Chapter Text
“Potter.”
Draco was having an out of body experience. It was the only excuse for what he said next; that, and Draco’s desperation to break the silence that had bypassed awkward and careened straight into loaded, excruciating, deadly.
And as Draco was no longer in control of his faculties, he reverted to the only pattern he really had for addressing Harry Potter.
“I always thought your hair looked the way it does because you’re lazy with no care for your appearance but seeing it first thing in the morning, I feel I owe you an apology,” Draco said.
“I am going kill him,” said Potter, reaching for his wand.
“Oh No! Don’t. Stop. Harry!” Granger had jumped forward and was wrestling with Potter’s wand hand. “If you lose your temper, you’ll be angry with yourself,” Granger continued.
“I’ve already lost my temper!”
With the sound of shouting, Ginny began to stir. But rather than waking, she let out a loud groan, and mumbled something that sounded like “my head” before burying her face in Draco’s shoulder.
Potter’s eyes widened and even Granger was looking a little shocked.
“Get away from her or I swear I’ll end you!” snarled Potter. He’d managed to wrestle his wand arm from Granger, and had his wand trained upon Draco.
Draco did not need to be told twice. He scrambled awkwardly backwards trying to extricate sleep numb limbs from beneath Ginny. But he somehow only managed to tangle himself in her long hair.
“Ouch! Merlin. What the bloody hell are you doing, you bumbling hippogriff!” Ginny groused.
She was still squinting against the morning light and barely cognizant when she finally caught sight of the golden trio.
“Harry… Hermione…Ron?” Her eyes fell upon each of them in turn as if they were puzzle pieces she couldn’t quite put together. “What are you doing here?”
She asked with such sincere and innocent bewilderment that a little bubble laughter erupting from Draco.
“What are we doing here! What are you doing here! What are you doing with him!” Potter yelled. He was jabbing his wand in Draco’s direction sending red sparks from its end.
The very air was crackling around Draco. It felt like the edges of his cashmere sweater might combust from static with the slightest provocation.
“Harry, mate” said Weasley, stepping forward, his voice placating.
It was surreal to see Potter’s hot-headed sidekick act like some kind of peace-maker. Suddenly the slightly loopy feeling of being caught in an absurd misunderstanding sharpened into real fear.
Ginny, however, seemed entirely nonplussed by her boyfriend’s rage. She let out another groan and massaged her temples.
“Merlin’s tits, my head,” she grumbled. “Can we do this later?”
She gave a rather dismissive once over to the golden trio before wiping some residual sleep from the corner of her eye.
“No. We can’t do this later,” Potter replied angrily, but he’d dropped his wand to his side. Somehow, his girlfriend’s utter lack of care broke the threat of violence in him. In that moment, Potter looked every inch a hurt teenager: a little scrawny, a little spotty, underslept – vulnerable. For perhaps the first time in his life, Draco wondered how Potter had managed it: the whole defeating-dark-wizards-at-every-turn thing.
“You’re gone all night. You don’t come back to the dorms. We were worried sick.” Potter had begun listing grievances in a rambling monologue of worry, anger, and half-formed jealousy. “And when we finally find you, you’re. . . you’re. . . sleeping in … in his arms! I never said you two couldn’t hang out. I didn’t stop you. But what am I supposed to think? Why HIM? It could be anyone but him .”
Draco felt an uncomfortable prickle of shame.
Ginny, however, did not share these feelings. In fact, Ginny’s own righteousness seemed to sharpen the closer she came to full wakefulness.
“Oh, anyone but him?” she said. Her voice was growing rich with that reservoir of anger that always seemed beneath the surface for her. Draco had an absurd impulse to reach out to her. A touch on the arm, perhaps, that said “let’s take a moment before we say something we regret?” but Draco was a lot of things and a fool wasn’t one of them.
