Very Midsummer Madness

And I sat down under his shadow

"Magnificent, isn't it?" said a quiet voice behind him.

Of course, it was Malfoy. In the corner of a long bench against the balcony's back wall, he sprawled with such apparent ease, one leg bent upward and the other dangling down to the floor, that the wood might have moulded itself graciously to accommodate his body. It pleased Harry to see that the damp weather had spoiled his fastidious presentation, adhering the filmy grey shirt to his skin and weighting his hair into limp strands which he had pushed back from his face. His only adornment was the book - large and leatherbound - which lay open in his lap.

After the world of Hogwarts where the books so greatly outnumbered the wizards it was hard to say which was studying which, Harry had been perturbed to discover that, here, they were a rare curiosity - causing more excitement than the latest pregnancy but less than a handful of nutmegs - and far too unscholarly to tell him how to get home. His gaze caught on it as he longed simply to pick it up, feel its weight, run his finger over the elaborate illustrated rectangle which caged the first letter of the chapter title: canticum canticorum.

"There's no finer view in all Illyria," Malfoy continued with a slight slurring of words which seemed less the product of alcohol than of lazy meditation. "Stay and watch for as long as you wish."

Harry kept his back to the panorama. Malfoy might be a picture of harmless indolence, with the buckles at the knees of his breeches unfastened and his arm draped nonchalantly over the back of the bench, but a prompt exit was still the wisest course.

"I have another message from my lady the Duchess."

Malfoy turned his face away.

"Don't speak of her. "

"There's nothing else I want to discuss with you. She loves you. That's my message." His commission was poetry rather than petulance, but the words stuck in his mouth and came out as a challenge. "Did you really think you could put her off with a bit of scorn and a cheap ring? Why don't you get it over with and invite her to dine with you."

Malfoy stopped a fraction short of outright laughter.

"I would sooner brick myself up in a monastery than spend an evening in her company."

Good, Harry thought. He would have left their conversation there only he remembered too many Weasley cheeks reddening under the whip of Malfoy tongues and he could not let the insult stand.

"A few minutes of your afternoon then. Invite her to take tea with you. All you have to do is sit in your garden and discuss the weather. You don't look like you have any more important business."

"Do you say this to vex me?" Malfoy snapped and relinquished his slouch to put both feet on the floor. As he straightened, the pained expression evolved into something more cunning. "Are you angry with me? Is that it, Viola? Tell me why you're angry. Could it be, perhaps, because I kissed you? Or are you angry because I let you go?"

When Harry's power of speech returned, it came in a spluttering rush of air.

"Angry?! I'm angry because - I'm not angry. I couldn't care less what you did. It's you - you're the one who should be ashamed. Since lies and trickery are the only way you can get what you want. You can't do that to people."

From the way Malfoy frowned at him, Harry might have spoken in Chinese.

"But I can," he said with simple mildness, and Harry saw it then, how it was not only Ginny whose eyes took on a rapture when she spoke his name. He remembered how Malfoy's cold portrait in the castle's great hall was rarely without an audience whispering behind the shelter of hands, how despite the serving boys' disdain of the polishing rag only that picture's frame was never tarnished, and how even Professor Trelawney glanced aside rather too often when she described his equestrian accomplishments with indifference in her voice and colour in her face.

Malfoy arranged himself deliberately with his arms outstretched over the back of the bench.

"Now," he said clearly. "Please - and you will note the word - please put aside this coquetry and use your admirable bluntness to tell me what you are trying to procure from me with your reluctance. I can be generous when it amuses me, and I think that in your case it might amuse me."

Harry presumed that coquetry was what happened to women when somebody like Gilderoy Lockhart in his glory days (or, in recent times, the gravely charismatic Remus Lupin) walked into the room. It was a guarded advance for those who wouldn't risk making their interest plain, and that was how Malfoy saw him. Well, this Malfoy hadn't been there when Harry had screwed down his will and made himself speak the truths that other people evaded - had spoken them to Umbridge, to Fudge, to Dumbledore, to his friends and had paid the price for his words, again and again and again and again. The skin of his right hand stung and he shook it. He matched Malfoy's most lordly tone for coldness.

"The only thing I've asked for is your love for my mistress. I don't want your ... attention." He spat out that word like he'd found a worm in it. "Is that blunt enough? You have nothing I want."

For a moment, the muscles in Malfoy's mouth appeared to lose all control and could form neither sneer nor smile. He remembered the book in his lap then, turned his attention to it with a sudden glare as though it had crept there slimy and uninvited, closed it with a dusty thump and hurled it onto the bench beside him.

