Draco could hear Blaise behind him as they neared the Great Hall. Blaise's steps were longer than his own, lengthy strides that ate up the stone floor. Draco was tall—he always had been—but Blaise was taller, and Draco was expecting it when he saw Blaise pass by on his left, walking with that purposeful, rolling gait Draco was sure he cultivated.
Blaise walked like the aristocrat he was. Fast, sure, and utterly confident, a boy who had never known anything but extreme privilege, who had never known what it was like to exist in a body that was not beautiful and moneyed and somehow more than everyone around him.
Most of the other third years still skittered through the hallways like children, alternating between shuffling and running, never thinking about how they presented themselves.
Blaise was different. As was Draco himself, he knew. For the Zabinis and Malfoys of the world, childhood ended when short pants were put away.
When Draco arrived in the Great Hall, Blaise was already seated, pouring a cup of tea and smirking at Pansy, who was gesticulating wildly as she recounted some bit of gossip. Blaise watched her over his teacup with a look of sedate amusement—he could have been thirteen or thirty.
Draco took a seat across from them, taking it as his due when Crabbe and Goyle parted to make room for him.
"Draco!" Pansy trilled, her little snub-nose wrinkling happily. "You'll never guess what I heard about Hannah Abbot." She launched into a retelling of the story with gusto, and Draco let his eyes wander to Blaise, who greeted him with a tilt of his chin.
Blaise. Blaise who looked as perfectly put together as Draco himself, Blaise who could speak three languages flawlessly and knew what wines paired well with what entrée, despite the fact that it would be several years before he could order a bottle himself. Blaise who, like Draco, had been bred for nobility—and if Blaise's mother was marrying her way through various old money in order to afford her son the opportunity to live the lifestyle to which he had been bred, well, that just made Blaise all the more fascinating, didn't it?
Blaise took a sip of his tea and let his bright, tip-tilted eyes linger just a moment too long on Draco, let his long, long lashes sweep closed in a blink that was just a bit too calculated, a bit too much of a performance.
It was still the subtlest movement Draco had ever seen.
~*~
It had been nearly midnight the previous evening when Blaise had slipped into Draco's bed, pulled the curtains back in a gesture so smooth and so practiced that Draco had wondered if Mrs. Zabini had taught her son the fine art of moving in and out of a gentleman's bed in a secret tryst.
Blaise's smile had been genuine, not wolfish, though. In fact, Draco had realized rather sadly that after Blaise slid into his four poster and pulled the curtains smooth behind him, he looked younger than he ever had. But his wandwork had been flawless when he cast the Silencing Spell.
It happened every night. Had for months now. Blaise would creep into Draco's bed after the rest of the Slytherin boys were asleep or likewise holed up in their beds, jerking themselves to sleep under hastily applied charms.
"Draco." Blaise's voice had been quiet, a whisper, low enough that if it had cracked with the indignity of puberty, Draco wouldn't have heard it.
"Blaise." Draco had said it back on instinct, Blaise's name falling out of his mouth before he could stop it.
And then it had begun, the same desperate dance they'd been doing all winter.
Blaise's pyjamas were thin for January, imported silk that left little to the imagination when he pushed his long, lean body against Draco's, covered Draco's narrow frame with his own, more muscled one.
Draco's hands worked independent from his mind, reaching up to wrap around Blaise's shoulders in an instant.
The best thing about their secret meetings was that they didn't talk. Not really.
"Oh, fuck," Draco groaned when Blaise shifted until his erection was shoved against Draco's hip, nothing but a layer of thin silk separating his hard-on from Draco's body.
"Uh-huh." Blaise grinned, and Draco could hear the expression in his voice, even in pitch darkness.
Draco felt his hips snap, hard and fast and without control, against Blaise's body. Ohgodfuck, when they were close like this Draco couldn't think, could barely breathe, could hardly do anything but exist, his insides pulled taut as kneazlegut string.
