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III., in which we see another side of Draco, attend the start-of-term feast, and learn what truly frightens Harry.
Sometimes, Draco liked to dress in leather. Real leather, this was, not the cheap Muggle excuse for it, made from the hide of an innocent, unobtrusive bovine with large, round eyes and a glossy, dumb stare. No, this leather was expensive, hundreds of Galleons, made from only the finest stock of dragon in existence.
When the world seemed to grind down on him, he would take out the false bottom of his trunk, and there, folded neatly beside his favorite Muggle novels and a dusty box of old photographs, lay the shining black pants, the heavy, silver-studded jacket, and the slim-fitting sleeveless shirt styled with large, slick silver buckles. These, paired with his usual boots, enormous and thick-soled confections which reached nearly to his knees with zippers, buckles, and studs, turned Draco into another wizard altogether.
He would steal away from the common room to wear them, tuck them into his robes and disappear up the tiny back stairways which no one seemed to use or even remember at all, they were so cluttered with shadows and cobwebs and memories. Names were carved here, symbols and dates.
Draco used to look for the names of his father's contemporaries, his professors, and his rivals. His pale fingers would brush over the crumbling brickwork, come away dusty with the past; he would sweep away the thick grey veils of cob webbing and listen impassively as spiders scuttled away from this disturbance. He found the Lestranges names, here, and even the fancy letters spelling Severus Snape.
But when he found small letters carved into the moldering base of the stairs, letters which read J.H. Potter & L.D. Malfoy, 'til death do us part,' Draco stopped looking.
Draco was not at the start-of-term feast that year.
Harry knew this because the Great Hall seemed unnaturally empty without Malfoy's silvery preditorial gaze fixed sternly on him, Harry, through the entire meal. On either side of him, Ron and Seamus laughed and smattered their pumpkin juice on the table and on themselves as they carried on, waving forkfuls of steaming food to illustrate this point or that.
Now, because most of the conversation centered around this year's promising Quidditch team, one of them would interrupt the other to interject a question which Harry was expected to answer.
And Harry answered their mindless questions, questions to which they should have known the answer, yet somehow didn't; they didn't notice the dull pain in his voice, nor did they notice that he wasn't eating.
In fact, the smell of the meat in its thick, delicious gravy sickened him, not because he dislike beef, but because it reminded him of the Burrow, a place he could not envision himself visiting again any time in the foreseeable future.
Ginny watched Harry eat.
Or, rather, she watched him not eat.
He would spear a bit of meat onto the tines of his fork, swirl it through the gravy on his plate, and look at it; he would make as though he was going to eat it, this succulent bite of tender, juicy beef dripping in its rich bath of gravy. Then Seamus, all flustered by this rambunctious talk of Quidditch, would push his sandy curls away from his dark eyes and knock into Harry's elbow, pawing at him, and ask a question. Harry would answer, lowering his fork to his plate.
Ginny, from behind her glass chalice of juice, pretended she did not see any of this, that it wasn't happening; she pretended that, no, Harry was eating just as much as any of her brothers, that she couldn't see the gauntness of his already thin face. She pretended he was the Harry she had known years ago, when he swallowed mashed potatoes at such an inhuman rate that the entire length of the table would stop and stare, amazed that he didn't choke on his own tongue.
But she could not let herself pretend that she hadn't seen that wounded look in his eye, that flicker of curious injury and self-loathing that she saw so often throughout the meal.
Ginny wondered where the Harry she had fallen so desperately for in her first year had gone, and she felt the last few drops of the sweet, tangy pumpkin juice slip down her throat.
The crowds at the school that year seemed stifling to Harry. In walking with his fellow Gryffindors up to the common room, he found himself surrounded by a frightful amount of noise; he felt panicked, pushed into himself by the raucous laughter and shouts of his housemates. His through tightened, his skin damp and clammy, as he gasped shallow breaths of air.
Neither Ron, who was laughing with Seamus at his own jokes, nor Hermione, who was glued to Ron's side, noticed in the least, but Harry could feel the cautious and watchful eyes of some smallish person never leaving his emaciated figure. When he looked around, however, guarding his puzzle, searching gaze carefully, he found that he was no longer being watched; the eyes had left his gaunt frame, and he was again alone in the swirling throng of Gryffindors crowding their way through the corridors to the common room.
The common room itself, of course, was exactly as Harry had remembered it, slightly cluttered in a familiar, comfortable sort of way. The fires had already been lit in their dusty old grates, and the red and gold banners sporting delicately embroidered and fierce looking griffins fluttered from the heavy wooden rafters above.