"Nothing," he repeated sceptically and only then looked up.

The small shrug Harry gave had all the rush of a blow. In its path it left silence as Malfoy watched him with those hard, pale eyes, watched him for a long time.

"Well then."

Malfoy had no more than stood up before Harry dropped his coat and readied his fists. Though his eyes darted to where delicate sleeves stretched tight across the tensing of Harry's biceps, Malfoy's only response was an unpleasant laugh.

"You have nothing to fear from me, girl," he said, a touch of the sneer returning. "You have made yourself clear. I would not so much as stoop to seduce a queen, and you need not imagine that I would put myself to greater effort for a messenger."

As good as his word, he passed Harry without a sideways glance to clamp his hands over the balcony rail, where he stood with his gaze on the far landscape and the fine fringes of the shower spattering on the tip of his nose.

And Harry lingered. Because this thing that looked like victory - limp and lacking the hot blood that pounded in his ears when he snatched the Snitch from between Malfoy's fingertips or produced a potion that even Snape couldn't fault - left him unsatisfied.

"Why are you still here? Your message is delivered and if you have set your aim higher than a count then you have no time to lose. Seduction is a slow business, you will find, and most of Illyria's dukes have one foot in the grave already. "

With a slow letting out of breath, he leaned forward until the rain fell on his forehead. His eyelids flinched once then relaxed and let the droplets wash over them as transparent pearls wound their way down the strands of his hair and Harry faded into invisibility.

"You've got it all wrong," Harry protested, a beat too late. "This isn't some kind of scheme. I don't want to marry a duke - I'm not after any man. Only you would think like that."

Malfoy looked at him then, sidelong through glittering slits of eye.

"What is it that you want, little Viola?"

Harry wanted Hogwarts and unchallenging grey stone and enemies who knew how enemies were supposed to behave and he wanted it with such sudden fierceness that he had to turn his face to the rainstorm to hide it.

Malfoy saw, though. Whatever he saw, it drew him across the gap between them and made him seize Harry's hand in both of his, sliding it in one swift movement under the slippery fabric of his shirt so that Harry's palm lay over his breastbone. Smooth skin, Harry registered numbly. Wet from the rain but giving off a sticky heat. And a pulse - there was a pulse in there hammering away like it was ten seconds before Judgment Day. Anger, perhaps. Desire. Or fear. He didn't trust Malfoy to distinguish the three as separate emotions. But, now that he was closer, he could see the same furious beat rippling under the skin of Malfoy's temple.

"There," Malfoy said as if that put something beyond doubt.

Released, Harry's hand slipped down, but his fingers only bumped over two ribs, three, before he stilled them. The whole possibility of Malfoy having ribs and skin and a heartbeat seemed ridiculous and so astonishing he needed to keep his touch on it for proof.

It was perhaps only an instant that he stood there, Malfoy's damp shirt clinging to the back of his hand, before the space between them disappeared. Malfoy was still almost an inch shorter and his hair smelled faintly, sweetly of vinegar as he leaned in until his nose was just inside the folds of Harry's shawl. He found Harry's free hand with his own and put his fingertips inside the curl of Harry's. Then he waited, and he could have counted twelve beats of the heavy raindrops that rolled off the balcony roof before he turned his face up and caught Harry's bottom lip between his.

The heat overwhelmed him, under his hand, along his lips, and where it radiated through thin fabric from Malfoy's chest, and by the time the shock of it released him it was too late, because Malfoy's hair was tickling his cheek and Malfoy's breath was on his skin and Malfoy's knee had insinuated itself very gently into his skirts and Malfoy's tongue was inside his mouth and stroking the very tip of his and coaxing his jaw to open wider. The right hand he needed to separate their bodies was pressed between them but when he moved it his nail dragged over Malfoy's nipple and the instant hardening of flesh sent a jolt from his fingers to his stomach that turned his knees traitor and made him stagger back against the rail. Malfoy followed with his whole body and thrust his mouth against Harry's until their teeth scraped and by then it took only one graze of Malfoy's narrow hips over his own to make Harry shudder and press back with a murmur of abandon that caught in his throat.

Mid-moan, he remembered the dress. And the conflict between his skirts and the telltale flesh beneath. Though his body writhed and hardened and denied it, his whole identity in this place was built on femininity, and to let his façade slip was to risk the loss of all the trust he had built here. With the grief of his exile from Hogwarts still so raw, he flinched from the prospect of another parting and he struggled.

"Don't!" he panted around the obstacle of Malfoy's tongue and teeth, and in one unkind shove he had his hip in Malfoy's groin and Malfoy's lips were full of hair.

