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Draco’s exhale is almost a moan. And he doesn’t just sound like someone’s punched him in the gut, he looks it too. The hurt is gone from his face in an instant, but it takes a bit for his eyes to recover and the pain in them is searing before it turns to ice.

It’s all over even before Harry has finished speaking. He sees it play out in slow motion, like through the omnioculars, but it’s too late to stop. The damage has been done.

A heavy silence settles between them. Oh, there’s the stew, still bubbling on the stove, and the cat fountain, burbling away, and the noises of the world outside, muffled by the windows—familiar, comforting sounds suddenly made sharp-edged and dangerous by Harry’s unthinking, cutting words. 

He hates himself. It’s been a long time since he’s done something like this, but an eternity would not have been long enough. And he can’t apologize. Not while anger still thrums hot in his blood. Because Draco will know.

Harry closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, massaging under the pads of his glasses.

“Well.” Draco clears his throat. “Didn’t think we’d be taking that particular skeleton out of the closet today.”

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Draco takes another step and absently notes an inexplicable, sharp rise in temperature. Potter isn’t like the sun, he is the sun, and Draco’s face is burning with the stress of its regard.

“So… are we doing this?” the sun speaks.

Draco nods. His lips fall apart for his breath to be vaporized by the sizzling heat.

“Close your eyes,” the sun suggests. Or risk being blinded.

“Ha—ah—” 

And then he is branded, soul, not skin, by the sun’s scorching kiss.

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“Potter’s staring at us,” Pansy told Draco over dinner. They were sitting together. They had spent the whole day together, within easy sight of the Gryffindors: holding hands, whispering, laughing. A good start, but more was to come. Draco would kiss her, soon, and ask her to be his girlfriend. That should put a stop to any and all rumors. Not tonight, though. He would to it properly, one step at a time.

Perhaps that was why he only felt a vague stirring of interest at Pansy’s pronouncement, and the impulse to look up and meet Potter’s gaze was easily quenched.

“He’s jealous,” he told her, plucking his spoon from his untouched porridge and plunging it back in to make it look like he was eating. He’d made himself eat a chicken leg for lunch but had barely kept it down afterwards. His stomach was still in knots.

Pansy giggled and smoothed a strand of hair behind his ear. Her fingers were like ice.

“Oh,” she said, pressing them against his temple, and then his cheek. “Draco.”

“Hm?”

“Come here.” Pansy took him by the chin, turned his face, and kissed his forehead. Her lips were cold too. “You’re burning up.”

Draco felt his face and neck. She was right. His skin was flushed and oversensitive, as if he’d been too long in the sun. Taking further stock of himself, he realized his eyes were dry and prickly, and his own breath felt too warm in his mouth. He was running a fever.

Pansy kept running her fingers through the hair over his ear and he was reminded of how she had clung to him last year when his arm had been broken. He didn’t mind. It was nice, to be fussed over. “Are you feeling alright?” she asked.

Draco shrugged. “Just a bit tired.”

It shouldn’t have been a lie, after his mostly sleepless night and everything that followed. But in truth, he was thrumming with excitement.

“Maybe you should see Madam Pomfrey?” Pansy said. “I’ll come with you if you’d like.”

“Alright. I just need to take care of something first.”

This involved walking over to where Vince and Greg were sitting, well into their third servings of pudding, and leaning on their broad backs to whisper his instructions. Ten minutes later, as the crowd thickened at the door, they started a ruckus, pretending to get into a fight and expertly pulling half a dozen other boys from all four houses into the fray. Meanwhile, Draco got behind Finnigan and cast a potent flatulence curse on him, hiding his wand in his sleeve and speaking the incantation so quietly it might as well have been wordless. Though his heart pounded, he grinned brightly as he strode out of the Hall with Pansy on his arm. That should keep the Gryffindors awake all night, freezing by the open windows.

* * *

Pansy kept talking the whole way to the hospital wing about her grandmother’s second cousin who had allegedly endured a fever so high that flames licked up from her skin and the house elves who tended to her had to wear oven mittens. Like Draco’s grandfather, and a good few other prominent wizards and witches of their generation, she had died of dragon pox in the epidemic of 1974.

“Do you think this might be it?” she asked anxiously, and put her ice-cold fingers on the side of his face again. Her concern was likely just an excuse to touch him, but that was alright. He’d do well to get used to it. “Is it hereditary?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. Of course it wasn’t. Besides, he knew perfectly well what had caused his fever. He wasn’t about to let Pansy in on it, though.

