melancholy soft & outrageous sentimental

The same. Scribbling, pacing, lying down.

Sleepless.

The third time confirmed pattern, committed the odd rituals to routine, resolute.

Malfoy was a ghost in all the ways that didn’t matter. He was threadbare and absent and far-off. He lingered, unsettling and unwelcome, a powdered jasmine perfume, caught in the back of the throat.

Harry doesn’t know what to do with it, only that he has to do something.

Three weeks after Harry’s first clandestine visit, Malfoy collapses in a stairwell after supper. Harry isn’t the first to find him, but he is the first to respond— wrapping him in a soft Rennervate that doesn’t pull him conscious but steadies the harp-sharp thrum of his heart, evens his shallow breathing. Harry’d scoop him in his arms, but Malfoy is all leg, unwieldy, so the best he can do, short of a Leviosa, is pull him over his shoulder. He weighs more than you’d think and less than he ought.

Half of Harry is ready to haul Malfoy into Gryffindor Tower, tuck him beneath his own bedsheets— inexplicable, (insane)— but he doesn’t do that, resists the impulse, if only just. He finds the infirmary and Madame Pomfrey, and she fusses in that steady way she has, a woman who’s seen a thousand broken bones over, who’s pulled more witches and wizards, (more children), from the brink of death than anyone would ever enjoy accounting for.

Malfoy sleeps, at last, (sort of; unwilling), and when Harry, nine hours in, follows him over the precipice, his face folds forward into the nest of his arms, elbows a press in the mattress to the left of Malfoy’s warm thigh. It’s sleep, if you can call it that, for either of them— fitful and desperate and empty.

Later, Malfoy hardly has to move before Harry’s awake, forehead pulled upward from the cool cotton of the utilitarian bedsheets.

Malfoy’s eyes open. They’re tired, rimmed red, crinkled, and they trace the rafters as he shifts his shoulders. Harry wonders if he recognizes the room by the ceiling alone, by the week he spent here, sliced- and then unsliced-open a mere two years ago. (Two years— a moment. A miniature eternity.)

Eventually, his gaze turns.

If he’s surprised to find Harry at his bedside, it doesn’t show. If anything at all, it doesn’t show. Those steel eyes, sunken, do one long blink, before his head dips back again, seeking the pillow and settling on it.

Harry feels Malfoy’s fingers flex. Pauses, processing. Feels his fingers. He glances down, discovers his own hand wrapped loosely around them, his palm crowding pale knuckles, holding somehow too tight and not tight enough. He tugs back, sharp, like burned, like steam or Fiendfyre have found him.

His hands huddle in his hoodie pocket. He forces focus back to Malfoy’s face.

The absence of him is still present, but his pallor’s faded. Which is to say— the faintest traces of pink touch his cheekbones, his chin, the tops of his ears, the tip of his nose. Pale peach, apricot.

Shying from something too sincere, (something that’d make him scatter), Harry offers: “You slept for forever.”

There’s a wobble that crosses the musculature of him, an almost-nothing that sends an almost-flicker to the corner of his mouth. Harry swears he sinks further into the pillows.

Malfoy slowly lifts his hands, and Harry sees as they move toward his torso, ready to fold again above his stomach, at his center, just shy of the beating beacon of his heart. He remembers the sight, sleepless and still, and refuses outright the false face of fatality. It doesn’t take thought, (too many things with him, Hermione says, take too little— thoughtless— though she’s said it less, of late, lax and forgiving), only instinct. Only the certainty that he won’t see him lie like a dead thing.

Hand finds hand.

A tangle of fingers, tugged to the side of him, resting on the bed.

Malfoy’s eyes go wakeful, a little, light coming on in the house behind them, hospitality, or at least inhabitance, trying to take shape, to sweep the floors and smooth the tablecloth.

His gaze goes sideways. Sees Harry. Sees.

“Potter,” he says, and his voice is a straight shot— Firewhiskey, arrow, to gut, to heart, to whatever feeling thing it can find. It creaks, soft and rasping, un-posh in its un-use.

“Yeah,” Harry replies, and it’s a question that fails to find the right tone, more a breath than a word, more automation than answer.

Malfoy lets his hand be held, taps a beat to the back of Harry’s, the scarred skin there, his thumb obscuring the word lies, revealing it, obscuring it again.

