FIC: Own Two Legs (H/D, ~30 000, NC-17) 2/3
Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3
12.
"The eyes," Draco whispers in awe and traces an impossibly huge, adult finger over the flushed, soft cheek.
The baby produces a tiny mewling sound and blinks up at him with big velvety eyes of slate blue.
"They won't keep," Miriam tells him with utter confidence, and he can't help but be impressed yet again by her easy, matter-of-fact cognisance of all things baby.
He's always laughed at the whole fingers and toes counting ritual, which has been hopelessly banal and needless in his teenage eyes. Now, when he's done it himself, he sees it does take some counting, as tiny as they are. His own hands seem grotesquely out of proportion in comparison, and something swells inside him with quiet warmth. They are all there, ten plus ten, and he has no idea whose nose is that but it is just as tiny, and he has to forcibly suppress the need to coo.
The baby blinks again - apparently still blind as the Mediwizard claims - his translucent lids flutter, and with a barely audible sigh he falls asleep. Petal-rose lips are half-open, and Draco is losing the battle rapidly.
Miriam tucks a loose strand behind her ear, and Draco looks up to see her watching the blue-wrapped bundle in her arms. He has never felt like that towards another human being. She looks at him and smiles, and Draco leans to kiss her. It's a slow, languid caress, and his heart feels huge, beating against his rib cage.
The baby shifts and begins to protest, and they break apart. She murmurs a quiet something and touches a cheek, and he snuggles against her fingers, content to be petted.
"Thank you," Draco hears himself say, watching them, and he has never meant it quite that frankly before.
She laughs, a quiet sound, and in the sunlit room she's simply radiant, despite the bloodshot eyes and ghostly pale skin.
"Worth the china?" she jokes: over the last two months all the porcelain has met its end by explosion. Draco, quite positive this is worth far more than the entire world's supply of china, tells her so.
Truth be told, he wasn’t her parents’ ideal candidate, and he’s never doubted that if Lucius were a bit more sane, he wouldn’t have been thrilled, either. But Draco, having chosen with eyes wide open, thinks he's made the best of all choices.
"Are you quite sure...?" he asks her later, when an energetic nurse has come and under Draco's kicked puppy stare taken the shock of soft, coppery sunrise hair away.
"Yes," she tells him firmly. "Tradition needs to be preserved."
Draco isn't all that convinced that such a soft, tiny and blond creature deserves to be named like that, but awed, humbled and utterly dazed as he is, he can't put up much of an argument.
He tells her that her sister will arrive tomorrow and that she's actually deigned to talk to Draco without a mediator.
"You are horrible!" Miriam accuses him, but he strongly suspects her twitch is a second away from being a smile, or maybe a smirk.
"I love you," he says, very serious, and her eyes grow darker with silent intensity.
"I know," she answers, and it will occur to him much later that he has never actually said the words before.
The sun is shining on his back, a solid warmth, and he wants more than anything to wrap her and the small miracle that is their child into a cloak of safety and never let go.
The frightening nurse arrives again after a while to inform them the baby needs to be fed and that Draco has to go.
Despite the vehement protesting, Draco finds himself out in the street in record time, and spends a couple of moments admiring the scary, practical efficiency of medical personnel. Equally equipped to give news of a death and convincingly pat the crying on the shoulder, and throw out recalcitrant, tipsy-on-excitement fathers.
Draco walks home. It's not so close but it's a crisp Saturday afternoon, winter weather just beginning to mellow up. His coat is a bit too much, but he doesn't want to carry it. People pass him in the street, happy and moody, alone and in groups, laughing or silent, and Draco feels light as a feather. He gives a couple of coins to an old man playing the guitar at a corner, and never notices the stare the shape of them draws.
When he comes home, he's pleasantly tired, and his high has matured to a warm, grounded core. He should go visit his father but he can't make himself spoil the moment. Instead, he goes on the terrace and watches the stars. A couple of red lights blink closer than the rest and move rapidly east. Airplane, Miriam has told him. Draco repeats the word in his mind, and this makes him remember the programme she's been needling him about for months now.
He goes back inside and picks the leaflet for the hundredth time. As he reads it yet again, his fingers repeat of their own accord the familiar folds and lines, and the crane stands stable and sharp-edged on the tabletop.
Haven't got your Hogwarts diploma? The leaflet screams in painstaking schoolgirl writing.
Draco takes it and moves to the sofa. Maybe she is right, after all, and he should apply...
An envelope is caught in the cushions of the sofa - unnoticed until now, it is brown and heavy, and bears Ministry insignia in High Priority red. He tears it open, already annoyed at the scatter-brained elf for forgetting to inform him of new mail received.
Official notice, it says inside, and Draco takes a deep breath and sits up straighter: the fate of his house and his money will be reviewed in six month's time on an official hearing.
He reads it again. Years of not one word and now... a line in small print says Instigated on official enquiry. Someone has asked for such a review. Someone who knows...
Draco suddenly has a very bad taste in his mouth. And is very angry.
He knows who has done this.
-:-:-
13.
There's the shrieking of banshees attacked by pixie swarms, a flash of flames, and the actual source of the noise lands in a heap by the fireplace next to an already annoyed-looking Hermione.
"Hugo, if you bite your sister one more time, we are going home to decline Latin verbs."
Harry hides his smile before he is sent to bed without dinner, and hugs Hermione, who looks more tired than ever.
Galloping down the stairs, a battle cry accompanied by the thump of a jump over the last three steps, and James flies into the room with a triumphant laugh, managing to bang the door.
"James! " Harry hears Ginny yell from the second floor, before Albus runs in as well and everything settles into familiar, deafening cacophony. There are no less than a dozen screamed happy birthday!s
Hermione looks like she'll either strangle somebody, or topple over, whichever is more energy-preserving.
"Ginny's upstairs," Harry tells her. "Why don't you go, and I'll see what I can do."
She smiles her thanks, before exiting. "Ron will come with a Portkey sometime soon."
"Okay now," Harry shouts down the gaggle. "Who wants to have a snow fight?"
They all do, naturally, and Harry shepherds them out on the lawn, covered thigh-deep in snow that has already suffered three snow fights this week and has given birth to no less than four snowmen, all askew.
They begin Potters versus Weasleys with Harry refereeing, shift to old and young against the middle, and end with everybody against Harry with Harry on the ground struggling feebly and sputtering under the attack.
