Trumpet

Draco always loved trumpets. As a child of the channel, raised in the French Catholic tradition - wizard or no - his favorite part of the annual Malfoy Christmas Ball was hearing the trumpets in the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel's Messiah. Ice blocks carved into perpetually melting and self-recreating nativity scenes, crystal fountains cascading rich champagne in regular waves over their multi-faceted cliffs, and twinkling laughs colder and more glittery than either - the brass was the only piece that seemed warm, or even real. He loved the instrument's boldly confident design and earnestly full voice, the way it shouted over other noises at the thirty-seventh measure without embarrassment or expectation. He waited for the triumphant G-B-D.

When Draco made ready two summers later to leave for Hogwarts - when, four days before his departure, Lucius gave him a clap on the back with a leather-gloved hand and told him to do the Malfoy family proud - when the bell to Madame Malkins's store jingled a second time and a nervous voice first stammered, "Yes, school robes" - Draco suspected he might be in trouble. Even though the glasses frames, so cheap and disfigured they looked like tinfoil, were as far from the highly polished brass as possible. The irises - and here, that term was appropriate, where it had always been irrelevant before - behind them replicated the color of the picked-out embroidery on Draco's pillow. He wondered how such beauty, objectively speaking, could exist outside 1200-count sheets and have such honest openness despite the glass cage.

When the boy was Sorted into Gryffindor, Draco's shock reached to the stratosphere. Green and gold. He watched the trumpets with the most hungry of gazes that winter, and their plaintive B-E-G filled the chamber so subtly he hardly noticed.

By second year, Draco knew Harry Potter's voice, so undecorated, better than Handel's notes. He could have written their entire conversation into a composition in the key of C. (Which apparently Potter couldn't, for all his remedial eyewear.) There was the Trio's normal talking, then Draco's sly drawl permeating their atmosphere, sneaking an F into their comfortable A-B-C. A rest, a breathing in, a digging, and a sharply blasted retort. Draco knew these changes by rote, knew their evolution and progression and result.

And yet - his ribcage still closed in, hard, whenever he approached the cluster, body winding as tightly as a strung violin emitting expectant e-e-e-es. And yet he couldn't fit his emotions into five lines and four spaces; they somehow leapt beyond the boundaries, off the scale, into the land of U and I.

That midwinter, he wrote home asking for music lessons, and a recording of the Messiah: in his copy, the trumpets couldn't get beyond D-E-A-F.

Third year was the year of hands. It was Draco slipping one beneath his Harry-green sheets, making sure he came before the new day did. It was Draco picking his trumpet from its velvet-lined case with care he had not known he possessed, blasting two notes that sounded more desperate and off-key than triumphant, and replacing it with fear in his gray eyes, fingers easily reworking the lock. It was being slashed by a hippogriff and using this explanation ("The muscles in my hand don't work!") on his father to excuse his abandoned pages of sheet music and canceled tutorials. It was running a finger along the spine of schoolbooks slowly, steadily, and pretending he didn't want to see if Harry Potter would shudder and fall open just as easily, trustingly. It was lunging forward and grasping Harry's Firebolt in mid-air, lungs heaving from the physical exertion and his heart's cacophonous rat-a-tat. It was marking Potter like a monogram, flying fused from thigh to shoulder and wishing every tremble was from closeness, not winter - and moments later, it was Harry's hand on his outstretched fingers, dodging to capture the Snitch below them. It was almost blurting out that that beating object didn't matter, for Harry had already taken possession of Draco's heart.

Third year Christmas was access to his father's alcohol cabinet for the first time and thinking dizzily that the trumpets likely played E-D-G-E, because that's what their sheen and Harry pushed him to.

Draco was fourteen when he had an actual and independent duel with Harry Potter: fourteen years old and frightened, gripping his oak wood wand with sweaty fingers and trying to hide it all. In the face off, his mind spun wildly away to his days in the Drawing Room training for precisely such a situation. While Lucius had masterfully imparted his knowledge on the etiquette of bowing and wand bearing, and had drilled offensive spells into Draco's memory until he imagined his skull would burst with the effort of retaining so many terms - Draco could never recall discussing the psychology of the battle. What to do, for instance, if you were supposed to kill your opponent, but kill was looking a lot like kiss, and after all they're only two letters off. What to do when you were brandishing wands like swords, but your shadows - so clear in the dungeon half-light - were holding hands, becoming one shape on the store floor, mirror images of each other. No, Lucius had never covered that.

