most sane and sunly by talithan
Title: most sane and sunly
Author: talithan
Pairing(s): Draco/Luna
Prompt number: 24
Word Count: 2232
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Beta(s): Thank you to the wonderful Kate for looking this over for me. You won’t read this, but your help was invaluable.
Summary: A morning on the Quidditch Pitch.
Author's Notes: This scenario unfolded in my mind right when I saw this prompt. I haven’t written a fic since before DH, but I’ve long wanted to look at Draco after Dumbledore’s death. Title from the E.E. Cummings poem “love is more thicker than forget.”
November 8, 1997
It’s getting colder.
Draco pulls his scarf tighter with a scowl. This is meant to be a brief respite, a small bit of freedom. The fact that he has to force himself to enjoy it completely defeats the purpose.
He releases the tiny, fluttering snitch from his fist before kicking off on his Firebolt. He’s not meant to have a broom anymore, now that he isn’t on the Quidditch team, but he bought one last Hogsmeade weekend. He keeps it (Disillusioned, of course) in the shed with the school brooms. As long as he remembers to lock it afterwards, no one notices anything.
A hundred feet in the air, he stops, hovering above the center of the pitch. The wind isn’t strong enough to interfere with flight, but it is cold enough to cut through the warming charms on his cloak. It whips through his hair and numbs his face. He feels the chill from the inside out, as though it’s radiating from his bones. He closes his eyes against the wind. Perhaps it isn’t the weather. Maybe it’s Draco that’s getting colder.
When he opens his eyes they’re watering. He blinks fast, trying to clear his vision. He’ll never see the snitch like this.
But there, a flash of gold in the stands. It’s far too big to be the snitch, but instinct kicks in and he is already diving. It’s a girl, a girl with golden hair spilling out from under a striped hat, sitting in the Ravenclaw stands. He can’t imagine what would compel a person to get up before sunrise and sit in the stands of the Quidditch Pitch. She isn’t watching him, is she?
He pulls out of the dive and hovers thirty feet above her. She isn’t watching him, or even looking up at all. There are several small colorful objects hovering around her. The pink of the sunrise lights her hair and dances on the birds.
Yes, they’re small paper birds. Without realizing it, he has continued to descend closer to her. Now he can see that she has a stack of colorful paper squares that she is folding and charming to fly. Just as he decides to let her be, to look for the snitch instead of watching this girl create company for herself, she calls, “Your snitch is over there, Malfoy.”
She’s pointing towards the Hufflepuff stands, looking at the snitch and not at up him. But he recognized her voice, and he doesn’t know how to react. He’s never been alone with Luna Lovegood. Now that she’s spoken, though, he feels obligated to reply. Silence would be backing down.
“What are you doing out here, Lovegood?”
This time she looks up, fixing him with a blank blue stare. She doesn’t say anything, instead patting the bench next to her, inviting him to sit down. There’s a moment’s hesitation-what could come of this?-but he’s too headstrong to back down from a perceived challenge. He lands smoothly and sits right beside her, as though this isn’t strange at all.
“You’re not on the Quidditch team.” Nothing about the way she says it makes it a question, but her enormous, unblinking eyes demand a response.
“No, I’m not. I quit this year.”
She shakes her head. The ear flaps on her hat wobble. “You quit last year,” she says.
He stares. “I think I’d know better than you would.”
She shakes her head again. “You stopped coming to practices, then games, even the ones you were supposed to play in.. That’s what quitting is, wouldn’t you say?”
“What do you care if I don’t play Quidditch?”
“I didn’t say I cared.” She folds another bird, this one from pale purple paper.
“I just like to fly.” He doesn’t know why he says it, but she smiles slightly and he thinks it may have been the right thing to say. “Why are you out here?”
She taps the bird with her wand. “It’s the best place to watch the sunrise.”
Draco watches the bird crane its neck, stretch its wings, and make a few feeble flaps before settling back in Lovegood’s hand. He doesn’t agree with her last statement. From here, you can’t see the lake at all, let alone Hogsmeade. The best place to watch the sunrise is from the Astronomy Tower. It’s the tallest and the farthest east of the towers, built to observe the sky. From that tower you can watch as the glow from behind the mountains creates a halo over the Forbidden Forest; as it lights up the roofs and reflects off the windows of Hogsmeade, all the way across the lake; as it casts a soft pink haze over the stone of the castle; as it dazzles over the surface of the water and makes everything bright and clean and new.