“You snore,” he says, short (by mere degrees) of judgment, landing instead somewhere closer to revelation, edging a slight step toward taunt.

“I do not,” Harry offers, wavering warmth rolling throatward. His free hand lands with an indignant push at Malfoy’s knee, his thigh, the tender juncture between, itself tensing beneath the touch. Then easing as he keeps it there, palm a loose splay.

Malfoy nods, an adamant thing for all the exhaustion of him, weakened and weary. “Loudly,” he expounds. He coughs against the effort, then whispers, still: “You snore loudly.”

Harry smiles, a small slip, in spite of himself, and tips his face forward again, cheek landing on the bedspread.

“Well. I’m going to have another nap.”

Malfoy’s wrist is there, just before his face, and he has to resist the muddled urge to tug it forward, to press it to his forehead, his nose, his mouth. The blue-green veins there beneath his skin tangle something in Harry’s stomach he’s unsure how to relieve. He clenches his eyes shut.

“If you want to avoid my snoring,” he says, sly, linens bunching beneath the curl of his hand, drawing closer, “then you’ll have to fall asleep first.” He opens one eye, watchful.

Malfoy hums, shifts, slowly pulls his fingers from Harry’s grasp. There’s a ticker at Harry’s middle that goes into a mortified sort of free fall.

But Malfoy’s hand doesn’t go far. The calloused ends of his fingers fix on the frame of Harry’s glasses. He lifts them from his nose, works them from the careful catch of his ears. He folds them, after a cursory glance, examining, and sets them bedside.

The quiet grows temperamental a moment, the quiver of all the unfounded proximity leaving color at Malfoy’s collar, just visible over the unfastened top button of his shirt.

His hand dips forward again, cutting tension with tenacity, taking hold, slight, of the curl falling in Harry’s face. He traces it, the unsteady spiral, gone long, more intentional now than in the handful of years before.

“When I wake up,” he says, soft, sound scratching. He swallows. “You’ll still be here.” It come like a statement, but the tail of it begs response, covered query.

“Yeah.”

Malfoy tugs the curl before letting it go.

“Swear it, Potter.”

“Solemnly swear.” He takes Malfoy’s fingers, still tremoring, fatigued. Tugs them close. “I’ll be here.”

He isn’t sure there’s more to say, and Malfoy must concur. After a beat— a heart-wrought moment that could steal the breath of twenty— he sinks in the sheets. Shuffles. Rolls his shoulders. Shuts his eyes.

Harry will stay. Make sure he sleeps.

The dominant impression is heat— the room had pulled the air out of every pocket that held it, had turned them inside out and tossed the contents flame-ward as offering.

The fire gave no grace.

It’s strange to see from Harry’s vantage.

There is no subtlety to his own expression, (pale brows folding, pinching, color high and hot on hollowed cheekbones; every ache brought forth with the intensity of each suppressed instinct or emotion before it— terror, distilled, then concentrated, made facial and human and frail); there is no subtlety and the memory ensures he knows that Harry knows, (knew;), (—knows).

But the after…

He plays the feeling back and forth, over & over (& over again), caught in a careless loop, greedy and graceless and god-damned. The feeling intoxicates— it rennervates.

Harry does not hesitate.

He sees Draco. And then he saves him.

The space of the decision is so small so as not to be a decision at all. The feeling evades description, can only be borne by function— sure. Harry sees him and is sure.

He lets the memory run over his retinas, (whatever the equivalent of his mind, that inner eye turned watery with the absence of blinking, with all that watching).

He lets it blind him. He lets it burn. & then he watches it more.

.

When he surfaces— stumbles back into himself— he could swear it’s a lifetime later. (An hour, they assure him. No more, no less.)

He trembles, whole-body, wracked entirely with the rising weight of recollection.

“Did you find what you need?”

Hermione Granger stands at the other end of the bed, furiously twisting some sort of handkerchief in her fingers.

Draco blinks down at the man on the mattress, folded beneath the blankets, (familiar, too familiar), and the memories don’t flood back, but they begin. There is a place for them now, a room that indicates there must be a start to them, must be an end.

It’s a horrifying thing— the gaps are great and hungry. They threaten to swallow, and there isn’t enough mercy in the forced forgetting to make the process so neat as to swallow him whole. Fragment and mess only.

The absence gnaws. It presses against his throat and runs its teeth over the tendons. It wants him to know it could devour.

