Title: Sunlight and Souls
Author: kbk
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and related characters belong to JK Rowling, Bloomsbury Publishing and various other people and companies. Not me. I make no money from this.
Rating: PG
Summary: Draco. A thousand words. A deca-drabble? The Manor, the family and painting.
There are times when the Great Hall is flooded with light. It seems incongruous. But at a certain time of day, sunlight strikes through the south window and reflects off the portrait of my great-great-grandfather in such a way as to fill the space with almost-tangible light. Nobody told me that this would happen - I discovered it for myself at the age of ten, on a summer day when my tutor was in town collecting supplies. I was working on an illustrated family tree, a project I had undertaken at the behest of my father: an attempt on his part to ingrain pride in my history and understanding of my genealogy. I should not have been there had I not been distracted by the grouping at the top of the stairs, which included a younger version of my father. He looked almost human.
I was nearly finished in the Hall – completing my fifteenth sketch of a typical Malfoy male, all cool delicacy and disdain – when the brightness in the room suddenly increased. I looked up. The statuary flushed with life and the gilded cherubim took flight. I stretched up without thought, reached out to touch that transcendent experience... and fell, with the sneer on every portrait face striking at my heart. I should have realised, even then, that purity is not for such as I. That light, if I am to have it, must be reflected from the ice or created by the fire. It must not be warm and comforting. Sunlight must be avoided at all costs, and not only because it damages the dramatic effect of a pale complexion and silvery hair against a black robe. It must be avoided in case the sheer life-giving energy makes you forget. In case it somehow coerces you to the side of good. In case it instils a wish to be of the gold and not the silver. Sunlight is dangerous.
There are rooms in the Manor that the sunlight never touches, be it due to the vagaries of architecture or to the location. My father's study has a window which overlooks the main entry-way, but is so situated in a nook in the outer wall that the sun can never penetrate. I have spent little time in that room, and through the majority of it I was waiting for my father to come with the strap or the lecture, whichever he had decided was the more appropriate punishment for my imagined offence. My school-room was somewhere in the middle, probably adjoining the courtyard on the blind side – even I, who have lived all my life in this house, cannot be certain – and was lit only by the torches along the wall. This may explain why I am so comfortable in the Potions classroom at Hogwarts – it simply reminds me of home, and days spent learning quillmanship under the watchful eye of Mr Hanran. Two of the cellars have high enough windows to enjoy the light, but the rest of them are dark and cool and still, comfortingly similar to the mausoleum – a punishment, he thinks, for an impressionable child to be consigned to sleep with the dead; but somehow, it is less awful than sleeping alone and unguarded when the lightning strikes and perhaps, perhaps tonight is the night they will come for him and take him away and it surely must be safer to be out of the house in the event that there is a battle; because the Manor may be grandiose but it is old, and there are ways to destroy it that even a five-year-old can see. The dungeons would survive, of course, beneath the cellars; but the way in is secret, and it would be easy to be forgotten in that oubliette, easy to starve to death as some of our ghosts surely have.
My room is in the West tower, overlooking the grounds. I grew up with sunsets. The dying of the light, all symbolic and meaningful and keeping me awake until midnight every summer. I try to capture the sunset, sometimes, in watercolours and oils. Naturally, I fail. It would be easy enough to take a photograph: but there is more to a sunset than long shadows and pink-tinged clouds. The purpose of a picture is to capture a little of the soul of the object depicted, and a sunset has no soul. Thus, the sunset can never be painted. I have tried to paint the sunrise, as well, pulling myself out of bed and into the grounds to sit in the gazebo, waiting for the light to come. The first stroke of ethereal pain over the horizon is simply indescribable. Yet I feel uncomfortable with the dawn. The connotations of birth and renewal seem, in essence, too righteous and good and holy for me; and I find myself discomfited by the tendency of the light to delicacy, fragility, closer to a candle flame than the ravening blaze of sunset.
I have a small talent in art, but I find myself lacking. I am unable to capture the soul. If I could just take a little. If I could take a tiny fraction of ineffability from the sunset, from the dawn, from the trees and the flowers and yes, even the Manor. If the thumbnail sketches that litter my notes could impart to me some of the feeling that belongs to others – if I could accumulate and store that indefinable something. Ten of Potter, two of Weasley, five of Granger, three of Snape, innumerable of my housemates, one of Dumbledore, multiple of Narcissa, none of Lucius. Is that enough? Do they compensate for the emptiness inside me? If I could keep drawing, if I could collate enough of them and siphon off a little from each person, from each thing, would that suffice? Would that replace the dead places I feel where I assume my soul ought to be? Would that, finally, be enough?
Is that what it is to be a Dementor?
