Part Twelve : Glass
The air in art museums is pristine, I think, like everything there. Clean and pure. Untainted. Here are the masterpieces hidden from war and hate and blood and love and everything threatening to corrupt them; here is the porcelain and ivory, the statues of unbreakable stone. But I am not here to find that elusive salvation in the glory of Botticelli's heavens. I do not seek the calm forgiveness of a statue or the open wings of a painted angel.
I'm looking for Potter.
It is but a whim, though now I will go on less. ("It's amazing," he had said, scratching his nose. "I didn't know people had that much talent. I mean. You know. Like, the great works?") I have been searching for months. And maybe I'm not surprised when I stumble into a room and find the same tousled head of hair and crooked glasses and rumpled clothing that has been haunting my dreams. But I don't approach. I stand and watch him watch the angels and think that maybe we exist in a tiny heaven of our own, suspended from the domed ceiling of the museum. (It is a heaven with gates of spiderweb steel and filigree lace, a heaven where angels can still sing their choruses to the painted sky without fear of being torn down. It is a dream.)
"M-Malfoy?" Potter looks up, then, and his eyes trip over the unexpected figure before him that I make. Stumble like uncontrolled paintbrushes that line me with great strokes of black and gray and a bit of downy gold, a touch of dreaming silver and the barest hint of white. I am standing; the hands-in-pockets modern angel that haunts the art museum like a ghost, and Potter comes to me.
"Where have you been?" I say, pushing back the urge to reach out and touch him. So real, he looks; but then, so do da Vinci's subjects. And they are naught but canvas.
"Here, I suppose," he says dully. "Waiting."
"What are you waiting for?"
"I don't know. You?" He asks it like a question but his breath clings to it more like a life raft and he buries his head in my shoulder with his shaking hands and his wrinkled shirt and the tears that stain his cheeks. (So he is not an angel. Angels do not cry. But angels are not real, and Potter is real - so real.) I put my arms around him, run my hands reassuringly down his back and its absence of wings, and sigh.
"Well," I say, as if I, too, cannot believe it. "I'm here."
"Why did you come?" He looks perplexed and those lines of breaking green in his eyes are expanding to swallow me. "Why - why are you here?"
I shrug. "I - Dumbledore sent me."
"He what? He sent you? Why?"
"I don't know." I reach to brush his cheek, reach up to touch the skin I've only really dreamt of feeling again. "I wanted to come, too, you know. We've been frantic."
"We?"
"Everyone. Weasley, Granger, all of your silly little friends. All of Dumbledore's people, the ones that he told." Quietly, "Me."
Potter is silent. Around us, the angels sing, but the silence resounds in our ears and this time it tells me nothing.
"You got my owls?" I ask stupidly. I take a step back from him, feeling the stillness in his body even while me own arms are wrapped around him as if I never plan to let go. (Clinging to him like smoke, or another sort of cage. Is that what I am to you, Potter? As unshakable as a Cho-shadow, chasing you towards inevitable death? Do you want me to go?) The tears have already dried on his cheeks, have already disappeared.
He sticks a hand in his pocket and withdraws a few sheets of parchment. I take them wordlessly and flip the pages, seeing my own precise handwriting rise up at me. Sometimes hysterical, nonsensical, "…please, Potter, I swear if you come back I'll never call you by your first name again." Sometimes wondering, conversational, "…so I met with Weasley and barely recognized him; you never told me he grew…" and "…Professor Kimball asked about you, today. People've been avoiding it so long." Angry at times, where the quill stabbed the paper, shaking even in the precise lettering. "…why the hell won't you answer me? Is it Sirius? You had nothing to do with that, Potter, stop being such a selfish bastard…"
I look up at him. "You kept them," I say, still stupidly.
He shrugs.
"You never wrote back."
He shrugs again.
"Potter-"
"I suppose," he says, voice sharp like knives slicing canvas, razor blade wings of steel shattering glass, "now that you've found me, you'll want to take me parading back through the magical world and shove me up against Voldemort again."
"That's Dumbledore," I return in bewilderment and worry and gruffness to cover the pain, "not me. I thought you knew that. I've never, ever, 'paraded' you around for your scar."
He looks quietly at me. "No. You haven't." There is a bit of a silence, where our words trickle back to us from the vaulted ceiling. "You just march beside me, isn't that right? Malfoy?"
"You don't want to go back?" I whisper.
"That really isn't the issue in question." He pushes his glasses up his nose, runs a hand through that familiar tousled hair, and looks squarely at me. "I needed time alone. No thanks to everyone, I got it. Are you satisfied, now that you've found me?"
