Chapter 4
At dinner, Harry made polite conversation with Ron and Seamus, looking up to catch Malfoy’s eyes often, before they flitted away to look down at his plate or at Zabini. When he finally gave up on looking away as if he wasn’t watching Harry as much as Harry was watching him, Harry gave him a smile that said a combination of well hello there and are you feeling OK? to which Draco let the corner of his lip quirk up in a response to both and Harry felt his cheeks flush at it, to the surprise of them both and the blond boy quirked a pale eyebrow at him in a silent, long distance conversation. Harry’s attention was jerked away from their friendly interaction by Seamus choking on his drink, however. Ron was thumping his back in an effort to be helpful and Hermione was glaring at Ron.
“That’s not something that you just ask people, Ronald,” she snapped.
“I’m sorry, I was just curious, that’s all,” he replied meekly.
“It’s fine guys, honestly, just a wee bit of a surprise that’s all.” Seamus had recovered and was now laughing. Harry was in a state of utmost befuddlement. “I didn’t wake up one day and think to myself, you know what, Seamus, you are a flaming queer, if that’s what you are wondering.” Ron and Harry laughed, Hermione glared some more, “no it was more like one day I just looked at my best friend and thought, merlins fucking pants I love you and then when he was dating Ginny I just kind of wanted to hit her. Or hit him. Or pin him against the wall and kiss him, you know?” Seamus finished. Hermione was nodding gently, Ron was flushing so hard that not only were his cheeks red but also so was his ears, his neck and the rest of his entire face and Harry was watching Pansy bat her eyelashes at Draco and feeling like he just wanted to hit her with a stinging hex so violent that she refused to get out of bed for a week.
Sleep that night was painful, he had the worst dream in the cycle and while he didn’t wake up screaming, he was sobbing so hard that it was difficult to breath and couldn’t get the images out of his head. It was the one where he followed the ghost of Pavarti Patil (she had hung herself from the highest curtain rod in the Gryffindor common room two months after school commenced and was found with a note by a second year Hufflepuff student who still hadn’t been dismissed by Madam Pomfrey. The note was charmed to show different messages to whoever read it but also explained for everybody to see, that she could not live without Lavender and had gone to seek her on the other side) to a room filled with everybody that had been a casualty to the war they fought for Harry. And they never say anything, they just look at him with their dead eyes, everyone that he loved, dead. Sirius and Remus and Tonks sat with Hedwig and Harry’s parents, Lavender, Pavarti, Fred and Colin sat on the other side with Cedric. Dumbledore and Moody and even Snape sat amongst them as well. All of them dead and looking as if all that they wanted was a tiny bit of his alive. When he went out walking, he didn’t run into anyone, not even the person he both least and most wanted to see.
The next day went by in a blur of boring classes (potions, astronomy, and history of magic where the look on the professor’s face told them that he highly disapproved of their privilege to skip classes) and by the time everybody was ready to turn in that night, Harry was exhausted but unwilling to sleep. His good luck with uninterrupted sleep would not likely last this night as well, unless someone had been slipping potions into his evening cup of tea. As everyone mumbled their tired goodnights, he yawned and muttered his own, but didn’t head out of the common room to his dorms like everybody else. Instead he crept out the door and ignored the fat lady telling him that he should try to sleep, walking down the familiar corridors to the Room of Requirement. He started pacing along the length of the wall, thinking to himself as he walked, I need to get into the sad room, I need to ge- Malfoy. He was standing in the shadowy hall behind Harry and watching him trying to get in. Harry had only walked by twice so he still had to go one more time but he stopped to watch Draco watching him.
“What room do you need, Potter?” he drawled.
Harry shrugged, “I don’t know,” he said.
“Liar,” Malfoy spat, “you know exactly what you want and so do I”
“Why do you even care so much, Malfoy?”
“Draco,” he whispered his own name under his breath and under Harry’s confused gaze, looked down at his feet and started shuffling dust on the floor into tiny pyramids with the toe of his shoe, “just call me Draco. Not because we are really friends. Just because I don’t want to be a Malfoy anymore.” Harry, though hurt at not being considered at all a friend yet stunned by this confession of sorts, just nodded. He understood where Malf- Draco- was coming from, he was sick of what his own surname meant, and he was fighting for the right team. But there was really no way to tell him that without offending him or seeming too sympathetic. Wait, since when have I cared about offending him? Harry wondered.
“Anyway, I don’t care. I am just curious, maybe I need to be in that room as well”
“And what room would that be?” Harry threw back at him.
“I don’t know. You tell me,” said Draco.
