Disclaimer: Hogwarts and its people still belong to JK Rowling, bless her cotton socks for letting us play with them.

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Chapter 6: Measuring in Hands

Grunch, grunch, grunch.

He'd only climbed up into the loft over the stall when Hooch had suggested it would be a safer place for him to sit. He'd dangled his legs over the edge for a while, listening to the kerfuffle as the others tried to treat his horse. Then, when he'd dispensed his wisdom for the day and Luna was busy washing (and he could hear the water go glurgle-sloop in the bucket and the way her breathy voice changed when she leaned down to dip whatever she was using into the bucket) the horse's healed injuries, a wave of tiredness had hit him like a plank. It was a long walk back to the Infirmary and everyone sounded too busy to help him anyway, so Draco decided to lie back in the fragrant hay and close his eyes (ha!) for a bit.

When he woke up again he could hear something making terrible moist crunching sounds and the air was cold. There was a very… organic … smell to the air that suggested whatever was in here with him wasn't housetrained.

"Hello?"

The crunching stopped, then started again as if whatever was making the noises couldn't be bothered with one misplaced Slytherin.

Grunch, grunch, grunch, grunch…

Draco's sleep-addled mind raced as he tried to catalogue the noise. Thief of Socks, no – that was a myth. Dire Bookworm – not in a barn.

Barn!

The sound was similar enough to the one the horse had made when that Ravenclaw girl fed it apples to make Draco think that this was just the horse eating something else. He could smell horse, too. Warm and sharp. Utterly distinct, although reminiscent of deer and unicorns. And he thought he could also smell… carrots?

"Hello, horse? Is that you?"

Stupid, stupid, stupid… What would he do if someone replied "Yes, Draco, it's me, the horse"?

So everyone had decided to forget about Draco Malfoy, had they? They were probably having a good laugh now, thinking of him stuck alone in the night outside the castle; maybe they thought he'd try walking back and get lost and disappear into the Forbidden Forest for good? That brute Hagrid and Hooch (who needed a shave almost as bad as the freaky half-giant) were probably down at the Hog's Head in Hogsmeade thinking up new ways of tormenting the Malfoy brat if he lived through the night.

Well, he'd show them. He'd show everyone.

He'd show them just as soon as he figured out a way to show them…

Fuming slightly, Draco found the ladder (set into the wall so as an occupant couldn't brush up against it and injure itself) and climbed down. He followed the grunch-grunch noises, which suddenly got louder as the horse lifted its long nose out of the bucket and swung its head around to investigate this late-night wanderer. The smell of carrots and molasses was much stronger as the horse sniffed his face. Draco was amused by the way the horse kept chewing as it made sure this wizard wasn't a danger. Finding nothing more interesting than what it already had, it turned its attention back to the contents of the bucket.

Grunch-grunch-grunch.

Much reassured by the fact that the horse was relaxed enough to ignore him, Draco stepped closer until he could hang an arm over the blanket-covered high back and lean against the warm side. The horse seemed content to keep ignoring the boy, which suited Draco just fine. It was a chilly night and the horse was nice and warm. Draco yawned, automatically covering his mouth with a hand. Good manners didn't get left outside a barn, after all.

What time was it? There was no way to know. It had been late when he'd suggested Luna fix the horse's injuries, so it must be a lot later now. If he went back into the castle Filch would probably catch him and give him hell, the rotten Squib. With no Snape to protect him Draco would most likely feel the wrath of McGonagall: she was the only teacher with the guts to take on the older Slytherin students and her bias against his house was the stuff of legend. Maybe he should stay here…

Humiliating though it was to admit it, Draco knew no-one in Slytherin House would be too concerned if he didn't show up. He didn't know who was doing the rounds of the dormitory now that Snape was dead. He didn't really care, anyway. It was warm here, and the company was undemanding, although after a week with no-one interesting to talk to Draco was feeling more than a little stir-crazy. Besides, if his father broke through the wards (and Draco was confident the resourceful Lucius would one day soon. Anyone who could kill Severus Snape and live to boast about it in a letter to his son was resourceful) the Death Eaters would slaughter a Muggle animal… and Draco was feeling oddly possessive of this one. It had carried him out of the forest. It had saved his life from the spiders, too (although okay, what was the point of being alive if he was blind?). He'd found it (okay, it had found him) and so it belonged to Draco. (Because a wizard, even a blind wizard who was no better than a Squib, couldn't belong to an animal, Muggle or magical!) Okay, so now that he was blind he was done for as a wizard and he wouldn't have a lot of clout with his father, but Lucius still needed him to carry on the Malfoy bloodline.