Draco scooted a bit further away from the pair. There was still no easy path to the greenhouse door for him. Draco surrendered to the reality that, while no longer in danger of being murdered by Potter, he would still have to bear witness to Potter's embarrassing relationship drama. From the way Weasley and Granger let their gaze roam uncomfortably from empty pots to their slippers, it seemed they were feeling similarly caught.
They had, however, underestimated Ginny.
“Do you even hear yourself sometimes?” Ginny had continued to rant, harsh and mocking. “Him, him him. I swear to Morgana. Is it the sleeping around that bothers you? Or the sleeping with Draco Sodding Malfoy?”
There was a deathly silence.
Merlin’s Sagging Ballsack. Draco thought. Perhaps Ginny really was trying to get him killed. A convoluted revenge plot all along.
“We. Are. Absolutely. Not. Sleeping. Together–Well, I mean we fell asleep last night by accident, but not together. We were just in the same location. What I mean to say is –We. Are. NOT. Having. Sex. At. All.” Draco said. His voice was high and slightly hysterical in a way that did nothing for his believability.
“I bloody well hope not,” growled Weasley. Whatever earlier charitable feelings he might have harbored toward Draco’s wellbeing had fully-evaporated. And Draco had the distinct feeling that things were spiraling again.
“Ron! Not now,” exclaimed Hermione. She was bouncing on the balls of feet seemingly unsure which of friends was more likely to start hexing each other and, thus, unsure where to bodily insert herself.
But when Draco finally looked Potter in the face he didn’t look near to hexing anyone. He looked devastated.
“We really aren’t.” Draco heard himself asserting again.
But Potter didn’t seem to hear him.
“Harry?” Hermione was saying, tentative and gentle.
But Potter was ignoring her as well. He had eyes only for Ginny
“You aren’t are you?” Potter asked, naked hurt in his voice.
Ginny had gotten to her feet at some point during the exchange and was facing off with her boyfriend, fury still burning in her eyes.
“No, but that’s not the point. It’s never about me. It’s about having me. It’s about all of us in perfect little happy ending places. It’s sick, it’s indecent, it’s cruel. When you think of everyone who died –”
“-- That’s not true! That’s not fair at all! You’re always –” Harry interrupted her. He was back to shouting.
“ALRIGHT! Pause, let's just all calm down,” Hermione exclaimed, raising her wand like she might cast a calming charm on the whole lot of them.
“Stay out of this, Hermione.” Ginny shot in the girls direction. Her words were imbued with such venom that Hermoine took a step back.
“Gin?” The bushy-haired witch said, almost confused.
“Fix your own relationship for once.”
The morning light had grown brighter in the dim greenhouse. It gave the entire scene an odd sort of stage lighting. As Draco drifted into the background, he felt like he was watching a rather violent play that seemed to simply inconveniently be occurring in the middle of his life. Merlin’s Beard the four of them were fucked up.
He was almost sympathetic.
“What’s that supposed to mean!” Hermione was exclaiming, her voice also growing heated.
“Ask my brother.” Ginny spit out. Draco couldn’t tell if Ginny was finding perverse pleasure in drawing the other girl into the argument, or if like Fiendfyre she started to burn and simply didn’t know how to stop from consuming everything around her.
But Ginny’s words must have struck at something true because when the other girl turned to her boyfriend she found him red and comfortable. Weasley let out an undefined cough.
“What’s that supposed to mean!” exclaimed Hermione again, her frustration now with both the siblings.
“I’m just saying that’s a bit crowded in any relationship when a third keeps butting in. It’s bad enough getting an emotion out of Harry without you telling him everything he’s supposed to think and feel and just maybe you should spend half that emotional labor on your own boyfriend,” replied Ginny. Draco realized that he didn’t actually know the trio particularly well, but he was willing to guess that Ginny words struck with remarkable acuity.
“You don’t really think that Ron.” Hermione was asserting even as Weasley was mumbling”
“Well actually Mione –”
As Hermione, Ginny and Ron Weasley deteriorated into a three-way argument, Draco found his eyes drawn to Potter.