“Madam Pomfrey?” he said, looking around her office door, which always stood ajar unless she was seeing a patient.

“Yes?” Madam Pomfrey sat behind her desk, measuring out sparkling blue powder into tiny glass jars.

“May I come in for a minute?”

Lifting her eyes over her thin spectacles, she took a quick measure of him, and nodded with a stiff little smile. She had liked him well enough when he’d been younger, but Mother had made her life miserable last year.

As he entered, Pansy tried to follow him in. He barely managed to close the door behind him in time.

“What’s the matter, my dear?” said Madam Pomfrey.

Draco sighed. “The usual.”

“Let me see.” She motioned him to the round stool next to her, then felt his forehead, took his pulse, and waved a gentle diagnostic spell in his direction. “A bit of a fever,” she confirmed, then peered into his eyes. “I thought we’d left those behind.”

“Me too.” The last time he had come to the hospital wing with this complaint had been on the night before his first match against Gryffindor in second year.

“Well. Hormones have a way of stirring things up. I expect there’s no reason to be alarmed. How are you feeling?”

“Nervous,” he confessed. “Restless.”

“Any runaway magic?”

Draco tried to recall. This day had been longer than most weeks and some months. “Not that I noticed?”

She regarded him shrewdly for a few seconds. “That tournament nonsense upset you, didn’t it.”

He shrugged.

“Well. It’s all over, for now. Let me get you something to help you sleep it off.”

While she rummaged in her medicine cabinet, Draco bit his lip. “Was anyone injured?”

“Worried about your classmate?” She laughed, not unkindly. “He was a bit singed, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a few quick charms. No serious damage to any of them, thank Merlin. Here.” Draco accepted a vial of familiar milky liquid that swirled slowly on its own. “Take half now, and the rest before bedtime. You should be right as rain by the morning.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, my dear.”

* * *

He took the first dose of the calming draught in the empty dorm, leaving Pansy to make excuses for him in the common room.

The effect was immediate, and shocking. Draco had forgotten what it was like to not be anxious. He had grown so used to the twisting in his guts and the perpetual ticking of his pulse in his ears that he found the silence a little unnerving at first, and checked, absurdly, if his heart was still beating by pressing fingers to the underside of his wrist. But soon the magic of the potion took away that silly concern too.

He opened his trunk with a mind to take out Potter’s Invisibility Cloak and indulge in some mischief. But instead, his eyes landed on his sketchbook. It had been ages since he’d opened it. He remembered the history essay (still a foot short of completion), dug it out of his bag and transferred the drawing of the beating heart to an empty page in the sketchbook. The spell he used was one of his invention: a variation on the duplication charm, with a mimetic inspired by the pensieve thought-extraction charm, wordless. All he needed do was tap the drawing with his wand, draw the pigment out, and deposit it in a new location, shrunken or enlarged according to his whim.

But now the page looked unbalanced, with only one corner filled. Draco sat cross legged on his bed, took the quill and inkwell from the nightstand, and drew the horntail, still as sharp as a photograph in his memory. As a final flourish, he spelled it to spit animated fire all around the heart, because it hadn’t been melodramatic enough before. Before he knew it, he had also sketched a small Potter, driving his Firebolt into that last, insane dive, his hair whipping back in the wind; and a larger one, his brow knitted in concentration as the broom flew into his outstretched hand; and finally, Potter’s glasses, dripping lake water and breaking imaginary sunlight into a wobbly little rainbow. He put down his quill. The page was full.

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It wasn’t till the afternoon free period that Draco had the chance to don the Invisibility Cloak and go looking for trouble. By then, the calming draught had finally worn off. His heart thudded at the base of his throat as he followed Chang and her Ravenclaw girlfriends, listening in on their disturbingly relatable conversation. They ranked male Quidditch players by awarding one, two or three stars for face, hair, eyes; shoulders, waist, arse; charm, wit and “heart”—whatever that meant. One of the girls magicked a quill to keep the score on a long piece of parchment that bore evidence of many similar rankings from the past as everyone voted. Draco had to bite his tongue to keep from arguing against the collective delusion that Marcus Flint deserved anything but the lowest score in charm, and that anyone (apart from himself, obviously) could possibly outscore Potter in eyes. In the end, Draco won in hair (apparently the Ravenclaws had some sense, after all), Potter won in “heart”, they were tied in eyes with some Beauxbatons boy, Flint was tied with Krum in shoulders, Krum was tied with Diggory in arse, and Diggory won everything else by a wide margin.