But Luna Lovegood doesn’t need to know how many sleepless nights Draco Malfoy has spent in the Astronomy Tower.
Now she has the bird flying graceful figure eights. She watches it with a child’s delight.
“What are these for, anyhow?” he finally asks.
“I’m practicing my Animation Charms. You know we’re doing them in Charms now.” She gives him a sideways look that’s the closest thing to a mischievous expression he’s ever seen on her face. “I expect you’re terribly familiar with the sixth year curriculum at this point.”
It hurts because he doesn’t expect it. Zabini and Nott have been mocking him since September. (Crabbe and Goyle would, but that would require the formulation of a clever insult, something that has always been beyond them.) His former classmates, especially the Gryffindors, laugh when they can, but he doesn’t see them much anymore. His new classmates, especially the Gryffindors, take a crack at him in every class. This is the first time Lovegood has mentioned it, perhaps because she’s usually with the Weasley girl, who always takes every opportunity to ridicule him. He didn’t know she had it in her to make fun of anyone, but maybe he is that low now.
If the professors had their way, he would have been expelled. Snape managed to prevent that, but he couldn’t do anything to make up for the fact that Draco didn’t sit for any of his exams, or even complete the majority of his homework throughout his sixth year. Draco arrived in September to the news that he would continue to live with the seventh years but take sixth-year courses over again, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
“We aren’t Animating paper birds,” he says at last, hoping she didn’t notice that her remark affected him.
She laughs. It’s so kind that he wonders if she meant to hurt him at all. “No, we’re not. This might be something...extracurricular.”
The pause is just long enough that he knows she means the ‘something’ is the reckless group of Potter-loving rebels that has been performing small-and not-so-small-acts of insurgence for the past few months. “Didn’t you just get caught trying to steal from the Headmaster’s office? Why are you still doing this?”
“Oh, if Professor Snape-”
“Headmaster Snape.”
“Right, sorry. If Headmaster Snape really wanted us to stop he would have given a more painful punishment. We like working with Hagrid.”
“You think he doesn’t want to put a stop to what you’re doing?”
“I’m not sure. His reactions don’t make a great deal of sense. Ginny is furious, of course, because she can’t play Quidditch or go to Hogsmeade anymore, but at least he’s never handed her to the Carrows. Those are rather small consequences in comparison, don’t you think?”
Draco knew the professors were always reluctant to let their students be punished by Hogwarts’s resident Death Eaters, but he hadn’t heard of Snape sharing that reluctance. “So how are paper birds an act of rebellion?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says, though she looks like she very much wants to. “You might turn us in.”
“Won’t I turn you in anyway, after the fact? When something happens that involves a massive amount of paper birds, you’ll be the obvious culprit.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“Why won’t I?”
“Well, I certainly can’t answer that.”
Remarkably, she doesn’t seem to intend to be difficult, only curious.
“You can, though,” she prods.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Ginny saw you, and she knows you saw us.”
He feels warmth creep into his face. He thought he hadn’t been spotted. Three weeks ago, on his way up from the dungeon to the Astronomy Tower, he saw a handful of Dumbledore’s Army members graffitiing the entrance hall. He waited in the stairwell until they were finished, then continued on his way. It didn’t occur to him to stop them, to get one of the Slytherin prefects or a staff member. He just wanted to be alone.
“You didn’t turn us in.” Once again, she doesn’t bother phrasing it as a question or even changing her intonation. Her eyes do the asking on their own. “The next day in Muggle Studies they asked people to come forward if they knew anything, and you stayed in your seat.”
“I’m not a prefect anymore. I can’t take points. I didn’t have any more right to be out of Slytherin that night than you all did.”
She doesn’t seem convinced. But then, he couldn’t possibly explain it to her. How could he convey what it is to be rejected by those who once would do anything for his approval; to know that everyone on one side hates him for his successes and everyone on the other hates him for his failures; to constantly wonder what might have happened if he had been quick enough to accept a dying old man’s offer instead of stalling and stalling until the decision was taken from him; to have a mark on his arm that meant safety and protection and most of all power but somehow now means humiliation and pain and regret; to nightly revisit the scene of his worst mistake and relive it and relive it and relive it and-
It would be impossible to explain.
“I suppose that’s true,” she says after a long silence. They both know it’s a feeble reason, and they both know he isn’t going to give her the real one. “It’ll be really excellent, though. I think it just might be so brilliant that you won’t want to tell anyone it was us.”
