Lavender

Black and Lupin leave quite early the next morning, Harry apparates to their place with them, when he comes back fifteen minutes later he’s soaked. 

“Bloody hell!” Draco closes the book he was reading and scrambles up from the sofa to find his wand, “You’re wetter than a wanker’s rag, the fuck happened?”

“Rose did her first magic.” Harry sat down at Draco’s abandoned spot, “a lot of Hermione in that one.”

Draco retrieves his  wand, which was somehow beneath the kitchen cabinet and gives it a complicated little wave so that hot air streamed out of the tip; he then pointed this at Harry's robes, which began to steam as they dried out.

“One seventy four - isn’t she like three months old? One sev..”

“Hermione through and through for real.” Harry runs a hand through his hair and adjusts his glasses. “What’s one seventy four?”

“Page number.” He gestures towards the book he’d hazardously stuffed into the crack of the sofa cushions.

Harry pulls out the book, “Pride and Prejudice?” he looks up at Draco, “haven’t you read it yet?”

“Evidently not.”

“One of my favourites, this one.”

“My uncle Tim used to read this at family dinners just to piss me dad off.”

“Hold up,” Harry says incredulously, “You’ve got an uncle Tim?”

“That’s what I just said Potter, do keep up.”

“No but like you’ve got all these fancy ass names with what? Bellatrix? Andromeda? And there’s just this old geezer sittin’ there called Tim reading Jane Austen?”

“Bit of a laugh, that man.” A strange wistful expression flits through his face, “he’d charm this - he’d charm these house elf heads to start singing that muggle song that goes ‘ You a starfucker, starfucker, starfucker ’ whenever anyone passed them.”

“Sounds like a proper old man then.”

“Yeah his funeral was rather a morbid affair.”

“Oh - oh my god I’m so sorry -”

“It was four years back mate, over it.”

Harry grabs Draco by the arm and pulls him onto the sofa, Draco tumbles over his feet and trips, falling right onto Harry’s lap. “Hey!” Draco exclaims indignantly, if you could retain any dignity with your face right in front of your enemy turned roommate turned potentially fuckable man’s crotch, that is. 

Harry pushes him away, his face dusted in a lovely shade of barely visible crimson, he bites his lip in the way he often does when he’s nervous. “Sorry!” he squeaks. 

“Is’ okay.” Draco mutters, nonchalantly moving as far away as possible without making it painfully obvious. “Would you please stop biting your lip before i fucking do it for you?” 

Why Draco is still allowed to talk to the substantial half of Great Britain, he doesn’t know.

“I - what?” Harry splutters, staring at Draco as though he’d just asked him for his kidneys. 

“It’s very hot in here, isn’t it?” Draco gets up very suddenly, causing Harry to flinch. He ignores that and moves to open a window.  

“Very hot, yes.” The boy agrees, his knee, Draco observes like the very observant person that he is, is bouncing up and down, the air in airing, the floor is flooring and Draco is the stupidest person to walk god’s good earth since Margaret fucking Thatcher. 

“I need to -” Draco starts, retreating to his room already. 

“I have a -” Harry intercedes, also walking backwards towards his own room.

“Yeah of course okay.” 

Three more entire weeks , Draco says out loud, lying on his bed, Three fucking weeks.

Draco summons the book he was reading from the living room, just in case he’d run into Harry again, one hundred and seventy four . And he locks the door too, just in case, and no one comes calling to him for three and a half hours. 

Harry doesn’t come himself, instead a large silvery stag bursts right through the wall. Draco leaps from his bed as though it were on fire and grabs his wand from the bedside table before you could say Billy Ray.

The stag drops a handwritten note at the foot of the bed instead of speaking a message like it should, and evaporates into mist. 

‘People coming in an hour.’ it said in an unruly scrawl, ‘be redy’

“R-e-a-d-y” Draco corrects instinctively as though he were beside him, then groans realizing he’d have to change. 

When Draco walks out of the room the ‘party’ is in full swing. There are a lot more people than Harry said there would be, Draco counts up till 17 before someone knocks into him with a drink in hand. 

An expression of shock masks their face, “-Malfoy?” they ask. 

“In flesh.” Draco sighs. 

To their credit they don’t punch him in the face or hex his gob shut, both of which have happened before, they just simply walk away. 

Could’ve gone worse. 

Granger and Weasley sat together in an armchair Draco assumed was previously the dining table. Weaslette - Ginny - was curled up with Dean Thomas on the sofa and he apparently was doing his best to locate her tonsils with his tongue. Draco grimaced.

Harry appears as though from nowhere beside Draco. “Having fun?”

“Eh.”

And Draco does not notice the way Harry’s arm seemed to have snaked around his waist, no. 

Harry steers him away from the bathroom where Draco was hoping he could lock himself till the night got over and forces him into conversation with Luna Lovegood. 

Draco didn’t particularly dislike Lovegood, she seemed of the ok sort and he didn’t know her well enough to have an opinion on her anyway. “Hi?” he tried feebly. She tore her eyes away from the top of someone’s - Seamus Finnigan? - head as though it were the most interesting thing in the room and instead surveyed Draco under the same scrutiny. 

