A Pact With Vertigo

The night was reflecting off the shell of the lake and casting starry shadows in his eyes, stars caught only because they were more intense in this backdrop than he could ever recall. Cradled within it all, he was gripping the fractured surface of the castle's outer walls with his fingertips, though he was in no danger of losing his balance, and he blamed it on the rising feeling in his gut. He swallowed it back down.

From here he could tower above those distant peaks, purple and faintly majestic tonight, and for an instant he felt that he could kneel down and scrape those mountains up by their thorny roots. It was a fleeting notion, the sort of thing so exhilarating that it was lost in a second, and afterwards could not be recollected no matter how long or deep or persistent the thought; while it was ebbing, he was left with that rising sense of need that required conscious reminder to keep suppressed. It had been there all along.

There was one thing he needed accomplished tonight; nothing difficult, but nothing relishing in distraction. He sighed as if the chance to do so was golden.

It would be a long drop. He closed his eyes and told them to forget the things he'd imagined, stared into the darkness left behind. Opening them, he stepped forward a few halting paces, and the ground opened up below him, his shoes over the edge enough so that a hole through the left heal allowed high thermal winds to blow through. It rose again, that feeling. He swallowed.

The drop wasn't getting shorter. He looked down again and locked eyes with the ground, the expansive green lawns that he had run across so many times, and the feeling of sheer vertigo escaped his throat to crush him, murder him with his very sins and fears. While it was far too late, his throat pulsed with the effort to drink it back down, and it nauseated him. Stumbling backwards, he braced himself against the wall once more, panting as if woken up from a nightmare.

"If you can't make up your mind, let me go first, will you, Potter?" Draco Malfoy, drawlingly.

Of all wizards. "You have to ruin all my moments, do you?" said Harry, breathing by forced habit. His words were bitterly intentioned, but not entirely unwelcoming, and he felt the tension roll a bit in his muscles. "What do you want?"

Draco was leaning through the window, a lesser window of the castle overlooking the shores of the lake, and the very same that Harry had come through earlier. "You must realize you'd plummet and die from this height."

Harry glanced at the front ends of his trainers, waiting so patiently for the rest of the shoes to follow. He pushed away his fringe and dropped his head back against the stonework. "Only if I want to."

"Well." Malfoy looked, for a moment, as uncertain as the eternal child-like purity of his hair, set golden in the starlight shining through it. He shifted his arms on the window frame, wavered, and then swung his right leg over, so that one was still inside. "Well, if you must die, I'm coming along."

"Stop kidding, Malfoy."

"I never said I was kidding. I feel like going with you, honestly." There was no sarcasm. The earnestness tipping his eyelashes helped little to make Harry feel more at ease.

"Go to hell or be serious. I could work with either," said Harry, a bit tersely.

"I'm jumping with you, Potter, and if we both die I can send you a t-shirt as a souvenir from hell, and you can write me from heaven. Get on with it, or shall I really go first?"

How could he keep a light mind-set like that? Now- even smiling, if a bit derisively. He had swung his other leg over, and was now standing beside Harry on the ledge. It was wide enough for a comfortable foothold, narrow enough for a thrill to settle in.

"Sod off, Malfoy, this is personal. And, for once, I'd like for you not to ruin it for me."

"Wouldn't want to ruin it for me, either, would you? Don't stop me, Potter, because you don't understand." He paused, as if searching for some cue. "My father once taught me that a great evil without an enemy is only a broken man."

Silence from the other end, uncertainty and the strangest expression.

"So where would I be without you to hate, and your hate for me, Potter?"

"A happier place, Malfoy."

"Perhaps. Maybe not." He rose a little, drawing himself up, and the stars threw his profile into hazy relief. "Ready yet?"

"I don't get you, Malfoy."

"My name is Draco. Is that clear enough? Let's go fall to our gory deaths, shall we?"

"Just like that?"

"Just like I want it, Potter, because that's how it always works."

A flicker of understanding. "This must be some sort of control issue with you, then. You want to be able to control your life."

"My death, you mean. I want to control my death."

"Yes, your death, whatever."

Draco shot a sideways glance through the air between them, looking triumphantly mutinous with the stars casting halos in his hair. "Whatever you want to think, Potter. Are you ready to jump yet, or did you inherit too much sugar and spice from your mum?"

"Shut up. I'll be ready when you shut that prattish mouth of yours." Harry shook himself off, stood on edge again.

"So you don't want to know why I'm jumping, then?"

"Not at all."

"Come over here. I'll whisper it, for you." His smile was thoroughly reptilian, with arms folded comfortably across his chest. There wasn't much distance between them, no need for whispering, and yet he offered it.

"No, I'm jumping."

"You're not." He breached the inches between their shoulders, seized Harry by the Gryffindor tie and yanked him backwards. A dull thud sounded as he slammed heavily against the wall, and Draco wrenched himself closer without any thought of strangulation. One hand splayed against the rough stone, one clenched around Harry's tie, he lowered his lips unswervingly to the irresolute ear of one Potter's boy. Harry held his breath, inhaled and would not dare exhale lest the moment implode around him, and felt that familiar frost begin to splinter over his heart.

Because Draco Malfoy was never warm.

And neither was the hypocritical starlight, trickling down through a well picked path in the sky to obscure things he'd always thought he knew, so that demons became cherubs and childhood enemies became...

Nothing. Draco was nothing, and his breath the wintry condensation settling on his lips, running icicles through Harry's ear and down his throat. When the whisper promised so long ago slithered out, it constricted the moment and held open a panorama of Draco's glacial heart.

"Because I'm going first, just this once, Potter. And if I die, you will be the broken man while I am only dead, not shattered."

So this was the core of it all, melded like deadly silver into a whisper. The feeling was rising again, that achingly forbidden sentiment that Harry could only suppress once more as Draco plunged into a free fall, spiraling circles into the wind. And then, he dove after him.

In essence, the drop felt entirely like a Wronski Feint, like rivals hurling towards disaster as if carrying each other towards it. But this wasn't Quidditch. There was no chance for either of two seekers to pull away unscathed.

But chance enough for two enemies.

The change passed within a heart's blink, feathers and talons and wings and glorious flight appearing without disturbance of motion in the air. The ground rose to shatter them, yet the air rose as well, and they caught the rising winds and soared back to the window they had left behind. There were no thoughts of suicide that night, not outside of jest.

A soft rustle of feathers marked their return. Harry left his owl form quickly, found himself alone in the tower room. It was dark with the starlight settling in through the window, more intense than he could ever recall. A falcon was resting on the windowsill. For once, Draco was more gold then silver, arrogance slanted into the angle of his beak drawing yellowy highlights from the air.

"You've got a twisted sense of humor, Malfoy."

The raptor regarded him for a moment, unblinkingly made of dangerous and beautiful and starlight stitched in between, and then contorted back into human form. The beak was now a softened smirk, golden feathers now gold-laced hair, and in the form of Draco Malfoy, Harry found yet another thing he was not to own. Because he was the Boy Who Lived, broken and shattered from the start.

"I win, Potter."