can fly, Potter. Wouldn't you know? I've been doing it since I was two."

"Ah, but did you enjoy it then?"

I am too stunned to answer, instead zooming off across the field into an oblivion of sky and grass and mindless adrenaline where I don't have to think. He follows me and of course he catches up, being Potter. And instead of the persistence I expect, there is something glowing differently in his eyes. "Look," he hedges uncomfortably, the happy grin flickering on his face into something more somber, "I don't want to. Erm. Intrude."

We flutter in the air, now, waiting. Like butterflies. Or the Snitch. Although I'm sure Potter would much prefer the comparison to the latter rather than the former. "What are you blathering on about?"

"Your childhood," he says simply, and I stare.

"Potter -" And my voice catches. It's not supposed to. Malfoys don't - Malfoys aren't - bloody hell, does it matter what Malfoys are or are not? Is that what I am, just Malfoy? Not Draco, not even to him. And this, for some reason, suddenly makes me angry.

(My feet touch the ground and I am reminded of a chillier spring, a memory I quickly shake off, a memory crowded with obstinate grave markers and eyes like frosted stained glass.)

"Malfoy!" he yells after me and that only stabs the knife further, but I cannot speak because I call him Potter. (Syllables like petals and silk on my tongue, your name a whisper of springtime. Don't let me say it; it says too much.) "Malfoy, what the hell did I say?" He swoops down, still on his broom, hovering beside me with his feet only inches from the ground. "If you want to go and sulk, fine, but don't blame it on me. I was trying to be nice about it."

"Yeah? Apparently you have been spending too much time with me. That good old Slytherin sniping rubbing off on you?"

He finally dismounts, jogging to catch up with me as I stride back towards the squat building that we call home. "What is wrong with you?

"What do you mean, what's wrong with me?" I round on him, nails digging into the palms of my hands. "I think the fact is, there's something wrong with you. You're the one expecting me to be different than I've always been. You're the one thinking I've bloody changed. I'm not another of your little groupies, all right? I'm Draco Malfoy; I always have been. And it isn't like you to forget that."

His eyes flash, just once, but the anger is somehow suppressed and he gives me a wry grin. "You're as moody as a cat in heat, Malfoy."

"Excuse me?" My eyebrows shoot up. "That," I tell him, decisively, "has got to be the oddest and most unflattering comparison anyone has ever made in association with me."

"Hey, that's what enemies are for," he says, grinning provocatively at me.

"That, and killing you." I can't help but show the tiniest hint of a smile, biting my lip to suppress it. The sun flicks droplets of sun after us, drenching our backs with languid warmth. "I didn't mean to - to do that," I tell the grass beneath my feet. "We could fly again, if you really want to."

It is his turn to look away, eyes evasive. "No. I, um, have to go see Kimball about that project."

I cough to cover my laughter. (That communicable disease. That one shared needle. Oh, how I was drawn in and addicted.) "I did offer to help you."

Bridled, he shoots back, "I don't need your help."

"A point so blatantly supported by the fact that you're failing."

"Right." Pausing, "Malfoy, why did you get so upset when I brought up flying and everything?"

"Because." But he is waiting, daring me not to answer. I wouldn't speak, only the way he's looking at me gives me the impression that he won't move until I do. And the melodic flutes of springtime twirl in his eyes. "I saw where you lived," I tell him, finally. "I've heard how it was. And you're pitying my childhood?"

"I wouldn't call it pity," says he, "but yes. We're quite a bit alike, you and I."

"And far different."

"And far different," he agrees. We walk in silence for a bit, footprints trailing through the grass. Above us the sky tumbles in manic circles of tie-dyed blue and misty silver. He sighs and glances over to me, fingers curled about the handle of his broomstick. "Dumbledore wrote."

"What, again?"

He rolls his eyes. "Well, you don't have to make it sound like we never talk. Of course he wrote again. Sirius led a barely successful raid on the Death Eater stronghold in Surrey. It's near Richmond-"

"I know. I've been there."

"Oh, well, okay." He looks at me uncomfortably. "Anyway, he also said that you can come next time I get involved and you'd best come with me over the summer. When we meet, I mean."

"Wonderful," I drawl. "I've got the old man's approval now."

"You're such a git, Malfoy."

I have no reply. Several beats later and I ask quietly, gently enough to make remorse flicker on his features, "Has he said anything more about the stone?"

"Not since he told me I was lucky I had people caring enough to protect me. But that was in March."

Dryly, "Very thorough, Dumbledore is. Sure explains it all, doesn't he?"

"Nobody's perfect, you know." When I don't reply, he only shrugs. "I should be off, then. You know how Kimball is. I think I'm just doomed at Potions for the rest of my life." He is glancing sideways at me with a hesitant smile. A friend smile.

"Wait." He looks at me and I swallow harshly into the benevolent springtime sky. He looks at me and the ice melts in my throat. He looks at me and I don't know why, but words slip easier from my tongue and the sun shivers courage down my back and into my soul. Something unexpected, unknown. "Thanks," I say quietly, spring's glow on my cheeks. "For. Um. You know."

He gives me the quizzical Potter Look I have come to expect; his questioning smile is rather lopsided. "For what?"

For caring about my mother, for kicking Weasley, for buying me a drink. For passing me in the halls and frowning like there might be more than this. For showing me your parents' graves, for trying to help me fly. For not laughing at Graduation when I felt you watching me and for the first time in my life, almost tripped myself. For lending me your clothes and your scent and your time. For sharing your chocolate and your taste, for playing chess and sometimes letting me win. For trying in vain to give me a sense of humor and presenting me with 101 Ways to Excel at Dark-Overlording for Christmas. For expecting less and wanting more and always, always wondering. For being colorful, Potter, for being you. For-

"This."

When I let our lips brush it is entirely my move, and he doesn't withdraw but he doesn't react when our breath mixes. He tastes like cherry blossoms smell, heady and sweet and intoxicating. They could bottle it like champagne and call it springtime.

His lips are wind-chapped against mine and I think I can feel - or maybe hear, or is that mine? - his heartbeat trembling in his chest. The breeze could wrap us up together and carry us away, a whirlwind sky of black and green and gold and gray. Only he is standing there like he is stone and I am quite, acutely aware of his immobile form. He reminds me of the sky and its ever-changing patterns and I think that perhaps kissing him is like flying and I can taste that elusive joy. If he kissed me, which he isn't.

And that is when he steps back. His eyes are on me, morning dew and grass cool, and he says as carefully as anything, "You're welcome."

And I am watching his back muscles shift as he quietly, calmly, inevitably walks away.

(Springtime, that caged bird, sings to me of the sky. It is a melancholy tune.)