All movement stopped then. Harry drew big shaky breaths, tangy with the scent of sweat and spit. Their torsos separated. The heat was swept away by a chilling blast of air, and there was nothing but the grind of Malfoy's fingernails into the flesh of Harry's wrist.

When Malfoy spoke, a new depth of loathing had twisted itself into his mouth.

"Go back to your duchess." He cast away Harry's hand with its ugly bracelet of abrasions. "Tell her I will cut out the tongue of the next messenger she sends to me. And take your false virtue out of my sight."

A pale whip of movement flickered in the corner of his eye, a spray of water droplets hit his cheek, and then the stairs echoed with the clatter of heels. Harry waited a long time with the rain trickling down the back of his neck before he started the journey home.

*

Which one of them would you follow?

The shawled figure who has stepped back into the storm without his coat and walks with head bent low? Or the aristocrat with the hair in his eyes who has lined up pomegranates along the dining table and annihilates them one by messy one with the swing of a jewel-studded scimitar?

Trust me, and let me lead you away from both. There is another Harry, you recall. Perhaps he is faring better.

Pass with me out of the villa and eastward further, where the hills make a steep descent to the north plains and the township nestles between two thrusts of rocky land. On the slope below the town, the rain fades to a fine lacework of hovering drops.

There. Two figures climb towards us, following the stream, spare packs fastened about their shoulders and moist shirts clinging to their sides. You need no introduction this time. Harry, who could never be mistaken, in a man's shirt and breeches, and his companion: a tall, striking fellow with long dark hair and his shirt unlaced rather rakishly.

Don't you think there's a carefree aspect to Harry's frame - an exultation in the rush of pulse and breath as, with each step, he stretches arm and leg to devour as much distance as he can. You should have seen him when he washed up on these shores, furious and lashing out in fear, his gaze probing every fissure in the rock for a trace of the Transfiguration classroom which had vanished before his eyes. How he kicked his legs as he lay on the sand and roared at the alien sky, hands crunched into ugly fists, seaweed in his hair.

When he turned his head and saw who had rescued him from the water, he fell silent.

"Sirius?" he said, very quietly. Then he put his forearm over his eyes and made no movement for a long time.

Do you wonder that it took him three whole days before he could make his first hesitant steps toward home?

They move quickly up the hillside now, the older man leading and making such easy strides with his long legs that, every so often, he will disappear from view among the trees.

"Wait!" Harry calls and runs for a few steps, rounding the path's curve only to find his companion leaning against a laurel tree and greeting him with a grin. "Don't go where I can't see you," he snaps, the peevishness regretted before the sentence is even finished.

But Sirius only grins that grin.

"I'm not so careless as to lose you, Sebastian, not when I've come this far to guard your safety. I'll see you delivered to the Duchess's castle."

And if his young companion's wavering smile doesn't quite fire in him the same surge of protectiveness that, four days ago on a storm-licked beach, bound him into service without a moment's reflection, then it's still a very near thing.

*

By the time the downpour had eased, the fire in the great hall was crackling fiercely behind him, his hair was almost dry, and he had learned how to tuck his legs comfortably under the too-short skirts of the robe Ginny had insisted he borrow.

Across the room, Ginny was playing dice with Professor McGonagall, who alternated between citing classical scholars on the evils of gambling and clicking her tongue in glee when the roll fell her way. Once the showers grew gentler, Fred and George had appeared under a beribboned yellow parasol with the offer to sing any song in history for a florin, and, three florins richer, they now performed with Dumbledore and his lute.

Lord Draco Olivier might as well have fallen off the edge of the earth. He had not been mentioned since Harry had returned with the lie "This time he refused to see me" and Ginny, taking one look at the drenched state of his clothes and the pallor of his skin, had promised him an afternoon of rest and two days' reprieve from any message bearing.

If Harry thought of him - and, with his chin resting on one knee and the torchlight making a golden sanctuary against the gloom outside, he did - it was no longer with dread. He understood one thing. What he had in this corset was a kind of power, not the sort that brought down dark wizards, but enough to give him a new sort of leverage. Though it was as unfamiliar in his hands as a rocket launcher, he would use it if he had to. He tucked the drying scarf into the aperture of his bodice. It was a strange thing to pity a Malfoy.

"Leave your daydreams, Viola, and join our game." Ginny crossed the room and perched on the arm of his chair. "You are under my care in this castle, and I command you to play."

