Anything but Ordinary

Seventeen minutes before the hot dog roast, and Harry couldn't find his trousers.

He wasn't ready to admit to himself why that particular pair of trousers was so important to him, but in the back of his mind he knew that they were the ones that he had worn on the last date he'd ever had with Draco, and they made his arse look really hot. He also knew that Draco would attend the hot dog roast, and if he was going to have to be in the same place as his ex-lover, he was damn well going to throw the fineness of his arse right in Draco's face.

That was especially necessary if Draco was going to have his new boyfriend along. Stuart. Harry thought about the name. St-u-art. He chewed it around in his mouth for a while, clicking his tongue against his teeth for the "t" sounds, hissing out the S with a hint of Parseltongue. Draco had always loved it when Harry whispered reptilian sounds next to his ear. Harry would pin Draco's hands against the wall and hiss, licking at the back of Draco's neck while Draco would squirm and moan and -

Harry threw the shoe he'd been holding against the wall in disgust. That was all in the past, now. Because Malfoy was a fuckwit who didn't know a good thing when he had one.

Ron had already filled him in on the basics: Stuart was the same age as they were but had gone to school at Beauxbatons, spending most of the War years furthering his education on the Riviera and living off of a substantial trust fund.

Maybe the pants were still at the cleaners'. They'd had such a row that night, and Draco had upended an entire plate of spaghetti into Harry's lap. It was just like him to be so melodramatic. Draco wanted to move further into the city so they could go out more and be social; Harry wanted to move to a house in the country where there was peace and quiet and no one would stare at his scar. They argued about it continually for weeks until the day that Draco finally threw up his hands and stormed out of the bedroom.

"You don't pay any attention to me any more, Harry," he'd snapped on his way out. "All you do is watch bad movies on the telly and do the crossword puzzles in the Daily Prophet. Quite frankly, you're boring the hell out of me."

And Harry hadn't been able to explain that just being with Draco every day, basking in the simple feeling of being in love, was enough for him. Not feeling like he needed to constantly look over his shoulder to see where the next attack was coming from, having to constantly defend and plan and strike and counter-strike, was all that Harry had wanted since his first year at Hogwarts. Harry was more than ready to leave all the drama behind and go on with his life like a regular wizard.

Draco wasn't.

Harry tried valiantly to convince Draco that he had just mistaken their lack of arguing for lack of passion, but even by shouting at the top of his lungs Harry hadn't been able to convince him that being ordinary wasn't the same as being boring. Draco had packed his things the next morning and left Harry standing, bewildered and sad, in the middle of a half-empty flat.

One month later, Harry was still sitting at home doing his puzzles, but with decidedly less interest. Draco had always known the answers to the really hard questions, and Harry just ended up chewing the ends off his quills when he didn't have anyone to ask.

He'd thought about getting a dog, but the landlady had made faces at him over the idea and he'd decided it was best just to leave that alone. Hermione had suggested a snake. "Then at least you'll have someone to talk to," she'd said airily. But Harry couldn't stand the thought of keeping it cooped up in a glass tank, and anyway the idea of feeding live mice to anything turned his stomach.

Draco, he was sure, would have counted that as a reason *to* keep a snake.

In the end, he came home one day with a ginger kitten he'd found scrounging in the dumpster behind his office, and the landlady had sniffed a bit but hadn't made him give it to the pound, so at least he had someone about to lay in his lap and purr.

Ten more minutes of searching went by before he decided to give up and just wear his favourite jeans. It wasn't like it was a fancy party, anyway; Ron and Pansy always had an outdoor picnic or something similar for their anniversary, and nobody except Draco ever dressed up. Living with a Malfoy for two years had certainly altered Harry's sense of style: he had to dig through several drawers to find the jeans, and when he finally did get them on, the creases from where they had been folded wouldn't fall out. He finally used a particularly powerful anti-wrinkle spell to fix them, although he realised afterward with some discomfort that he may have overdone it, as his socks were not in the least bit inclined to fall down.

