Somnambulist
by Silvia
Marcus wakes at five in the morning, every morning, and pushes back the covers with the soles of his feet, twisting fabric tight between his toes. They stick sometimes, especially in the spring, and Marcus has to lean forward to pry the cloth from his skin. He hates that.
Breeze drizzles in from the window that cuts through the dormitory wall about halfway up the four posters of his bed, shutters flung wide open. It only remains stopped up during the holidays, because he says so. He's the captain. Marcus can't sleep unless something is moving, even if it's simply air against his face.
The drop to the ground is long enough to think during, and his leap is casual - bare feet ghosting along the windowsill, broom scooped up five seconds before the fall. Marcus blinks as the chill worms its way quickly under his eyelids, and tucks his knees up to his chest as he fits the broom between them. The first breath he pulls in feels stuttered, all delayed reaction and seeping jaggedly into his lungs.
"You're late," Oliver calls from thirty feet above the grass, in one of the tight, winding circles that he practices before six, and it's a lie because Marcus is never late. He always wakes up at five every morning, and he's hovering above the Quidditch field in under two minutes. "Thought maybe you'd made the jump and forgotten your broom."
"Sorry to disappoint," Marcus drawls, and hears the faint hum of a crowd in the stands when he closes his eyes.
--
Marcus never sleeps the first night back, but he pretends to. He lies flat on top of the covers, which are turned back only to the edge of his pillow, rumpled about his neck, and wonders if Oliver will still get there before him.
Marcus could wake earlier and it would feel like cheating, and that's fine, but it would also feel like giving in. Marcus will wake at five because he wakes at five, and that's how it is.
--Oliver makes it to the field first, possibly, because he never sleeps.
Marcus knows the raw swell of his eyes, knows it from his Seeker. Terence draws lax, splintered breaths when he dreams, as if he's seeing, hearing something that he can never tell, and breathing is too close to speaking. Too close for comfort.
Terence doesn't dream often, not anymore, and burns two candles to the wick before daylight. Marcus sees their fractured yellow at the edges of his own dreams, melting a gold cast over his black and white snapshots. The little muggle born boy, the one who draws with shaky fingers, said that's what they're called: snapshots. Marcus had tripped once, cramped between library bookshelves, and the postcards -- the boy said they were postcards -- came down about them like springtime butterflies or flakes of snow.
--If the world turned backwards, and all the rivers froze, and someone asked, he would say: it's the books, why the library is a foreign place, a fantastical place. It's not that he wants to be stupid.
Marcus can't help his suspicions, his distrust of their crackling spines and fluttering pages. He can't help that they poke at his hands and they swing when they open. The letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs move too fast -- he can't contain them. He was never a Seeker, and there's a reason for it.
It's not that he wanted to stay, he tells himself; there's nothing here. He can have five am anywhere, with the same broom and the same gray-pink sky and the same clutch in his throat.
He would never fail on purpose.
--"Just think of it," says his father, because he's helping, because Marcus can be a real Flint yet, "Just think of it like a tiny Nimbus between your fingers." He plops the pencil into Marcus' palm and slaps his back, thick hand thumping dully against cotton.
There is a large wooden rectangle of a desk in his room, because it's an office in the non-summer months, and his father presses him to it. His father comes by after supper, to press him into the chair they've never changed, that is too short for his legs now, and tells him what he knows Marcus can do.
And books are beaters, Marcus supposes. It took him two years to think that one up, and he'll say it sometime. His father will shove his head back and his hands into his pockets and laugh.
--Marcus sneaks out to watch muggle television -- that's what the boy called it, on his knees to pick up the flat pictures (no, postcards) with fingers shaking, but not because he was sketching, but because Marcus was angry -- and he stumbles upon it in large flickering boxes tucked away behind sheets of glass, on muggle sidewalks. He watches and wants to learn, to pull their secrets into the tip of his wand, to store their tricks, because they're the enemy and he should know them.
There's sometimes a crowd at his back, bodies pushing and shoving, and he gets sludge on his loafers because he refuses to budge. They have to move around him.
It's better to watch when a muggle watches too, pausing with a slackening face and wide unblinking eyes, because they know all of these pictures and stories, somehow, and the shape of their mouths is a signal. He wonders a bit, but only a bit, if these people have their own magic, if they're time travelers, because they always seem to tell what happens next.
Some things he's watched before, because they play them again and again. They must be the most important television things, Marcus supposes, though he doesn't know how that's decided, don't know why. Just in case, he memorizes them.
There's one he's seen a hundred times, or perhaps only ten, and it's very bright and taffy-thick. He's supposed to laugh, he can tell, except he doesn't think the man in the sticky looking sweater is very funny.
"You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you," the man says.
The thing about muggles, Marcus figures, is that they're liars.
--
"My boy," says his father, "you're a natural, that's what it is. It's in your blood." He grins, and it brings a tinge more red to his liquor swollen nose. "Just like your old man."
His father would not believe about the mornings; real men wouldn't need them.
The other boys don't need them, because they are better. Marcus had to learn that.
His father will never learn that Marcus wakes against the tide of his blood, which is thin and sluggish, and props himself up, first, by his elbows, just a moment, and thinks of flopping back against the mattress. He thinks, and remembers splintered bones and falls and practice, he needs practice, and rises because Snape whispered to him once -- in the first year, when they all thought he'd have a future -- that anyone can win, anyone, if they're ruthless enough.
"The question is, Mr. Flint," Snape had murmured, eyes narrowed, "do you know when to bewitch yourself, if need be, and when to jump?"
--
Marcus wakes at five in the morning, every morning, except for the morning when he doesn't.
Nearly eight years of mornings wrap around his knees, stapling them to the center of his mattress, and he thinks of the knees, and scabbed ankles, and thick wrists that could have joined him if the torso wasn't zipping across the lawn, splattering dew from grass tips to robes and skin.
Breeze dries the sweat sleep brought to his face, and Marcus scrubs at the remaining traces with the back of his hand, prodding at the mattress with his weight, head filled with splinters, and rushing air, and promises he made for the sake of promises.
He thinks of patterns, and Oliver, and the fact that Oliver will say, "You're late," without searching the sunrise or looking for a clock, because Marcus is never early. Three simple sentences will make it feel like they've done enough, they've talked.
Marcus lifts with his thighs and a clench of the small of his back, and clasps his broom with firm fingers before flicking the length of it over his shoulder. It clatters beside Pucey's bed, the tip of it hidden by thick wads of comforter. His feet clatter and slip against the wall and the window frame, and he blinks at the polished wood beneath his fingers.
Marcus thinks about about bones, and flying, and mending, and what a person can do, if a person has to.
Marcus thinks, and laughs, and says to Oliver, though Oliver can't hear him, "I think we need a new topic of conversation."
Steps out.
Lets go.