To no one's surprise and Ginny's mild exasperation, when they come in after repeated calls, they are wet to the marrow and cold as you please. Lunch is a noisy affair, and Harry has grown so hungry without noticing that it's almost like being at school again. Ginny has made kidney pie, Albus' favourite, and something with vegetables in it, much to the children's combined disgust and indignation.
After that, Albus blows the seven candles off a cake shaped like a Quidditch pitch and almost tears himself in two trying to decide which he'd like more - to wolf down dessert or to open presents. The problem gets resolved by doing them simultaneously, and Harry is split between being amused and cringing.
Al gets a new broom, much to James' somewhat obvious envy. It's the last transitory broom either of them will get - Harry will buy them each an adult Quidditch broom when they in turn start Hogwarts, even if it means fighting Ginny about it.
Hermione's present is, unsurprisingly, a book, My First Twenty Spells: The Basis for the Next Two Hundred and Rose, much of the same school of present giving has given Al a beautifully crafted, detailed chart of Latin grammar. Ron makes a faintly embarrassed face, for the presents carry his name too, while Harry is, as always, surprised how honestly Al likes them. The leaning is certainly neither his, nor Ginny's.
Then the party paper is all over the place and the herd stampedes away. Lily, who's just past a terrible bout of chicken pox, followed by stomach flu, and was only allowed a tiny bite of cake and none of the pumpkin juice, slinks unhappily away.
Ron leaves soon after with apologetic words about work and promises to call on Friday for a butterbeer, and Ginny tactfully offers a now-ashen Hermione to show her something in the study.
Harry doesn't even notice when he's dozed off, warmed by the fire. He remembers thinking it's been a fun day, and then, seemingly ten seconds later, Ginny is shaking him, asking if he's seen Lily.
She's not worried, and easily laughs away Harry's first, rather tragic notions. By the time they've check again every room, though, Harry has remembered a dozen carefully hidden moments of the past, and his stomach is frozen lead. He can't stop himself from thinking about all the horrible, frightening possibilities.
Bad people haven't just disappeared from the face of earth with Voldemort, and a five-year-old is a ridiculously easy target. With the snow and the dark, it'll be a few hours until a search party can be roused.
"Don't be ridiculous, Harry," Ginny tells him and looks at him with a frown of incomprehension. "She's somewhere around."
'Somewhere around' is not what can calm Harry down. He goes out - it's bitterly cold - and starts doing tracing charms. Small as she is, and no stable magical displays yet, the chance to catch her with one are minimal, but in Harry's terrified and irrational state, it is much better that waiting. He goes around the house, twice, but they've left so many traces while playing it is impossible to tell apart anything.
At that point Harry can think only about graveyards and darkness and how scary it is to be alone. He throws the broomshed door open...
She’s curled up on an old blanket, around a wet and wide-eyed cat.
Harry slides to his knees, joints to water, and the windows rattle. He's so relieved he's queasy. He hugs her and she stirs sleepily, her small warm body in his shaking arms.
"Baby, how many times has Daddy told you to never go out alone?" he whispers in her hair, soft and smelling of baby soap, and his voice is awfully uneven.
She murmurs something suspiciously like cat, and snuggles in his arms as he picks her up.
"Where was she?" Ginny asks simply, already smiling, and takes her from Harry to tuck her in.
Harry sits down on the sofa, bodily shaking, after he's made sure his daughter is indeed in her bed, and feels terribly unworthy of Ginny's bright, enthusiastic positivity, of her faith and strength to bury the past and live in the present.
His heart rate takes a while to settle, and even when he lies down by her, later that evening, all he wants is a double whiskey, a dark room and someone who knows that sort of cowardice.
He wants Malfoy.
-:-:-
14.
Draco isn't sure what, exactly, it is he's looking for.
The last time he came - his first purposeful visit - he screamed and accused and turned out to be right in his suspicion, and all the while Potter took the abuse for the most part quietly.
The view from the French windows leading to a spacious terrace is faintly familiar. Draco wonders where this is in relation to his own flat, where his wife is currently packing her trunks for a visit home. His heart skitters at the thought.
Scorpius' first birthday is precisely a month yet, and the winter has barely begun to let up. Staring at the dark, naked branches of the soaked trees outside, Draco is more scared than he has been in years. The mere idea of remaining alone makes his throat close up anew.
It's not a memory he is particularly glad to retain. It's nothing he can help, either. Miriam has been talking about the visit for weeks now, planning everything with excitement and obsessiveness that at times amused Draco to no end. He is still not entirely sure how the thawing in her relationship with her parents happened. After almost two years of marriage, during which Draco never even met her father, suddenly bridges need to be mended and some reasonable attitude affected. Whether it's Scorpius' cherubim looks, or old age mellowing up, Draco can only guess.
He is glad for her. He's made a perfunctory offer to accompany them, more to show support than in actual delusion he'd be welcome. She accepted it with a kiss and a smile, appreciated it for the effort it was and denied it as he'd expected her to.
They'll be home in time for Scorpius' birthday, and Draco, with no real reason to protest the visit, can only be thankful for the small mercies.
Except that he will be for almost a month in a flat haunted by a past he tells himself is now completely buried, but he is not going to admit that to be a problem, even to himself. A sharp gust rakes the branches and the gutters are cracked somewhere because crystalline drops fly with the wind. The room smells of something soft and nice, although Draco hastens to tell himself that as far as praise goes, nice isn't much. The Fidelius lies against his skin like the most delicate of shivers.
"What are you doing here?" Potter's voice comes behind him.
"I..." Draco's throat closes up; he hasn't idea. He should have gone for a walk instead. "I'll go now."
"And there I thought you’d come to apologise." Potter's voice is light and impenetrable, and Draco's temper flares up with a shameful ease.
"You can be fairly certain I won't apologise," he says, stone cold, and glances a dagger across the room to where Potter is now splayed on the sofa.
"Then I'll have you know your manners are perfectly appalling." Potter smiles sweetly, strychnine in the honey, and Draco's heartbeat goes to an override.
"Now listen here, you self-righteous mongrel. You can't just go and stick your nose into other people's business, doing whatever you damn please. I understand that your hero complex brings the harlots to shaky knees, but you can't just... shape other people's lives for them. You can't control my life, because I am the one who'll do it! I lost, okay? I don't need you to plead my case, to beg on my behalf for crumbs of what was rightfully my heritage!"
Harry's laughter is far more sincere and real this time. Draco stares.