Harry, ignored by most of his house, collapsed into a threadbare red armchair in the corner of the room with a heaving sigh, struggling to keep the rough stone walls from spinning around him.
By the fire, Ron had settled down with Hermione leaning on one of his crooked knees, challenging person after person to a game of chess and winning every time.
Harry found it terribly cruel and ironic that a boy who had everything which Harry had always wanted, a boy who had envied the little that Harry actually had, was now in fact more popular than Harry himself was. Ron was also Quidditch captain of the Gryffindor house team, as well as Head Boy.
Harry found it strangely unsettling that this, the boy who had so been afraid of slipping into the shadows of Harry's supposed greatness, was now pushing Harry into those same shadows with all his freckle-faced might.
The Slytherin common room tucked deep within the dungeons of the school were bustling with energy and excited chatter as Draco came through the sliding wall.
By the fire, the younger, naïve first- and second-years crowded around something, a book, perhaps, of dark and evil spells. Pansy Parkinson, fanned by the lustful compliments and flirtations of boys from every level (and several of the girls, as well), lay on a long, low leather couch to one side of the fire, her face lit up by a green crystal chandelier and a slow, seductive smile. Her eyes widened slightly when she saw Draco enter, his leather tucked safely underneath the stairs at the end of the hall.
He slipped into an armchair on the fringe of her following, none of whom noticed his entrance but for a slender figure in the shadows. This figure emerged in silence, coming to the arm of Draco's chair and leaning on it gracefully, the curve of his back level with Draco's pale eyes.
"Where have you been? They've been asking for you all evening," said the figure, stroking the long, loose strands of his curling red hair away from his face.
"Who has?"
The figure grinned a perfect, shining white smile. "Why, everyone, darling."
This was the elusive Blaise Zabini, the son of a wealthy banker in London and perhaps the heir to one of the most coveted fortune in all of wizarding Britain, second only, of course, to the heir of the Malfoy galleons, Draco himself. Blaise was also the beautiful youth Draco's father had hoped he would choose at his annual party, that boy with dazzling violet eyes and a flawlessly contemptuous look below a perfect brow.
Draco scowled, sinking further into the dimpled leather of the armchair. The figure did not leave, in fact leaning closer on the wide arm of the chair. Draco glared up at him. "Bugger off, would you? I'm trying to fume in peace, thank you."
"Ah, but it's never that simple, is it?" asked the figure with a lingering sigh. He draped himself with a curving feline posture across the back of the chair now, a tiny, pretty pout gracing his delicate features. "Don't you want to play?"
"Not especially," replied Draco, a note of forced disgust present in his silken voice.
Draco naturally lusted after things of great beauty, and Blaise was most inarguably one of these things; however, Draco also had one general rule which he followed closely at all costs: do always the opposite of that which Lucius wants of you. Sleeping with the Zabini boy - as much as Draco wanted it for himself - would only please his father too much.
He looked at Blaise, one of whose eyebrows was cocked coquettishly, a smirk snaking its way over his petal lips. Draco felt his lip curl, but did nothing to stop it.
"I've got business to attend to," he said, and he pushed himself from the chair, sweeping out of the common room to no predetermined destination.
Dressed in his tough dragon hide leather, Draco found himself standing high on the ramparts overlooking the lake, which sparkled and danced in the silver daggers of moonlight. It was all very beautiful, the tiny crests lapping solemnly against the sands of the shore, the rippling Slytherin green and silver in the wind-kissed grass, the silvery leaves on the skeletal branches in the forest to the east, there, and even the swirling eddies of clouds touching the rising disc of moon at the edge of the horizon.
One of his feet, encased in the thick, hot, powerful leather of his boots, was pushed up against the parapet, and against the crooked knee of this leg, he leaned with his elbow, the slender angle of which was dressed in the gleaming silver-studded dragon hide. His long, thin fingers were shrouded by heavy silver rings, and the wind tossed his usually sleek hair wildly, whipping the sharp strands into his eyes and the soft flesh of his ears.
He felt powerful out here; he felt raw, untapped. There was no limit to what he was, to what he could be become. He was a live wire, ready to snap at any moment.
When he closed his eyes, he was no longer the skinny seventeen year old boy he was at home or at school. He was tall, broad muscle and sinew strapped in by soft, dark skin, dark eyes peering out from a brooding and shadowed brow, topped off with long, soft black hair trailing carefully down the sturdy ridge of his spine. He was a hero out here. He was a god. And he was beautiful like he never was at home.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------* Mad props to those who have reviewed so far (the pitiful few that it is - and I love you all for waiting so patiently for such a short chapter), but perhaps a few more of you might, ah, contribute?