But there is something to be said of the tenderness it implies. The tenderness that exists on the other side of violence. The presence of daylight that echoes against the threat of darkness. It refracts.

The memories he has now, (more, whole, reconfigured), have lit something in him, too bright to be overtaken.

His fingers find dark curls without him having the thought to put them there.

Harry, he thinks, rolling the name over, then fixing it.

Potter.

(It rings.)

Potter is brave.

And for the small miracles that bravery has granted (and the big ones, but mostly the small— close and near-confidential, corrosive and cataclysmic with care), and for the tandem feeling Draco feels it awakening in the heart-havoc of his veins—

He’ll try.

If his remembering him will heal Potter, he’ll try.

The spell briefly split his sternum, in the same-second-span stitching him closed & searing through his spine.

Cicely missed seeing the second strike, but did not miss its measure. M’s eyes flew open before wincing shut, his hand rising to clutch at Auror Potter’s shoulder, the red robes, golden epaulet, crushed beneath his grasp.

Cicely grinned broadly, twisting the end of her wand, the shape of the knot drawn taut, tethering.

“Oh, dear,” she called, as the men staggered against one another. “No sense of self-preservation with the two of you. I’ll tell you, though, the spell’s going to love that.”

She tugged sharply at her wand and watched as, instead of reaching for their own wounds, each man turned to the other.

“So terribly sad,” she crooned, dodging a furious Bombarda, casting aside a sharp Incarcerous.

“You see,” she said, tossing up a shield and scrabbling over the rubble toward the exit, “love only gives the pain more power. A bit sick, isn’t it?”

She felt it then, the barrage of feeling that tremored through the bond, her wand still tracing the edges of it by mere proximity. The flutter of panic-recognition-secrecy-embarrassment-shock-horror-delight that tore through them.

“Oh,” she said, then cackled against the sheer idiocy. “You didn’t know? Well. Hate to be the bearer of bad news.”

She stepped through the doorway, felt the bounds of the anti-Apparition wards loose at last.

“Confringo!” Mr. M called, form precise in spite of the stagger to his step. Auror Potter caught him at the elbow as he stumbled.

Merlin, what she’d give to stay and see them struggle. Alas.

“Careful, boys! The spell’s a bit touchy, if you catch my drift. Do keep it happy.”

This line of work didn’t lend itself to play too terribly often. What a pity it would be to waste the opportunity.

“Proximity should be sufficient, you know, casual touch. Though it can get a little greedy.”

She knew monologuing was gauche, and yet they made it so easy. She grinned, sharp.

“All else failing, nothing a decent fuck won’t fix.”

Even at this distance, Potter’s ears went scarlet. M’s— Malfoy, that was it, Circe’s tits, finally— Malfoy’s fingers went sheet white around his wand.

It wouldn’t help, of course— fucking. But such a red herring was the least of her crimes. The pocket watch hanging from her belt pulsed, once, twice, thrice, a warning, a reminder.

She took it in hand, quickly recasting her Protego.

Potter remained cleverer than he looked, seeming to divine that the curse was somehow still yoked to the length of aspen caught in the curl of her fingers.

“Expelliarmus!” he shouted through gritted teeth, and what a thrill, to have that particular spell directed her way.

But he was too late, and too weak now, besides. The pocket watch gave one final, violent shake against her palm, and then she vanished, cataclysmic. Debris went crashing in her wake, the doorframe folding— fractured, buckled.

The seconds stammered.

Quiet fell.

Dust did its level best to settle.

“Potter,” Draco breathed, the tense composure of him gone tremulous.

Harry turned toward him, then startled at the raw line of red between them, tracing from one ribcage to the other, the light of it emanant and pulsing, venous. He stumbled a half-step back, and Draco coughed, one hand sweeping sharply towards his heart, the other scrabbling at Harry’s shoulder, drawing him closer.

“Don’t—” he said, choking around the word, whatever after it dying in his throat.

The pang seemed to hit Harry on some sort of delay— he winced, teeth clenched, palm grasping harsh and heavy at Draco’s arm where it linked them. The sound that rose was equal part pain and fury.

“What the fuck kind of curse—?” he murmured beneath labored breath.

Draco bowed toward him, forehead dipping forward, leaving the barest room between the imminent press of their skin.