There wasn't anything he could do about that at the moment, though. He was going to be late enough as it was. He sighed, and headed out to the party.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Forty-seven minutes into the hot dog roast, and Harry wanted very badly to go home. It was a breezy and beautiful summer afternoon, but all he really wanted to do was slink off into a corner somewhere and mope. Everyone kept looking at Harry and smiling a lot and trying to be all chipper and bright, pretending that they didn't feel sorry for him, shaking their heads when his back was turned and tsk, tsking sadly to each other. Poor Harry. Do you think it's been really hard on him?

Draco was only ever late to a party when he wanted to be sure that his grand entrance would not go unnoticed, and true to form, this time was no exception. Every head turned as a shiny, black, expensive looking Muggle sports car came roaring up the drive, stopping a hair's breadth away from the gathering group of onlookers drawn by the sound of the engine. Draco's hair glowed platinum-blond in the sunlight as he stepped out of the car and greeted Pansy with a warm smile and a kiss on the cheek. "This is Stuart," he said, inclining his head toward the young man stepping out of the driver's side. Stuart slipped off his fingerless black leather driving gloves and extended his hand to Ron, who took it with a smile. "Pleased to meet you," Ron said, and Harry felt comfortable imagining that Ron didn't really mean it one bit.

Stuart was a little taller than Draco, about the same height as himself, Harry noticed. His close-cropped black hair was wavy enough that if it had been just a little longer it would have been an out-of-control mass of curls. His hazel eyes were wide open and friendly and his white teeth sparkled when he smiled in a way that would have made Gilderoy Lockhart turn green from envy. He was actually quite handsome, and Harry hated him on sight.

Stuart matched the Muggle car quite well. He wore black linen trousers and a black leather jacket over a pale green shirt open at the collar. His black boots were shiny and expensive looking. Harry was suddenly painfully aware that his own left shoe had a black scuff mark across the toe from where he had thrown it at the wall.

"This is the AC Cobra 212S/C," Ron gushed, walking around the car.

"Do you like it? I just bought it last week," Stuart grinned. "It's got a 3.5-litre 350 hp twin turbo engine with a top speed of 250 kph, and can go from zero to 100 kph in four seconds. You can't even get that kind of acceleration out of the top-of-the-line Firebolt."

Ron was practically salivating as he ran his hand along the fender. "These start at seventy thousand pounds," he said, turning to his wife.

Pansy rolled her eyes. "You are *not* getting a Muggle car," she glared.

Stuart laughed and tossed Ron the keys. "We can go for a spin later if you'd like." Ron's face lit up. Harry's heart sank.

"So tell me," Pansy purred loud enough for Harry to hear, sidling up beside Draco as Ron and Stuart continued to discuss the latest advances in Muggle automotive technology. "Where did you two meet?"

"Mother introduced us," Draco drawled. Harry turned back toward the yard. He didn't need or want to overhear the rest of it. It wasn't enough that Stuart had a great car. He also had great teeth and great hair and great clothes. To Harry, Stuart oozed culture and sophistication, and he probably even smelled like money. Very old, elite, wizarding family money. In other words, he was perfect for Draco.

They had probably gone right back to Draco's flat after the benefit and had wild and sloppy sex all night long. Of course they did, Harry thought, because Draco wasn't just sexy, he was sex personified, and Stuart was too fucking attractive for him to think that Draco hadn't jumped him the second they were alone. But, Harry told himself, it surely didn't go far beyond that. This was just a passing fling - Draco's rebound relationship. Draco wasn't going to tie himself down to one person so soon, when he had so vehemently insisted that he wanted to live some kind of wild and exciting life. Harry was sure he was just spending time with Stuart because of the car. Draco had probably just let him hang around because he didn't really have anything better to do.

Or maybe it was because he'd known it would start an annoying little twitch at the corner of Harry's left eye when they arrived at the party together. Draco was probably getting a big kick out of that right now.