He doesn’t know if he should agree with her, but before he can say anything, she gasps and exclaims, “A bumblebee!”
They’re high enough in the air that, after the initial surprise at the sudden outburst, he’s sure she must be mistaken. Bees linger close to the ground. But he looks down to where her fingers brush his cloak and sure enough, there’s a yellow bumblebee hovering over her hand.
“Aren’t you afraid it might sting you?”
She shakes her head, smiling wide. “Maybe it will, if I’m lucky.”
“Are you daft?” he asks automatically. He has never, ever heard of anyone wishing for a bee sting.
“You know that glumbumble stings make you depressed.”
“Of course.”
“Well, bumblebees are the opposite.” She cups her hand around it, still smiling. “It must have been on you this whole time, since you took off. That’s incredibly good luck, you know. Bumblebees produce happy feelings, even more so the longer they’re around you.” She looks up at him, pale lashes framing pale eyes. “You must have felt it.”
He shakes his head, baffled.
“You don’t feel warmer inside?”
Not at all, he wants to say. Instead, he only blinks at her.
“Maybe this will help.” She takes off her silly striped hat and pulls it down onto his head. “It has rabbit and puffskein fur. Very warm.”
He is so surprised that for several moments he only stares at her. She stares back with a pleased look on her face. After a silence that somehow manages to not be awkward at all, he says, “Thank you.” It comes out as a whisper, as though gratitude isn’t a sentiment he can bear to vocalize loudly.
“It suits you,” she says gently. She presses a soft kiss to his cheek. “Go find your snitch.”
He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t have to.
He mounts his broom and kicks off, flying a couple of circles around the pitch before he starts looking. The hat is hideous, but his ears are warm and he can’t bring himself to feel embarrassed.
Half an hour later, after catching and releasing and catching the snitch seven times, he looks down to find her gone. She left him her hat. Somehow, this softens her departure.
He lands on the ground, wraps his scarf in a second loop around his neck, and stuffs the hat in his pocket. He hears a crinkle of paper and pulls out the offending object. It’s that pale purple bird, struggling to flap its wings as he holds them shut.
For the first time in six months, a genuine smile spreads across his face.
Author: talithan
Pairing(s): Draco/Luna
Prompt number: 24
Word Count: 2232
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Beta(s): Thank you to the wonderful Kate for looking this over for me. You won’t read this, but your help was invaluable.
Summary: A morning on the Quidditch Pitch.
Author's Notes: This scenario unfolded in my mind right when I saw this prompt. I haven’t written a fic since before DH, but I’ve long wanted to look at Draco after Dumbledore’s death. Title from the E.E. Cummings poem “love is more thicker than forget.”
November 8, 1997
It’s getting colder.
Draco pulls his scarf tighter with a scowl. This is meant to be a brief respite, a small bit of freedom. The fact that he has to force himself to enjoy it completely defeats the purpose.
He releases the tiny, fluttering snitch from his fist before kicking off on his Firebolt. He’s not meant to have a broom anymore, now that he isn’t on the Quidditch team, but he bought one last Hogsmeade weekend. He keeps it (Disillusioned, of course) in the shed with the school brooms. As long as he remembers to lock it afterwards, no one notices anything.
A hundred feet in the air, he stops, hovering above the center of the pitch. The wind isn’t strong enough to interfere with flight, but it is cold enough to cut through the warming charms on his cloak. It whips through his hair and numbs his face. He feels the chill from the inside out, as though it’s radiating from his bones. He closes his eyes against the wind. Perhaps it isn’t the weather. Maybe it’s Draco that’s getting colder.
When he opens his eyes they’re watering. He blinks fast, trying to clear his vision. He’ll never see the snitch like this.
But there, a flash of gold in the stands. It’s far too big to be the snitch, but instinct kicks in and he is already diving. It’s a girl, a girl with golden hair spilling out from under a striped hat, sitting in the Ravenclaw stands. He can’t imagine what would compel a person to get up before sunrise and sit in the stands of the Quidditch Pitch. She isn’t watching him, is she?
He pulls out of the dive and hovers thirty feet above her. She isn’t watching him, or even looking up at all. There are several small colorful objects hovering around her. The pink of the sunrise lights her hair and dances on the birds.
