Celestial Being

The agony of waiting was made easier with alcohol. There had been a table set out in this room, as well. Draco drank and worried over what would happen when the next group finally arrived. It’s not that it mattered, really. This was just a silly game with obtuse rules and an end goal so unknowable Draco wasn’t sure it was possible to win.

He did want to win, though. Or, perhaps, he wanted to give winning his all. He wanted to let loose and revel in the thrill of competition. How long had it been since Draco had even played a competitive game? He’d forgotten he enjoyed it. He’d forgotten how fun it was to be on a team, like children squealing delightfully as they kicked a ball around the yard. Winning hadn’t mattered, then, but the thrill of trying your best never got old.

So, while there was nothing to be done, the competitive folks in the room were unwilling to stop trying.

“Let’s go back for more people!” Mars decided. It was a risky proposal, but Mars was a woman of action and couldn’t be bothered to wait. Draco warred with himself over being cautious and embracing boldness for the equinox. However, Aergia wouldn’t be bothered and the trio couldn’t reach consensus. A squabble broke out before the Patil sisters settled it by trading their library invitation for Draco’s gallery, on the promise that Mars would definitely bring the pair back. “Keep an eye on him for me?” Draco was surprised she had been talking to him about her brother, not the other way around.

“Alright,” Draco committed warily. Aergia could overhear and sighed pointedly.

It was painfully quiet once the girls left the two men alone. Draco was still on edge, waiting for the moment of action to arrive. Aergia slumped in his chair, indifferent to the game. Draco finished his drink, fearful of having another lest he reach questionable levels of inebriation. He glanced around for distraction, tempted to borrow a book off one of the shelves.

“How’d you know which book we needed?” the older man asked suddenly.

It came out of nowhere but Draco welcomed the break in silence. He sat up in his chair and pasted on a smile. “It was the name of the clue,” he shared.

“Yeah, right, but you knew the name of the author,” there was a hard tilt to the man’s voice. The sort of tone Draco’s tutors would ask when he got something wrong and he was about to be scolded for it.

Draco licked his lips, feeling like this was a trick question. “I’ve seen the book before. I just figured, book, library, probably connected,” he explained.

“You’ve read the book?” asked Aergia.

This was starting to feel uncomfortably pointed. Draco tried to smile again. “Yes?” somehow it came out a question.

“Where’d you get it?” It was sounding more and more like an inquisition.

“A friend gave it to me.”

“A friend.” the man sounded skeptical.

“Yes, I have friends,” Draco said, too defensively.

At that the man chuckled. Draco remembered the man had no clue who Draco was and no reason to view him as a social pariah. Aergia leaned back into his chair. “Sure you do,” his tone was bitter, directed more towards himself than at Draco. He plopped his chin down on a hand and stared hard at Draco. “Are you close with this friend?”

Draco half shrugged, not sure what trap he was walking into. “You could say that,” Draco said cautiously. But then, why was he underselling it just because this stranger was odd? “I think he’s my best friend, actually.”

“Is he.” It didn’t sound like a question. The man heaved a sigh and looked away from Draco. He stared sullenly into the distance. “I don’t want to play this game anymore. Help me get my sister to let it lie.”

“Er,” Draco said. He glanced at the door Mars had left through, hoping she didn’t take too long to come back. “She seems a bit worried about you.”

The older man snorted. “She should keep her nose out of it.”

“Probably,” Draco agreed, because he knew a thing or two about being standoffish. “But she won’t,” he said, because he knew a thing or two about how stubborn Weasleys could be.

Aergia rolled his eyes. He looked again at Draco. “Are you really enjoying this? Don’t you find it a bit silly and frivolous?”

Draco nibbled on his lip as he considered it. “I suppose it is,” Draco admitted. “But isn’t it fun to be silly once in a while?”

The man scoffed. “This is so far past that. How much money do you think it took to make up the ball room like that? And the thing with the ceiling? How many families could you feed off that?”

Draco nibbled his lip again. “I suppose he paid for all the work. That money for engineers and artists, as well as all the construction laborers. It’s not too different than going to theater. Are you opposed to the arts as well?”

The other man tried to hide his sneer. “It’s not like going to the theater,” he said flatly.

Draco pinched his lips and stared at his feet. He changed the topic, “Are there families going hungry?”

The sneer wasn’t hidden this time. “What sort of question is that?”

“An honest one,” Draco said to his feet. “I’ve always been quite sheltered, I suppose.”

The silence hung between them for a long, uncomfortable moment. Finally, the older man said, “There are, but Harry’s good about that. I just worry he’s gotten too caught up on all this pageantry to remember why he’s here in the first place.” Draco remembered Audrey’s words about the king being a reformer and better understood now what she meant. “Not that you’d know anything about that, sheltered as you are. I bet you just bop about and go to parties.”

“That’s me. Spoiled and pampered,” Draco drawled, not caring that he was sounding bitter now. He was giving second thought to the man’s request to talk Mars into ditching him. Draco got to his feet and decided he would go for another drink and took it as far away from the older man as he could get without actively disappearing into the shelves. Draco closed his eyes and took deep breaths to calm down. This was his friends’ brother. They were very fond of him and, more than that, defensive when he was slighted. If Draco picked a fight the Weasleys might all abandon him out of loyalty to their family. Draco had always known where he stood on that pecking order and he could play nice for one evening.

Only, it’s not like anyone knew who he was.

What the hell.