"What are you laughing at, you idiot?" he demands, and through the still present anger and faint indignation, feels the urge to laugh himself, long and liberating and no more than a little hysterical.
"Shut up, scarface," he commands five minutes later, when both of them have calmed down and are silent, anyway. The only thing remaining to bother Draco is the discomfort at being aware how they've either exchanged or horribly messed up their roles.
"Coffee?" Potter says in a moment, and Draco nods hesitantly. It's not too far in the day, although Potter's coffee on principle can't be more than barely drinkable.
But it is. Strong and sweet and lots.
Draco, who has almost completely come to himself now, has sat up straighter, nearly managed to put on his normal face and is distinctly uncomfortable.
"I..." he begins, without any idea what he wants to say. It's been a while since he's felt that too. "I really meant what I told you the last time we met," he says eventually.
"You said," Potter starts slowly, "a lot of things I wouldn't repeat in front of a minor. Which bits did you mean...?"
Draco's face heats up, but he tells himself the light is poor. "Them too, but I am impeccably mannered," he articulates with care, "and won't admit it."
Potter laughs quietly; it's a tired sound. He looks rather rumpled on the whole, Draco notices without particularly trying. "I meant it when I said I don't want you to give me back the Manor," Draco says very calmly. "I don't want it to be you. Or like that." He doesn't. He's managed to somehow stem the bleeding and the last thing he needs is a different sort of wound.
"I am not involved in any decision making," Potter answers even more dispassionately. "The last hearing is still pending, yes? It is all in the hands of the Wizengamot."
Draco is going to reply, then doesn't.
"I am sorry about your father," Potter lies smoothly a few moments later.
Draco snorts. The silence stretches between them, before he hears himself whisper, "It's better like that. He was as good as gone anyway..." He cuts it off. He hasn't meant to speak.
Potter nods once, stiffly.
Draco notes, with disdain mostly for appearance's sake: "You look terrible."
Potter smiles briefly and with an odd sentiment behind it. "My younger son has been sick all week. I haven't slept in days." He looks a little surprised to have said it.
Draco swallows. He knows how that feels. Minutes pass, and then he rises. He doesn't remember sitting down. "I'll go."
"Wait." Potter fidgets for a moment. "Do you play chess?"
Draco does. Potter, on the other hand, apparently doesn't.
-:-:-
15.
Harry thinks he will drown.
It's not a thought as much as an impression, an ache at the back of his mind.
He is sweaty - his fringe is getting far too long again - and the irregular gasps barely manage to affect the burn in his lungs. He crashes to the floor on his back and skids a couple of feet, limbs flying: it makes the world grey for a second. "Protego! " he cries, waving the wand blindly, and the answering grunt is enraged more than anything else.
Harry knows he has to stop. People are getting nervous, as focused as he is on the duel, and anyway, it is getting way beyond the purpose of the display.
"That would be enough, Malfoy." He tries to sound calm and composed, perfectly aware Malfoy won't back down by himself.
Malfoy pauses in the middle of a wand motion Harry knows will be painful if finished, and visibly struggles to regain control over the adrenaline rush and follow what are, in this situation, the words of a teacher and not a childhood rival.
When Harry stands up and dusts his trousers with an impatient gesture, Malfoy has already stepped back among the others, face impenetrable. Harry feels hollow. He gives an essay for next time on low-impact protective wards and bids them all goodbye. At least a dozen hands shoot up with questions and he is only peripherally aware of a flash of blond out the door.
It is mid-afternoon when Harry finally unlocks his car and crashes thankfully in it. It's gloomy, the sky is palest grey and in the sad light Hogsmeade looks rather forlorn too. There are moments like this one, when Hogwarts feels like a trap and not like the safe place it always was for him, and he is - briefly - sorry for having caved in to Ginny’s persuasion to participate in the programme.
He meant to buy Ginny strawberry vanilla from Fortesque's, but only remembers it twenty minutes later and curses. What a perfectly awful day.
Some lively music on the radio is struggling to fight the weather, and Harry - annoyed - soon turns it off. It begins to drizzle lightly, and after another mile or two it bleeds into one of those fogs foreign fiction writers are so fond of describing. Normally, it's a picturesque village road and a pleasure for the eye, trees and meadows and a pretty pond, but now all that can be seen are outlines of trees - mere impressions - among the whiteness. The road stretches a short distance forward and it honestly looks as if it's hanging in pure pale nothingness.
Harry slows down and stops by the side of the road. The engine purrs for a while pointlessly, then he turns it off and gets out of the car.
A slight chill is hanging in the air, along with the damp. It's fresh and sharp, and as he walks away. Eventually it looks like he's alone in the entire world, hardness beneath him and open, endless skies. Safe and anonymous.
He closes his eyes and just breathes slowly, in and out.
He hasn't seen Malfoy outside Hogwarts for months and months now. He's loathe to admit how much he misses it. The thrill of the duel today still hums in his blood, low and constant and familiar. It's astounding how something so far in the past can feel more natural and real than the present moment. His mouth forms a string of lisps and hisses, and he wonders if it is reasonable and healthy to be clinging to the past like that. To invest energy in not forgetting. To lie to the person he’s closest to in the world.
The chill is sharper now, and his fingers are getting numb. He's never thought he'd be that sort of person. But it is such a relief, once in a while, to look at the fire from just that angle and start, and have someone who winces - silently and knowingly - along with you.
And not laugh it off. Not look with the incomprehension of memories dismissed. Not tell you to forget.
His eyes are burning. Or maybe his nose is very cold.
The car is unpleasantly warm afterwards. Unclear shapes swim through the fog, and he turns the radio on again. An earnest female voice tearfully insists I never meant to make you cry. It's not very funny.
Ginny meets him at the door and gives him a kiss hello, her whole body thrumming with energy. She's wearing jeans he hasn't seen in years and an impossibly bright grin.
"See?" she laughs and swirls around a couple of times. "It took me almost three years but I managed to squeeze myself in my pre-Lily jeans!"
“Oh, Ginny,” he hears himself utter. He could laugh.
"Hush, you!" she chides, and Harry shakes his head helplessly as he is lead towards the living room sofa, where she's been watching TV. "I look better like that, don't I?" she asks, and Harry thinks, I love all the ways you look. "No, don't answer that!" she goes on. "How was your day?"
"Perfectly horrible," he says instead, as she spells a blanket and a bowl of something hot from the kitchen. He only then realises he is freezing and awfully hungry. "We have reached protective wards and practical aspects of duelling. No one wants to co-operate. Most people detest having to learn that."
