And walking on the wall that borders hell
... Always wondering
How you'd feel if you
Just fell.
--Waterdeep, "The Razor Light"
Madam Hooch eyed Persephone uncertainly. "A flying lesson?"
Persephone felt her face flush; she looked down at her hands. "Yes."
"But didn't you take lessons your first year, with the rest of your class?"
"Yes, ma'am." Persephone steeled herself and looked levelly into Madam Hooch's reproachful eyes. "But I'm afraid I don't get much flying practice at home. And since I don't play Quidditch--" she shrugged "--I don't get much practice here either." It wasn't a complete lie, but it wasn't the complete truth either.
Standing up, Madam Hooch placed both hands on her desk, leaned against it, and sighed heavily. "Miss Clearwater. Didn't I specifically tell you, along with the rest of your class, that you must practice flying regularly in order to hone your skills for later life? How do you intend to get around if you can't use a broomstick properly? You won't be able to Apparate for another two years, and even then--well, Apparition can only take you so far--"
Persephone looked down again--not in embarrassment this time, but in irritation. She hadn't come to Madam Hooch for a lecture; she had come to ask for a private flying lesson, and it had taken every ounce of humility she could summon.
"That's why I've come to you now." She met Madam Hooch's gray-eyed stare determinedly, and consciously added a note of desperation to her voice. "I know I should have practiced, but I didn't, and now I need your help."
Madame Hooch's face softened a bit, and she took a seat behind her desk. "I must say, I'm too busy to teach you myself, but I might know a student who would be willing to tutor you." She put a finger to her lips pensively, then picked up a quill and wrote a hasty note. "Yes. Let me ask around and get back to you, Persephone. Don't worry," she added in an unexpectedly reassuring tone, "we'll get you flying before that field trip."
Persephone shot Madam Hooch a thankful smile that she did not feel, and left.
***
As Persephone hurried across the lawn, she glanced down at the note that the brown barn owl had dropped onto her waffles at breakfast. "Six o'clock," she mumbled to herself, and looked down at her watch. She would be on time. She hoped that her tutor would be. She hoped that no one would guess why she had left dinner early. She hoped her fellow students wouldn't find out that she couldn't fly...
As she stepped onto the Quidditch pitch, she could just make out a lone figure standing under the goal hoops at the far end. Nearing him, she vaguely recognized the boy: tall, black, with shoulder-length dreadlocks. A Hufflepuff, she realized. That was disappointing; she had hoped she might get a Slytherin tutor, which might have minimized the chances of students from other Houses finding out that she couldn't fly. This boy was popular, she recalled, and a Quidditch player. She stopped in front of him.
"Persephone, right?" He smiled and held out a hand.
"Clearwater, yes." She shook his hand but did not smile. She wondered whether he found it amusing that a fifth-year found herself in need of flying lessons, when any pure-blood witch worth her wand knew how to fly years before ever setting foot at Hogwarts. "Green, is it?"
"Call me Demetrius." He dropped her hand and picked up the two school brooms he had brought with him. "Now, Madam Hooch didn't tell me what exactly you needed help with, so I figured we would just float about a little and get an idea of what you can do."
"Erm, okay." Persephone took the broom he offered. This was going to be more difficult than she had expected. Humiliating yourself in front of a teacher was one thing; humiliating yourself in front of another student--a student from a rival House, no less--was quite another.
He took the other broom. "Right then. Ready?"
She wasn't, but she nodded anyway. He kicked off first, and she followed tentatively, hovering just a few feet above the ground. Three words chased themselves through her consciousness, like a dog chasing its tail in her brain: I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.
Demetrius had risen a few feet above her, but when he saw the way she stared at the ground, and the way she sat rigidly on her broom as though petrified, he flew down to her. "Afraid of heights?"
She scanned his tone for the slightest hint of an insult, but found none. She shot him a quick sidelong glance, taking her eyes off the field for only a split second. "I just like it better on the ground. There's nowhere to fall to when you're already as low as you can be." She tried unsuccessfully to keep the shakiness out of her voice as she spoke.
"But think what you're missing!" he said in a friendly tone, flying around to face her. She noticed that he was completely at ease in the air, and she envied him. "Your problem is, you think about the falling too much. You're supposed to be thinking about the flying."
"Don't you think I know that?" she snapped. "If I knew how to do that, I wouldn't need your help, now would I?"
He didn't appear put off by her shortness; he simply frowned thoughtfully. "Alright, let's stay at this altitude and circle the pitch a couple of times." She didn't argue, but followed him, very slowly, as he circled the field. Several times he had to slow down and wait for her.