Gah.

That would mean Draco was even more likely to marry some ghastly chit of his father's choosing to breed with. Well, not that he'd ever thought he wouldn't, but it was nice to dream occasionally of choosing his own wife; someone he could respect and who respected him in return. Love was for romantics. Draco had never been a romantic, but he was a recent convert to pragmatism, and respect was well within the boundaries of pragmatism.

When the horse finished eating (and Draco envied it a little – he'd skipped dinner and now his stomach was protesting with loud growls) and lay down, the boy carefully worked out where the legs had been arranged then lay down too, choosing the inside curve of the horse's neck as his pillow and pulling straw over himself to keep warm.

But he didn't go to sleep for a long time. He lay there listening to the horse's soft snores and thought about things. General things like politics, and specific things.

Like Harry Potter, the Dark Lord, and Cornelius Fudge.

When at last he slept he dreamed he was playing poker with those three. All the cards were marked but no-one seemed to know how the markings worked enough to do some serious cheating. The queens were Luna for some strange reason, while the kings were Lucius, and all the jacks had green eyes and stupid scars on their foreheads.

When Fudge called Draco to show his hand, Draco put down his cards and watched all five turn into aces. Each ace was a black horse: one for diamonds, one for clubs, one for spades, one for hearts… and the last black horse had a green and silver pentacle over its back.

"Well played," said Harry, showing Draco his own hand which had four jacks. The jacks, who looked exactly like the boy holding them, said in unison: "Yes, well played."

"You have an equine flush," said Voldemort, his red eyes twinkling over his half-moon spectacles, and his voice sounded like Dumbledore's.

Draco smirked and drew his winnings towards him. The stakes had been cities and towns and villages and houses. Tiny sparks represented the lives of the people within them. Draco was gentle as he pulled them towards his chest.

"Wait," said Fudge. He was wearing his stupid little bowler hat. "Blind people can't play. You were cheating. "

And then Draco realised that he couldn't see anything. People were trying to hold him, control him, stop him from breathing… He shouted at them to go away as he struggled out of their grasping hands and tried to run away from the table.

The strongest hand clamped down on his shoulder. The fingernails were sharp. "I've got a present for you, Draco," said Lucius. He opened his free hand and a spell shot out, a curse the sickly yellow of old pus. Draco was blind but he could see it as it arced away and hit –

"NO!"

He woke as the spell hit Snape and ripped him inside out.

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The hand on his shoulder was still there and Lucius was breathing hot on the side of Draco's neck. But the world was black again. Small mercy, that: Draco had the image of Snape being torn apart tattooed on his useless retinas in technicolour shades of red and scream. He froze, waiting for his father to say something.

But his father stayed silent. The fingers (fingers? No!) relaxed on his shoulder when Draco tried to sit up. It was the horse. The horse had bitten him. It had woken him up. The fingernails were its teeth, and Lucius' breath was really the horse's. Draco reached up with shaking hands and touched a velvety muzzle. Hot air gusted over his fingers, reassuring him that the horse was alive and unharmed, a condition not congruent with his father being present. Draco shuffled backwards so that his back was nestled in against the horse's neck and he could pat the animal more easily. "Good horse," he said, his voice thin and still shaking from the nightmare. "Thank you for waking me up from… that."

It whuffled softly to him, just as he'd heard it whuffle to Luna, and rested its nose on his knee. Draco reached forward to pat it.

It was calming just touching the horse. The soft, satiny hide over the strong bones of the convex nose was a lodestone for reality. Nightmares drew back into shadows even a blind boy could see, but now he could see them for what they were: nightmares. Only nightmares. Unmagical and unfragrant, the horse trumped them. It stayed still as Draco's fingers continued to explore the alien physiology of the animal's head.

Draco began to map it out by touch. In the darkness of the night, there were no shadows under his fingertips. And little by little the nightmare drained away.

