A/N: It's my fervent belief that minor characters can be more interesting than the major ones. I like the minor characters. Although, make no mistake, this is a Harry/Draco story. It just may take a while to get there. Please bear with me.
Note #2: Beware of rampant out of character-ness.
Note #3: I love my Dean.
Note #4: But, I really love anyone's Draco.
Manichaeisms of Control
By Morgan Rowe
…Who owns nothing and never claims she does.
-winds of change-
And you can't fight the tears that ain't coming
Or the moment of truth in your lies
When everything seems like the movies
Yeah you bleed just to know you're alive
Goo Goo Dolls, "Iris"
A person is the sum of their experiences, a reflection on the world they live in, and, likewise, the world reflects a person right back. Although, the world is much more subtle about it. Raining tears, screaming gales: the world is more alive than it is ever given credit. And there's more to weather then you'd ever think, but far above it all is wind. Because wind brings whispers of change.
It began on a day filled with pathetic fallacy.
A comfortable wind ruffled through the grass, picking up the seeds of very ordinary, common dandelions and whisking them of towards the much less ordinary Forbidden Forest.
"Are you accusing me of lying, Weasley?"
"Me? I would never! What I'm accusing you of is avoiding the question."
"Hah!" Lavender laughed and pulled another dandelion out of the lawn. She held it up towards the sun: too irregular to be a sphere, with the light surrounding it like a corona. Gloriously imperfect. And then, with a certain amount of determination, she grinned up at Ron.
Ron raised his eyebrows and smiled challengingly at Lavender, who was stretched across the grass with her head in his lap; both his robe and hers lay a fair distance away and most of the buttons on his crisp, white shirt were undone making him look adorably dishevelled. "Don't you dare."
Lavender simply snickered, took a deep breath and sent a puff towards Ron, a puff that carried its own flotilla of seeds into Ron's face. Instead of getting angry, Ron simply brushed the seeds away and proceeded to tickle Lavender senseless.
Soon, when Lavender's breath was coming in wheezing gasps, she gave in. "Alright! Alright! Fuck, Weasley. You win." She batted Ron's hand away.
To anyone watching, the whole affair would have looked horribly flirtatious, but Ron and Lavender didn't care. They'd long ago come to the conclusion that their relationship couldn't be defined. They weren't dating or in love. They were just two adolescents who recognized each other as being attractive but would never entertain the idea of being attracted. And the rest of the world could go fuck itself.
Ron flicked a curl off Lavender's face. "So, answer the question."
"What was the question again?" Lavender asked, widening her eyes to an impossible size and batting her eyelashes, all sugar and sweetness.
"Feh. Don't try that crap with me, Brown. I'm not Sprout."
"With the way you bloat up around pollen? You don't have to clarify, sugar." Ron glowered at her affectionately and Lavender sighed. "Who do I like? Honestly, could you come up with anything more juvenile?"
"Certainly." Ron held up his fingers and began to tick them off. "Is it true you have cooties? Buttercups or daisies? When you dumped sand in his hair it was 'cause you liked him, right? Can you come out to play? See, easy. Now tell."
Lavender hooked her legs together, letting her skirt ride scandalously high up her thigh, and looked at the sky. "It's not that simple, Weasley."
"Like never is." Ron nodded soberly.
---
A hot, impulsive breath of air flowed through the cracks of the window frame into a room that already could have benefited from weather stripping.
Dean was lying flat on his bed, his back making a right angle with his legs which were rested against the backboard of a chair he'd found lying around the dormitory. At this angle he could take advantage of the small stream of sunlight that managed to manoeuvre its why through the filthy windows of Gryffindor Tower. The sunlight lit the pages of his ratty copy of "Karl Marx: Selected Writings" enough that he could avoid using a lumos spell. Always a plus since they gave him headaches.
The room's only other occupant, Seamus, was pacing back and forth in deep contemplation. His feet were scuffing against the floor in the way they always did when he was thinking hard about something. Years after he had graduated, Dean bet, there would still be a groove in the wood.
"This sucks."
Dean lowered his book, carefully hidden behind the December issue of Robeless because, while Dean liked to pretend he didn't care what the rest of the house thought about him, he had a certain image to maintain. "What sucks?"
"You want to know what sucks? This stupid school sucks. Fucking sucky school. That's what sucks."
"Not that I'm arguing, but why?"
"You and me, man. Our talents are going to waste here!" Seamus sat down on the bed huffily.
Dean dropped his feet to the floor and sat up, tossing the book and magazine off the bed. "We're two very talented motherfuckers, Seamus. Which talents were you talking about?"
"Why with our brains, intuition, street-smarts and my stunning good-looks," here Seamus paused for some preening that would have made Narcissus proud, "we could solve all the unsolved mysteries and untold crimes that lurk in Hogwarts' unseemly underbelly. Except Hogwarts, being the bitch it is, has no unseemly underbelly or even a seemly underbelly. Is an underbelly really that much to ask?"
