These past five years Harry has told himself any number of things about his classmates, and most of them are even true.
Of the things that are not true, the vast majority are small lies, private lies, things that it does no harm to believe. He tells himself that Neville wants only three or four months with a kind and patient tutor to be as good a student as any in their year; that Seamus will grow out of his recklessness without losing his good nature and before he gets himself or anyone else into trouble; that Ron and Hermione only bicker so much because they love each other.
He has also told himself that Draco Malfoy is a loudmouth and a bully, that a Slytherin’s manipulative backstabbing is no match for a Gryffindor’s forthright courage; that the contest between Slytherin and Gryffindor is simply one between good (which will always win in the end) and evil (which will always lose), and that Malfoy will never truly be a force to be reckoned with either on or off the Quidditch field. Sometimes he catches himself frowning dubiously when he tells himself this; sometimes he has to tell it to himself several times and at great length, feeling ridiculously as though he is arguing with himself, when as far as he can tell he could pace the halls of this particular ideological tower forever and never meet with anything but silent accord.
It is possible that he would have told himself this lie until he was rudely, and perhaps harmfully, jarred out of it had he not walked out by the Quidditch field during Slytherin’s practice, perhaps rather more perceptive than usual, perhaps in an unusually clear and open mood – walked out by the field, tilted his face up toward the light misting rain, and really watched Malfoy for the first time.
And now it is apparent that the lie is not harmless and is unlikely to serve him well; because Draco soars, he has reflexes like a striking snake and turns on the head of a pin, he takes possession of the entire sky and is as likely to come at another seeker from above or below as from behind, and the unpleasant suspicion builds in Harry’s stomach that his victories over Slytherin have had rather more to do with luck than he has heretofore liked to think.
Harry has, to be sure, had better days.
Harry has never liked winter, but here at Hogwarts it has come to hold a sort of morbid fascination for him.
Flying in winter is never pleasant. Too many layers of clothing unbalance him, make his turns sluggish and his dives intolerably awkward; and so he wears only jeans and a sweatshirt underneath his robes, and the air high above the school is scaldingly cold. He flies anyway, high and fast, answering the indefinable restlessness that has plagued him for months.
He feels alive when he flies. Too often of late he has felt shadowed, unreal, and has caught himself thinking that he is invisible even when his cloak is locked securely in the bottom of his trunk. Sometimes when he wears that cloak he wonders which is the real Harry – the one who can be seen, heard, touched, or the one who drifts through darkened halls as unnoticed as the slow wheeling of starlight on stone.
Since he and Ron and Hermione outgrew the easy physicality of childhood, no one touches him anymore, or only rarely. Sometimes he believes that the restlessness, the wondering, could be banished by the touch of a hand on his skin or an arm around his shoulders; but he does not know how to ask, or whom.
The earth sleeting by underneath him is pale and silver-white, and the sky is the color of slate – a color that could darken in a moment with a coming storm, or pale into crystal with the cold, watchful serenity of a cat drowsing before a fire. Harry soars and banks between earth and sky, unsettled, not caring that the cold burns his skin.
For years now, Harry has waited for the call to come.
Sometimes he forgets about it for weeks at a time, only to wake in a cold sweat thinking Today? Will it be today? And for days afterward his hands shake whenever the morning mail drops letters like a hard Spring rain onto Slytherin's table.
He knows that it will come eventually; that Slytherin House will empty, students pulled from Hogwarts by their parents and enrolled at Durmstrang to be trained in the Dark Arts. And people whom Harry has faced dozens of times across a Quidditch field will be his opponents in a far more serious game, and will show even less mercy than they do now.
(Once Cho had been knocked off her broom by a bludger; acting on what looked like pure reflex, one of Slytherin's beaters had sheared out of a dive and banked hard to catch her. He had immediately looked horrified, and any subsequent reference to his action was likely to be met with violence.)
To say that Harry has no love for Slytherin is something of an understatement. He dislikes their easy superiority, their nastiness, their firm conviction that a good end will justify any means; he dislikes everything that they represent. It is difficult, at any rate, to be on good terms with people who will almost inevitably wind up serving the person who murdered his parents. If someone asked him to save a Slytherin from a burning building, he tells himself, he would have to think about it for a minute.
But he knows the call will come; and, knowing, Harry is afraid.
Not merely apprehensive; not only dreading the signalled start of a war. This is something else, something that makes him dread the summer holidays for fear that the call will come and he will not be there to…
To something. Anything. All he knows is that, come what may, Slytherin House must not be allowed to empty into Durmstrang. And the only reason he can find for this fear that twists his stomach and dampens his palms is so ridiculous, so juvenile, so utterly self-centered, that only once or twice has he even been able to say it to himself:
That out of all of Hogwarts, only Draco can match him when he flies.
Harry loves the Weasleys with all his heart, but there are times when their rambunctiousness makes him want to crawl away into some inaccessible corner of his own mind where he can draw the shades and sit in cool, silent darkness that drifts and buoys like the waters of a lake.