The velvety skin around the wrinkled mouth and broad spreading nostrils switched to the sleek pelt Draco had already felt on the horse's neck, but with shaggier, softer whiskers under the jaw. The cheeks were flat with muscle. When Draco ran his hand up behind the jaw and felt the slight jowliness there he dug his fingers in and the horse pushed back, like it was enjoying having its jaw scratched. Draco smiled and stroked the hair flat over the neck until his fingers found something… odd.

It was a wrongness. That was the best way he could describe it. A lump that (even though he didn't know anything about horses) he knew shouldn't be there. Draco sighed to himself and moved back to the horse's head again. He'd ask Hooch about the lump tomorrow. The ears flickered when he bumped his fingertips into them, and Draco pulled on one, laughing silently when the horse didn't pull away. Between the ears was a bony bump covered in the same long hair Draco had felt in the mane, and he scrubbed at that with his fingernails while the horse pushed back happily.

Draco's happy mood dissolved when he moved his hand down flat and felt something tickle his palm. Eyelashes. His hand was covering the horse's eye. A lump formed in Draco's throat as he realised the horse trusted him enough to let him get close enough to blind it.

The lump in Draco's throat threatened to cut off his breathing as hot tears spilled down from his own useless eyes. He wanted to see again. He wanted to see the world and know that he had a place in it.

The fluttering against his palm brought him back to reality. He sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his robes. Bugger manners – this was a barn and barns didn't come with hankies. He sniffed again and realised he still had his hand over the horse's eye. The flickering of the eyelashes like a line of tiny paintbrushes was the most amazing feeling he'd ever felt.

Draco moved his hands over the horse's head again, but this time with more care and with a clinical intensity. He found the 'lump' on the horse's neck again and felt the wrongness as an itch under his fingernails.

He took in the smells of horse and hay and the laundry soap the house elves used on his robes.

He heard the faint rustles of trees in the wind outside and the gurgle of food in the horse's belly … and the gurgle of his own, empty belly.

Then he ran his fingers through the horse's mane, deciphering the different textures.

Then he leaned back against the horse as it put its head down and began to softly snore again, and he put his hands together.

Hands.

He carefully touched his thumbs to each opposing finger. Hands and thumbs and fingers. He'd never given them any thought before. They'd always been there – like eyes.

Hands were a miracle all of their own.

Snape's hands hadn't been pretty but they'd been clever. Draco had envied him that cleverness. Pansy's hands… grasping pudgy things. Crabbe and Goyle's hands like slabs of meat; butcher's hands; hands for dealing with the aftermath of life, Draco had always thought, and it had amused him once to consider that he, Draco Malfoy, would be one of those deciding how life would change. His father's hands were beautiful creations, representative of Lucius himself: cool and capable of quick, unlooked-for cruelty. Blaise Zabini… that boy had hands always with that faintest trembling, and only now did Draco consider what might have given the other boy such a characteristic. Millicent Bulstrode's hands were strong like Crabbe and Goyle's, but there was a more practical art to hers, as if she was waiting for the day when she'd learn she was to be famous for carving wood or work the lapidary magic that spun castles out of mountains. He couldn't remember Potter's hands even though they'd smacked into Draco's face enough times, but of all the Gryffs it was Granger's hands he held in his mind's eye. The Mudblood had the hands of a scholar, as his father had described them, although Lucius could never have condoned such a generous compliment to a Mudblood, even though Granger was (gah – Draco had to admit it) possessed of a brilliant mind and a not unattractive body. She did Mudbloods proud, and was – at least superficially – better than many purebloods; and in the lonely hours in the Infirmary Draco had mulled this paradox over, weighing it up against what Lucius had instilled in his son from the cradle.

Sometimes, Draco thought, his father had some really dumb ideas.

Draco's hands were so familiar that it hit him like a punch to the gut that he didn't remember what they looked like. It was like describing his mother: she was so familiar he couldn't picture her face as a physical thing, only as the series of passing emotions the thought of her evoked. Strange. He sat there and realised that whatever force had created humans – God, evolution, elf overlords, whatever – it had truly gifted people when it saw to it that they had hands.

Draco sat in a barn with a Muggle beast, blind, friendless, and – because he didn't kid himself when it came to this – powerless. All through history, a blind wizard was destined to be no more than a pawn. Unless he took his destiny into, as it were, his own hands and shaped it to his liking.

And he thought about hands and, for the first time in his life, Draco Malfoy bowed his head and felt blessed.

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