IDIOPHONE, PART II
By BUNNIEXTRAMSG
The ceiling of the Great Hall is indigo today, laced with stars. A large moon is pinned like a yellow brooch to the hefty clouds, looking too large to be real. Last month someone found a spell to make a flock of crows spray back and forth across the sky. It was a good for a lark, but boring; the teachers took no notice, despite the students' pointing and whispering. If anything, it showed just what a useless lot they were. Then a Ravenclaw first-year ventured outside and discovered crow skulls littering the ground. The spell was taken off to the beat of her screaming.
"I still hear Mandy whimper all the way from my room. Not the best accompaniment, I can tell you," Millicent Bulstrode scoffs at lunch, ringing her bowl with a metal spoon. "Nightmares, she says. If you ask me, the Ravenclaws are a bunch of soppy losers."
"Soppy bookish losers," Malcom Baddock agrees, mouth full of turkey. He's Millicent's new arm-candy, and a bit of an oxymoron in the couple with his relatively pleasant face to Millicent's rat one — the rumor is that either he was coerced or cursed.
"You can use crow skulls for loads of spells," Millicent says.
Down the table, someone tells her to shut up already about the ruddy crows, and, face poisonous, Millicent makes to get out of her seat.
Across from the bustle, Draco listlessly jabs at his plate, pushes the peas around. He takes his fork and meditatively squishes the green against the off-white porcelain.
Something is niggling at him. No, it isn't just the violins, which have since started a coalition with drum patters; but something as equally pervasive, although silent.
About the first problem, he swears to himself he is going to tell Snape. But every time he makes his way to his Potion Masters' office, he finds himself five feet short of entering.
"What is it now, Malfoy?" he can imagine Snape looking down his hooky nose to ask.
"Sir, I've got a bit of problem with my ears. Fancy you could ring them about a bit? I've got to get rid of the violins. And the drums, you see." Oh yeah, he can see, alright: Snape staring at him, appalled.
In his mind's eye, Draco can sense his dignity physically taking a blow, as Snape takes a St. Mungo's application out of his robe and, with a fatherly air, folds Draco's hand around the creased paper. "Take this. Years later, you will remember me in faithful service of the Malfoys, always ready with infinite copies to supply your ancient line with."
NO. NO. NO. The seed of a tantrum erupts in his throat. Despair tastes like burnt turkey. And rising vomit. Slowly, methodically, Draco plants his head on his plate, taking no note of the mashed potatoes as it flattens his eyebrows.
Next to him, Pansy grits her teeth. Ever since playing alleged knight to the Hufflepuff, Draco has been acting weepy and, under her jealous eye, like a love-ridden fool. At first, this made her spend a lot of time alternately lambasting Draco's features with Adria Market — "he's so ferret-y and he's got this, this, pointy chin and sometimes I'm afraid that it might take out my eye when I'm kissing him" — and then bawling on her flowered bedsheets and swiping at her nose with a cleaning charm. She even led her own interrogation of the Hufflepuffs last Tuesday, intending to pinch out any torches of illicit love, but none of the ladies could remember the fearless leader of the Slytherins ever stooping to help them, be it with books or anything else.
So it looked like Draco's distance came from something else. After a large amount of time perusing books of the medical persuasion and spending days in the library spattered with invisible ink, she took off her plastic spy glasses, pursed her lips, and concluded the inevitable: he was gay. Flaming gay. Starting with a name like Draco and then finishing the job by sending him those weekly installments of the best hair products the wizarding world had to offer, his parents might as well have lit him rainbow from birth. Red, orange, yellow, green, and yes, indigo. The sky is indigo, and Pansy is red with a secret exhilaration: that Draco's distance is not her doing.
Pansy exhales. She'll make the rounds again in the Hufflepuff quarters. It's her duty. But this time, the interrogation will begin with a boy. She glances at Draco sideways — his form has not yet moved from the mashed potatoes. Almost kindly, she reaches over and brushes his hair back.