Harry noticed that there was no longer any anger in his words, that they were now almost playful. And he found this easy, familiar banter both quite nice and quite strange. Strange as it was with Draco Malfoy of all people, and nice because everyone had started being varying degrees of awkward around him since the war, especially since they worked out that he was not exactly ‘Okay’ after it.
“Why don’t you tell me what to ask it for and I’ll open it for us?”
“Fine, but then you have to show me where you were trying to go”
“Fine”
“You have to think, I need to get into Draco’s room,” he said with a smirk
“Why? What’s in there?” Harry was suspicious, what if Malfoy was being friendly to try to lure him into a trap?
“Oh calm down Potter, I’m not drawing you in to kill you,” he said with a bite of snark and a huff of a laugh out at the absurdity but when he turned his head and looked Harry in the eye, he saw the legitimate terror there.
“I’m sorry, I honestly didn’t mean to scare you, I thought, I thought that you knew that I changed.” Harry saw the mingled sincerity, disappointment, empathy and sadness written in the lines of the blond boy’s face. And as scared as he was, he knew that this time at least, Draco meant him no harm.
Paranoia was another side-effect of the war, constantly being on edge and waiting for an attack left him constantly tired, and his jumpiness meant that even a first year walking down a corridor alone made him nervous. So it really wasn’t any surprise that Draco Malfoy inviting him into his strange room in the castle set off alarm bells. That might have been an actual dangerous situation. But it wasn’t.
“Here. I’ll open it and then you can see it before you go in, just to check”
Draco started walking along the edge of the wall and Harry watched, almost mesmerised, until a door appeared and swung open.
The room had a bed and a fireplace and a few comfortable looking chairs and it reminded Harry of the Gryffindor common room in miniature. Just with more green. As he followed Draco inside he spotted another couple of doors, one was open and led into a bathroom and the other was closed although Harry suspected that it might have had beds in it.
“What is this place?” Harry frowned.
“It’s the Room of Requirement” Draco snarked back.
“Well thanks for that. I figured that one out on my own, thanks. I meant what is it?”
“It’s my room. And Blaise’s”
“But why don’t you sleep in the Slytherin dorms?”
“Hmm, I wonder, Potter, let me think about it” Draco said, his voice dripping in liquid sarcasm as he held up a hand with one finger, “all of the younger students are either afraid of me, hate me or worship me and honestly, the latter is the scariest.” He added another finger, “two, there is a muggle born first year who thinks that I am going to murder him in his sleep. And three,” Another finger, “I barely sleep anyways. Blaise sleeps here some nights when I do but otherwise he’s out banging Parkinson. And I have no idea why I’m telling you this, other than I want you to at least trust that I won’t create my own Death Eater army or slaughter all the muggle-borns in the school or massacre fourteen people and string them out on my washing line or kill you and throw your body off the astronomy tower.”
Harry couldn’t understand why but he found it quite funny that Draco thought that being revered was the worst, “Oh I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be worshipped. Nope. Not at all.”
“Ahh, but you, Potter, were fighting for the right team. It’s not particularly lovely to be thrown up on a pedestal for trying to fight FOR vol-” Malfoy seemed to stop mid-word and change the course of his sentence, “the Dark Lord,” he finished.
“That is correct” Harry said with a frown, “But I do NOT want to hear about Zabini and Parkinson getting a good shagging together. Otherwise, I am glad that you aren’t planning to go all murderer and try to top me. That’s always a plus side for me, considering the number of people who would like nothing better than to see my body mangled beneath that godforsaken tower”
“Trust me, I don’t either. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what Blaise thinks that I’m going to get from that knowledge but he insists on telling me anyways”
“Ughh, I know. I love Hermione and Ron but there are some things that just shouldn’t be shared”
“Potter, that’s foul, I didn’t want to know!”
“And I didn’t want to know about Pansy and Blaise!”
“Alright, alright, I suppose that makes us even”
“Not even close Mal-” Harry paused at the blonde’s frown, “Draco,” he corrected.
Draco began stalking towards him, one long graceful step after another, like a panther going in for the kill, until Harry too backed up until the his thighs pressed against a chair, trapped inches away from his ex-nemesis, “and what does that mean exactly?”
“I think that means that you owe me”
“Owe you what?”
“I’ll think of something”
“I’m sure that you will, Potter,” Draco said with a sneer.
Not that Harry noticed, but Draco’s ears were tipped red.
And not that Harry noticed, but Draco’s forty-galleon, tailored white shirt had untucked from his undershorts and his robes had bunched up a bit, revealing a swathe of pale skin pulled tight over lean, quiddich-toned muscle.
And not that Harry noticed, but the two of them were standing very, very close. Close enough to kiss. Or hit each other. Or kiss.
Harry noticed all of these things very suddenly.