Today, for instance, Fred and George are trying to perfect a joke wand that will, whenever it is used to attempt a spell, turn whatever it is pointed at an eye-watering shade of chartreuse; thus far, they have only succeeded in making the juice jug give off a shower of varicolored sparks and sing "Lady of Spain" in a high tinny voice like a nickelodeon record. Charlie is home for a visit, taking up half the kitchen with his long legs stretched out in front of him and engaging Mr. Weasley in conversation about details of dragon metabolic processes that Harry would have been just as happy not to know about. Ginny is in tears because the boy her best friend likes has a crush on a fifth-year Hufflepuff girl, who in turn has a crush on the captain of Ravenclaw's Quidditch team, and Ginny's friend has, in a Medea-like fit of vengeful despair, threatened to go to the Christmas dance with Goyle. Ron and Percy are bickering over who gets to use Erroll to send a letter, and Harry wants...
He wants. He wants to get on his broom and soar until the clouds fold around him like soft illusion. He wants to fly so fast that his skin goes numb and makes the harsh sting of the wind on his face feel gentled to a lover's caress. He wants to leave the world far below and lose all of it, lose himself, take everything that makes him what he is and hand it over into some perilous safekeeping.
He wants to put his hands over his face and shut out the light so that, just for a while, he will not have to see the world through Harry Potter's eyes.
School has started at a rather lazier pace than usual this term, and Harry has had time to wonder why it was not until his last year at Hogwarts that he realized that Slytherin House possesses its own rather odd variety of honor.
The Dungeons are Versailles of the Sun King in miniature: full of a thousand petty quarrels and jealousies, jockeying for position, alliances that shift, whirl, and spin faster than any Quidditch player ever born; confidences, large and small, are the coin of the realm, to be guarded or betrayed according to their use. And at the heart of this dizzying venturi of Ancien Régime nobility in miniature is, always, Draco Malfoy, bright sun of the Slytherin dungeons, accepting the court paid him with the absent-minded courtesy of someone genuinely unaware that any other social structure exists. If there is a Slytherin equivalent of Madame de Montespan, however, Harry has not heard of it; though it has been common knowledge for years that Pansy Parkinson lusts after the Malfoy name and fortune, and possibly, just a little, after Draco.
Malfoy, Harry has learned, though Malfoy himself may not have been entirely aware of the fact during their second year, has more right to be justly considered the Heir of Slytherin than Voldemort ever had. (It amuses Harry, and he suspects that it amuses Draco, to think of the Dark Lord as a pretender to Draco's throne.) Since Hogwarts was established no Malfoy has ever been in another House, a consistency that no other wizarding family, pureblood or otherwise, can boast - though Harry has heard dark rumors of a Malfoy ancestor who avoided being sorted into Ravenclaw by sheer virtue of panicking and pinning the Sorting Hat onto his head in a white-knuckled grip, bawling like a toddler in the throes of separation anxiety and refusing to leave the seat until the Hat grumpily gave in and placed him in the proper House.
Confidences. But Harry, who is on the outside but has made it his business to see keener than most, suspects that there are many, many confidences, of far more consequence than cheating on a test or a boyfriend, that are silenced by the walls of the Dungeon as effectively as by the walls of a tomb.
(When they had first learned of the Cruciatus curse, when all other eyes had been on Neville, Draco's eyes had been on Blaise Zabini; Blaise, whose gaze had turned blindly inward, glassy as the eyes of a doll long forgotten on a dark attic shelf.)
Harry is not sure that he approves of this. The world was much less complicated when he did not have to wonder, out of all of the possible range of confidences, which ones even Draco Malfoy would not betray at any price.
When she leans over and places her lips against his, Harry's first thought is that this is possibly the first truly stupid thing he has ever seen Hermione do, and his second is that her mouth is as cool as lakewater with her tears.
Ron and Hermione have broken up before, often for hours, on one particularly unpleasant occasion for days; but this is the first time that the breakup has had a strange air of permanence hovering over it like the smell of a long-empty house. Harry doesn't even know what happened. All he knows is that Ron left for the Christmas holidays in stony silence, and when Hermione leaves as well the school is shrouded in snow and so quiet that Harry lifts his hands to his ears and tries to shut out the silence as he would the roar of a jet engine.
The sound of the shower is soothing, calming frazzled nerves and wiping away the hurt look on Hermione's face when she pulled away from his unresponsive mouth. He did not tell her, and has never told anyone, that what hesitant fumblings with girls he has managed to experience have filled him with a sense of loss, of mourning for an indefinable something that should have been and wasn't; and he has visions of the snitch soaring into the lightning while he, earthbound, cannot take flight and follow. Harry tilts his head forward and braces his hands against the tile, and the light and water fill his closed eyes with a soft white glow, and he thinks of the frozen-over waters of the lake.
Sometimes he dreams of the depths of the lake, of silence pressing on his ears, of blue stillness shaped and molded by the slow dancing of plants and the quicksilver darting of fish. In his dreams the sky is dark with a coming storm and snow lies pale and forbidding around the shores, blown into scattering misty whirls by the chill wind like unruly hair whipped into his face. Sometimes he thinks of the pale hands of the Erl-King; and then he dives into the lake, cutting himself on the sharp ice, and swims downward with clouds of red billowing in his eyes.
He remembers the Mermen, with their dark, flat gaze. Everything that Harry cannot live without is cold soundless water, pale with the winter light; so cold that Harry can no longer tell the difference between ice and flame, and no longer wants to.
In his dreams they are symbiotes, Harry and the silent water; and he wakes with his fingers clenched in the sheets, his whole body tight and aching with arousal, and has no idea why.