She laid her fingertips on his forehead, evidently finding his temperature satisfactory, and went back to the table. Outside, a fine gauze of rain still trailed from the sky. The twins harmonised quietly:

In delay there lies no plenty -
Come and kiss me sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

A goblet of red wine sat on the floor by his seat and he realised, with the same surprise with which he might have noted that a warm room had become cold or a dull pain had gone away, that he was happy.

*

"Stay a little."

It was a command, yet she grasped the end of his sleeve lightly between finger and thumb.

Over her shoulder, Harry watched the dancing shadows in her chamber, the stocky redwood furniture and the woven carpet rich with geometric colour. The air that escaped from it was musty from the fire's long work. Though its warmth reminded him of his long neglected bed, he followed her in and, before the door had quite scraped closed, she rounded on him.

"Perhaps now that you've rested you can tell me how you found him."

The day's levity had left her now and Ginny's eyes had a challenge in them. Experience had taught him, however, that the only way to curtail this line of questioning was the barefaced lie.

"I didn't see him. I only spoke to the guard at the gate, and he said that the Count was sick and didn't want any visitors. He wouldn't even take a message to him."

On the two occasions he'd been invited into her chamber, the dress had seemed to hang from his limbs, ill-fitting, a dirty and shameful disguise. It still made him uncomfortable, and as always he found himself moving in a safe arc no more than two feet from the doorway as she leaned on her dressing table, ornate with its gilded combs and scent bottles, and studied him.

"Yes. So you said." With the candelabra behind her, shadow obscured her expression. "You were gone a long time."

"I stopped under a tree to get out of the rain."

"As you will, Viola," she said opaquely, turning from him to slide into the chair with a dextrous manipulation of skirts. "And what do you suppose this means, his sudden silence? What is his strategy and how do I counter it?"

"This isn't Quid- ... it isn't a game, Ginny. You sound just like him with all these tactics and trickery." In the mirror, her eyes widened curiously. "Even I know that you can't trick someone into liking you."

She laughed at him.

"What are a romantic you are! Trickery, lies, feigning, poetry - why be delicate about it? As you say, my dear, this is no game. If I fail, I can spend a lifetime watching him parade about with a great Venetian beauty or a country girl with no letters and a fawning smile." Pushing away the powder box which strained in her grip, she carried on brightly as she began to unfasten her coiffure. "You have travelled. Tell me, is it true that Venetian ladies are lovely enough to put angels to shame? How do they wear their hair? Is it true they bathe only in milk? "

A difficult pin wrenched several red strands with it and she fixed it with a glare as if it were the last in a long line of traitors. His own unbiddable locks felt the sting sympathetically.

"Let me do it."

The reflection of her eyes snapped at him.

"I don't need your help."

He slipped his hands under hers and worked his fingertips between the tines of another pin.

"I know," he murmured in the tone he used to calm a Thestral or a Hippogriff and she let him have his way. When her hair hung free about her shoulders, she passed him a gilded brush. His first clumsy stroke provoked a grimace.

"What if," he prodded in a moment of spite. "What if there's no trickery or plotting that can change his mind. What if he likes someone else."

Chewing her lip, she considered the prospect as the tangles in her hair slowly gave way to smoothness.

"It's impossible." She looked up at him directly with the crown of her head pressing into his diaphragm. "I will never accept that."

For a moment he had no answer as he glued his gaze to her mouth, avoiding the sudden perilous slope from her chin along her throat to the creamy undulation of neckline and the shadowed space between her breasts. It was a cruel lure, the corset. The way it forced her young bosom into hard curves of flesh was more indecent than he would ever have imagined from history books. Mercifully, she returned her attention to the mirror.

"And what if man came to you," he rejoined when he was sure of his voice. "He sends you poetry and presents and he wants you with the same passion you have for that count. What would you say to him?"

"No." The quickest lightening could not have passed between question and reply.

"Of course you would. You don't love him. You tell him so. And he must take his answer." Her mouth tightened at the roughness of his strokes. "And so must you."

She caught his wrist, oblivious to the recent wounds beneath.

"How dare you compare my love to a man's?" Static charged strands of hair squirmed about the pale anger of her face. "Their feelings are shallow and quick, and their desire is always temporary. Oh yes, they can love a brave hunt or a well-turned waist or a barrel of fine wine, but the next day their fancy will be fixed on something else. They're not like us, Viola."

He snatched his hand away from her.

"How would you know?" he lashed out. "Just because they don't prattle on about it twenty four hours a day doesn't mean they don't feel anything. I know-"

He knew altogether too much about the business of holding your grief inside you.