"Oh," she says, and he wonders if she can read the I am duelling Malfoy every practical lesson subtext.
"You are very good at teaching," she tells him later that night while he is almost asleep and she is preparing for bed. "Maybe you can try to do it, you know, full time, after the programme ends in a few years. McGonagall would love to have you for the students too."
He's thought about it himself.
"Perhaps." There's a pause as she slips under the duvet and they settle around each other. "After the kids have finished there."
"Harry!" she sits up sharply and looks at him. "Lily isn't yet three. It is fifteen years you are talking about!"
He drags up some sense of humour with an effort. "Is there some reason you want me out of the house more?"
She laughs and flicks the lights off.
"You know," she begins as she lies on his chest, legs twining. "I've been talking with Hermione..."
Harry groans.
"...you are awful, you know that? So we've been talking, and I think we might consider beginning a new project."
Harry tries to focus and not fall asleep.
"Because, obviously, the Hogwarts evening programme will die out eventually, for apparent reasons, and anyway, I need to change focus and look forward from now on."
As she always does. The future and the endless wonderful surprises it keeps hidden.
"And why were you talking to Hermione about it?"
"Well, we were planning, actually. I know she won't have the time to help with the factual details. But we were thinking how at sea Muggle-borns are in their first year. Imagine if there was a summer camp organised for those who want to go, for example in August. Sort of a fast introduction to all things magical plus ten tips how not to get a Puking Pastry in your juice during week one."
There's a brief pause in which Harry remembers Hagrid and a pink umbrella against the stormy night sky, discovering what a Chocolate Frog was, and Malfoy’s proffered hand on a train of magic.
"You are set to make me a beggar, aren't you?" He says in a moment, lightly.
"I knew you'd like it!" She snuggles close and moves for a kiss. "Do you think McGonagall will approve?"
"If you bend her ear enough."
"Harry!"
-:-:-
16.
To say that Draco is horrified is something of an understatement. He isn't entirely certain how large the step from chess to sex is, and he doesn't remember wanting to make it. Yet here he is, having almost completely managed it, if only in his mind.
He wakes in the middle of the night, overtaken anew with that single moment of stunning clarity when he looked at Potter and thought how much he'd like to pin him down and make him shut up.
It's a disconcerting experience.
He has a beautiful wife and a small child, and the single recurring problem he will admit to are the visits of the in-laws, which are pure torture. He has managed, by so many balls and backdoors, to rescue as much of his father's masterpiece of a library as he ever hoped for, and the better part of his mother's collection of children's books and delicate daggers.
He's got his ending: he owns a tiny piece of them both and of the life they had, Before, and his son, though by Potter's interference, will reclaim the Manor on his twenty-first birthday.
Life has finally straightened itself up and started to - haltingly - move forth. And yet...
Draco is drinking his tea in the morning parlour when among a jumble of screams and Scorpius, no! and Elf squee, Miriam Floos home, with a visibly forced smile and Scorpius horseback on the Elf.
Draco stands immediately to help her, both with the bags and the child, who - he is a little embarrassed to note - is a devil without even coming close to what Draco himself had been.
Later, over dinner Miriam leaves mostly untouched, it becomes clear that the academic position she applied for has been denied to her for unclear reasons.
Draco has had this happen to him enough to be perfectly aware of the reasons, and she must know them, too, even if she is too loyal to say them aloud. Draco feels gutted, faced as he is with her obvious disappointment due to something he's to blame for.
Draco isn't quite used to the role he plays for her; a shoulder to cry on, a crutch, a source of valued opinion and advice. A support. Now that he's let her down, just by being who he is, it is shamefully easy to remember being weak and taken care of.
In truth, he does not like her plan. The mere idea of a Lady Malfoy joining the scientific circles, as in a job, and in such an area too, probably has generations of proper, ball-organising Malfoy wives rolling in their graves. But she's stood by her decision and argued him into silence, and in the end, he can't quite imagine forcing her to give up what has apparently always been her dream.
His feeling that he can't be what she needs is much stronger the next day when he exits the Muggle Related Studies Department of the Greenwich University of Applied and Theoretical Magics, with a denial in no uncertain terms and just for the reasons he's known it to be for.
He wants to laugh - who is he deceiving, he can't be anyone's strong support - and finds himself Apparating to a now-familiar flat.
Without a delay, he moves towards the window. The wyvern is sleeping and doesn't even stir as Draco lays both hands on the beautiful oak table beneath it.
Draco has known for a while there’s a spell Potter has put on the table to let him know if someone touches it, and has been trying with a various degree of success to accomplish it the other way round, too. Sure enough, Potter appears not a second later, and Draco realises he hasn't even thought to check the flat for him first.
Potter, irritable and eye-contact avoiding as he is lately, growls something along the lines of devil chasing you or something? and Draco sees in sharp relief the reason for his own obsessiveness and queer thoughts - the anchor, the relief Draco has needed all along is right here, before him.
As he pounces, Potter all but squeaks. Draco moves with a fevered single-mindedness, and Potter doesn't put much of a struggle, a flush slowly seeping into his skin.
Potter, Draco can see now, is safe. He doesn't matter. Doesn't care. Draco can be as weak as he wants and as horrible as he pleases, and Potter won't even blink, because he has seen it all. Before. His opinion of Draco is below sea-level as it is, and without the threat of disappointment hanging, Draco doesn't need to pretend.
It's surreal. Dreamlike and slowed down to total, palpable awareness. Draco thinks... no, he doesn't think anymore. He only feels now - his brain shut down and fingers trembling with lust all of a sudden. His heartbeat, loud in the quiet room, the faint air of expectation and challenge.
He slides to his knees; the carpet is thick underneath him. Potter doesn't move once he's stopped protesting, and only looks at him warily instead, wide-eyed. Waiting?
Wanting.
Draco unbuckles the belt. His fingers are numb and unresponsive. The zip comes down all by itself, and the trousers sag a little. He pulls, hard, and Potter moves an inch away from the edge of the table to help him. His head is heavy, empty; his mouth is dry; his hands are sweaty and shake. He swallows and looks up: Potter is steadily watching him.
The underwear slides down more easily.
Potter is half-hard already, standing up. Draco traces a finger over him, and watches with fascination as his thighs tighten, relishes the thrill of the stifled sound, of the filling flesh.