With Blaise draped over him, Draco felt his legs spread, just a little, just barely, until Blaise was between his thighs, and it felt so right Draco gasped. His hands were everywhere—over Blaise's shoulders, on his biceps, down to his ribs, across his abdomen---everywhere except where Draco desperately wanted them to be, under the fine navy silk and against Blaise's skin.
It was dark, full dark, and neither of them cast a Lumos even though they could and no one would have seen through the heavy velvet curtains. But Draco could imagine what Blaise looked like, could imagine the way his pyjamas gaped open at the throat, exposing collarbones that were both strong and delicate at once. God, Draco could imagine it. He had imagined it, had seen it a thousand times when Blaise changed after Quidditch practice or came out of the shower with only a green Slytherin towel wrapped around his narrow hips. God, Draco saw that perfect expanse of skin every time Blaise undid his tie in the evening when they were all sitting in the common room, a den of snakes finally left to their own devices after another day in a school that didn't truly welcome them, a home that didn't truly include them.
Blaise touched him with a strange kind of confidence, a confidence that was all the more poignant for its fear, its secrecy, its unwritten rules that dictated where and when and how he touched Draco.
With Blaise between his legs like that, his erection was against Draco's, their cocks separated only by two sets of pyjamas. When Draco snapped his hips Blaise rolled his in return, again and again until Draco was mindless, until all he could feel in the whole world was this boy on top of him, his body heavy against him, pushing down against Draco's own sharp hipbones.
The silk of his pyjamas was maddening against Draco's cock—all soft, warm heat, sticky where precome was pooling helplessly already, and it was so embarrassing because Blaise didn't even have to touch him, not really, not with his hands, and he wanted to come, already seeing stars.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Blaise cursed in his ear, and it was comforting, the urgency in that cultured voice, because it meant Blaise was as lost as he was, maybe.
Draco locked his hands tightly together behind Blaise's arse, knowing it was the only way to keep them from wandering, from touching and grabbing and squeezing and sliding beneath those pyjamas and breaking all the rules.
They couldn't touch. Not really.
"Going to—now, now, now," Blaise chanted, and Draco would have known what he meant even if he hadn't spoken. He recognised the way Blaise's breathing was too short, too fast, nearly panting—he could hear the same desperation mirrored in his own inhalations.
When they came together, it was perfect and wet and messy.
Later, Blaise took his wand and traced careless patterns down Draco's chest, letting the polished oak act as a stand-in for his hands. When Blaise pushed the wand down further, guided it up and down Draco's still-covered cock, Draco came again, desperately, feeling so out of control it made him want to cry.
Later still, Draco let Blaise arrange him spread out on the bed, face buried in the pillow, and did nothing but open his mouth and keen silently as Blaise placed his wand between the globes of Draco's arse, moving it gently up and down, from Draco's backbone down between his legs and back up again, the polished wood never snagging on the expensive silk. Draco's hips snapped over and over again, his cock trapped between his belly and the mattress, and he thought he might die when Blaise straddled the backs of his thighs and ground his crotch into Draco's arse.
He could feel Blaise's orgasm before Blaise made a sound, could feel warm come splatter onto the Italian silk of the pyjamas Narcissa had brought to Draco from Milan the last time she visited.
When Blaise had left that evening, slipped out of the bedclothes and through the curtains as easily and silently as he had arrived, Draco had wanted to cry—for himself, for Blaise, for the two little boys who knew each other's most intimate secrets and had never held one another's hands.
~*~
"Hand me the sugar, Zabini," Draco said, tearing his eyes away from Blaise's slow blink.
Blaise did, careful to keep his fingers from brushing Draco's during the exchange.
It broke his heart a little, but Draco smiled and turned his full attention back to Pansy. "Hannah Abbott is a filthy little tramp," he said, launching himself into the conversational fray.
And so, perhaps, was he. But it didn't matter. Blaise would never tell. And someday, someday it would be Draco who slipped into another man's bed, Draco who came and went as he pleased.
Someday, Draco would be in control.