Yes, they’re small paper birds. Without realizing it, he has continued to descend closer to her. Now he can see that she has a stack of colorful paper squares that she is folding and charming to fly. Just as he decides to let her be, to look for the snitch instead of watching this girl create company for herself, she calls, “Your snitch is over there, Malfoy.”
She’s pointing towards the Hufflepuff stands, looking at the snitch and not at up him. But he recognized her voice, and he doesn’t know how to react. He’s never been alone with Luna Lovegood. Now that she’s spoken, though, he feels obligated to reply. Silence would be backing down.
“What are you doing out here, Lovegood?”
This time she looks up, fixing him with a blank blue stare. She doesn’t say anything, instead patting the bench next to her, inviting him to sit down. There’s a moment’s hesitation-what could come of this?-but he’s too headstrong to back down from a perceived challenge. He lands smoothly and sits right beside her, as though this isn’t strange at all.
“You’re not on the Quidditch team.” Nothing about the way she says it makes it a question, but her enormous, unblinking eyes demand a response.
“No, I’m not. I quit this year.”
She shakes her head. The ear flaps on her hat wobble. “You quit last year,” she says.
He stares. “I think I’d know better than you would.”
She shakes her head again. “You stopped coming to practices, then games, even the ones you were supposed to play in.. That’s what quitting is, wouldn’t you say?”
“What do you care if I don’t play Quidditch?”
“I didn’t say I cared.” She folds another bird, this one from pale purple paper.
“I just like to fly.” He doesn’t know why he says it, but she smiles slightly and he thinks it may have been the right thing to say. “Why are you out here?”
She taps the bird with her wand. “It’s the best place to watch the sunrise.”
Draco watches the bird crane its neck, stretch its wings, and make a few feeble flaps before settling back in Lovegood’s hand. He doesn’t agree with her last statement. From here, you can’t see the lake at all, let alone Hogsmeade. The best place to watch the sunrise is from the Astronomy Tower. It’s the tallest and the farthest east of the towers, built to observe the sky. From that tower you can watch as the glow from behind the mountains creates a halo over the Forbidden Forest; as it lights up the roofs and reflects off the windows of Hogsmeade, all the way across the lake; as it casts a soft pink haze over the stone of the castle; as it dazzles over the surface of the water and makes everything bright and clean and new.
But Luna Lovegood doesn’t need to know how many sleepless nights Draco Malfoy has spent in the Astronomy Tower.
Now she has the bird flying graceful figure eights. She watches it with a child’s delight.
“What are these for, anyhow?” he finally asks.
“I’m practicing my Animation Charms. You know we’re doing them in Charms now.” She gives him a sideways look that’s the closest thing to a mischievous expression he’s ever seen on her face. “I expect you’re terribly familiar with the sixth year curriculum at this point.”
It hurts because he doesn’t expect it. Zabini and Nott have been mocking him since September. (Crabbe and Goyle would, but that would require the formulation of a clever insult, something that has always been beyond them.) His former classmates, especially the Gryffindors, laugh when they can, but he doesn’t see them much anymore. His new classmates, especially the Gryffindors, take a crack at him in every class. This is the first time Lovegood has mentioned it, perhaps because she’s usually with the Weasley girl, who always takes every opportunity to ridicule him. He didn’t know she had it in her to make fun of anyone, but maybe he is that low now.
If the professors had their way, he would have been expelled. Snape managed to prevent that, but he couldn’t do anything to make up for the fact that Draco didn’t sit for any of his exams, or even complete the majority of his homework throughout his sixth year. Draco arrived in September to the news that he would continue to live with the seventh years but take sixth-year courses over again, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
“We aren’t Animating paper birds,” he says at last, hoping she didn’t notice that her remark affected him.
She laughs. It’s so kind that he wonders if she meant to hurt him at all. “No, we’re not. This might be something...extracurricular.”
The pause is just long enough that he knows she means the ‘something’ is the reckless group of Potter-loving rebels that has been performing small-and not-so-small-acts of insurgence for the past few months. “Didn’t you just get caught trying to steal from the Headmaster’s office? Why are you still doing this?”
“Oh, if Professor Snape-”
“Headmaster Snape.”
“Right, sorry. If Headmaster Snape really wanted us to stop he would have given a more painful punishment. We like working with Hagrid.”
“You think he doesn’t want to put a stop to what you’re doing?”