Dean laughed. "A detective duo Seamus? Really?" He wasn't in the slightest bothered by the 'out of the blue'-ness of the idea. Seamus got bored easily, and when he got bored his mind floated to all sorts of different, far-off possibilities. Unlike Dean who preferred to base his thoughts solidly in fact and reality, or at least his perception of reality.
"Well why the fuck not?" Seamus jumped back to his feet and resumed pacing. Dean fell into his own thoughts and stopped watching, but that was okay. It wasn't anything he hadn't seen before. Suddenly Seamus came up short and whirled around with the expression of someone who had come across a fifty-dollar bill on the street, right before they realized it was in Canadian currency. "We could be like Cagney and Lacey!"
"You realize both Cagney and Lacey were women."
Seamus didn't miss a beat. "We could be like Holmes and Watson."
Dean rose to his feet. "Which would I be?"
The word 'Watson' formed on Seamus lips but a split second later his brain caught up. "Why Holmes of course!" He replied dismissively.
"Right." Dean clamped a hand on Seamus' shoulder; his eyes had gone all shiny and glittery with anticipation. "Let's get to work then."
Seamus boggled. "What? Weren't you just listening? Hogwarts, no unseemly underbelly, remember?"
Dean grinned like mad. "Oh yes. I remember. So if there's no unseemly underbelly for us to muck through, we make our own and then we muck through it."
Seamus' face lit up like jack-o-lantern and the newly formed duo digressed into spasms of maniacal laughter.
---
The ancient air of the library stirred slightly, its only concession to the younger waves of change wafting outside.
A page flapped and Hermione slapped a hand down on it with barely a change in position, a practised manoeuvre. All around her were stacks of dusty books written by old men, each book as ridiculously large as the last so that you just knew they were compensating for something.
At that moment, she was devouring one of the smaller volumes entitled Muggles and Magic: What They Got Right. It was research for a project, but given time she would have got around to reading it anyway.
Hermione didn't read because she wanted to know everything, although that was certainly part of it. A thirst to know anything, everything, from the deepest workings of magic to the ins and outs of her wand's technical manual. But, on a more fundamental level, it was because Hermione Granger loved words.
She turned the page and reached up to dig her fingers into her curls. Hermione was a full-body reader: she moved her lips along with her reading, she tapped her feet to the meter of the lines and she wriggled her hips when she found a passage she particularly liked. All in private, naturally, Hermione would die if she looked silly in public.
Ah, words. Words are powerful in a way that only a few people grasp. Hermione was one of those people.
Everything that is so infinitely special about humanity started and ended in words. What was history if not a collection of words written or passed down by people who were long dead? What use was the information superhighway if there was no way to communicate the information? Oh yes, words have so much more power than simple magic. They have the power to move and inspire, to change and create, to hurt and destroy. Words define humanity. The idea was nearly orgasmic.
Or so Hermione thought. But what does she know? She's only 15.
---
Out near the Quidditch field the wind was a lot less gentle. Professor Sprout had claimed it was because the trees that had once sheltered the area had been torn down to make room for the turf, so nothing was left to temper the wind. Dean had called her a closet tree-hugger.
Whatever the reason it made life harder for the players. In the air, little dots that flashed of silver and green fought, trying to make their way somewhere, anywhere, against the violent headwinds.
From down near the entrance Harry watched, amused by their difficulty and impressed too. If it had been Gryffindor's day to practice they would have cancelled it. There was something to be said for Slytherin pigheaded stubbornness.
A player, who Harry knew was Slytherin's captain because he'd just come from an argument with the boy, took off into the air and flew straight into a bludger which had been blown into his path. Harry laughed.
"Really, Potter." He knew that voice: frosty as an arctic wind and twice as biting. He cast a glare over his shoulder at Draco Malfoy and then resumed watching as the Slytherin, broom in hand, stepped up beside him. Malfoy's eyes were also fixated on the practise, and he didn't show the slightest interest in Harry. Oh no. "I know Gryffindor isn't ready for tomorrow's match, but stealing Slytherin strategies…" Malfoy loved to alliterate the letter 's'. It made a hissing sound like a snake. Parselmouth wannabe.
"What strategy? You mean all this 'dive, shoot, kick people off brooms' crap. You call that strategy? I thought you Slytherin were supposed to be cunning?"
Malfoy stiffened and his smile froze in a way that made him look constipated before smoothing out into a smirk. "You've always had a selective memory Potter. I believe it went 'those cunning (and unfairly good-looking) folk use any means to achieve their ends.' Any means, see?"
"Do you ever get a hernia from kissing your own ass Malfoy?" Harry snapped.
Malfoy's eyes flickered in his direction filled with contempt. "Not all of us have been so special and gifted that people have been begging to do it for us since we were born." He swung a leg over the broom and kicked off, rising into the air. "Eh, wonder boy?" And then he was flying away, just another silver speck.
Harry shivered with anger and wondered why Malfoy always got the last word. With a silent vow (not the first and most likely not the last) not to let it happen again, Harry turned and left the arena with one last glance into the air.
The wind died. Some things never change. And some things just don't need the foreshadowing.
- end part one -