“Hello,” she says as though she were pleasantly surprised at his presence and nothing more. “Harry’s place has quite an infestation of Wrackspurts, innit?”

“Oh- oh yeah def.” Draco says as though he had a complete understanding of whatever she said. 

He exchanges  politeries with her, asks her about her dad and the Quidditcher or whatever it was he ran, (The Quibbler, she had corrected) and how life was treating her outside hogwarts, (Quite well, she had her own quaint little shop in hogsmeade.)

Just then Harry, quite evidently drunk, transfigures the armchair back into a dining table, big enough for twenty people this time, and stands upon it. “We’re playing spin the bottle!” He announces gleefully, conjuring up chairs to fit around the table. Chatter dies out as everyone takes a seat, Draco groans for all he’s worth but sits next to Harry nevertheless. 

Seamus Finnigan is sitting three chairs away from Dean Thomas and throws over ugly looks at him every so often, Weaslette - Ginny - is sitting all the way across the table between Granger and Lovegood talking about something which apparently required a lot of swearing. Weasley has an arm draped behind the back of Longbottom’s chair and is being explained in detail about why exactly you shouldn’t knit hats for mandrakes and Harry is beaming all around the table like some kind of mama hen looking over her chicks. 

Draco doesn’t recognize the rest, though they know him quite well according to the side eyes and double takes he’s been given throughout the evening. Surprisingly, not one person asks him about Harry. 

Granger goes first, spinning the empty glass bottle; it lands on a dark curly haired girl he doesn’t recognise, she lets out a snort and leans over, pecking her on the lips. The girl then has her turn, kisses longbottom who turns pink like a giggling twelve year old.

Longbottom kisses a ravenclaw girl he can’t quite place, and the bottle goes around till Dean Thomas leans forward to kiss Harry. 

A surge of jealousy runs through Draco - which he cringes upon almost immediately because Draco is not a jealous person, a touch starved bereaved megalomaniac who doubts every move of his, sure but not jealous. 

Harry and Dean are full on snogging, Harry is cradling Dean’s face and Dean is holding him firmly by the shoulders, everyone is either wolf-whistling or hiding barely guised disgust upon their faces. Ginny shouts encouragement from her seat- which takes Draco by surprise because he thought she was shagging Dean - and finally they break apart.

Harry’s lips are red, he leans back on his chair, rocking it in a way that’d make McGonagall give him detention for a week and a half, and Draco notices the way the light catches in his eyes just the right way, bringing out the flecks of dark brown in it. 

Susan Bones, who Draco hadn’t noticed was sitting next to him right up till there, nudges him with her elbow, “proper smitten aren’t you?” she grins, her voice barely loud enough along all the chatter, Ginny was snogging Luna and it was all anyone wanted to see apparently. 

“What?!” Draco coughs loudly, he starts hiccupping and Bones looks at him in an almost pitiful way. 

Harry turns around to all the noise from right beside him, he starts rubbing circles into Draco’s back in a soothing way. 

Granger spins the bottle, it lands on Weasley who almost shrinks away from the table. 

“Go on then, give us a snog!” a blonde with her hair plaited on either side of her head shouts. 

Weasley kisses Granger delicately and Harry whistles. Draco is suddenly very aware of the fact that Harry’s still rubbing circles into his back, right up from his nape to the curve of his waist. He moves away an inch and Harry draws his hand back so fast you’d think he had touched fire. He doesn’t look at the boy after that. 

He’s still thinking about the feather touches though, and that should have been his first clue - he wasn’t a poet but Harry made him wish he were one. 

An hour goes by and somehow a very drunk Hermione Granger is now standing on the table, she dictates the rules of a very weird game and waves her hand so that everyone in the room has a bottle of beer in their hand. “The game’s called ‘never have i ever’” she slurs her words together ever so slightly so you’d have to pay attention to what she were saying to understand, “someone says something and if you have done that - you drink.”

Everyone sits in a circle on the floor and Harry sits right across from Draco.

“Never have I ever shagged a famous person.” Ginny says first.

“How famous are we talking here?” Hermione inquires keenly, Ron looks scandalized. 

“Weird sisters.” Ginny decides, “or higher.”

Hermione, Dean, Ginny, Harry and three people he doesn’t recognise take a swig from their bottles. The way Harry wraps his mouth around the bottle while looking right into Draco’s eyes boderlines on pornographic. Draco swallows heavily. 

“Threesome!” Someone sitting behind Luna exclaims and one brunette takes a tiny sip. 

Everytime Harry’s mouth would touch the bottle he’d make intense eye contact with Draco, after the fifth time Draco’s mind starts drifting to other places Harry’s mouth would look great on and he feels his jeans getting tighter. 

“I’m - going to -” he mutters towards Seamus who's sitting next to him, Seamus either doesn’t notice or really doesn’t care as he nods vaguely at Draco. 

He walks to his room feeling Harry’s gaze burn into his back and takes a cold, cold shower.