Green

Draco spent half of breakfast wondering what Harry Potter would have looked like in green.

If Potter had just accepted his hand on the train and been Sorted into Slytherin, Draco was sure Harry would have sided with him in the Intra-Slytherin Game of cunning, and then he could have discarded Crabbe and Goyle who were more of a liability than an asset except for when muscle was what you needed, and in any case he probably could have won them back any time he liked, they were too stupid to hold grudges or even spell the word grudge.

Slytherin green would have suited Harry's eyes.

Draco watched Harry's eyes and snarled as Weasley ruffled Potter's hair and Granger leant her head on his shoulder and if emotions were visible Draco would have been standing in the midst of a huge poisonous green cloud.

Harry Potter, whether you knew him or not or liked him or not or cared at all or not was like a big creeping vine, the green tendrils reaching into your cracks, taking hold, spreading large green leaves that blocked out the sunlight until all you could see was him, a magnet for attention that Draco couldn't stand.

And Harry Potter reminded Draco of flashes of sorcerous green light, green like poison not green like leaves or glass bottles or discarded snake skin right after it comes off, except that snake skin was white, wasn't it, white like bones. Like the bones after the green light of the broken victim, tortured before death, and Lucius had made him watch and laughed and Draco had had to laugh and not be sick because Malfoys Did Not Throw Up At Death, especially when she was just a mudblood and lower than the greenfly Narcissa cursed off her roses that nobody else but her touched.

But Draco was green now, and if he was honest he knew he had been green for some time in the part of his insides that he didn't let himself see. And Weasley and Granger did not see that Harry's eyes, that had been green like emeralds with rich promises in their facets, were now green like bottleglass with nothing behind them to make them emeralds again.

Harry Potter in green, sitting by the verdant flames of the Slytherin hearth in a green velvet armchair, wrapped up in green bedclothes as they whispered in the night time of the dorm room with a privacy charm, and all the others wanting vainly to listen in and win the game and throw them over and be top of the writhing heap of green and silver-clad serpents, at least for a little while. And Harry and Draco would laugh at them and plot against them, all the time knowing that the other boys couldn't overhear and had no idea of what they were going to do to them as soon as they turned their backs.

Draco couldn't imagine that now, not with those bottleglassgreen eyes staring across the Great Hall, with the slow-blinking lids and Harry pretending he was listening and caring and responding to what Weasley and Granger said like he had used to, in the same way he had used to snipe back at Draco when Draco insulted him and his mother and his father and all the leaves of his family tree, old and fine and dark-haired like the dark leaves of all old trees in the autumn when they are all falling off and dying. Like everyone but Harry had, all the fallen Potters in a rotting green heap below the branch of the most famous scion of their tree, who sat there with glass eyes pretending to be alive.

Draco sat out by the expanse of the lake and made little splashes in the water with the very tips of his toes, watching the ripples spread and susurrate in the underwater weeds with the tiny clear bubbles coating their green leaves and occasionally rising to the surface and popping without a murmur. Far away the Gryffindors practised high above the late summer grass of the Quidditch pitch, with Potter playing himself to a tee except for the spirit in his playing that had gone missing sometime over the holidays, bleached away by the sun that had turned his skin to gold somehow. And even if that meant that Draco could beat him easily when they played one another again, DracoMalfoygrabsthesnitchforSlytherinandthewholeschoolischeeringwhataherowhatamoment, he didn't want to go out there with green robes caught fiercely by the prevailing wind and win because Harry Potter was gone but still there, and the bulb that was him might never sprout again.

Harry Potter fell down to the grass on his knees in Care of Magical Creatures, grasped his head in his hands and screamed before collapsing onto his side, and Draco might have been the only one to see between his fingers that the famous scar the Gryffindors were so proud of glowed green right before he collapsed, Avada Kedavra green and shining into his skin and burrowing in like woodworm into an old oak dresser. When they had taken him away and the class was busy looking for the things they had been 'looking after' before the incident, Draco hid just inside the forest and threw up, having a horrible feeling that someone else was dead just as Lucius had done to those mudbloods and made him watch.

Green, green, green. A plethora of Slytherin uniforms that were always there, the Prince of Slytherin, bottleglassgreen eyes emeralds instead, in a green room laughing and ruffling his hair and leaning his head on his shoulder, and not dead on the other side of the hall at breakfast and lunch and dinner and not caring any more but beside him and new and spring green instead.