More importantly, Potter seemed to be tied with Diggory as the subject of Chang’s unguarded blushes and giggles. Draco filed this intelligence for later.

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But the page looked unbalanced with only one corner filled. Draco sat cross legged on his bed, took his new quill and the inkwell from the nightstand, and drew an Oxalis plant in three stages: budding, flowering and ripening. Then he used his wand to combine them into one animated picture. His heart started drumming up as he laid down a sketch for a larger, more elaborate drawing of a single, ripe pod. He looked at it for a minute, as the excitement swelled large inside his chest and between his legs, and then he drew a hand around the pod. Potter’s hand. Draco remembered it in shocking detail. The well-shaped, wide-knuckled fingers, the bitten fingernails, the tip of the ulna rising attractively under the brown skin. He spelled the hand to slide slowly up and down.

It looked filthy. Much more so than the real thing. Draco stared, transfixed.

A crack and a rumble issued from the furnace, making him jump. He had lost all sense of the passage of time, of the space around him. The other boys were in the common room, playing cards; he had excused himself with every intention to study. A glance at his wristwatch told him he’d been in here, alone, for just under an hour. Plenty of time till lights out.

He looked at the drawing again and, heart fairly pounding now, deleted the Oxalis pod, leaving only a faint cylindrical outline. Quickly, racing against fear, he sketched his cock in its place. Oh, gods. He’d never drawn a cock before, at least not with any pretense at being realistic, but it was easy. Too easy. His hand trembled as he charmed the moving hand to tighten on the upstroke, pulling the foreskin over the head and down again. The result was a motion picture so pornographic that stolen erotic magazines Greg had brought from home couldn’t light a candle to it.

Draco kneaded his aching hardon with the heel of his hand. Given how ridiculously turned on he was, he could probably get off in under three minutes. But he’d need to either lock the door—an unattractive option that would raise suspicion if one of his roommates tried to enter—or go do it in the bathroom, and he didn’t feel like it. He didn’t feel like getting up or even undoing his flies. He wanted to keep drawing.

Half a minute’s fondling over his clothes dulled the ache enough to turn his attention—the more critical kind—back to his sketchbook. There was still room on the page for a few smaller drawings, but the pornographic animation was too distracting, so he turned a new leaf. In the next hour, he drew a barely recognizable portrait of Professor Snape, his mouth gaping at the glassware cataclysm in the classroom; Potter’s swollen scar, trying to recall the way the ragged edges of it caught light and cast shadows, like a shallow canyon carved out in skin; and finally, Vince’s bubo, which proved the most challenging for the absolute lack of features, other than hair, under his meaty arm.

He put down his quill. The page was full.

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Anger doesn’t encroach upon him the way it so often did with the Durselys: inching, insidious and inexorable like the tide. Instead it rises all at once, a towering wave that darkens his vision and turns his arms to iron.

He rushes at Malfoy at a speed he didn’t know he’s capable of. Malfoy, even more surprised, tries to step aside, but he’s too slow. Yet the split second it takes Harry to grab him by the lapels of his robes and jumper provides ample opportunity to enjoy the predictable sequence of expressions on Malfoy’s pallid face: from the confident sneer to momentary puzzlement to fright. Harry slams him into the nearest wall with such force he’s sure Malfoy’s skull would’ve cracked open like a dropped melon if not for the tapestry. Later, he’ll thank his good fortune for it. Of all the times he courted expulsion, painting the walls of the school with the blood from another student’s smashed head would’ve surely been the final one.

Malfoy’s winded by the impact and Harry smells the cinnamon roll and chocolates Malfoy had for dinner on his open-mouthed huff of a breath. Harry leans in to hiss, “Say that again, Malfoy,” distantly aware of the jerky, cough-like tremors going through Malfoy’s bony frame, pressed flat under the weight of Harry’s fury.

