Unwinging Pegasus
1.
Ambush, Potter thinks, serves me right, ambushing Malfoy in his flat, serves him fucking right too.
England's newborn winter is miserable and painstaking, Muggle-city and Wizard-city all whirling silver, scarves and coats and gloves. The black coldness of it bleeds and Potter hates it. Nothing ever goes right so everything goes wrong. Longbottom's face, for a week, has been pale and wry; Harry Potter doesn't look at him. Harry knows what's coming and Neville does too.
In stead he sits there and waits, half awake and half numb with cold, frost-tracery on the windows because London's winter is lacework and stone.
Neville points to his watch.
Half an hour left. The wards are ready.
I know.
Their breaths fade into ciphers and scrawled calligraphy in the crispness of the morning.
2.
Draco's key turns the lock: click, clack. Harry sees and feels and tastes the sudden tensing in Neville's muscles, looks at him from across the jambs, nodding.
Now.
The white light from outside pours in as the door opens; a golden head emerges from the plane that is Outside. Harry's eyes meet with Neville's and they're counting: one two three over over over over. The air suddenly gets taut and quiet.
"Expelliarmus!"-"Stupefy!"
Draco's wand skitters across the wood-floor and his face freezes in terror, bug-eyed and twisted. Harry spares a handsome second to smile before roping Malfoy's hands.
"Fish in the net."
"Too big of a fish. No. He looks like a hare." Harry says, retrieving the wand and snickering.
Neville doesn't quite get it for a moment, "Hair?"
Harry looks at him, tilts his head, narrows his eyes. He leans. "No. Hare. Rabbit. Bunny."
Neville hears the humiliation buried in the timbre of Harry's voice but he chooses to ignore it, out of pride. His mouth opens for a second as if he'd remembered something to say and closes as if he'd then forgotten it.
When the spell wears off, the first thing Draco says is: "So."
Neither of them responds.
Harry is looking away, Neville is looking away.
Malfoy clears his throat, speaks with a soft voice and softer smile, "You know, I knew something was wrong."
Harry bends dangerously close over him, leaning on the arms of the chair to which he is tied. "I guess you were goddamned right."
3.
Harry has a dream.
There's hurt and slaughter in the echoes of his eyes and they flout the command and take no warning. It unmakes him in the end, after it all, because of his eyes and what they told people. For some months he'd forgotten it all, forgotten the winter or even the presence of it that loomed beyond the peace of summer, and it all came down, crashing and kicking, until he remembered the sound and the variations of its echoes. It must've been what hurt felt like, in tessellating schizophrenia and through the whiskey it felt all the same, though, so it was all right. A is for Avada Kedavra-every letter is for avada kedavra avada kedavra avada kedavra.
4.
Smoke rises and fades from Potter's mouth. He coughs, from either the cold or the cigarette. He's watching. He's waiting.
It's not even that Draco flinches under Harry's gaze. It's that he turns toward the window and the pale light catches the shadows of his jaw, makes it sharper, makes Harry want to break it.
"So."
"Shut up."
"Do you remember-"
"We didn't gag you for old time's sake, Malfoy, so shut up."
The way he spits out the old time's sake makes the nerves behind Draco's eyes burn. Draco sighs, shakes his head and grins. "This is really not going to work." His head suddenly jolts upright, eyes glinting, grin still there, cracking, perfect. "You know why?"
Nothing.
Malfoy can see the clenching bones inside Harry's jaw, so he doesn't stop. "You should fucking know."
The smell of fresh spilled blood climbs like an alarm into the morning and it starts to snow outside. There are fronds already, copses of snow, of papered cold. Harry has trouble breathing.
"Funny, isn't it? The bloodtraitor bitch wouldn't shut up either, about you. Harry Potter. The great goddamned messiah."
"You were there, you fucking tory?"
"Maybe."
They stare at each other and Harry suddenly catches the understanding.
5.
"Lupin's talking about one more day."
"Why?"
"Under attack, apparently." he turns to Draco, smiles a smile that's really just an excuse to flash his teeth. "We get your pleasant company for one more day, Mr. Malfoy, imagine my delight."