Harry closed the distance, the relief immediate and unkind.

“The kind that kills slowly,” Draco whispered, fingers trailing the seam of Harry’s uniform to the collar, the exposed side of his neck.

“She can track us. And they’ll try to separate us,” he said, hand curling over Harry’s nape.

Harry sighed into it, dropping his face to the crook beneath Draco’s jaw, nosing along the column of his throat.

Draco hummed, barely conscious of the sound, but Harry felt it go through him like lightning. Every feeling had gone frenetic, fundamental.

Draco exhaled heavily, turning his face into the impulse, pressing his cheek to Harry’s curls.

“They’ll separate us,” he went on, desperately reaching for reason, the sunken semblance of rationality. (Harry’s hand sliding up his spine made thinking very hard.) But vital, and thus vehement:

“And then we’ll die.”

“Photog—?” Draco’s gaze swings sideways, spotting the young woman from the Prophet, Qwik Quill scribbling at her shoulder. “Hm,” he breathes, forehead dropping to Harry’s shoulder.

Harry’s hand finds his elbow, steadying. “What? We can sit. Do you need—”

His words stall— hands, cold and hands, are suddenly beneath his shirt. He can feel the fabric rucked upward, his back and sides exposed.

He tugs at Draco’s wrists, immediate and adamant, until the offending appendages drop to his sides.

“Hands, watch your hands,” he hisses, skin tingling under the memory of his palms.

Draco’s mouth curls into a slow smile. “But you told me to watch my feet.”

“You’re a menace,” Harry says, with far less bite than could be reasonably afforded.

Somehow, they’re still moving, slow-spun circles that have lost the better sense of timing.

Draco leans in (and in) and laughs direct into his collar, the soft hum of it a heady warmth against Harry’s throat.

“We could give them a picture worth printing, don’t you think?” Draco says, low, stepping closer, their chests practically flush.

Harry’s feet stop, the Morganese waltz brought to sharp conclusion in spite of the ongoing lilt of the orchestra. His hand at Draco’s waist has gone a bit desperate, fingers all ache and restraint.

“That’s it. I’m taking you home.”

Draco hums approvingly.

“Your home,” Harry amends, certain the plum stain of his cheeks must be visible fifty meters out.

“Good,” Draco mumbles, nodding, then effortfully pulling himself into near-proper posture.

He dips his lips to Harry’s ear, too close, brushing his jaw just so as he sways, whispering: “I have better bedsheets.”

Harry’s grip goes rigid at his wrist. He does not deign an answer.

As he tows him toward the cloakroom, into its meager privacy, unmistakable is the mechanical shutter, the camera flash, accompanying their retreat.

.

“You’re being ridiculous. And nothing could happen anyway,” he tells Draco, practical, tossing his cloak (grey wool, dovish) around his shoulders, helping to fix the fasten at his front. “You’re drunk. Very drunk.”

Draco’s mouth pulls into a pout, and Harry forces his focus elsewhere, suddenly intent on buttoning his own coat.

Then, Draco’s fingers, just above the top loop, catching tight and tugging him forward. Harry startles, the proximity even more… proximous than prior.

“I’ll take a sobering potion.”

Draco’s free hand wraps around, finds the nape of Harry’s neck. The steady press of his fingers sends a shiver stippling through Harry’s shoulders, outward and through. Draco’s eyes are alight, expectant, as he whispers: “And I’ll still want to fuck you.”

Jesus, Mary, and Merlin.

Harry stammers out: “That— You— I—”

He takes a breath and gently pulls Draco’s grasp from his skin.

“I’m not negotiating this until we at least get you through the Floo.”

Draco snorts, then covers the sound, pink tipping his ears. He coughs, a clearing thing.

“Negotiation,” he says, fixed flat and smirking. He pokes at the breastpocket of Harry’s coat. “Very sexy.”

Harry rolls his eyes, but feels the smile insisting at the edges of his mouth. He guides Draco out of the gallery, down the corridor.

“Potter,” Draco whispers, his fingers once again seeking, finding, touching. They thread themselves through the very ends of his curls.

“Hm?” Harry says, maneuvering open the gate on the lift, trying to carefully tuck Draco inside without having him stumble over the edge of it.

Draco drops his chin, finding the downward slant of Harry’s focus.