Silly, it seems, like a dog with his bone. Once he's found it, then what? Did I compare Potter to a dog? No, he doesn't have the sloppy joy spilling in his eyes anymore. He doesn't have that silly grin. He isn't the one loping after people like they might be something he's lost. "If you are."
"And if I'm not?"
"Then." I shrug. "I won't tell Dumbledore I saw you until you want me to, Potter. But you aren't getting rid of me."
He looks at me for a long moment until I have to wonder if he's scrutinizing the painting behind me rather than my face. His eyes are focused, piercing, chilled. Green smoke. "Tell me about school," he requests after what seems like half an eternity. I follow him back to the couch he had occupied earlier, sit beside him with too much space in between. "Tell me about school," he says again.
"Um. We actually made Veritaserum. You know how Snape always said it was too dangerous to leave to the hands of pathetic students like us?" He nods without speaking. "Yeah, Kimball basically gave us the same speech, then proceeded to let us do it anyway. I got perfect marks."
"When don't you?" he says, and his voice is quiet and without inflection.
"When I work with you." I watch his face for a smile, a hint, any kind of crack in the mask, and am rewarded with an enigmatic stare. Perhaps now isn't the time for jokes. "Weasley and I get along tolerably now. All because of you. I guess you really are Miracle Boy."
My mouth seems to be out of my control. But that does not matter, because I don't think he's really listening to a word I'm saying. Instead he is watching the paintings and the figures balanced in flight. "Potter?" I question.
"Look," he says, too patiently. "I don't know what you expect me to say or do. What, shall we go throw a jolly 'Welcome Back Harry' party? I don't think so."
"Say or do what you bloody well want to, Potter. Don't look to me for expectations."
"That's the last thing I'd do."
"Then who are you looking to? Weasley? Dumbledore? The Ministry fools?" He is silent, and so I barrel on. "Your ruddy parents, Potter? My mother's gravestone? Cedric Diggory? Cho? Sirius? The hordes of dead? These, these angels, these fucking angels, this fucking untouched paradise? Is that your fucking salvation, Potter? Or is your fucked up salvation the moment when you face down Voldemort and whip out the two words on the tip of your tongue for years? Then whose expectations are you li-"
"Malfoy," he says simply, and it is enough to stem the tide of my rising hysteria. I am ranting. I am ranting, and he is ice. People should not be ice in summertime, unmeltable angels or no.
I stare at him. He stares at me. Or maybe I stare over his shoulder and he stares over mine and we both see the suspicious security guards at the same moment. If I hadn't yelled - If he hadn't not -
"Let's go, Malfoy," he says quietly, glancing around him as if his paradise has crashed. (Are they glass walls around you, Potter, here, that I've shattered? Or am I but another of those walls that ensnare you while they grant you solitude? Did you come to me to lose something, instead of finding it?)
"Let's go," he says again, and there is melting sand in his voice.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Wait," I say, though we have already stepped into another room. This one is full of paintings depicting dancers embracing their partners of shadow. Their heads are thrown back, city lights woven down the planes of their necks, frantic colors tossing their skirts and far-flung limbs into a frenzy of motion. (Cinderella, the wings on her feet too fragile to last.) "Wait. There's something I want to show you."
His gaze is disinterested, but he does not resist when I take his hand. From my pocket I pull the wrapped key and fumble for the activation. Specific Portkeys are not as easy to come by lately, but my father obtained it for me last Christmas.
Potter does not even blink when we settle in the starkness of our library. He does not look the slightest bit disoriented, nor is he confused. "That's a lot of books," says he, as calmly as ever. I wonder absently where he has been staying.
"You know," I say, almost under my breath, "if I hadn't found you today, I don't know what I would have done. They've all been - I've been - crazy with worry."
He looks at me. (Weighing words. Did he ever do that before?) "I know." Silence. "Why are we here?"
I do not answer immediately. "You like art?" I say instead.
"It's sort of something I never got to experience. I - I like how you can lose everything if you look hard enough." (Yes, Potter. You would.) "Do you? It's rather Muggle of you, is it not?"
I smile as we tramp up the stairs. (He is here. He is breath in my ears and blurs of motion out of the corner of my eye, green and black and tan and colorful, always colorful. And if this gasp of cinnamon and pine and emerald light ever fades, how does the world keep on spinning? Goddamnit, Potter, the world really does revolve around you.) "Don't make such assumptions. Do the Mona Lisa's eyes move?"
"Not actually," he begins, when I push open the door. He stands stock still, wondering eyes trained on the picture. Is that emotion in those eyes? Is he riveted by its beauty, or the surprise, or by me? "Malfoy, that's-"
"The other version of the Annunciation."
