redwill

You scored 28% Slytherin, 28% Ravenclaw, 68% Gryffindor, and 32% Hufflepuff!

That’s a lot of percent.

Earl Grey ‘tea’ is an abomination, unworthy of ingestion, an offense to any palate not paralysed to the point of insensibility to all but the hammerblows of overweeningly egotistical strong chemicals.

The only reason it is popular is an expressed preference for it by the fictional character, Jean Luc Picard. It is a testament to the charisma of this character portrayed by Patrick Stewart that Earl Grey tea is widely consumed by characters in fanfiction who are of course quite unaware of its flesh cringing irritants suspended in formerly innocent water, and the sinus-opening gaseous emissions of its flavouring agent, the bergamot oil that is better suited to nasal inhalers of nearly explosive effectiveness.

The noble name of tea should never be applied to the vile concoction known as Earl Grey.

Based on characters of J.K.Rowling
Written by Lancelot Price. Begun 2008 January 08, complete 2008 January 09, last story edit 2008 January 27

Heat

There in the falling snow outside the castle, pale Draco reached through the world’s massive cold toward the heat he needed, had to have. Harry.

It began in springtime, or was it summer? Was it fall? It’s too hard to remember. It was probably all.
I’m not even sure which year it was that it really all began. But finally I came to know it, to know what it really was. To know I loved a man.

We were always white and black, light and dark. They said so often that my white and pale was the dark and that his black hair and tanned skin was the light, the hero to my villain. But everything depends on point of view, and from the highest peak, I think that the universe-god looks on it all the same. All needed, all exciting, all beautiful. Alive. Nothing could live without its other.

No one else could touch us. We existed all alone, both at a higher level that others could not reach, and we fought and hated, each one despising that the other could come so close, could be as skilled, as hard, as tough, as daring. There was no one else in our world. No one.

It took me years to truly realise this. That my friends, my allies, my family, none of them affected me so much as he. His opinion mattered. His defeat, his shame, these were my goals, the object of my doing, the reason I lived. No politics but what was between us mattered. Voldemort’s insane crusade did not matter. Power did not matter. Rank, position in the world did not matter. The only position that mattered was when I could stand with winning-trophy or top-class certificate in hand and look down my nose at Harry Potter.

After Voldemort was dead, the bright colours of the war flags began to fade as we all had to live in a world that no longer had two great sides, teams, armies. In our school days, the houses we once were in had been so closely tied to opposing armies; loyalty to them faded too. Everything became personal; patriotism died. Good riddance.

We were left with our selves.

I was bored. And empty. We had gone our separate ways, free now to do what we wanted. But what was there to do?
I found no passion in me for anything. I worked at this and at that. Did translations for a while, of words whose definitions I knew but which meant nothing to me. Much that was magic had lost its appeal with no Harry Potter to use it on; I explored the muggle world, their cars, their food, their things. So many things. They had no flying worthy of the name; the food was best. And that’s how I met Harry again. He was still ”Potter!” at the time, but without the exclamation.

The Potter was as sick and bored of wizardry as I was. One day I was in the university town of Aberstwyth, in a restaurant, and there he was. It was of course not possible for us to ignore each other nor to pretend non-recognition. Though we had both changed in appearance with a whole decade from our last sight of each other. Not just appearance either, of course, and that is what made it possible to speak. Just after the waitress left with my order, he came to me. To my table. Still more impulsive than me; that had nOt changed.

“Forgive me for asking, but you’re Draco Malfoy, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes I am. You’re not wrong about that observation, Potter.”

He smiled. ”Something of a first, that.”

And I smiled, too. “From me to you, yes, very probably.”

I was not really surprised by my calm civility to my old enemy, but perhaps a bit by his. Clearly the years had changed him, perhaps as much as they had changed me. I invited him to sit down and his food was brought to my table.

