Transition

By the lake on the Hogwarts grounds, beneath a spreading weeping willow, a silver-blonde boy was sitting quietly. The wind toyed quietly with his silver-gilt hair, brushing the strands of ethereal silver fire across his pale face: the movements reminiscent of a mother's soft touch. The wind played down his visage, stinging his enigmatic grey eyes, and flowed down with the folds of his cloak. It brushed the surface of the lake, stirring light ripples in its wake, and rose again in a lazy circle to fly among the willow's branches.

The boy brushed his hair from his face, and gazed to his right. There was another person there, out by the lake today. She was the same age as him, and could almost be called pretty, on certain days, and in certain conditions. She hadn't seen him yet, so he had remained where he was, watching her.

"Mudbloods," said the six-year old boy's father, "are the lowest form of human existence on this earth. They are worse even than the Muggles, for they dare to call themselves witches and wizards when nothing but false magic and mud flows through their tainted veins. Do you understand me?"

The boy nodded silently and slowly, his lambent grey eyes watching his pacing father with barely disguised apprehension and fear within them. He knew he was going to be punished now, for daring to associate with the child of a Muggle family.

"If you understand me so well, then why did you disobey?" hissed the father, turning abruptly on the son.

The boy knew his father expected an answer. "H-he didn't seem like a bad person, F-father, I just-"

"Just thought that your own judgment was better than mine!" the father growled, seizing the front of his son's robes and slamming him against a wall. "You will have to be taught a lesson!"

The child whimpered- his breath was being cut off. "F-f-father, p-p-please....."

The father's wand came out. It was pointing at the boy's chest.

"Crucio."

The boy was still young- too young to fully understand the pain that surged through him like a ball of electricity exploding outwards from deep within. But he felt it, every atom of it, and he screamed because his father wouldn't stop it until he made a noise, any noise, as long as it was anguished.

The father lowered his wand, and the boy slid to the floor, shaking horribly, his face turned aside in terror.

"Look at me," the father said softly, strands of his gilt hair falling about his handsome face. "Are you ashamed to look at your own father?"

The boy obeyed. And as he looked into his father's face, he saw his own eyes, his own hair, his own face, all the same. And if he had been a little older, he would have seen the same darkness.

He turned his eyes back towards the girl. She was close enough so that he could make out detail, but the spreading branches of the weeping willow hid him from her sight. Her shining chestnut hair was floating softly in the wind, undulating like slow-moving water, every ripple soundless and drawn-out. Her chocolate brown eyes were lifted to the sky- her spirit throwing open dark windows to heaven- and beneath one slender tan arm lay several books, unattended and forgotten. Her black robes rippled in the lazy zephyr in the same manner that her hair did- as if the scene were caught in slow motion.

As he watched, she removed her left arm from around the books, clasping her hands together wistfully. Her arms formed an ouroboros of flesh, a continuous chain of life, like the black lashes that encircled the deep pools of her eyes, or the slighty curved lips set thoughtfully in her face.

He glanced down at the clasp of his cloak. Here was another ouroboros, right here, a snake that devoured its own tail. He gazed at the symbol for a moment. It was a representation of unity, of eternity. A representation of the endless cycle of birth and death.

Or it could be a dragon, not a serpent, that bit its own tail and became the ouroboros.

Many legends through the world held the dragon as having all potentials within him- the potential for light. The potential for darkness. The potential to create, the potential to destroy. In fact, in all the major dragon symbols, the good and the evil were delicately balanced. The serpent that held the world together, but also longed to break free to destroy it.

The dragon. Draco.

He reached up to his face, removed his earrings. They were delicate, small things, worn one on each ear, both in the shape of identical dragons. The dragons were crafted of silver that curved so delicately it looked almost natural, and the skin of the dragon's wing was made of a thin sheet of deep black obsidian. A tiny ruby formed the eye, and another, larger ruby, cut in the shape of a flame, rested in a ring of silver at the tip of the dragon's tail. Tiny emeralds glittered down the length of the dragon's body, set deep in the silver. It was expert craftsmanship, using fine jewels. A gift given to him by Voldemort.

"Take these," Lucius had said, with a strange look in his gray eyes as he handed Draco the earrings. "Wear them to remind yourself of your service to the Dark Lord, for it was he who asked me to give these to you."