He also noticed the stifling amount of tension was now simmering between him. Harry felt like he had just sold his soul to the devil. If the devil was blonde and snarky and his old school enemy, he thought. Either way, Malfoy isn’t gay. And for that matter, neither am I!
“By the way, I could still throw you off the astronomy tower if you want me to. I had it all planned out and everything. See, I could just push you as you walked to class. No-one would suspect a thing. The Boy Who Lived, yup, right up until he fell from a building. Quite tragically I might add.” And just like that the tension was snuffed out like a candle.
Harry, who had been alternating between gaping and laughing through Draco’s soliloquy was starting to wonder where he sat on an idiocy scale between zero and muggle-dashboard-bobble-heads. Why do I even care what he thinks? But what he said was,
“Great to know that you’ve already planned my death”
“Oh yes, between being rejected in first year, second year, third year, fourth year, trying to find your army in fifth year and trying not to get killed in sixth, there was a lot of time for that honestly. They were worse in second year I assure you”
“I don’t understand? How did I reject you that many times, sure in first year I didn’t shake your hand but to be honest you were kind of a prick, but what about the rest of them?”
A light blush crept up Draco’s porcelain cheeks, just light enough to see, “let’s see, first year I came thinking that you could be my best friend and then you chose Weasley above me,” he said Ron’s surname as if it were toxin in his mouth, “but I’ve made my peace with that because I admit that I was an arse. Second year I wrote you a really terrible poem and then blamed it on Weaslette”
In all honesty, Harry couldn’t remember a single word to that poem (it probably consisted of thinly veiled threats under seemingly romantic notions) but the memory of the ghosts and gnomes/cherubs reading St Valentine’s Day poems on Professor Lockheart’s command was still accessible. Harry almost shuddered at the thought.
“Third year you just hated me plus you had bigger things to worry about than me writing you nice little notes inside the paper cranes if you used a revealing charm, and with that map of yours, I thought you might’ve checked. Fourth year I admit the ‘potter stinks’ badges may have been perceived as cruel but-”
“That was cruel!” Harry exclaimed. “And you spent all of fifth year trying to get me expelled, you said so yourself!”
“But my father wanted me to so he could remain in cahoots with the minister, I’m not a bad person! And well you can’t judge me for sixth year, you would’ve done the same, I just didn’t want to die, I was not going to do it and I think you know that, but he said that he would kill me and my mother and father.”
“And you plotted my death why exactly?”
“Because I did not know how to deal with you, of course”
“Why ‘of course’?”
Malfoy was blushing quite heavily now.
“You are quite daft, you know that Potter?”
“So I’ve been told, mainly by you. Anyway did you say the word ‘cahoots’ before?” Harry asked with the ghost of a smile.
“I can see why, and no. Of course I didn’t. Do I look like the kind of person who would say that?”
“Still don’t know why I am daft.” Harry shrugged with a grin.
Draco looked exasperated, “that makes you even more daft, git”
Harry had to stop for a second. What in Merlin’s good name was he doing?! He thought, am I flirting? With Malfoy? And the most concerning thought, and do I like it? After a very brief second of thinking it over, he concluded that in order, the answers to his questions were; talking to Draco Malfoy, maybe, yes and apparently yes.
“Why am I daft?”
Draco was blushing again, “I have no idea”
Harry sighed. All he really wanted to do was curl up and sleep but with sleep came nightmares and with nightmares came humiliation. And he didn’t want to humiliate himself in front of Draco. Not now at least. Not when they had formed some semblance of friendship. Or whatever this was.
“Anyways, you said that you would show me where you were trying to go.” Draco shook his head to clear his thoughts a little.
Harry groaned and fell back onto the armchair behind him, “but I’m so comfy here.”
“It is quite wonderful here isn’t it?” Draco did the same thing but somehow made it look much more graceful, like he was moving through water.
“’m really tired” Harry murmured.
“Well then sleep”
“Here?”
“Why not?”
“I thought that you said that we aren’t friends.” Harry’s eyelids were heavy, and keeping them open was a battle that he was losing.
“Yeah, well, maybe I get things wrong too.” It was probably a good thing that Harry’s eyes were closed when he beamed at Draco, because Draco didn’t want to lose this odd, fast-paced friendship by having Harry see him melt.
The black haired boy sighed his agreement as he fell asleep, feeling more protected than he had been in a long time. The nightmares still came, but they weren’t as bad as they could have been and when he woke up the first time Draco was still awake and he was singing to himself in what sounded to Harry like French, and the next dream he had, he didn’t remember in the morning but it featured him grabbing the cuff of Draco’s robe sleeve, dragging him into this room and kissing him right on the mouth for hours.