Author's Note: Eh. Tired. Writer's goddamn block. Hope this is fun (it's not. It's vague and poety and idk why you're bothering).
The water crawls up and around her skin. It clings and moves and she feel its comfort at her ankles.
The trees are dusted with ice petals and she feels the way they breathe. Like winter in deep slumber and she can feel its dreams on her cheeks.
She strokes the hums of deep imagination with her trembling fingers. She doesn't like wearing gloves. She can't feel the sleep around her when she wears gloves.
A figure huddles in the frozen flowers; petals hugging the frailty she can make out beneath his clothes. He is a pile of splinters. He is drowning in the snow.
She reaches out and ice fingers meet an ice cheek. He is carved sharp like a statue. He is stone. He is stone splinters.
She covers her palm with stray shards from his cheek. She can feel him digging in between the prints of her skin.
He sits in his cloth mountains. They encircle him, weighing him down like sacks of water suspending from his bones.
His dry fingertips scratch against the textbook pages. She watches the dust lift and wear him down, with every breath he seems to be across from her a little less.
He stills looks the way he did in the snow.
She doesn't know if he can hear her, and yet she speaks anyway. The way her voice bounces off the edges of every desk and wall and the window behind her makes her insides go cold. And yet, when she pauses there is a downpour in her lungs.
The rain stops. There is a leaking tap and she can hear it, the echoing in her ribs and she waits for the silence to freeze it. But there is a warmth, and it strokes the knuckles of her hand.
She meets the suffocated grey in his eyes. He stares at her. With his eyes on her, she feels like someone else.
Ron's face is cold. Harry's eyes are rimmed purple. Lavender is slowly making her way through the cutlery, bending and shaping it and grinding her teeth.
"So I take it the breakup didn't go well." Ron scowls at her words.
She wants to smooth the crease between his eyebrows. She wishes she hadn't bent his face like that.
She swallows. His eyes shoot through her. She can feel them pricking at the veins surrounding her heart.
Nott's hands curl and uncurl and curl and uncurl and she stares at him and his fluttering eyelashes. She imagines his thoughts like little moving lights and she imagines his mind like the city at night. And all the thoughts he ignores light up and go out and he pushes them between his fist.
She moves her fingers and dips them into the lights and watches how they collect under her nails and between her knuckles. He closes his hand, the lights caught between her skin and his.
She watches the way Nott's eyes look at the spaces between the table and the faces. As though he wants to place his gaze somewhere much nicer than the empty spans of air but he knows he shouldn't. She can still see his face consumed by white. It hides in the cold moving of his throat as he swallows every so often.
Harry's arm finds its way around her middle. She leans into his lukewarm chest.
His embrace feels like the summers that she used to spend at her aunt's by the sea. And the endless sky and the sand between her toes. She would wear dresses that had hems that collected the tide for her to bring back home.
She had never liked heights. Watching the players fade through the air still makes her stomach upset. She imagines them stilling and then falling like stones and splashing to the ground, robes billowing around them like feathers.
Green and red blur the clouds. She can see Harry's glasses flashing, the light catching. She wonders how he can see. She wonders how he stays on that small plank of wood.
There is a pause, a shout from the commentator and Harry descends. Another win. She moves through the crowd, elbows barely avoiding her skull.
Her head sways. A bottle rests delicately in her hand. Parvati and Ginny have their arms wrapped in hers and the three of them are skipping. It's much more amusing and she thinks it's because of the night and the stars and the just-larger-than-a-quarter moon that casts stretched shadows on the floor.
The darkness mirrors their actions, soon joining with three more and they link arms and dance.
"Well hello there." A satin voice becomes the music and the shadows freeze, swaying, staring at their partners.
She studies the curves of grey against the brightness cast by the window.
"What are you doing this side of the castle?" Ginny's figure moves on the wood. Hermione's dark mirrored arm reaches out and strokes Ginny's back. It looks so strange, as though she is comforting a sadness inside of her friend. She smiles, watching the shapes move.
A long stringy shadow moves through and toward hers. It takes her dark fingers. It's soft and warm, pricking little feelings inside her stomach.
The pricks start in her cheek. She looks into Nott's dark eyes and smiles.