“You danced very well,” he says, the sound of it too soft, his gaze searingly sincere. He slumps against Harry’s shoulder, letting out a huff, mildly disgruntled. “But I won’t say that sober.”

Harry warms, and whether it’s the cramped space (it isn’t), the stuffy robes (wrong again), or the easy presence of the man beside him (…), he finds he doesn’t mind.

The charity ball…

Well, perhaps it wasn’t the worst idea.

"Variation on the Word Sleep," Margaret Atwood || ⟡ || @/ladiscomfort ("More Than It Hurts You," The Front Bottoms) || ⟡ || "Separation," W.S. Merwin || ⟡ || "Wound," Larry Levis || ⟡ || @/zanefrederickwrites (via @/artfest) || ⟡ || @/unwastelandunbaby || ⟡ || [ #7 - ? ] || ⟡ || "Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light," Richard Siken || ⟡ || [ #9 - ? ] || ⟡ || "Poems for Blok," Marina Tsvetaeva (tr. Ilya Kaminsky, Jean Valentine) || ⟡ || "At Baia," H.D. || ⟡ || @/oh-phoenixx || ⟡ || "Meditations in an Emergency," Cameron Awkward-Rich || ⟡ || "Snow and Dirty Rain," Richard Siken || ⟡ || "Wait," Faraj Bou al-Isha || ⟡ || @/sisyphusshrugged || ⟡ || Letters to Felice (January 19, 1913), Franz Kafka || ⟡ || shami || ⟡ || "[since feeling is first]," e.e. cummings || ⟡ || [ #20 - ? ] || ⟡ || "I Loved You Before I Was Born," Li-Young Lee

*if you happen to have attribution for images #7 & #9, which are a pair, or for #20, please let me know— i’d very much like to credit them. ♡

Harry drums his fingers over the tabletop, traces a whorl in the woodgrain.

“Just, you know, specific. And not especially novel. Which is a quality some might say you’re prone to seeking. With things like that.”

He flicks his own quill back and forth, sends it levitating through the stacks of the Ministry library before calling it back again.

It’s just that something unsettles, seeing Malfoy’s script, small and neat, scratched in shades of subtle grey. To see it— once in a long while— erased away.

The reason doesn’t hold, he knows. But wizards don’t use pencils. They just don’t.

He prods at solutions, in spite of the lack of problem.

“You could get a self-replenishing ink well. Or some biros, if you’re looking for a closer quill alternative.”

Draco’s eyes do flicker upward then, and Harry catches his expression as it wars one way, and then another.

He places his pencil on the table.

“Before they would see me in the Wizengamot,” Draco says, and sees Harry bristle at the thought, “which you know took a rather long while—”

He hesitates a moment, the precipice edge of confessional. Tips forward.

“During that time, my magic use was severely restricted. And as you well know, magical items are quite directly correlated. For the most part, the magic of them doesn’t originate within the object— it’s drawn from within the owner.”

He stretches, unrolling his shoulders from the position he’s held for the last few hours.

He’s not sure why he’s speaking quite so freely, even as the words fumble forth. The hours trifling over text, leafing through the tomes that litter the table, have left him tired. Loose-lipped and too far at ease, or anyway, too long laboring to keep aloof and close-guarded. He quiets. Then carries on.

“Magical core suspension meant no qwik quills. No brooms, no Floo, no recreational owl post. And absolutely no use of wands. Not for spells. Not for charms.”

He fidgets a beat with the signet ring where it rests on his pinky finger, twirling it ‘round, wrong-sided, then back again. Pressing his thumb softly to the flat face of it.

Then— the point.

“After the war, I spent lots of time drawing.”

Draco can picture them, (still, immediate)— the pages upon pages of parchment, sketches stretching to every margin. The mere act a diversion. Desperate, then devotional. A place to put all the things that had been displaced. Somewhere to direct the devastation, and the long, dour days.

“We ran out of Muggle-style ink at the Manor rather quickly. But the DMLE Junior Officer assigned to me took a bit of pity— Merlin knows why. She left me four pencils, once.”

He can still see her— tidy auburn hair; heavy, attentive brows— setting the pencils unceremoniously on the desktop in the guest study, where he often holed himself away during Ministry observation days. The resonant clack of the wood, her slight nod towards them. “To replace your quills,” she’d said, then left no space for question, striding from the room.