He exhales and ruffles the dark, damp curls a little. Potter takes hold of the edge of the table, tawny skin against the gleaming wood.
Draco closes his eyes.
The groove between torso and thigh is sweet with the taste of sweat and man and lust, and somehow it's all the same thing. Draco licks along it, and then up, to the flat stomach and belly button, and muscles ripple beneath his lips. He wants to bite, and he does. He wants to preserve the moment, to keep the unique feeling of utter, precious disconnection. Potter's cock nudges his chin, begging, and he wants to know who the unsteady laugh belongs to.
But his hands shake no more.
The skin beneath his fingers - knees, thighs, buttocks - is smooth and even, and gives way to his nails with a faint shiver of goosebumps. He nuzzles the base of his cock. This, he thinks, should be harder than it is, or maybe it is just as easy as he needs it to be. He can't decide - can't think, can't say - if the significance of this is nonexistent or blown out of proportion.
He licks a path over the inner thigh, up along the juncture of body and leg, and ends on skin both tighter and softer than it looks like.
The taste is unexpected. Not that he has ever thought of this moment, ever, or would admit to it, if he has. The texture makes him salivate. He moves his hands up, fingers the dimples where the sweet arse begins and works his way down, between cheeks clenched with the effort of staying still.
He draws them apart, imagining behind tightly closed eyelids the dark damp place now out in the open. He licks the heavy head once. Potter doesn’t manage to stifle a deep, guttural beg of a sound, and Draco pushes his pelvis back, pressing the crack of his arse open against the shiny edge of the table.
Potter moves his legs further apart, a bare inch, and then stays put, and Draco opens his eyes to a bowed head and abdomen tight with lack of movement.
Draco works his lips around the head. It's not that difficult. His tongue finds the small bunch of skin on the underside and pushes hungrily against it, against the slit, into it, greedy and scared and knowing. Draco wants to bite down, to suck it dry, to lick it like a sugar quill melting pink and sticky over teenage lips. He draws away and nuzzles his way down to the base, teeth and puffy lips and nails clenched in the soft skin between inner thigh and buttock.
He mouths the darker, wrinkly skin of the balls more because of the scent of lust than because he expects it to be great. The cock jumps up against his cheek and he repeats, digging deeper, sucking, making sounds he'll never own up to.
Potter's thighs - his whole body - are trembling against his palms, against his face, and Draco has never felt quite like this, fully in control, strong, commanding. He pulls away, suddenly, mouth and hands, just because he can, just because he wants. Potter's knuckles are ghostly white against the table's wood, clenched with great effort, and Draco drinks in his gasps, the sight of the bitten bottom lip, of the shaking effort of buckling knees locking to not follow his retreat. The pulsing vein and the shiny trail of spit and sweat. The glittering eyes, dark and bright and broken and bruised, focused in the shadow of a lock falling forward, in the light of desire he visibly tries so hard to control but only manages to hold onto.
Draco feels like he can do anything in the entire world. Like he owns Potter. Like the meaningless buzz in his head is making him drunk on sheer need.
His own limbs are so liquid, his joints immaterial, his body all pulse, that everything swims before him, in and out of focus.
He puts a hand over Potter’s cock, and Potter breaks into fresh sweat.
"Fuck me," Draco says, voice low and broken and forceful and ragged with swallowed sighs and need and want. Then he twists his hand and pumps him hard and brutal.
Potter screams. Comes apart, flies apart, immolated, sated, hurt and healed and sewn together, run ragged and whole, undone.
Draco is the one to close his eyes first, against the blaze of it, against the sensation, against the force.
They are slumped against each other when he opens them again, and his nails have left half crescents of silence from where he's held onto Potter when he's come apart himself.
The aftermath comes with an alarming speed. Potter, blinking back into focus and reason, curses; laughs in quiet, amazed disbelief and curses again, and Disapparates even before Draco has quite returned to conscious thought.
He dresses and makes a slow circle around the room in dazed surreality. The wyvern has moved a little, shifting along with the sunbeam working its way across the tank.
Draco is fighting not to panic. He isn't sure where his brain is, what was he thinking. Was he, at all? The single thing he's given the woman is his name and now...
He stops sharply and retraces the thought. Only his name. He can bet they haven't even read her application any further. She has yet to take Scorpius to her parents' this year and who will think to compare an impressive application from abroad to an unread, denied one, anyway? And the name will be different.
He has Apparated before the idea has fully formed.
"Miriam?" he calls and follows the muffled call back. "Miriam," he repeats once in the room, breathless. "Reapply from Switzerland with your father's name."
-:-:-
17.
"There's nothing quite like trees turning," Harry says from his place by the window. "Life given up to protect life. There's something very poetic about it." He pauses. "And true."
"Yeah," Malfoy drawls from where he's teasing a reaction out of the wyvern. "Pure poetry, selfless stupidity, martyrdom for the masses." There's something nasty and bitter behind his words.
"I don't think you have any right to say that," Harry notes with exact enunciation, trying very hard not to fly off the handle. "Through a very bloody experiment your opinion has been proven faulty, after all. There were people ready to die for a cause, and if memory serves you weren't among them."
Malfoy snorts. The wyvern, sensing tension, recoils from his touch and spreads its tiny wings, hissing.
"I am not interested in dying," Malfoy spits and barely manages to take his hand out of the tank, avoiding the snap of sharp teeth. He turns. "I don't want to die. It's something you have no idea about." His expression is no less vicious than the snake's.
"I chose..." Harry begins, and can feel blood thumping quick and careless behind his eyes.
"You chose nothing," Malfoy draws out, fist hitting his thigh for emphasis. "You walked a path you never questioned the point of following, a route someone else chose for you, and had not one reason to stop and think, not one obstacle to make you rebel."
"I risked my life again and again, and saw things no child should ever even imagine!" Harry is bodily shaking now and a mere nuance away from shouting.
"Oh, yes, I can imagine the emotional turmoil of a starry-eyed teenager faced with a great adventure. The drama! Was there a single turning where you had to decide for someone else beside your precious self? Someone you loved? Someone who would have suffered for your decision? Did you stand, ever, between two options, hating both? Did you..." Malfoy's voice is harsh, and striking and hurtful, and Harry can't care less.
"Screw you, Malfoy!" he screams, stung, memories quick to the surface. "I took the two people I loved most there with me! I risked their..."