"What do you know?" Ginny asked gently, took his hand and kissed it with anxious eyes upon him. "Forgive me. I speak with too little thought."

The skin tingled where the wetness from her mouth was disappearing. Wordlessly he tilted her head and, this time, as he brushed, he tried to get back to the rare peace of the afternoon. He let his eyes slip out of focus and aimed to do the same to his mind. The candlelight scattered ruby and gold into her hair, heavy and smooth under his touch, and in time his breathing and the slow strokes made one soothing rhythm. The air was thick with the honeysuckle scent that rose from her and the smoky heat of the room.

"I think you've been luckier in love than I have," she mused, her eyes closed in contentment. Though he laid down the brush and set about twisting the compliant tresses into a semblance of a braid, she was not diverted. "Am I right, Viola?"

He ran his hands along her neck to gather the last reluctant strands, then repeated the gesture with his fingertips, once and again. The texture of her skin was a revelation. Unlike his own, which was rough despite its rare exposure to the elements, Ginny's skin was tender and pliant like the outside of a late summer apricot, warmly alive with a little trembling pulse running beneath it.

"Who was he? What did he look like?"

As he made short strokes along the place where smooth skin gave way to young curls of hair, she sighed and the sound seemed cruelly short.

"Oh, he was a nobleman." His fingers looked like sea serpents gliding their way through lush red waves. "He had the same colouring as you."

Her voice dropped another level, somewhere between a murmur and a breath.

"Then I'm sorry for him. Was he old?"

"No. Not old. He was young. About your age."

And then he was doing no more than running his fingers through her hair. With a feathery touch along her forehead, he stole her interrogation, and with slow circles just behind her temples he reduced her to a low hum of pleasure as she leaned into his caress.

"You must never leave me, Viola." The words were slurred, all stumbling consonants. "Your touch is exquisite."

His fingers dipped lower, following the tendons of her neck down to the delicate tips of collar bone. The stalling of her breath transformed her into a perfect marble statue whose stillness invited contemplation, so he placed his thumb in the soft indentation under her ear and traced the curve of her jaw with such gentleness it might have been cobweb. His free hand skimmed her shoulder, pushing her sleeve with it to bare all the skin in between, and that curve of flesh with the warmth and the scent rising off it demanded to be tested under his lips.

With one shudder, all the tension came back into her body.

"You are tired." Her tone accused him and she was suddenly very much awake. "I have asked too much of you today. I shall keep you no longer."

Then the shoulder he had almost kissed was Ginny's again, freckled like Ron's and more likely to taste of soap and sweat than of honey. The straightness of mouth underlining the command in her gaze, he knew that look as the one that froze tactless comments on Dean's lips across the table in the Great Hall.

She pulled her hair over her shoulder, swiftly twisting a plait.

The muttered "Goodnight" he threw from the doorway didn't hit the right note of nonchalance and the cold of the corridor ran up his legs.

Let him go.

Wait with me, here by the door, and watch the young duchess as she ties her hair tightly with ribbon and extinguishes the three flames of the candelabra in one efficient breath. Once, as she undertakes the brisk task of disrobing, her fingers trace the line of her jaw, a curious gesture. Then she is sitting on the side of the bed in the light of the remaining lamp.

On the chest of drawers beside the lamp, a cameo portrait leans against the wall, ivory on dark blue velvet. With its sharp chin and steep incline of nose, its subject would be unremarkable were it not for the sacrifice of rose petals strewn around it. The petals bruise as she works them between her fingers, the scent bleeding from them, and then with a jerk of movement she has the top drawer open and sweeps ivory and flowers all inside it. Leaving no time for reflection, she winds the lamp's wick down into oblivion and pulls the covers over her.

Not long after midnight, the room will awaken to the scrabbling sound of an idol being restored.

*

One moment longer, I beg you. One more scene before we part.

In the gloom of the kitchens, Harry in the borrowed dress leans his elbows on the bench. The empty goblet stands before him and his stance is unsteady.

"What is love?" he hums, now in his natural tenor, but almost too soft to be heard. "What is love? 'Tis not hereafter."

On the surface before him lie the last of the berries and he rolls one in distraction under his fingers.

"Present mirth hath present laughter. What's to come hmm hmm hmm hmm."

From his own hand, the berry tastes bitter. He spits it into the goblet.

"Youth's a stuff ..." He follows the notes down. " ... youth hmm hmm ..."

Loose and unravelling, his mind makes odd connections and it's as if a great abstract truth were nudging his palm then darting away too soon for his fingers to close.

"Youth's a stuff will not endure."

The dead coals and the shadows in the pantry make no answer.

*