III., in which we see another side of Draco, attend the start-of-term feast, and learn what truly frightens Harry.
Sometimes, Draco liked to dress in leather. Real leather, this was, not the cheap Muggle excuse for it, made from the hide of an innocent, unobtrusive bovine with large, round eyes and a glossy, dumb stare. No, this leather was expensive, hundreds of Galleons, made from only the finest stock of dragon in existence.
When the world seemed to grind down on him, he would take out the false bottom of his trunk, and there, folded neatly beside his favorite Muggle novels and a dusty box of old photographs, lay the shining black pants, the heavy, silver-studded jacket, and the slim-fitting sleeveless shirt styled with large, slick silver buckles. These, paired with his usual boots, enormous and thick-soled confections which reached nearly to his knees with zippers, buckles, and studs, turned Draco into another wizard altogether.
He would steal away from the common room to wear them, tuck them into his robes and disappear up the tiny back stairways which no one seemed to use or even remember at all, they were so cluttered with shadows and cobwebs and memories. Names were carved here, symbols and dates.
Draco used to look for the names of his father's contemporaries, his professors, and his rivals. His pale fingers would brush over the crumbling brickwork, come away dusty with the past; he would sweep away the thick grey veils of cob webbing and listen impassively as spiders scuttled away from this disturbance. He found the Lestranges names, here, and even the fancy letters spelling Severus Snape.
But when he found small letters carved into the moldering base of the stairs, letters which read J.H. Potter & L.D. Malfoy, 'til death do us part,' Draco stopped looking.
Draco was not at the start-of-term feast that year.
Harry knew this because the Great Hall seemed unnaturally empty without Malfoy's silvery preditorial gaze fixed sternly on him, Harry, through the entire meal. On either side of him, Ron and Seamus laughed and smattered their pumpkin juice on the table and on themselves as they carried on, waving forkfuls of steaming food to illustrate this point or that.
Now, because most of the conversation centered around this year's promising Quidditch team, one of them would interrupt the other to interject a question which Harry was expected to answer.
And Harry answered their mindless questions, questions to which they should have known the answer, yet somehow didn't; they didn't notice the dull pain in his voice, nor did they notice that he wasn't eating.
In fact, the smell of the meat in its thick, delicious gravy sickened him, not because he dislike beef, but because it reminded him of the Burrow, a place he could not envision himself visiting again any time in the foreseeable future.
Ginny watched Harry eat.
Or, rather, she watched him not eat.
He would spear a bit of meat onto the tines of his fork, swirl it through the gravy on his plate, and look at it; he would make as though he was going to eat it, this succulent bite of tender, juicy beef dripping in its rich bath of gravy. Then Seamus, all flustered by this rambunctious talk of Quidditch, would push his sandy curls away from his dark eyes and knock into Harry's elbow, pawing at him, and ask a question. Harry would answer, lowering his fork to his plate.
Ginny, from behind her glass chalice of juice, pretended she did not see any of this, that it wasn't happening; she pretended that, no, Harry was eating just as much as any of her brothers, that she couldn't see the gauntness of his already thin face. She pretended he was the Harry she had known years ago, when he swallowed mashed potatoes at such an inhuman rate that the entire length of the table would stop and stare, amazed that he didn't choke on his own tongue.
But she could not let herself pretend that she hadn't seen that wounded look in his eye, that flicker of curious injury and self-loathing that she saw so often throughout the meal.
Ginny wondered where the Harry she had fallen so desperately for in her first year had gone, and she felt the last few drops of the sweet, tangy pumpkin juice slip down her throat.
The crowds at the school that year seemed stifling to Harry. In walking with his fellow Gryffindors up to the common room, he found himself surrounded by a frightful amount of noise; he felt panicked, pushed into himself by the raucous laughter and shouts of his housemates. His through tightened, his skin damp and clammy, as he gasped shallow breaths of air.
Neither Ron, who was laughing with Seamus at his own jokes, nor Hermione, who was glued to Ron's side, noticed in the least, but Harry could feel the cautious and watchful eyes of some smallish person never leaving his emaciated figure. When he looked around, however, guarding his puzzle, searching gaze carefully, he found that he was no longer being watched; the eyes had left his gaunt frame, and he was again alone in the swirling throng of Gryffindors crowding their way through the corridors to the common room.
The common room itself, of course, was exactly as Harry had remembered it, slightly cluttered in a familiar, comfortable sort of way. The fires had already been lit in their dusty old grates, and the red and gold banners sporting delicately embroidered and fierce looking griffins fluttered from the heavy wooden rafters above.
