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The fount of his entrancement is a forsaken room tucked away at the end of the western wing, fourth floor. Despite Harry’s countless accolades and achievements, an invulnerability to gravity and the forces of nature is not one he possesses, and so he is helpless against the pull of a melody, whispering through the air. The notes seep into his blood as music courses through his veins, and all of a sudden Harry is wistful, so wistful it hurts, for a life he’s never had: fleeting flashes of red hair and green irises he knows all too well flickering behind his eyes.
It’s all he can think of; nothing exists but for him and the crying echo of a violin through castle halls. Until he reaches the heart of the magic, and so registers a third entity: an unfamiliar, familiar boy. Sunlight through a dusty window casts a halo off white-blond hair, hair that falls into closed eyes from which long lashes flutter over high cheekbones. There is an aristocratic point to his nose, cut to his jaw. His wrist is water, for nothing else could move so fluidly: arching up and sinking down, up and down, up, down- it’s mesmeric, that’s what. Long, slender fingers dance and quiver and shimmer upon silver strings, the boy is both painter touching strokes to canvas and muse, for he belongs framed in gold. His beauty is that of a marble sculpture, carved by the weathered hands of a master- otherworldly, ethereal.
Yes, this is a type of magic Harry has never seen before, and he is entirely, utterly, and completely bewitched.
He stares at this boy who he has seen millions of times before for the first time. Because that’s true, isn’t it? How could such a work of art be in his vision for so long and remain unnoticed?
Harry stays until the light ringing the boy’s hair mellows into orange- a boy who is not really on this world at all, swept up far away in the waves of his own unrestrained playing to be cognizant of space and time around him. And then a tear pools from under ivory lashes onto an alabaster cheek, and grey eyes flutter open, wide and startled.
Draco Malfoy stops playing, and Harry is falling. Falling fast and far, hurtling from the heavens above all the way back down to Earth. But Earth could never hold a candle to a palace in the clouds and disappointment surges through him so fiercely, Harry feels salty tears of his own prickling in his eyes. The world stills, and Harry watches as Draco looks beyond the walls to other galaxies, eyes empty, void of any and all emotion.
At last the moment shatters, and Draco moves to a black case in the corner, and so Harry slowly turns. He walks back down the corridor: west wing, fourth floor, exactly as he had left it. Grandiose paintings and polished suits of armor are exactly how they should be, but for the fact that they too, like everything else around Harry, are a shade brighter than he recalls.
And when Harry walks out of that corridor, the world is birthed anew, fundamental shifts in the axioms of the universe putting an end to everything he thought he had known. Already the memory is something sacred, and Harry holds it close to his heart with the intention of never letting go. It plays unbidden in his mind over and over, a broken record on a loop.
Maybe he’ll go back again tomorrow- if he’s there, of course. Just the once. It can’t hurt, right?