The dark-haired boy was looking down at the wand still gripped tightly in his hands. There were tears in his eyes but the kind so tightly held in place that Draco suddenly suspected that Harry Potter might not actually be physically capable of crying. Gone was the self-righteous surety that Draco always found so irritating. Instead, Potter looked sad and a little lost, and yet somehow still so-cursedly-heroic.
That tendril of sympathy surged again, and Draco wondered if he might still be slightly drunk.
As if reading Draco’s thoughts, Potter suddenly lifted his head catching Draco’s eyes. Draco couldn’t for the life of him read the flash of emotions that crossed Potter's face, but the impression hit somewhere in Draco’s ribs. It hurt.
A moment later, Potter wheeled around and made for the greenhouse door. Ginny followed him immediately, with Hermoine and Weasley close upon her heels. The greenhouse which moments ago had felt like the site of the Third Wizarding War was suddenly silent and serene, bathed in morning sunshine.
After a while, Draco got to his feet to look out the greenhouse windows. They hadn’t made it very far. All four of them stood on the lawn maybe fifty meters from the greenhouse door shouting at one another. Someone must have cast an Imperturbable Charm because he couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Ron and Hermoine seemed thoroughly locked in their relationship strife. Harry was angry again, rubbing his scar as he gestured irately in equal measure at his girlfriend and his two best friends. Ginny was too far away for Draco to really read her expression, but she moved like bad weather between the three others, striking out like thunder and lightning, unpredictable and violent, for all that he could not actually hear what she said. Her red hair, flowing behind her, caught the light the same way water sometimes catches sunshine tricking the eye to look like flame.
Draco watched another minute before deciding he couldn’t wait any longer for them to sort themselves out. Instead, he vanished a glass panel from the far end of the greenhouse and slipped out.
As he walked back toward the castle, morning frost crunching beneath his feet. His emotions were in turbulent disarray. He vacillated between an intense feeling of doom and a feeling of life’s inescapable mundanity.
Watching the golden trio fight with Ginny had reminded him, unexpectedly, of the years of petty conflicts amongst his Slytherin cohort. He thought back to the duel he had fought with Theo after Draco had tried to disavow his homosexuality by losing his virginity to Pansy after the Yule ball. Blaise, Draco’s hopeless crush at the time, had been Theo’s reluctant second. Blaise had been fully aware of Draco’s obsession with him. Crabbe and Goyle had been Draco’s haplessly ignorant defenders, and Pansy and Daphne had nearly murdered them all. They’d been so messy and so earnest. The war was not even a thought. Even the fact that they would in a couple years be slotted into advantageous marriage contracts to one another regardless of their feelings and petty dramas - felt like distant reality.
It was a memory from the “before times.” And like all of his memories from the “before times,” it was almost impossible for Draco to reconcile it with what came after. Like the sunshine on his face as he walked back to the castle. It was late October for Merlin’s sake; the weather had no business being so fine and yet every year there were days in late October that were. It was incomprehensible.
The further he got from the greenhouse the more the whole morning seemed to slip - like his memories from before the war — into that space of unreality: of real experiences that seemed to have happened to other versions of himself because they were simply incompatible to what he knew to be real now. Except unlike the memories from the “before times”, this morning wouldn’t stay put. It was fractured. Too close. The incomprehensible erupting rudely into Draco’s present.
He almost wanted to laugh with the absurdity of it all. The more he thought about the morning, the less he seemed able to settle it into any version of reality that made sense. On one hand, it had been typical teenage drama: girlfriends fighting with their boyfriends– jealousy, friendship, love – Draco ironically cast as the villain in a love triangle that was never actually going to be anything but jealous imagining. On the other hand, he’d been worried for a moment that Potter might kill him in that greenhouse; Because they had fought in war and tried to kill each other. How did one make sense of that?
How could one ever be eighteen and in love and also have survived a war?