“Ha-ah,” is all Malfoy says, but somehow Harry manages to find even that insulting and presses closer. Close enough to pick up the citrusy fragrance of Malfoy’s shampoo and the flowery perfume of his freshly laundered robes and underneath it all, the warm musk of sweat and fear. Close enough to see Malfoy’s eyes turn nearly black with how huge his pupils have grown, and his limp, wet lower lip tremble. Close enough to count the pores on his skin and the peach hair on his cheeks, flushed a pretty pink, and feel the frantic beating of his heart.

“Cat got your tongue, huh?” Harry breathes into Malfoy’s face, leaning into it.

Malfoy’s gaze drops, a bit cross-eyed, to Harry’s mouth. His eyelashes flutter. Some noise tears out of his throat, as far from his usual taunts as Harry’s mindless rage is from his usual calm.

And then Harry notices three things all at once.

First, that Malfoy’s entirely too passive. His arms are spread wide, bracing against the tapestry instead of pushing on Harry’s shoulders or chest. His wand hangs precariously from his right hand, pointed down, when it could be used quite effectively to hex the crap out of Harry or, at the very least, to take a painful jab at his completely open flank.

Second, that Malfoy’s trembling from head to toes like a leaf, and, more alarmingly, that Harry is trembling all over himself.

And third, that something’s poking his hipbone. He’d assume it’s Malfoy’s wand if he hadn’t noticed Malfoy holding it. His belt buckle? That low, and that far to the side? Something large and hard in his right pocket?

Malfoy shuts his eyes and his brows pinch together like he might cry as the large, hard thing in his pocket becomes even larger and harder.

Understanding leaves Harry breathless. His stomach somersaults, rage melting into a liquid heat that drips from his chest to pool under his navel. With another jolt, he realizes he’s half-hard himself, and in the moments it takes him to process that shocking new development, there’s nothing half about it anymore. Worst of all—Malfoy must feel it too. It’s wedged right between them and—Christ—that thought makes it bloody twitch.

Malfoy’s grimace intensifies until it starts to look seriously pained and he turns his face away from Harry’s starved stare and gasping breaths. Wetness glints under his lashes.

Dismayed, Harry steps back abruptly, lightheaded and nauseous. Malfoy’s knees buckle like they can’t hold his weight, but he grips the tapestry in time to keep himself upright. His wand clatters to the marble floor and rolls towards the stairs. Harry stops it with his foot and picks it up.

Malfoy has turned his back on him. He’s leaning on his knees, heaving as though he might be sick. But after a few seconds, he straightens up, adjusts his robes, and wipes his face. When he turns around to face Harry again, he looks almost normal. Even his signature scowl is back in place.

He steps forwards and shoves Harry’s shoulders with a savage strength, nothing Harry could’ve seen coming after how limply Malfoy had stood against the wall, held up, as it were, by the pressure of Harry’s weight alone.

Harry staggers back, steps on the edge of the stairs, and for one horrible moment, sees his life ending with a broken neck, of all things. But he catches the newel and regains his balance. His heart hammers in his throat.

Malfoy has retreated a few steps back, something like relief flashing over his features before he remembers himself and arranges them into a more appropriate picture of disgust.

“You’re a swine, Potter,” he squeezes through clenched teeth, then spins with a dramatic swipe of his robes and starts to leave.

“Malfoy,” Harry exclaims. “You forgot something.”

Malfoy stops. He turns his head without really looking back, as if considering the plea of some lowly supplicant. At last he returns and holds out a hand.

Harry swallows and walks up to him, then twirls Malfoy’s wand in a deft little move of his own invention till the handle faces outwards.

Malfoy snatches it and walks away at a brisk pace, just short of running.

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“Yeah,” Harry says. Exhales, really. Relief? Defeat? She’s not so good at reading him anymore. “That’s how I find them.” The hand that held the wand to the scar—now more like an open wound—falls to his lap. “How I found… him.”

Draco shifts, pallid and grimacing. The grip he’s got on his forearm is white-knuckled.

“And I’m supposed to, what?” Hermione says. “Fix this?”

Neither of them meets her gaze.

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The muffled clamor of an argument rises at a steady crescendo while Harry descends the stairs. Ron, George and—

“I don’t care,” yells Draco fucking Malfoy as the door swings open, narrowly missing Harry’s nose. “Talk to the godsdamned distributor!”

He slams the door shut, then freezes. It’s been eleven years, and he’s gained as many inches between height and hair length. He looks… stunning.

Harry wets his lips, takes a breath—

“Shut up, Potter!”