"I see," he said as they returned to their starting point. Persephone still felt just as anxious and shaky as she had when she'd first kicked off. Part of her hoped that he would give up and declare her hopeless. At least then she could get off this wretched broom.
"A bit higher, I think," he said as he rose twenty, then thirty feet into the air. Her heart sank. "Come on."
She watched him apprehensively, dreading the climb. No sense prolonging the torture, she thought, and resolutely followed him.
If Persephone had been uncomfortable just a few feet above the ground, she was absolutely paralyzed with anxiety now. She couldn't take her eyes off the field--it seemed so far away. Instead of flying, she simply hovered. Once again, Demetrius flew around to face her.
"Persephone, don't look down. Look at me." He stared at her intently. She tried to focus on him, but ultimately the strange compulsion to stare at the field far below her took over.
Suddenly she was possessed by a strange thought. She wondered what it would feel like to fall from this height: whether it would hurt when she hit the ground; whether she would die or simply be injured; whether anyone would care. In her fascination, she temporarily forgot her surroundings, including the boy who stared at her curiously. An image of her father and stepmother, dressed in black and grieving, appeared in her mind. A perverse impulse seized her for the tiniest fraction of a second, and in that moment she let go of the broom with her right hand.
Just as suddenly as she had let go, something solid encircled her wrist. She looked over, startled, to see that it was Demetrius' hand. He uttered one word, a command so stern that she didn't dare to disobey it.
"Don't."
With a soul-rending surge of panic, Persephone realized what she had almost done. She closed her eyes and felt all the color drain from her face. The fear returned then, a hundred times more intense than before she had tried to let go. She felt dizzy. Her hands and feet were numb. Still, she clung to the broom with her left hand, and Demetrius grasped her other wrist.
"Are you alright?" he asked, taking in her tight-lipped, ashen face. She could not respond except by nodding.
After a few seconds of hovering, the anxiety began to recede. And then Persephone noticed something: for the first time, she was suspended in midair with absolutely no fear of falling. With Demetrius holding her wrist, she could throw her broom away completely, and still she would not fall. She opened her eyes and looked around.
It was the strangest feeling she had ever experienced. Everything looked different from up here; she saw the castle in the distance, the trees of the Forbidden Forest, and the stadium surrounding them from a wonderfully foreign perspective. She was weightless. For the first time, she understood the appeal of flying.
She gazed around in wonder for about a minute before she looked over at Demetrius and noticed him smiling at her. "Remember this," he said.
And she knew what he meant. He wanted her to remember what it felt like to fly without fear.
"I'm going to let go now."
"No! Don't do that," she blurted before she could stop herself. All the Slytherin pride in the world couldn't mask her fear of the anxiety that she was sure would return when he took his hand away.
When he spoke he was compassionate, but firm. "I have to. You'll be alright, trust me."
Before she could protest again, he let go of her wrist and hurriedly put several feet between them. She would have reached out and tried to grab him if she could have been sure that it wouldn't have caused her to overbalance and fall. Instead, she grasped her broom tightly with both hands.
But the fear didn't return completely. She felt a little precarious, to
be sure, but she was no longer preoccupied solely with falling. She'd had a
taste of flying, and that wasn't a feeling she could easily forget.
Hesitantly, Persephone began to move up the field. Slowly she gained speed, until she was traversing the pitch at a moderate pace. I'm flying, she thought with unrestrained glee, I'm flying! When she returned to face Demetrius, she could not hold back a smile.
He returned her smile, but his had a thoughtful element to it, as though he had found out something about her that he didn't want to articulate. It was a look that Persephone would grow to recognize, and hate, and love, over the next few months. But at that moment she was too excited about her success to take notice of it.
They dismounted in silence. Persephone noticed that her hands and feet still tingled a bit from her earlier scare. As they walked back to the castle, neither of them said anything about her letting go of the broom, or about his grabbing her hand before she fell.
***
Author's Note: Yes, I realize that I have no business working on a side project while the Heir of Slytherin remains unfinished. Oh well, sorry. I thought of this piece on a long drive, and I really liked it because (for those of you who are reading my year 5 fic) it foreshadows the relationship between these two characters exactly. When I finish Heir of Slytherin I may spin this out into a full-blown prequel (though not in the style of Rowling). What do you think?
Of course, this world belongs to the great J. K. Rowling, but the
characters (except Madam Hooch) belong to me.