"No, you fucking didn't! Don't you see? They chose it, they suffered it, they shouldered the hard part. You packed and left, secretly happy to have them, and didn't wake every morning wondering if your mother was still alive, didn't measure every step twice, lest it be the one that signed her death sentence, didn't..."
Harry is, at this point, well beyond any pretence of control and logic.
"Don't you dare try and reason your cause with me, Malfoy, don't you dare, or help me god..."
"Fuck the cause," Malfoy hisses, face splotchy, locks flying, two feet way from Harry. "Do you think I cared about the cause? Do you think I remembered what it was? Would you think about some bleeding heart drama if every breath you took were just the next nail in the coffin of everything you've ever known?"
Malfoy pauses to take a breath and kills Harry with a glare, his mouth twisted with resentment and disdain.
"Would you roam happily and pull childish stunts if your darling friends had chosen to stay in Hogwarts, hmm? If all you did hung like an axe above their heads? Would you be so brave then?"
Harry punches him in the face, hard and brutal and precise. It is not about wards and magic, but about the very primal need to stop the words. Malfoy cries out, once, and then attacks Harry back just as desperate and furious. They fall on the ground, trading kicks and hits, and Harry tastes blood. They roll around. He scrapes his way on top, grips Malfoy by the hair and beats his head against the floor, Malfoy writhing violently beneath him. A kick in his back renders Harry gasping, just for the second needed for the places to be reversed.
Then there are nails on his face and a mouth against his tongue, and his fingers clench and dole out bruises freely. It doesn't matter, none of it does, buttons flying and clothes torn away, only the simmering, desperate need to stop the words, now ringing in his head, make them disappear, because it is not true, not true, just. not. true...
Teeth close around him, feeding lust into his body, and he is writhing, eyes closed, lungs not working, groping, pushing, pumping...
In his mind, Malfoy's keen from almost an year ago, Fuck me, blossoms like a bruise just as fingers breach him inexpertly. He's been thinking about that for months, and now he knows Malfoy has been, too, as he feels the spell he's been mouthing soundlessly in shame sometimes in the dark fill him up with slickness.
His body arches up, getting closer and away in the same heartbeat, and then his own weight bears him down on the intruder. He bites Malfoy's shoulder, savage, until he tastes blood, and Malfoy cries out and rams his fingers in. They tumble and roll and then Malfoy's mouth wreaks havoc in Harry's brain, and Malfoy slides into Harry's body without a pause.
Harry isn't quite connected. It hurts and tears him apart and holds him together, and Malfoy's hand pumps liquid need onto his cock. Harry is trying to chew clear through his lip, flay his skin away, press closer, clench harder, and then they are coming, coming, coming, so hard and fast and brutal the world fades.
They unfold like wet paper; slow, breathless, weak. Harry is so focused on the sound of Malfoy's gasps that he can't catch his own breath.
He's never been so sated and spent and ashamed. The oxygen in his lungs feels golden, and the world moves with his pulse.
Malfoy pulls away in a while, sharply, and only then Harry notices they are still holding each other, tangled and intimate.
Malfoy dresses and leaves in record time, not looking at him, and Harry tries to persuade himself the emptiness is not there. He hisses, tired and quiet, and the wyvern opens her eyes sharply and spreads her wings.
He goes home eventually; Ginny is not there.
The next morning, when he enters a chamber he hasn’t seen in years at Hogwarts, after months' siege on Ginny's part, and says, "Good morning, everyone, I'll be your DADA instructor this module," Malfoy's inscrutable face looks back at him from the back row of desks.
Harry shivers. A candle flickers and then burns higher.
-:-:-
18.
Draco feels rather ridiculous.
He is thirty-two years old, has a nightmare of a son who he adores and a wife well on her way to becoming the next big name in Muggle Studies. He is a responsible adult, who's build a normal life from the abyss.
He is waiting for his NEWT results by the window with a hammering heart.
"Morning post is never punctual anymore," he grumbles.
"Draco, get back on the table." Miriam's exasperation is getting more palpable by the second. "If I reheat that coffee one more time, it won't be drinkable."
Said coffee, in a cup of fine china, gets levitated to about a foot off the table, trembles precariously and before any of them can react, smashes back down with a deafening noise and a wave of coffee all over the place.
"Scorpius!" Miriam doesn't yell only because Draco's wife can't possibly be yelling. The child's answering laughter melds with the pop of an agitated Elf appearing, with Draco's Banishing spell and the delicate melody of owl wings against the window glass.
Draco jumps as if scalded, then stops, pulls a dispassionate expression on his face and counts to ten in his head. The owl taps on the window pane. Five, four, three...
"Draco, don't be an idiot," Miriam tells him, and he realises he's closed his eyes and is counting his breaths. He looks down. She's crouched on the floor next to a solemn Scorpius, who's managed to fall off his chair and somehow scrape his knee on the silken carpet.
"What?" Draco questions, feigning nonchalance, stalling, and she rolls her eyes.
"If you don't get the owl, I will."
Draco turns towards the window. It's easy for her to say, she's finished her basic wizarding education at the proper time. He, on the other hand, is shaking with expectation over something most people his age have long since forgotten.
He opens the window. The owl, annoyed, waits no more than a second for him to take the heavy scroll away, and takes off with wings square in Draco's face and a none too gentle squeeze on his forearm.
"Do you want me to open it for you?" Miriam asks from behind him. He shakes his head no, and she wraps her arms around his waist and lays her chin on his shoulder.
Something swells inside him. He's never laid more open before someone and he's never felt so sheltered.
He breaks the wax seal.
"Oh, Draco," he hears Miriam whisper.
He reads it again, then a third time. His heart has stopped, his head is of lead. He reads it a fourth time.
Draco bursts laughing, knees turned to water, and drops the parchment. She squeezes him gently and lays a kiss on the side of his neck. It takes him a while to come down; he's laughed himself to tears. He turns and takes hold of her hand and waist. She nods, once, the beginning of the dance, a smile on her face, and they waltz, much to Scorpius' delight.
It was the first dance they did, years ago, her favourite, and after the last swirl Draco holds her close; her small body against his, the smell of her hair against his skin.
"Thank you," he says, quietly.
She does the traditional curtsy that ends the dance, and kisses him lightly on the lips.
"I'm so proud of you."
The funny part is, Draco has never had anyone say that to him.
"Mr Malfoy!" McGonagall greets him when he enters her office, but doesn't stand up.
