Lavender

“British cuisine is just another thing on their list of war crimes.” Harry mutters darkly over a bowl of pea soup. 

“For the last bloody time!” Draco exclaims, pulling his own bowl closer, “you’re british too, stop whinging like an obtuse fucking arsehole that you are and fucking eat!”

Harry scowls at him and gets up from the table, opening a window. He pulls out a packet of fags from between the sofa cushions, soup abandoned, he unbuttons the top two buttons of his white shirt, and it hangs off his shoulders like poetry or something. 

A lot of things were often found between the sofa cushion, Draco thought to himself, old buttons, the TV remote, fags apparentally, maybe one of these days Draco would find some self respect. 

“Look what i can do!” He says leaning back upon the windowsill and he looks at the cigarette with intense concentration till it lights up. He looks at Draco as though for praise. 

“Clever you,” says Draco in what he thinks is a nonchalant way. 

“Do you smoke?”

“Used too.” Draco mouths another spoonful of soup, “when did you start? Never saw you smoking in school - not that i was watching you -”

“Relax.” Harry smiles his careless smile, a genuine one that made his eyes go really small and made all his teeth gleam under stretched out lips. 

A week and a half and Draco was down bad .

Draco was done with that stupid motherfucker. His stupid fucking smiles and those stupid fucking butterflies, all he really wanted was one person to talk to, just one fucking person, and with a pang in his chest Draco realizes he had no friends. 

Goyle hadn’t replied to any of his letters, Crabbe was fucking dead and every other person who practically worshipped him in the slytherin dorm didn’t want anything to do with the Malfoy name, and the thing was Draco couldn’t even blame them, he wouldn’t want anything to do with himself if he could help it. 

And then he realized he never really did have any friends, Crabbe and Goyle weren’t friends , simply pawns, bigger children he could boss around. 

He was five years old when his father told him for the first time - you’re only worth as much as your family is. 

He was seven years old his father decided to get creative with his punishments, those straight deep cuts on the back of his calves never faded away like he thought they would. His mother had patched him up with a putrid purple jelly-like thing later. Draco runs a finger up his leg, feeling the wounds prickle ever so slightly. 

He was a good child, Draco really was. He’d pride himself upon it. He barely ever got into trouble, he did well in school, he ate his vegetables - the whole thing, it’s just that his family didn’t need much of a reason to get mad. His mother was a delicate woman, she’d make him tea in the mornings and ask him to read to her in the evenings. She took sick too often though, so he was usually left to his father’s mercies, or Aunt Bella, he didn't know who was worse.

Draco wasn’t big or strong like they wanted men to be. Bellatrix took a liking to telling him how much he looked like ‘a fuckin’ poof.’ She’d make him memorise books upon books of dark magic, she told him with particular glee about Andromeda Tonks and Sirius Black, how they were cast off the family tree was a favourite of hers. 

When Draco disobeyed her in the slightest she would draw shapes on his skin. She’d burn small dark circles of cigarettes into the pale skin of his thighs and -

“Malfoy?! Malfoy?” Harry’s urgent voice pulls him out of his trance. 

“Malfoy.” Draco repeats faintly. 

“What happened? Are you -?”

“What?”

“You just like…froze?” Harry hoists him from the chair and leads into his room. 

“What?” Draco asks again.

“Does your head hurt?”

“What?” 

Harry stares at him weirdly for almost an entire minute. “I’m gon’ call Hermione.”

Draco agrees amicably with no clue what he was actually agreeing to, and just to keep up with the amicable gig he very conveniently passes out. 

When he does wake up again the sky outside his window is in shades of dark blue and a very anxious Hermione Granger is looking at him as though he’d torn one of her favourite books. 

“Fucking finally.” She gets up from the chair she’d taken home to and feels his forehead - probably for a temperature. “What happened?” she asks.

“Just a headache I suppose.” Draco says crisply. 

Hermione gives him one of her looks. “Harry said you stared at a wall for like ten minutes and then slumped in your chair.”

“You know Potter… always making shit up, isn’t he?”

Hermione still looks unimpressed. 

“Look Gra- Hermione, it’s not that big a deal.”

Hermione lets out a long suffering sigh, she gestures towards a strip of medicine by the bed and tells him to take one after eating. She apparates out with a loud crack. 

“Do you have a job?” Draco asks aloud from the sofa about six hours later as Harry attempts to muck up something for dinner. 

“Obviously.” Harry says.

“What do you do then?”

“Your mum.”

Draco groans and lets himself fall sideways into the sofa cushions. “Fuck you.”

Harry mutters something that sounds an awful lot like ‘would you?’

“What?” Draco asks, raising his face from the pillows. 

“Soup?” Harry paints on a painfully large smile and walks out of the kitchen wearing a colorful apron that says ‘kiss the chef’ in large bold letters and places the two bowls of soup he’s holding on the coffee table. 

“Didn’t you hate soup this morning?”

“Technicalities.”

“Literally fuck you so much.”

Harry coughs, “ha.” 

Draco sits up straight again, “Potter are you blushing .”

Harry removes his apron, balls it up and throws it at Draco. It hits him smack in the face. 

“Hey!” Draco proclaims indignantly, throwing the apron back at him. 

Harry laughs infectiously and practically jumps on the sofa, bodily moving Draco to the other side so he could tickle him. Draco thrashes around for all he’s worth, laughing too hard to actually try moving too much. He grabs Harry by the wrists in a feeble attempt to regain control, flipping him over and pinning him down. And something changes. He could hear Harry’s laboured breath and he could see the way his grin washes off his face. 

Oh.

Okay. 

He had a boy beneath him. Harry pushes his hips upward kind of hesitantly, as though testing waters. 

“No one has to know.” Draco whispers. He doesn’t think, he really doesn’t. 

Harry pushes him off very suddenly and gets up rigidly, “What?” 

Draco looks at him bewildered. “What, did I say somet-?” 

“I’m not gon’ be your dirty little secret if that’s what you’re asking for, Malfoy .” He spits out his name as though it were venom. 

“That’s not what I me-”

“Save it.” Harry’s face hardened and he almost ran to his room with whatever dignity he could muster with his dishevelled hair and his shirt hanging off the side of his shoulder.