(Half-blooded, he recalls, then feels foolish for recalling. Strives to remember something else: Coffee, not tea; hazelnut syrup, flimsy paper cups. The watch she wore, navy blue band, digital numbers blinking in block font. Twenty-five or so, in age— right around as old as he was now.)

(He reaches for her first name. Fails to find it.)

Upon her appearance in the the room, (then— an age ago, a blink), he’d hardly let his gaze leave the windows, heavy curtains drawn back, where outside a sparrow was flitting about on the ground, selecting dry pieces of grass with a deliberateness Draco couldn’t ever remember expending on the outdoors.

He couldn’t say the number of Galleons, in that moment, he would have given to be allowed out— to scatter birdseed in the tea garden, labyrinthian rows of overgrown orchids and temperamental peony, capped by bushes of long-familiar hydrangeas, themselves encroaching upon some forty years of age. To be let to lie down in the summer pasture as June slowly dappled itself green again.

He hums, an absent acknowledgment of his own stumble into memory. He re-emerges, fingers rolling his writing utensil of choice over the library’s oaken tabletop.

“I didn’t know about pencil sharpeners, and didn’t have one besides. Merlin, I hardly knew about pencils,” he huffs, mouth twisting with mirth. It milds.

“So I’d whittle away at them with a nearly-useless penknife, more heirloom than tool. I’d sharpen them, careful, our old house el—”

Draco’s cheeks go into high color as he amends, admonishes himself.

“Miffy’s favourite expression echoing in my head, over and over. ‘Waste not, want not. Waste not, want not.’”

The next line arrives through a smile, and something in that makes Harry’s chest ache, makes the space behind his sternum itchy with a care he can’t quite quantify, not without bringing himself to acknowledge it, (which he won’t).

“Potter, I don’t know that I can account for the number of splinters I was subject to over the course of that handful of months.”

He had sharpened each pencil to shavings.

He had used them until they were stubs.

He pulls his thermos of coffee closer. Harry checks his tea, under Stasis.

“You don’t realize all the frivolous things we use magic for until the option no longer exists,” Draco continues, half under his breath. He takes a long sip of coffee, gaze gone a bit distant before he shakes himself back into the moment, a seriousness settling over his shoulders once more.

“Most days, anymore, I do my washing up by hand,” he says, “even though I don’t have to,” and Harry does a decent enough job of burying his surprise.

Draco goes on:

“I have a Hoover, and I run the tap when I need water. Keep a battery-powered torch for when it’s dark. It’s… silly, I suppose, sometimes. Tedious, for certain.”

His glance flicks to Harry for a beat, two, like he’s inviting him to intervene, to tell him to stop— Enough with the melodrama, Malfoy.

Harry doesn’t.

Draco ducks his head, chews the inside of his cheek a moment. Deliberates stopping himself. Proceeds, in spite.

His voice goes thin, gossamer.

“But magic is magical, isn’t it? I think I understand more, now, what Muggles mean by that particular adjective.”

He draws his wand from the inner pocket of his cloak, and it isn’t until it’s in his hand that Harry realizes how truly infrequently he’s seen him use it of late.

He says, for the second time this evening:

“Radiosa plumbscriptus.”

From the table, the black-and-yellow Staedtler Noris lifts itself, lofty, and does a sharp spin, shavings unfurling tidily from the writing end, slate-shaded & sure. It comes to a stop, a perfect point, the shavings raining downward and disappearing, blinking out like starlight on a windy night, before they ever touch the table.

It stills. Settles, dipping into the predestined groove of Draco’s hand, against crook of his thumb, finding a home in the fine clutch of his fingers.

(It is an odd charm. An odd charm to it.)

Draco’s mouth draws in a tight smile— Wistful, Harry thinks, or wry.

“Magical,” Draco whispers. He prods at his fingertips, left-handed, thumbnail catching on the ridges of each print, and Harry can imagine the pinprick of pain like the memory’s his own, splintering.

Draco’s gaze trips over Harry, the fractured look on his face, then lands back on his notes, neat and numbered. He resolves himself. Resumes his work.

And as Harry watches the script trail to the page, the unremarkable grace of graphite, and the soft scratching sound it leaves behind, he hears him murmur, (subtle, half-secret):

“So. I prefer pencils. But I don’t imagine I’ll sharpen one by hand ever again.”

The library hums. Evening light spills.

Harry aches. Picks up his quill.