Electric Stars

Electric Stars

Draco jerks his head up from his porridge, spoon falling from his grip, and his eyes are gray like chrome and fog.

"He put out the stars," Ron is saying, "the stars are gone," in a voice that is both desperate and empty. A mop of red orange hair falls from six feet to five and on down until it connects with marble flooring. Draco watches it detachedly, as though it's a comet streaking to its death across the horizon: beautiful, vaguely sad, but too distant to register. There is a dull thunk, and then a screaming clamor; Draco wants to tell them it's okay, he's only dropped his spoon, he's retrieving it immediately and look, good as new, see how the gold shines -- but the words never leave his lungs.

Later that day, a body stands before Draco in the second-and-a-half floor winged corridor. A body as lanky slim as his, though with knobbier hands and more sloping curves to his harsh angles. If he knew about Muggle elements, Draco would have called the eyes radioactively green, but he doesn't, so they stay unclassified, just two chips of electric green floating groundlessly. It looks like the eyes have used all the current of the body, for all the rest of the boy is parchment-pale and oddly glistening.

"What?" It's not like he cares.

A beat. "What are you doing?"

A blink. "Being pinned to a wall by the Boy Who Lived, and yourself?" It's not like he cares.

A choke of hollow amusement. "Dying."

Draco would laugh, but something in the air forbids it. "So's everyone."

"Not like this."

"And what way is that?" It's not like he cares.

"Inside-out." Forty seconds later: "You?"

Draco's eyes lash up. "Outside-in." Not like he cares, not like he cares, not like a feral bolt of green lightning has electrocuted his silver cloud cover skies of eyes back to 20/20.

Harry's eyes narrow and he stalks away; Draco stays leaning against the wall for a long time.

Dinner that evening is lentils -- lentils. In earlier days, Dumbledore charmed the carrots bits in each bowl to spell a message -- his candy of the week, perhaps, or else an interesting "This Day in History" factoid. But that was before the siege descends upon Hogwarts castle like a fog, before magic has to be conserved and can't be wasted on frivolities anymore. Before the stars go out.

Before they have to take even that information on trust, since the Great Hall ceiling has been boarded up and demagicked for seventeen days.

The lentils plop-plop from upturned spoon to bowl, like fat droplets of rain that Draco has forgotten the feel of.

Except is rain is thunderstorms is lightning is Harry, and that doesn't help matters at all.

It has only been two hours since their corridor conversation, but Draco is already worried: while dressing for dinner, his mirror told him, "Still waiting for someone to finish turning you on?" which is true on so many levels, more than Hogwarts.

And so Draco makes his way to the second-and-a-half floor winged corridor as soon as he's finished. He eyes the stone his body touched one hundred and eighty minutes ago, hears a noise, and looks left. Apparently time is the only thing that's pulled a 180.

Harry is wary and nervous, his gaze flitting around like a hummingbird. "I'm sorry, I just need th--"

"Don't confuse need with want." Draco speaks like he knows what he's talking about.

Harry gulps and nods, the moment is awkward, Harry licks his lips unconsciously, senses fail. Draco's hands are in Harry's hair, Harry's are cupping his face like it's a life preserver. All Draco can think is "this is too easy," a refrain pounding in his skull. He opens his mouth to ask, but Harry takes this as an invitation and hunts deeper -- for tongue or answers, Draco isn't sure. Hands are working at his trousers, his boxers, his - ohHarry, right there...

"Tomorrow night?" Draco would call the tone in Harry's voice a kind of aggressive hope. He kisses Harry's mouth in agreement, but one millisecond after closing his eyes, he leans back and looks away, embarrassed by his affection on cold lips. He rakes a hand through his hair and exhales "sure," trying to affect a similarly uncaring demeanor. He makes a grab for his trademark sneer. "Whatever." Harry nods, cuts and businesslike; Draco waits until the other boy has rounded the corner before slumping down the stone. His mental chorus has become "fuckfuckfuck."

One week passes. The stars stay obsolete (or so everyone imagines) and Harry becomes crueler in his -- love? (How do you redefine something that never really had a name?) But Draco sees the lightning that's migrated from Harry's forehead to his eyes, sees the fury it ignites there and wonders if Harry's trying to compensate for the absent weather systems.

Tonight Draco turns around, pants around his feet, and says with as much boredom as he can muster, "I want -"

"Don't confuse want with need." Draco wonders whether Harry knows what he's talking about.

When Harry fucks Draco, hard, against the wall, Draco squeezes his eyes shut, hits his forehead against the stone, and sees stars. They are multicolored pinpricks of pain dancing across the edge of his vision, swelling and ebbing with each of Harry's slams.

Draco knows he is looking for -- whatever he's seeking -- in all the wrong places. He knows, on a very basic and rational level, that Harry's eyes aren't so much electrifying as an electrocution, that stars shouldn't hurt and bruise the way these do.

He also knows, though, that he'll never turn around, never stop coming (which way, Draco, which way?) so long as the siege lasts and lentils stay unanimated. That as long as the sky stays but a memory disintegrating with each day spent in the used castle air, he won't turn from wall-aroused and eyes-induced electric stars.