We talked. Afternoon became suddenly evening and we’d replaced the restaurant with a park and then a pub frequented by students and sometimes professors. Surrounded by jolly chat or impassioned but civil arguments of philosophy or the merits of football teams, I and Harry spoke of how our lives had lost all meaning. At first the expressions on our faces were melancholy, but as we discovered more and more how each of us felt the same, this finding in each other of our equal, our… cousin, no.. our brother in empty suffering began to make us smile. Not the smile of detached cordial manners anymore, but almost an enjoyment of the mutuality of our dissatisfaction.

We understood what we had lost when war was won. The others from our separate circles who’d survived and weren’t imprisoned, and of course only those from my circle had spent their time in Azkaban, those others had found some new purpose, and or found someone to share caring with. But I had not. Nor had Harry. There seemed to be no one else who felt loss instead of victory, whose heart was not in celebration. You see where this was going. So do I. Now. But not that day we met.

This many years after the war, we had both had money and leisure, and nothing fulfilling to do with it. Over the course of the next few days we met and spent most of our waking time together; a comradeship evolved and with it a plan to travel together, to see new things if possible, and to make new the things already seen by seeing them with someone else who knew, someone who felt the same way, but brought a different set of experiences and comparisons and views.

Though we shared the same kind of fire in our souls, there was much we did not know about each other, and I, Draco Malfoy, discovered that Harry Potter was a funny funny man. Oddly enough, he said the same about me. Funny. Odd little word, that one. How many words in our language are constructed that way? A noun, a doubled consonant, a ‘y’ on the end, and there you have it, an adjective. Full of fun. And we were. It was a new feeling for me, or at least one that I had never felt in this pure, beneficent form. It was wonderful.

Months passed and life became what it should be, an ecstasy. A taking in of sights and sounds, all senses bringing every kind of data in, and your mind quiet, letting it all be noticed, unjudged, felt.

Harry and I became close with common experience and delight. We felt so different, so new, so ready for any occasion, that finally we thought we could go back to Hogwarts, to remind ourselves of all the things that had happened between us then, all the rage, the hate, and to put it all behind us.

It was during the vacation over Yule, and in these days of postwar safety, no one stayed there in the holidays. We had it all to ourselves. There were no wards to break, no traps for the enemy. From early in the morning, we roamed everywhere, through halls and commons, and towers and dormitories, remembering everything. It was gone, the war, the houses of Gryffindor and Slytherin, the hate, our old selves. All gone. We were not they.

In the afternoon, we were at the quidditch field, the locus, the greatest focus of the passionate hatred we’d held so long. We got on the school brooms and flew in the cold fast wind, the thickly falling snow, seeking to find the snitch. We zoomed high; we dived, we feinted, we thrust the air aside and jostled for the catch. We’d lost nothing of our innate skill, that feeling that love that need for flight, for speed. The passion remained; the hate was gone. For an hour of ecstasy we flew, and at the last catch we got our hands on the snitch at the same time, our fingers intertwined around it. It could not get away. Nor could we.

We drifted slowly to the ground, and arriving there, put the snitch away in its box with the unneeded bludgers and quaffle.

“We’ll keep this”, said Harry.

“And buy the school a new set”, said I.

There in the falling snow outside the castle, pale Draco reached through the world’s massive cold toward the heat he needed, had to have. Harry.

Harry, equally needing, desiring… reached back. They touched. And kept on touching.

——-

My usual email service blocked the account confirmation mail from BayWords, so instead of already having my blog four days ago, I didn’t get it till today. To get it, I had to use Yahoo email which let it right through. I had just tried for the third time in four days to get the blog, and as soon as I signed up at Baywords, then logged in to Yahoo mail, the confirmation mail from BayWords was right there waiting for me already. Way to go, Yahoo.

To my other email service: Let mE decide who gets through and who doesn’t.

Apparently they were blocking just because it was from PirateBay. It wasn’t for anything I had ever done or said. It wasn’t for any wrongdoing in the mail itself, but just based on someone at the service deciding that PB is inherently evil and should be stopped. But it’s mY mail and mY decision.