Love, friendship, jealousy. All of it felt impossible.
He thought of his mother. She’d written to him that morning. Pressuring him to invite Astoria Greengrass to tea. There she was trying to find him a nice pureblood wife as her own nice pureblood husband rotted away in Azkaban.
How were any sort of relations possible in the face of such incomprehensibility?
Draco for the life of him did not know.
But, it had been foolish to get involved with Ginny. That much was clear. Still, when he thought of some of the hours they’d passed together—of listening to music in the conservatory; of crying while he apologized to her; of that choking feeling of relief that came from just that small bit of honesty —Draco wasn’t sure he would give it up.
Draco was so lost in his own thoughts that it was only after he’d made it to his dorm room and found Blaise shirtless in the middle of some tedious work out routine that he realized that it had grown too late for him to slip unnoticed into bed.
“I was wondering if I should go search for your body,” said Blaise. He was far too jovial for someone who had just finished fifty push-ups.
“Hmmmm” replied Draco, unable to think of anything that would put Blaise off.
“You look like shit, Wait? Did something actually happen?”
“I don’t… yes?” Said Draco, uncertain. “We were caught.”
“What do you mean caught?” asked Blaise. He had completely abandoned his work out and the very genuine look of concern on his face was starting to freak Draco out a bit.
“We fell asleep by accident. Potter and his entourage found us this morning.”
Blaise's look of concern shifted into something that might have been horror.
“But you’re –”
“Don’t!” said Draco. He might be confessing this morning's humiliations but that didn’t mean he was going to start being honest about his unspoken queerness.
“Nothing happened,” said Draco, noting somewhere in the back of his mind that holding Ginny as she cried might not have been romantic but didn’t quite fall into the category of nothing. “It just… looked bad,” said Draco.
“ Shit, ” said Blaise.
Having spent his whole life with a mother who skirted the boundary of acceptable but titillating scandal, Blaise blessedly didn’t need someone to explain that there was really no difference between what was and what something looked like. “I’m waking Theo up. We are going to need his help. Is he coming after you?”
“Who?”
“Potter!”
“Oh right. Ummm maybe?. . . I don’t think so,” said Draco. He tried to resurrect from his memory that final look Potter had given him before storming out of the greenhouse. Had it been the kind of look that said, “just let me finish yelling at my best friends, but then I’ll come finish what I started that day in the second-floor bathroom.” Draco really wasn’t sure.
“She’s got like six older brothers doesn’t she? Merlin, you should know better,” Blaise said.
“She’s got five. One died in the war.”
“That’s worse. I’m waking Theo. We need a plan. THEO!” called Blaise. An indistinct mumble came from depths of the dark green curtains drawn around Theo’s four-poster.
Draco took a deep breath attempting to reorder his thoughts. His headache, which had lifted with the adrenalin of facing off with Potter and his gang, was now returning in doubled strength.
“I think it’s fine. They’re Gryffindor’s after all, premeditated violence isn’t really their thing. Anyway, I thought you found the whole thing funny. Wanted to ride my coat tails and all that.” said Draco.
Blaise seemed to consider his words.
“It was funny until you got caught. And I was warning you! ” replied Blaise. “Theo get your ass up!”
Thirty minutes and a shockingly large pot of coffee ordered from the kitchens later, Blaise had managed to coax Theo out of his bed and keep Draco from returning to his. Draco was recounting the events of the morning for the third time. Draco had offered up a heavily redacted version of the night before: a version that left out leaving campus, the murderous music room, references to killing curses, and most of the tears. Blaise, the perennial gossip that he was, could tell that Draco was leaving more than a few things out and was pushing at him like he was fucking leading the cross-examination in front of the Wizangamot.
“I just don’t understand how you got so deep,” said a still sleepy Theo.
“I like her company,” said Draco. His headache had grown to be a whole body affair and he was finding it difficult to choose his words with any sort of care.