Draco's barely seen her outside of this room in the two and a half years it took him to complete his NEWT levels, and in the scant few times he has, she's been relying heavily on a sturdy walking cane. He can see it even now, propped against the side of her desk.
Her hair is steadily going to pure silver.
"Good afternoon, Professor," he answers with the befitting deference. "How are you?"
She smiles slightly. It's a bare gesture, and her eyes behind the spectacles all but twinkle. Draco wonders if it's the office that's doing it.
"I am fine, young man, thank you for asking."
Draco blinks.
Her expression gathers a faint veneer of smugness, which Draco only recognises - a twitch of the eyebrow, the angle of her mouth canted just so - because he's been versed at reading people ever since he can remember.
He sharply remembers Transfiguration homework done in the library, paper cranes sent flying just when she appeared, and then a detention spent attempting to turn them into paper dragons. Praise and reproof, and being a child. Young man. Maybe that's her aim.
"Yours is an outstanding result," she says in a moment and Summons a heavy scroll from the upper room.
He watches it fly forth with a wild thrum in his chest. Every eighteen-year-old takes that scroll, that achievement, for granted, and he is bursting with pride.
He unrolls it, his hands steady by sheer will. The ink is typical Hogwarts ink, the parchment creamy and smooth, and each subject and grade is in an ornate, gilded cursive. Six Os and an E. The original document looks far more real and satisfying than the letter informing him.
He's beaten his father's record.
Draco traces the letters slowly. The first touch causes a high, clear tone, and he starts a little.
"There," McGonagall says with a pleased voice. "It's registered now."
There's a bit of small talk, and then Draco rises to go.
"Mr Malfoy," she begins slowly, pushing her glasses up with a delicate gesture of realised authority. "My Transfiguration teacher might be retiring this year. Would you be interested in filling her spot? I do recall your paper dragons had perfect wings."
Draco opens his mouth and then silently closes it. "What?" he manages eventually, rather shocked.
"Do not worry," she says with the faintest of smiles, pleased to have left him wordless. "Think about it over the summer. I will officially ask again in August."
The door opens on its own accord, and Draco steps out, dazed.
"And do pass your wife my regards."
-:-:-
19.
James is building a tower of cubes on a blanket on the floor.
Harry watches him for a while, he's suspiciously silent tonight. It's not quite real, how fast the time passes. It's like yesterday when they were only talking about children and what they'd be like, and here is the present day - James will be three next week and Ginny is pregnant for the third time.
The door opens with the smallest of sounds and Ginny sticks her head in, clearly hoping to see James asleep and thus shorten the going-to-bed war.
James, needless to say, is wide awake.
Ginny enters the room fully and makes her way to the couch. Harry watches her belly, unmistakably round now.
She sits down with a silent groan. "I barely managed to put Al and Rose to bed. I'll take James upstairs now, he'll protest the whole way and wake them both up."
She sounds pretty much ready to cry.
"Sh-h-h," Harry tells her and pats her thigh. "Give me your feet here."
She lies back with a sigh, head on the armrest, and obediently presents him with two white-socked feet. He takes the socks off and throws them up in the air, where they Transfigure into a music box and a rabbit, sail down sedately to James and settle among the building cubes.
"Harry, these are my worn socks!" Ginny chides half-heartedly.
"No," he winks and picks up one foot. "They are a rabbit and a music box."
His fingers are on her sole. She groans with palpable relief and practically melts on the sofa. The music box opens and starts playing something slow and sweet, and a colour-blind clown of glitter floats out of it.
James looks up from the cubes.
"What's that song?" Ginny asks, voice far calmer.
"No idea. Some lullaby?" Harry says, working her toes. "I must have heard it somewhere. Don't you have it?"
"Ngh-ugh," she mrows, and Harry laughs quietly:
"It must be Muggle, then."
"I feel like I'll fall apart any moment," she says after a moment.
James is staring rapt at the clown, the rabbit's ear clutched in a tiny fist, and a few of the building cubes have started to merge into something suspiciously like a pillow.
"Gin, maybe we should go see a doctor. I really don't remember you being so tired all the time with James or Al. And your feet are again stone-cold."
"They are warmer than yesterday," she makes a feeble attempt at a joke, but he only raises an unamused eyebrow.
"That's not very reassu..."
"I went to St. Mungo's today," she cuts him off, sobering up.
"What?" he sits up straight. "Why? Is this why you needled me all week to go to McGonagall just today?"
"No! Harry, you really should pass the course and get your NEWTs. And you are just the DADA instructor we need to have the entire programme ready for McGonagall to announce!" There's a pause in which Ginny glares at him until he backs down.
"But why didn't you tell me?"
"Keep your voice down, please, James is almost asleep."
"Ginny." Harry's voice is level and very serious.
"Oh, all right." She flicks a lock back and closes her eyes for a second. "Every time we go together there's a riot."
"But that's not my f..." Harry begins to protest, but she interrupts him:
"And you are an utter panic."
"I’m worried about you, and want to make sure you get the best possible thing," he notes with a neutral tone after a pause, trying to hide his affront. "I don't think that's so bad."
"I know, just…" She sighs. "Let's not talk about this, okay? Some other time."
He nods unhappily.
"I went with Hermione. You know she practically lives at St. Mungo's now that internships have to be approved, and she stole some time to come with me."
Harry searches her face with anxious eyes. "Well, what did the doctor say? Is there something you should do? Or shouldn't?"
"Calm down, Harry," Ginny tells him impatiently. "He gave me another blend of vitamins and a potion for the fatigue, and forbade me to do pretty much anything except breathe, but not too deep or too often, lest I disturb something." She rolls her eyes.
"Ginny, you have to take care of yourself. Of the baby. Maybe you should stop…"
"I know, Harry, and I am taking care, but I certainly won't spend the next twenty weeks in bed rest as he said I should!"
Harry counts to ten in his head, breathes in deeply a couple of times and picks up her foot again with great concentration. "Taking another child on top of the two you have hardly falls in the trying to rest more section. Why did Hermione let you take Rose tonight anyway?"
"Harry," her voice is very serious. "When did you last see Hermione?"
He stares at her. "Before that trip to Bulgaria, five or six weeks ago. Why?"
"I think… well, she didn't say anything about it but she had that grey-tinged look about her, and she's visibly lost weight like she did with Rose, and well. I think she's pregnant again."
"What?" Harry blinks stupidly. "So soon?"