Draco improvised, and his silver curse hit Harry's gold in a perfect clash of alloys. The chemical reaction changed each charm, so Draco never did discover what magic Harry sent his way.

Fourteen years, and that Christmas concert was the first time he fully appreciated the trumpets' color: yellow like Harry's power, like the scotch (how many glasses now?) he'd consumed. When, later that evening, his eyelids burned from too much staring-into-the-fire and his stomach lurched like an earthquake, Draco's mind couldn't deviate from its drum roll of magic-magic-magic, and he wondered if he'd earned his colors, his stripes, his B-A-D-G-E in dueling this time, and whether this was what honor felt like.

Hair. It was absurd. And thoroughly inappropriate. Fifth year was the revival of Lord Voldemort, the Malfoys' growing governmental influence, Hogwarts's desperation and powerlessness. Fifth year was not about hair. And yet, whenever he thought back to being fifteen, Harry's thorny black locks snapped into focus. Harry pushing wind-tousled flyaways from his line of vision before tumbling upon the Snitch; Harry's dark crown bobbing down the hallway away from the Room of Requirements, each strand shining brightly from perspiration; Harry's tousled mess appearing just inside Draco's peripheral vision and shocking him so forcefully that his levitating wine glass crashed to the floor and bled across the wooden boards.

Then again ... Draco sometimes felt a shift in the air, saw Harry retreating a bit too rapidly, caught Harry's face at an odd angle, hair blown in the wrong direction into the wind - suggesting that the stares had not been one-way.

And Draco began learning spells as dark as Harry's perpetually messy mop, imprinting the archaic language behind his mind's eye.

One evening in the library, as he divided his time between studying powerful enchantments and casting pained eyes to Harry's back, Draco realized, with the force of a steam engine, that this whole setup was a C-A-G-E, that salvation was a country as far as the past.

And Draco thus began sixth year, mouth set determinedly and resolved to forget this Potter Thing. His sneer bordered on perpetual, and within several meetings, his lip would curl reflexively at the first sign of Harry Potter. And it all went off quite well, leaving Draco wondering why they not tried this mutual ignoring sooner, because surely this was better, and the fact that he awoke rasping "Harry--" after vivid dreams at two AM through swollen lips was certainly easily dismissible.

Until Harry confronted him one weekend in late November on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. It was cold enough for snowflakes, and the sky matched Draco's eyes unspeakably well.

The frozen ground crunched as Harry stomped forward and said, "What the hell are you playing at?" His words crystallized on the freezing atmosphere and breathed past Draco like a caress.

"What are you on about, Potter?" he replied, slicing the words maliciously and trying to listen to the impassioned response, but unable to tear his eyes from the freckle above Harry's left upper lip. (How had he never noticed it before?) Draco shook his head, eyes shut, and when they reopened, Harry's mouth, bittersweet pink from the frost, loomed before him like a prayer.

"What is it that you want?" He drew out the final t, tongue snaking between his teeth. And then their lips were somehow, inexplicably, fused. Steam issued from the corners when they came up for air, and Draco thought dizzily that the most beautiful image of his life was Harry's mouth glistening wetly with sharp frost from Draco's tongue. He F-E-D his addiction on spearmint-harsh kisses, detours to dark corners, and trumpet solos.

***

It is seventh year and this is the time of scars. Harry screams himself awake, the lighting bolt on his forehead glowing red as if it would split his body down the middle. Green sheets are bunched around his waist, knotted as if they would keep him whole, and the clock reads "1:07 AM." It is hard to see if he is awake thirty-six minutes later.

Draco Portkeys in, shaking from Cruciatus and perhaps from heartache as well, though he wonders whether he retains that organ; it often feels like he splinched himself and left behind the irrelevant bits. The dark mark on his forearm burns black, an otherworldly color on a body that has otherwise turned practically translucent. His heather-gray eyes shine out of their sockets like pre-blizzard skies. Draco is a study in monochrome to Harry's riotous multicolor, and the Year of the Snake means different things to each one. But for all these variations on a theme, Harry (opening his eyelids with wrenching gentleness) yet makes out flecks of warm amber in Draco's steely depths, and Draco finds grounding light black swimming with Harry's overpowering green. Draco climbs into bed and, lying across from Harry, runs a thumb along Harry's lower lip, emitting a spike of static electricity.

It is seventh year, and this is the time of scars, but more and more Draco's discovering that whether the marks be weather or skulls, his feeling still defy a trumpet's scale and measure, and he's still captivated by Harry's F-A-C-E.