Harry, ignored by most of his house, collapsed into a threadbare red armchair in the corner of the room with a heaving sigh, struggling to keep the rough stone walls from spinning around him.
By the fire, Ron had settled down with Hermione leaning on one of his crooked knees, challenging person after person to a game of chess and winning every time.
Harry found it terribly cruel and ironic that a boy who had everything which Harry had always wanted, a boy who had envied the little that Harry actually had, was now in fact more popular than Harry himself was. Ron was also Quidditch captain of the Gryffindor house team, as well as Head Boy.
Harry found it strangely unsettling that this, the boy who had so been afraid of slipping into the shadows of Harry's supposed greatness, was now pushing Harry into those same shadows with all his freckle-faced might.
The Slytherin common room tucked deep within the dungeons of the school were bustling with energy and excited chatter as Draco came through the sliding wall.
By the fire, the younger, naïve first- and second-years crowded around something, a book, perhaps, of dark and evil spells. Pansy Parkinson, fanned by the lustful compliments and flirtations of boys from every level (and several of the girls, as well), lay on a long, low leather couch to one side of the fire, her face lit up by a green crystal chandelier and a slow, seductive smile. Her eyes widened slightly when she saw Draco enter, his leather tucked safely underneath the stairs at the end of the hall.
He slipped into an armchair on the fringe of her following, none of whom noticed his entrance but for a slender figure in the shadows. This figure emerged in silence, coming to the arm of Draco's chair and leaning on it gracefully, the curve of his back level with Draco's pale eyes.
"Where have you been? They've been asking for you all evening," said the figure, stroking the long, loose strands of his curling red hair away from his face.
"Who has?"
The figure grinned a perfect, shining white smile. "Why, everyone, darling."
This was the elusive Blaise Zabini, the son of a wealthy banker in London and perhaps the heir to one of the most coveted fortune in all of wizarding Britain, second only, of course, to the heir of the Malfoy galleons, Draco himself. Blaise was also the beautiful youth Draco's father had hoped he would choose at his annual party, that boy with dazzling violet eyes and a flawlessly contemptuous look below a perfect brow.
Draco scowled, sinking further into the dimpled leather of the armchair. The figure did not leave, in fact leaning closer on the wide arm of the chair. Draco glared up at him. "Bugger off, would you? I'm trying to fume in peace, thank you."
"Ah, but it's never that simple, is it?" asked the figure with a lingering sigh. He draped himself with a curving feline posture across the back of the chair now, a tiny, pretty pout gracing his delicate features. "Don't you want to play?"
"Not especially," replied Draco, a note of forced disgust present in his silken voice.
Draco naturally lusted after things of great beauty, and Blaise was most inarguably one of these things; however, Draco also had one general rule which he followed closely at all costs: do always the opposite of that which Lucius wants of you. Sleeping with the Zabini boy - as much as Draco wanted it for himself - would only please his father too much.
He looked at Blaise, one of whose eyebrows was cocked coquettishly, a smirk snaking its way over his petal lips. Draco felt his lip curl, but did nothing to stop it.
"I've got business to attend to," he said, and he pushed himself from the chair, sweeping out of the common room to no predetermined destination.
Dressed in his tough dragon hide leather, Draco found himself standing high on the ramparts overlooking the lake, which sparkled and danced in the silver daggers of moonlight. It was all very beautiful, the tiny crests lapping solemnly against the sands of the shore, the rippling Slytherin green and silver in the wind-kissed grass, the silvery leaves on the skeletal branches in the forest to the east, there, and even the swirling eddies of clouds touching the rising disc of moon at the edge of the horizon.
One of his feet, encased in the thick, hot, powerful leather of his boots, was pushed up against the parapet, and against the crooked knee of this leg, he leaned with his elbow, the slender angle of which was dressed in the gleaming silver-studded dragon hide. His long, thin fingers were shrouded by heavy silver rings, and the wind tossed his usually sleek hair wildly, whipping the sharp strands into his eyes and the soft flesh of his ears.
He felt powerful out here; he felt raw, untapped. There was no limit to what he was, to what he could be become. He was a live wire, ready to snap at any moment.
When he closed his eyes, he was no longer the skinny seventeen year old boy he was at home or at school. He was tall, broad muscle and sinew strapped in by soft, dark skin, dark eyes peering out from a brooding and shadowed brow, topped off with long, soft black hair trailing carefully down the sturdy ridge of his spine. He was a hero out here. He was a god. And he was beautiful like he never was at home.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------* Mad props to those who have reviewed so far (the pitiful few that it is - and I love you all for waiting so patiently for such a short chapter), but perhaps a few more of you might, ah, contribute?