Draco turned back round. “Did you really come out tonight just to put in zero effort and be a prick to strangers?” he demanded.

To Draco’s chagrin, the man just laughed. “Basically, yeah,” he said without shame. “Planned to wallow over that disgusting fucking grog and devise ways to make Harry feel awful about himself all evening.”

That took Draco aback. “That’s a terrible plan.”

The man laughed again. “Don’t I know it.”

“No, I mean, you seem to have some chip on your shoulder and you’re letting it get to you. I get why you’d do that out there,” Draco gestured kind of everywhere, “but tonight is supposed to be a made up fantasy world where all of that,” he flailed around again, “doesn’t matter. You can do whatever you want tonight. Why would you spend that being sullen and petulant over whatever… Harry…” Draco stumbled over using the king’s actual name, “did you wrong. A better revenge is enjoying the evening and rubbing it in his face.”

Aergia looked at Draco like he was seeing him for the first time. “And you’d help me do that? Rub it in your best friend’s face?”

Draco recoiled. “The king is not my friend,” he spat out.

The man tilted his head. “Then who gave you his book?”

“I have other friends!” Draco snapped, still defensive about it even though he knew intellectually he needn’t be. He just didn’t know what this man would think of a Malfoy playing with his nieces and cozying up to his brothers. Draco tried to shrug off his nerves. “Some of my friends might know the king, what of it.

Aergia got to his feet and shoved his hands into his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He glanced at Draco once, then again, contemplating. Draco could practically see him releasing a tension he’d held in his back and shoulders. Now he chose to change the optic. “What do you think happens if you win?” he wondered.

Draco guessed wildly. “You get a dance?”

The older man shook his head. “No, the speech said you just needed one clue for that. I bet he’s out there dancing the night away with all the courtiers who don’t know about this scavenger hunt underway.”

That sounded right. Draco was at a loss. “Maybe a trophy? Some gold token? An invitation to join the equinox committee? Hell, he pulled out all the eligible bachelors in the kingdom. Maybe he’s looking for someone to propose to so he doesn’t have to marry the foreign prince.”

That was the funniest thing Aergia ever heard. He doubled over laughing until tears leaked out of his eyes. “That’s not it, mate. I’m the last person on the planet the king would propose to.”

It was Draco’s turn to laugh, too loud and self disparaging. He distinctly remembered the king yelling at him in the hall the last time he was here for a party. “You give yourself too much credit. I’m the last person in our vast universe the king would ever propose to.”

The men found themselves both laughing together, caught up in their individual imaginings of their own ridiculous scenarios.

When their laughter faded, Aergia was smiling and more at ease than Draco had seen him all evening. Draco grinned to see it, warmed that he could help ease Aergia’s burden even only if for a short while. Aergia tilted his head again, taking in the joy on Draco’s face. Once more, he looked Draco over as if he hadn’t seen him before. This time felt different than the last. It left Draco feeling warm and gooey. “You can’t be so bad a catch as that,” Aergia remarked offhandedly.

Draco thanked whatever god might be looking over him that, at that very moment, a mass of masked attendees flooded into the library. There were so many people. Enough that when Draco intentionally stepped back into a darker corner no one paid him any mind, and even if Aergia wanted to follow it would have been hard to step through the crowd.

That hadn’t been imagined, the man had been flirting. Draco absolutely could not handle any of that right now, for a million different reasons. His last anonymous flirtation had caused nothing but strife and he would not get into another. He could not handle getting familiar with another man only to find out that they also loathed Draco in the real world. Worst still. Draco had already seen the other man flirt with the Patil sisters to gain their favor. The action could be wholly insincere. This Weasley hadn’t proven particularly likable thus far, but if Draco decided he was interested just to find out the man had done it on a lark…

Draco supposed tonight would be the time to learn to stay out of trouble.

In the middle of the room, Mars and the astrolabe had climbed up onto a table and were summoning everyone’s attention to lay out what may have been a twelve point strategy to get to the next step. They kept emphasizing numbers, like how there were seventeen in the room but they needed twenty one. Then they’d emphasize deals made, like here are the people agreed upon to go back because everyone agreed those were the ones who wouldn’t backstab the rest. They laid out terms of agreement about how everyone would play fair and square to get to the next room before it would return to an all out race to the finish line, pulling a man dubbed “the comet” up on to the table to hold up his invitation that spelled out “place of arms” to everyone’s cheers. Right before they launched the plan into action, Draco spoke up.

It was one of those moments where Draco didn’t think before speaking, and therefore didn’t consider the consequences of opening his mouth. Namely, when he shouted, “Everyone should read the invitation card before we start!” and interrupted the grand finale, the eyes of sixteen of the cleverest nobles all focused directly on him.

Draco’s luck wasn’t so sour that he saw any close friends in the crowd. It wasn’t like the first two balls, though. He was out in society now and the subject of intense scrutiny. Any of these people might recognize him. Especially those he had interacted with over the last few months, such as Hermione the astrolabe, the pair of Longbottoms in a pair costume that created a solar eclipse, or even Colton in his elaborate gold-stitched attire that had him shining as the sun.

However, it was as likely as not the words of the invitation held a clue. The choice was to hide from all these people and give up on the game, or to stand up in this moment and give it his all. For Draco, it wasn’t even a choice.

After all, what was the point of an equinox ball if not to embrace the magic? Draco trusted the spell he’d cast on himself this evening. These people would not see Draco Malfoy before them. They saw a stranger worthy of awe.