The Golden Snitch

Flying High

'Draco, I wonder, would it be possible to share a memory with me, a memory of feeling happy.'

Draco paused, he hadn't been expecting this, he thought ... he didn't know what he thought it would be like. But this felt so utterly personal. He sighed.

'We don't have to discuss this, if it's too hard to do at the moment.'

'No, it's OK. It's not really a memory. Well, it is. I'm not sure. It's only just happened but I don't think I'll ever forget it as long as I live.'

'That's great, Draco. Can you tell me about it?'

'Harry taught me how to fly again.'

'Harry?'

'Yes, Harry.' He nodded towards the door and the room where Harry was waiting for him. 'It's funny calling him Harry,' he mused. 'I've always called him Potter, right from the beginning of the first year when he refused to shake my hand on the Hogwarts Express. I deserved that, of course, I was being an utter pillock but, anyway, it was time to grow up and start letting go of the past, so despite it being an awfully hard habit to break I try not to call him Potter anymore...' he shrugged.

'And this memory?'

Draco closed his eyes, trying to recapture the moment. 'We'd been flying, out over the Black Lake and were on an island, just the two of us. It sounds like a dream, it was a dream.' He breathed deep into the memory. 'We were about to return, we'd both got onto our brooms but hadn't yet kicked off when he looked at me. I could see that sparkle that he gets in his eyes sometimes, when he has an idea. He dismounted and dropped his broom. He walked over and held the front of my Firebolt, just gently. He told me to hover about three feet off the ground and asked if I trusted him. That's the sort of question that always makes me jittery, when someone asks that they're normally about to do something stupid or untrustworthy. Human nature is so transparent. But when I looked at Harry, well, there's that saying isn't there, that the eyes are the window to the soul, its true with him, all I could see was sincerity, and yes, I trusted him, implicitly. He told me he was going to wrap his scarf across my eyes. I let him. I was blind, on my broom, and so vulnerable, he could have done anything, but I trusted him and I've never felt so secure.'

'What happened next, Draco?'

'He told me to focus on the broom, on how it felt beneath me, in my hands, he told me to lean lower over it, he told me to relax my grip, not let go, just relax. He told me to breathe, he counted with me. He just kept talking to me, sometimes it felt like he was talking nonsense, but at the same time it all made perfect sense. He told me to stop being a Malfoy and start being Draco, to drop my shoulders, and relax my jaw and my feet, of all things. And all the time I couldn't see and just listened to his voice. He told me to imagine I was flying over the water, up over a bank, across a meadow, he would describe details, from butterflies and flowers to Highland Cattle or rock outcrops which he would tell me to fly up over or around. He told me to imagine a valley between the Scottish hills, the purple heather, the bubbling streams. He kept reminding me to feel the broom beneath me, to become one with it. Sometimes he would tell me to lean left or right through my arms, or to straighten a leg briefly and I would feel it tilt slightly. Sometimes it was as simple as to point my left or right toes fleetingly. Sometimes he would tell me just to think moving up or down, and I could feel the broom react to the subtleties. It was amazing. I felt like I was soaring, yet all the time, I was hovering, just a few feet off the air, or so I thought, completely calm under his instructions, while he held the top of my broom. Only, when he told me to take the scarf off, we were no longer on the island, he had made me fly all that time, we were over the hills, we had followed the land, he said we would, but I didn't notice. It was just his voice and the broom.'