Draco had scrutinized the earrings with the expert eyes of a wealthy child, and been impressed.

"My service to the Dark Lord?" he had said, after a few moments. "But I haven't even met him... or spoken to him before..."

"As my heir, we expect you will follow into Lord Voldemort's service. The Dark Lord has made a gift to you, and you will wear these for as long as you stay in his service. He has high hopes for you."

But was it worth it?

He turned his gaze back to the earrings resting in his hand. Storm clouds billowed across his eyes once, and were lost in darkness as long lashes flicked down, veiling his eyes from sight; his spirit closing its silver windows in anticipation of a night of indecisive thought.

Hermione Granger was startled out of her reverie by an evanescent sensation of being watched. She turned to gaze at the willow to her left, and was surprised to see, in the darkness between the thin willow branches, a flickering, fleeting glimpse of something silver and black, dotted with tiny glints of emerald: something deadly silent and ethereal, a shred of the spiritual unknown, caught in the embrace of the weeping willow.

Silver-gold silk streamed into sight, and the indistinct image resolved itself. Silver-gold silk became platinum blonde hair, and the emerald-dotted, silver-black shadow of the ethereal realms became Draco Malfoy.

Hermione retreated into frigidity in her usual manner; Draco, however, seemed less stable and sure of himself.

He took a seat, a fair distance from her; Hermione eyed him warily. What exactly had happened during their long sessions together, working on that Potions project Snape had made them do, she didn't know, but she had a feeling that whatever was about to happen had stemmed from that.

"Hermione," Draco began. "I have to tell you something."

Hermione turned towards him, brown eyes questioning. "I'm listening," she replied, to her mild surprise. Since when had she ever deigned to listen to something Malfoy said?

Since Snape assigned them to work together, intending two months of torture but instead inspiring sixty-two days of revelation. Since she had seen the troubled boy beneath the cocky exterior. Since she had caught a glimpse of his back after he returned from Christmas break; a back crisscrossed with the thin scars that only resulted from the strike of a lash, a back that would eventually be healed because a heir to the Malfoy fortune did not have marred skin, or marred loyalties, or marred thoughts.

She found herself wanting to heal him on a different level, but didn't know how to start if the subject of her healing did not want her ministrations.

Draco glanced at her, searching her distant brown eyes. "You remember these earrings," Draco said, the tilt of his head causing the fine jewels to dip and entrap the light. A thousand shafts of light arced at a thousand critical angles, and were incident upon the tiny gems; bending within the frosty hearts of the jewels, the light reflected endlessly within, entrapped in the crystal by a single factor: the angle at which they had approached.

Draco was a sixteen-year old boy, entrapped in his life by a single factor: the family into which he had been born.

Hermione nodded slowly, her demeanor still impassive and wary. "...Yes, I do. Aren't they a mark of your service of the Dark Lord? Just a placeholder until you get a Dark Mark?" The last two words were enunciated quickly, with something just a shade distant from disdain, spat away so they could not corrupt the voice that spoke them.

Draco nodded absently.

"Wear them to remind yourself of your service to the Dark Lord, for it was he who asked me to give these to you."

He smiled vaguely.

"You will wear these for as long as you stay in his service."

"Yes... they are. A mark that I will wear as long as I stay in his service."

Hermione opened her mouth to say something about that, but closed it again in astonishment.

Draco removed the earrings, barely glancing at them before setting them in a slight depression in a stone by the lake. They rolled against each other, clinking in protest, demanding that they be taken back, reclaimed. The rubies glistened in the light and seemed to catch fire.

Hermione stared, first at the forlorn pieces of jewelry, then at the person who had been wearing them up until now. "Does this mean you'll be getting a Dark Mark in their place, then?" she asked. Her tone wasn't sarcastic or hateful; it was wistful, tinged with a hint of the sadness that comes of a healer giving up on their patient.

Draco looked at Hermione and smiled. It was a lighter smile- more at ease, more blissfully free- than she had ever seen him give.

"I don't think I'll be getting a Dark Mark. Ever."

The two got up and left then, walking together, talking with the ease of old friends.

In the hollow of a stone, sitting by the lake and the whispering reeds, two silver earrings winked with the miniscule brilliance of a thousand shafts of light streaming free from innumerable tiny emeralds.