"I was going for amazing, but yeah."
I want to reach out to him, but I stay where I am several steps behind. The angel in the painting gives me a sad smile, wings drooping ever so slightly. Fabric rustles. "It's yours," I say quietly. "Er, if you can figure out how to get it out of here, that is."
His eyes are on me. His eyes are on me, and they burn. "Mal-" And he drops off, steps forward, and drags me to the equally piercing heat of his lips.
(Melting glass. Heat glow, lines on the backs of my lids, and when I look all I can see is forest fires of green. How many angels fly to fall?)
For the first time I think I see the trails of Summer's languid kisses and he is not a frozen, faceless angel, but Potter. There is light in his eyes like the pieces of sunlight leaking through the veins of leaves. A smile is almost tickling those softened lips as he holds his wand up, trying to consider spells to move the work. His cheeks are flushed the barest sheen of dawn.
And then there is a startled, "Draco?" behind me, and Potter is rigid steel.
Steel, unmanageable and grinding, lips that just caressed my own now handing out a different sort of shiver. And even though I close my eyes and stumble backwards, I shall never forget the waves that wash my world green. (Did I wish for that once, verdant and monochromatic peace? Do I wish for that now? Be careful what you wish for; fire is hot, Draco. Really? Avada Kedavra is green, Draco. Really? Father is dead, Draco. Really? Really?
Really?
Yes. Really.)
There must be smoke somewhere, suddenly, because it is stinging my eyes. I have to blink away the protective watering that results, hovering on my lashes.
One pair of eyes is lost in the shifting painting, glazed and distant and forever cold. Another is vibrant, desperate, burning. Both sets echo the ringing fear in my own.
I give a strangled gasp, and even I do not know whether the word tangled in my throat is "Potter" or "Father."
He will not look at me.
"Voldemort didn't kill Wilson and Sirius and Cho," Potter whispers. I think his eyes are tracing the creases in my father's robes, the shadows on his ash-pale skin. "Wormtail gave me my wand back. He stood behind me and held my hands around it. He said the words himself and I felt the power rush past me. Wilson was the first."
"But you didn't say it," I whisper in return, refusing to recall how 'it' leapt from his tongue only a moment ago. (We trade words, pass them over his corpse as easily as we have over drinks or homework or chessboards or empty air. To and fro, Potter; catch.)
He whispers back. "I wanted to. After Wilson, how I wanted to."
I look at him and think, maybe that's why he didn't die the first time. Because he is Avada Kedavra incarnate. Because his soul throbs with these words. Because-
"Malfoy," he croaks. "When Wormtail turned the wand on me, I nearly said it myself."
I watch the expressions flicker and transmute on his face. Silence streams between us in arrows sharper than words. "But, the stone?"
"Yes."
I think of it, added quietly to the clutter of Dumbledore's desk when no one was looking, wobbling like a feeble sign of respect to him. Maybe he has noticed. Maybe not. And owl post. "When you find him, keep him safe," Weasley had reluctantly charged me. Oh, and don't I try. But can I really protect him from what even I can't touch? Can I truly save him from himself?
"Potter." We are both looking at the painting, where the wind is stirring the cloth. I smile a bitter smile that seems more at home on his features. "Welcome back."
"Some party." His eyes are breaking and I think, the world is going to fall in. "Malfoy," he says at length. "You keep it."
"What, the body?" A weird little laugh shakes my frame uncontrollably. (Father. Oh, Father. Shall I build you a marble angel to trumpet the world away and make music of glass windchimes and grating laughter on your grave?)
"The painting, Malfoy."
"I gave - I gave it to you."
He is not ice; ice melts in heated days like this. No, he is a glass - or perhaps steel, for he does not break like me - imitation, a statue like those collected on the distant premises of this manor. Cold. Immobile. But he is not shattered, unlike my father. He is not dead. "You need it," he says. "Everyone needs something to lose themselves in."
I say, with my eyes on the aquiline curve of my father's nose, "But I have you."
"That doesn't count," says Potter. He doesn't explain why. And I don't ask him what his something is.
Even when we walk down the stairs, afternoon pasting shadow wings on our backs, I am four steps behind. But I suppose it doesn't matter. What matters is the presence lying still behind me, gathering dust in that room until the house elves come to take it away. What matters is the presence I am following before me, the presence of which I cannot let go.
I lose my thoughts in the curves of his back and pretend, pretend in the absence of my father's ghosting breath, that we can fly away into the sky of watercolor blue and go back like stray paintings to the haven of the museum's peace. Only we cannot, can we? We can never.
Be careful what you wish for, the walls whisper to me. Fire is hot, Draco.
(And glass melts.)