“I’m not sure. His reactions don’t make a great deal of sense. Ginny is furious, of course, because she can’t play Quidditch or go to Hogsmeade anymore, but at least he’s never handed her to the Carrows. Those are rather small consequences in comparison, don’t you think?”
Draco knew the professors were always reluctant to let their students be punished by Hogwarts’s resident Death Eaters, but he hadn’t heard of Snape sharing that reluctance. “So how are paper birds an act of rebellion?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says, though she looks like she very much wants to. “You might turn us in.”
“Won’t I turn you in anyway, after the fact? When something happens that involves a massive amount of paper birds, you’ll be the obvious culprit.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“Why won’t I?”
“Well, I certainly can’t answer that.”
Remarkably, she doesn’t seem to intend to be difficult, only curious.
“You can, though,” she prods.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Ginny saw you, and she knows you saw us.”
He feels warmth creep into his face. He thought he hadn’t been spotted. Three weeks ago, on his way up from the dungeon to the Astronomy Tower, he saw a handful of Dumbledore’s Army members graffitiing the entrance hall. He waited in the stairwell until they were finished, then continued on his way. It didn’t occur to him to stop them, to get one of the Slytherin prefects or a staff member. He just wanted to be alone.
“You didn’t turn us in.” Once again, she doesn’t bother phrasing it as a question or even changing her intonation. Her eyes do the asking on their own. “The next day in Muggle Studies they asked people to come forward if they knew anything, and you stayed in your seat.”
“I’m not a prefect anymore. I can’t take points. I didn’t have any more right to be out of Slytherin that night than you all did.”
She doesn’t seem convinced. But then, he couldn’t possibly explain it to her. How could he convey what it is to be rejected by those who once would do anything for his approval; to know that everyone on one side hates him for his successes and everyone on the other hates him for his failures; to constantly wonder what might have happened if he had been quick enough to accept a dying old man’s offer instead of stalling and stalling until the decision was taken from him; to have a mark on his arm that meant safety and protection and most of all power but somehow now means humiliation and pain and regret; to nightly revisit the scene of his worst mistake and relive it and relive it and relive it and-
It would be impossible to explain.
“I suppose that’s true,” she says after a long silence. They both know it’s a feeble reason, and they both know he isn’t going to give her the real one. “It’ll be really excellent, though. I think it just might be so brilliant that you won’t want to tell anyone it was us.”
He doesn’t know if he should agree with her, but before he can say anything, she gasps and exclaims, “A bumblebee!”
They’re high enough in the air that, after the initial surprise at the sudden outburst, he’s sure she must be mistaken. Bees linger close to the ground. But he looks down to where her fingers brush his cloak and sure enough, there’s a yellow bumblebee hovering over her hand.
“Aren’t you afraid it might sting you?”
She shakes her head, smiling wide. “Maybe it will, if I’m lucky.”
“Are you daft?” he asks automatically. He has never, ever heard of anyone wishing for a bee sting.
“You know that glumbumble stings make you depressed.”
“Of course.”
“Well, bumblebees are the opposite.” She cups her hand around it, still smiling. “It must have been on you this whole time, since you took off. That’s incredibly good luck, you know. Bumblebees produce happy feelings, even more so the longer they’re around you.” She looks up at him, pale lashes framing pale eyes. “You must have felt it.”
He shakes his head, baffled.
“You don’t feel warmer inside?”
Not at all, he wants to say. Instead, he only blinks at her.
“Maybe this will help.” She takes off her silly striped hat and pulls it down onto his head. “It has rabbit and puffskein fur. Very warm.”
He is so surprised that for several moments he only stares at her. She stares back with a pleased look on her face. After a silence that somehow manages to not be awkward at all, he says, “Thank you.” It comes out as a whisper, as though gratitude isn’t a sentiment he can bear to vocalize loudly.
“It suits you,” she says gently. She presses a soft kiss to his cheek. “Go find your snitch.”
He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t have to.
He mounts his broom and kicks off, flying a couple of circles around the pitch before he starts looking. The hat is hideous, but his ears are warm and he can’t bring himself to feel embarrassed.
Half an hour later, after catching and releasing and catching the snitch seven times, he looks down to find her gone. She left him her hat. Somehow, this softens her departure.
He lands on the ground, wraps his scarf in a second loop around his neck, and stuffs the hat in his pocket. He hears a crinkle of paper and pulls out the offending object. It’s that pale purple bird, struggling to flap its wings as he holds them shut.
For the first time in six months, a genuine smile spreads across his face.