“Merlin’s socks. Do you hear him?” said Theo, shaking his head at Blaise. “How, after everything, is he still the biggest idiot out of all of us? Did you hear him? He likes her company! Merlin.”
In the end, Blaise let Draco get into bed declaring that the conversation wasn’t over but they weren’t getting anything useful out of him. His roommates stayed up discussing his predicament.
Draco knew he should have been alarmed. Merlin only knew how they would use this against him. But Draco felt so raw and worn down that he decided to approach Blaise and Theo’s concern for his well-being as exactly that, which for the time being it appeared to be.
When he woke a couple hours later, Draco learned that Blaise and Theo had determined that it was too risky for Draco to go anywhere alone. So Draco spent the next day being accompanied by one or the other, and during the single hour when they both had unavoidable commitments, by Daphne and Pansy. Draco wasn’t sure what they had told the girls but presumably not the truth because Daphne hadn’t given him one of her cool, judgmental looks, and Pansy hadn’t hexed him.
It irritated Draco, of course. But it was also, though he loathed to admit it, rather nice. Draco had been icing the other Slytherins out all year: refusing to walk to classes with them, sitting far away from them at meals when possible, avoiding being drawn into conversations in the common room. He hadn’t stopped to examine if the impulse had been born out of his annoyance at the way his peers seemed intent on resurrecting the “before times” with little regard to having just fought and lost a war, or if he avoided them in his own half-baked attempt to protect them from the fall out of his reputation. He didn’t examine his motivations now either. He merely gave up on whatever his isolation had been attempting and accepted that it was rather nicer to walk next to someone in the halls than to not.
Of course, Blaise and Theo’s watchful companionship meant that in the evening ,when Draco would normally wander out of the dorm room and toward the greenhouses without a by your leave, Draco had to pretend to go to sleep. And then a quarter of an hour later, when his roommates’ snores had lengthened into the sounds of deep rest, Draco had to creep out of own bedroom.
It was humiliating. And made it very hard to convince himself that he wasn’t as Theo would say “in too deep.” But the die was cast. And Draco let the impulse to stop examining the things in his life that didn’t make sense to continue to guide him.
On the walk down, Draco had tried to convince himself that his confession to enjoying Ginny’s company had been an unfortunate effect of a very bad hangover. It didn’t mean anything, and it certainly wasn’t why he was on his way down to the greenhouses tonight. He merely wanted to see if he had more nerve than the Gryffindor. He wanted to prove that Ginny Weasley – lion though she was — would drop him in the face of her friends' scrutiny faster than he would drop her over his innate fear of her boyfriend. It was spite not affection.
However, this reasoning hardly explained the way his stomach seemed to leap into his throat when he caught sight of the familiar red hair through the greenhouse windows, or why that same stomach dropped to his toes when he realized that the hair was familiar but it wasn’t Ginny waiting for him.
“Took you long enough,” said Ronald Weasley. The boy got to his feet stiffly and gave Draco churlish once over. “This is for you.”
He handed Draco a folded note.
Draco reached for it. And a part of him hated himself for his utter lack of hesitation.
He was unsurprised to find that Ginny handwriting was messy and words so sparse she almost seemed to be writing an abstract form of poetry.
Can’t come tonight.
Something I need to do.
Things okay with Harry now.
See you Thursday instead.
Don’t hex my brother, K!
G
The whole note was infuriating. So much so that Draco couldn’t decide which part was most annoying: the fact that she thought he would care one whit that Potter was “Okay”; the fact that the something she needed to do was so transparently her boyfriend; Or the fact that she had now transformed them into the sort of acquaintances – he wouldn’t say friends – who now made plans to meet up by note; Or most, aggravating of all, that in signing off Don’t hex my brother Ginny had asserted her mysterious will across time and space so that when Ron Weasley said –
“Right then. Drink?”
Draco found himself compelled to say –
“Sure. Whatever. You lead the way.”