"I wish I could say the same of you, Mr. Potter" Draco smiles back as he struggles, but more polite and more gentleman-like. "They stick me with fucking Arrogant and fucking Idiot, they better be goddamned looking-"
"Silencio!"
"Thanks a lot, Neville."
Neville grins. "So that's what the spell is for."
6.
Harry has a dream. He is standing in middle of the room, where there rises a light so bright he can't see afterwards. He hears wings, beating like a fretting bird, too heavy to be lifted.
7.
It's the chill across wood's lacquer that crawls up Harry's calves.
Fucking no, this is not-
He almost thinks but Draco's mouth swallows the thought.
Harry knows where to touch. And kisses slowly and burns apologies. Draco reaches up and his hand somehow-somehow-fits the bow of Harry's neck. Something is missing. Not that Harry doesn't realize, he's just waiting, he's still waiting. There's a silence but the death of the silence swallows it. The room is church-dark and it brings out the pale in Malfoy's arm when he drags his tongue across it.
"Don't, don't say anything."
"I wasn't going to."
"Yes you were." Harry covers his mouth over Draco's lips and pushes his wrists up, pushes his pants down.
On his knees between Malfoy's legs; Malfoy's hands tied behind his back and feet to the chairlegs, body firm and stiff against the edge of the chair. The muffled sound of sucking and licking occasionally filtering through fabric and skin and sweat, the snag in his breath and the blue of winter creeping over them all. He bites a cry and a sound and swallows the come down. "Not a word."
Draco is breathing hard and long and rasps, "I don't think I have to."
The door creaks.
"Harry," comes a hoarse whisper from the door where a sick light gushes into the room. Neville's silhouette is solid against it. Potter needs some seconds to adjust to the brightness, and then sees the acerbity in Neville's face.
"Longbottom." Draco laughs as he beats Harry to the name. "A compromising position to catch a friend in, hmm?"
Harry grimaces in the dark, Neville sees it.
"The order was that we watch him. Dumbledore said-Dumbledore said-" His voice has lost its hesitation. "Don't you fucking get it?" Neville snaps suddenly and it sounds like he's lost the nerve or courage.
"You don't understand," Harry seethes out.
"Understand." And it's almost a question.
8.
The carafe flickers. It catches the brief phoenix of the sun before it fades and almost dies. Harry memorizes the glimmer of it.
The waiting game is the job description for exphilosophers and writers who are willing to do it again & again again again again but it has never been so black and horrible as it is now. It's the process of breaking thoughts that breaks Harry, too.
"Was he right?"
"Neville, don't. Don't."
Neville's face twists and this time it narrows, threatening. Harry didn't know he could do that. "Nothing, okay? I didn't mean to say a fucking thing." He hates the indignity but he gives surrender and lowers his head, turns.
9.
When he wakes up it's to a bright flash of yellowmagiclight and a sound of wood shattering; the ache in his forehead tells him something is wrong.
"Go." Neville doesn't move. Harry screams, "Go!"
Neville breaks, gasps, bolts for the door and understands.
There was a trick up his sleeve after all.
"Malfoy. Draco Malfoy I swear, I fucking swear if you do it I won't let your fucking bones rest."
"You weren't going to anyway," Draconis Malfoy's laugh is like a dragon's; his teeth clash against the ash on him, the grime and blood.
Harry stares at him, hands on the table as if to steady himself. "You can't. You fucking can't. You're a fucking coward and an idiot to boot-" breaths & breaths "-You don't even know how to work the thing."
Draco the Golden Dragon leans across the table, the gun held shakily in his fingers, glinting, magnificent; eyes so obvious and brilliant it hurts Potter to watch. He says, breathy and coarse, fire in his breath, "Potter, did you really think that?"
10.
(The Greeks always had the penchant for wings. Potter deems it their most brilliant and most fatal flaw: Plato's obsession with the perfect universe conveyed it well: the fall, the dissociation, the quest for something upward. Not that he thinks of it often. He's not afraid of lifting. It's perverse that Malfoy seems like a heavensend, tendered by pale angels from their faroff land; his wings clapping his flight. It's perverse that Neville sees the same thing. It's simply beautiful and perverse and wrong.)