Ginny nods. "After the nightmare Rose was, I thought she'd at least give it more time, too. I'm not sure of course, but… that explains why she's so frantic to get that internship now, before it starts showing and they turn her down because of all the time off she'll be taking."
James is asleep on the floor, clutching the rabbit; the music box has fallen silent with Harry's focus on something else.
He stands up and bends to pick up James. The child snuggles closer and mumbles something.
"I'll strangle Ron," Harry whispers on their way up the stairs. His worry is only halfway about Hermione, though - what Ginny tells him is an odd echo of what the two of them are currently going through, and the words further his anxiety about Ginny’s unexpectedly problematic pregnancy.
"I am not certain he knows yet," Ginny answers quietly in the darkness, and Harry struggles to recall what he has said before that.
-:-:-
20.
Draco isn't quite sure what makes him go to the flat.
It's mid-December. Miriam's birthday is precisely in a week, Christmas - Scorpius’ seventh, a special number - is less than a fortnight away, and he really ought to be using the last Saturday of term to clear his For Marking tray. Hogwarts is snowed in, a misshapen, overgrown cake, and he would actually love to play a little one on one Quidditch. The mere thought makes his hands itch. But the bloke teaching Potions is clueless on a broom and Miriam, even if home, won't be persuaded out in the cold no matter what.
Draco spends the time it takes to walk to Hogsmeade trying to dissuade himself, but ends up going anyway. It's not his first planned and conscious visit, but they are certainly rare.
The Apparition from biting cold to a warm room is startling, and he spends a second letting confused receptors settle. He then turns and notices the tea kettle in the middle of the kitchen table: it's full, untouched, and has singed a ringlet on the table cloth. Draco banishes the whole mess and slowly enters the living room.
Potter, sitting on the floor, is emitting an almost constant litany of hisses; it sounds rather like crystal grinding into sand. The wyvern, mostly uncaring, shifts her wings every other second, more to capture as much light as possible than to react in any way. Potter has an unkempt look about himself, ragged and gaunt, and Draco realises he hasn't seen him since before the beginning of term.
Draco moves closer, Potter shows no reaction. As the distance melts, the lisp breaks down into more discernible sounds, sharp but melodic, oddly sinuous, slithering like a shiver down Draco's spine.
Up close, Draco can see Potter's hands, thumbnails bitten into stubs and continuously picked at, body rocking slowly back and forth.
"Dear God, Potter, what has happened to you?"
Potter starts so bad he disturbs the tank and Draco finds himself at wandtip before the sound of his words has died down.
Ten seconds pass.
"I think I'll take that," Draco ventures eventually, and makes to pull the wand away from Potter’s unmoving fingers. Potter grabs at his arm and the wand clatters to the floor; a thin gist of unconsciously released power gutters the candles and whispers against Draco's ears.
He finds himself dragged to the ground and almost completely naked in record time: Potter wears a strange, focused expression and between them the air crackles with static. Draco shivers. Soon, he can feels nothing but the carpet under his back, lips on his neck and hands on his chest - and he's forced to admit, in that tiny strip of time he'll later remember as sensation only, that this is what he's come for.
Potter is crouching above him, clothes tickling Draco's naked skin, and is making a mess of his neck and chest. Draco gasps, silences the sound into his own skin, and arches up as nails trace the even silvery line across his torso.
He tried, once, with great reluctance and after much persuasion, to explain that state of mind to Miriam; the one in which you begin to shout Crucio! faster than get out, the one in which the first answering spell on your tongue is a deadly one, the one in which you try to bite a scar open and lick it back into nothingness in the same breath.
It's not exactly easily understandable.
Potter, though? Potter needs no explanation at all.
He flicks his tongue briefly into Draco's belly button and then continues downward with a focused determination Draco is less and less capable to be worried about.
Potter pinches a nipple and Draco, tense for weeks and already ready, lets his body go, lets it drown in whatever Potter dishes out.
Potter seems to recognise the surrender. He traces warm breath along Draco's cock and fits his lips, tight, just on the tip of it. And sucks, hard. Draco squeezes his eyes shut and feels himself try to squirm away: Potter holds him in place, relentless, and continues.
It's uncomfortable and too much, and Draco writhes, and then, somehow, it isn't. Draco feels light and floaty, anchored by nothing but Potter's lips, and his limbs are tingly. Potter pushes his tongue against Draco's slit, flicks across it, and it's not a delicate gesture. Then sucks again and moves away. His exhalation rakes coldness across Draco's wet skin, and he realises, dimly, from afar, that he's been a second away from coming, abdomen still tight.
Draco's mouth protests on its own accord: a soft, low sound. Potter pays it no heed and with shaking hands pushes Draco's body back onto itself, legs splayed apart. Potter, Draco has managed to discover many times in the past, has smart nimble fingers and a yet smarter mouth, both of which he applies with typical single-mindedness over the now-exposed hidden recesses of Draco's body.
Draco feels himself sink deeper and deeper, pushed into a dark warm place full of glitter and tingle. He is only peripherally aware, later, of Potter's low, husky tones bidding him to come and of someone’s mewling, needy keens.
The world shivers and Draco's mind skids to a full stop.
Draco comes back to a normal state slowly, with steadily fainter eddies of after-pleasure, like a fiery oak leaf twirling slowly to the ground in the autumn.
Draco is splayed supine on the floor, staring at Potter's plain white ceiling, no ornaments. Potter is curled up like a child by Draco's side, eyes closed, breathing even. Draco knows he's not asleep. There's a speck of come on his chin, already drying, and it makes Draco's fingers twitch.
This is the first time their meeting has ended in sex and no one has left, horrified, in a swirl of Apparition the second it's over.
"What the hell was that about?" Draco asks. In the quiet, his voice is unaccountably loud.
Potter starts, then blinks a couple of times, as if he's forgotten Draco to be there at all.
It's curious how easily that alone gets Draco furious. Potter's focus when Draco is near is not to be on anything else. It has been like that all their lives and won't change now.
"I..." Potter begins and shudders softly. "My daughter disappeared last night," he closes his eyes and Draco sees him swallow. "She had gone out by herself. She’s only five, for Merlin’s sake. She was... I found her in the broomshed."
Draco vividly recalls Potter ordering him come for me now, now! not five minutes previously.
"Well, well," he drawls, mocking. "Harry Potter, the control freak. How very... trivial."
Potter looks sharply at him, eyes hard and bright, now focused solely on Draco.
Draco gives him a tight, pretended smile. Now it's just how he likes it.
-:-:-
Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3