Unconditional

Draco shook his head. “This will not do.” Harry looked confused. Draco hit him with a bat bogey hex.

Minerva McGonagall was not pleased. Professor Flitwick was about to collect on another bet, so he couldn’t be too upset.

“Fighting! In the library!” McGonagall shouted.

“Don’t do that,” Flitwick chimed in.

“Mister Black! I would have thought you knew better this year. And Mister Potter! You shouldn’t escalate the situation, you should put a stop to it,” she continued.

“Shame,” Flitwick said with a bit of a smile.

McGonagall shook her head disapprovingly. “Do you even know how many books were damaged?”

Draco said in a small voice, “So cast a Repairo?”

Flitwick snorted loudly.

McGonagall’s glare split between all three males in the room.

“Detention, of course. And fifty points from Gryffindor.”

“Fifty?! But it’s just the start of the year and—“

“Exactly, Mister Potter. This is not the way for you to start off your year.”

Harry fell quiet. Everyone turned to look at Professor Flitwick to see what Draco’s punishment would be.

“Oh, I don’t know, Minerva. Boys will be boys after all,” he said with a grin. At her murderous expression, he amended, “But perhaps sometimes a detention does them good.”

---

Scrubbing out the trophy room with Potter was horrible. First off, Potter wouldn’t talk to him. No matter what insult he hurled at the black-haired fool, he couldn’t get a rise. He’d given up trying. They had been trying to stay away from each other all night, but they were almost done cleaning and were now only a few feet from each other.

“What’s that, Ferret-face?” Potter asked, pointing at Draco’s tattoo. He had rolled his sleeves up a few hours ago so they wouldn’t get dirty.

“A tattoo, Scarhead. I mean, honestly—“

“Covers your Dark Mark pretty well.”

Draco fell silent.

“If you didn’t want it, why did you get it?”

“I did want it,” he said simply. He watched the emotions run across Potter’s face. Honesty was working better than insults. That was interesting.

“Well then… why did you cover it up?” he asked.

“I didn’t want it anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?” Draco gave him a look. “I mean, you changed your mind pretty quick.”

“That’s a pretty personal question, Scarhead. I didn’t know you cared,” he said sarcastically.

Harry just shrugged. “I’m curious.”

Draco put down his rag. He sat down and leaned against the wall. “I did want it. I went there, on my birthday, like my father had planned. I was always going to get it, but he moved it up after that whole Ministry fiasco.” Potter, too, dropped his rag and sat down. He was biting his lip and obviously thinking about his Godfather. “I was there. The Dark Lord was there. My father was kneeling on the ground, his forehead in the dirt. Begging for forgiveness for the failure of his plan. Offering me as consolation.”

“That’s low,” Harry said quietly.

“Oh, I didn’t mind that. What bothered me was the way he was acting. I had seen it before but suddenly I realized… Lucius loves the Dark Lord. Unconditionally. And that’s just foolish. I never want to be such a fool.”

“It is. Really foolish. I mean, it’s Voldemort.”

“What? Oh, yeah. I mean really, it’s foolish to love anyone unconditionally. The Dark Lord especially, I suppose…”

Harry gave him a look. “Loving someone is foolish?” He shook his head. “You’re fucked up, Ferret-face.”

“Loving someone unconditionally,” Draco corrected. He couldn’t quite believe he was having this conversation with Potter.

Harry snorted. “That’s the only way to love someone. I mean, you’re not going to love someone conditionally.”

“Of course you are.”

“That’s not love, Ferret. That’s just… using someone.”

“No,” he protested. “You can love someone. But if they do wrong, you shouldn’t just keep loving them. It just encourages them to do more wrong things to you.”

Harry just shrugged. “Maybe if the person you love is a sociopath. Hopefully, the person loves you back and feels bad enough about hurting you that they won’t do it again.”

Draco shook his head. “You are so naïve.”

“Better than being cynical,” Potter retorted.

“Oh, is it,” he said sarcastically.

“I think so, yeah.”

---

Later that night, Draco couldn’t get Potter’s words out of his head. He had always thought that unconditional love was stupid. And it still was. But the more he thought about it, the more he thought it might be a nice kind of stupid. At least for a little while.

---

It was scary, really, how Draco was becoming obsessed with Harry Potter. He always had been, but now it was different. Harry had stopped responding to Draco’s mocking and insults and when Draco would cast a hex at him he would just block it and carry on. It was infuriating, really. The only way to make the boy show any kind of emotion was to talk to him. It had been this way almost a month.
Incorrigible.

“So, Scarface. Ready for a battle of epic proportions, with curses that barely miss and some witty banter sprinkled in for good measure?”

“The Charms exam? I’m gonna kick your arse, Ferret.”

“Not bloody likely. You couldn’t master a charm if it walked up to you with a pair of handcuffs and asked you very nicely if you could please take mastership of it.”

“Yeah, well, you couldn’t pass an exam if it was handed to you with the answers already written on it!”

“Settle down, class. The questions are on the board. No more talking,” Flitwick admonished.

This is what Draco had been reduced to. Repartee. Having a laugh. Teasing, with no hard feelings. It was ghastly. But it was all he could do.

---

“I told you, Scar-potty-face-head.”

“You beat me by only four points!”

“What?”

“I said you beat me by—“

“‘You beat me,’ says the loser,” Draco said, and smirked. Padma Patil gave him a strange look. Almost angry. Draco checked himself and found that his “I’m better than you,” smirk was looking sort of like his “you think I’m pretty, don’t you,” one. The color, what little of it there was, drained from his face.

“I gotta go,” Draco mumbled, and walked away quickly in the direction of the Ravenclaw dormitory.

---

Padma caught up to him. “So, Draco. Are we going out or what?”

Draco coughed loudly. “Erm, should we be?”

“I think so,” she said.

“Well, I mean—“

“We’ve been making out for like, two weeks. Now it’s time to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“Is that how that works?” Draco muttered distractedly.

“Yes,” Padma replied easily.

Draco thought about it. It couldn’t hurt anything. Hopefully kissing Padma on a boyfriend/girlfriend level would take his mind off why he had smirked at Scarface like that. As he pulled Padma in for a kiss, the Dark Mark on his arm began prickling painfully.