***

The first hour had passed without Harry having to interact with Draco or Stuart at all. So far, so good, he thought. He'd been able to keep to the edges of the party, talking to people like Colin and Ginny, while Draco and Stuart naturally gravitated toward the center where most of the attention was naturally centered on them. Harry had decided to head for the house - if he could get inside without being noticed, he could slip into the den, lie on the couch and watch the telly in peace for a few hours without actually leaving and insulting his hosts. It would be a while before anyone noticed he was gone, and he could just say he felt a little tired and needed a lie down. No one would mind that. Just a few more feet, and he'd have made it, into the sanctuary of the house where there was no Draco, no Stuart and no adoring crowd.

"Oi, Harry!" Fred called. "Have you met Stuart?"

Damn. He'd let his attention drift, and hadn't quite noticed where he had got to ... Harry twisted his face into what he hoped was the close approximation of a smile, and went over to where the twins and Penelope were standing with him.

Stuart's handshake was firm and solid and his eyes were wide and friendly. Harry pulled his hand away as quickly as possible. "Wonderful to finally meet you, Harry," Stuart grinned. "My pleasure," he replied through gritted teeth, staring fixedly at a point just below the top button of Stuart's shirt.

"Stuart was just telling us about sky driving," George said.

"Sky diving," Fred corrected him.

"Right, that's what I said. Did you know that Muggles jump out of perfectly good airplanes?"

"Harry grew up with Muggles, you prat," Fred said, cuffing his twin affectionately on the shoulder. "Of course he knows that."

"Oh!" Stuart said brightly. "That's interesting. Have you ever been sky diving, Harry?"

"Um, no, actually."

"Do tell us again, now, how does it work?" George asked. Ron wasn't the only one of Arthur Weasley's sons to have inherited a fascination with Muggle modes of transportation.

"Well, first the plane climbs to three thousand meters, and then when you jump you have 30 seconds of free fall. At fifteen hundred meters, you pull the cord on your parachute, which billows out above you and slows down your fall. Then you just sort of glide toward the ground, and as you float down you can see the whole world there beneath your feet. It's like bungee jumping, too - that's where you tie a stretchy sort of rope to your feet, and then you jump off something really high and the rope makes you bounce back up before you hit the ground. I took Draco bungee jumping the other day, in fact; you should have seen him - nerves of steel, I tell you! He dove right over the edge like it was nothing, not even a second's hesitation. Took to it right like a fish to water!" Stuart gazed adoringly across the yard, where Draco was fielding questions from Bill Weasley about what the Head of Slytherin House was up to these days.

Oh yes, Harry thought bitterly, Draco has nerves of steel. In fact, this one time during the War, when he was being tortured by Death Eaters, just before I came along and saved his life, he didn't scream like a girl at all. He saved all the screaming for afterward, when we had the ridiculously hot life-saving thank-you sex. Some of us don't have to jump from a great height for our thrills, thank you very much. Did I mention the part about the saving of the life?

"You make it all sound so exciting," Penelope cooed.

"It is," Stuart laughed. "Although I can't imagine that you would really find it all that great, Harry, after all that you've been through - secret missions, life-and-death duels, I mean you killed You-Know-Who! What can compare to that!"

Harry opened his mouth in shock, then realized that it probably looked like he was about to speak, which he wasn't really, he was just caught totally off guard, but then Stuart held up a hand to cut him off. He continued, more seriously, "I don't mean to make light of it, of course, don't mistake me - you're a hero, Harry, you're the real thing. All that other stuff, it's just pretend. People like me are just playing at thrills, because thanks to people like you, we won't ever have to face that kind of real danger. I've long admired you and the things that you've done, Harry, and I'm so glad that I finally have the chance to meet you. It's a real honor, and I mean that." He clasped Harry's shoulder with a brilliant smile.

Harry felt dreadfully off balance. "I - er -"

"He means thank you," Fred said cheerily. "Rest assured, I've been translating for Harry for years."

"Yes, right, thank you," Harry said, flustered. "Very kind of you to say. Um. I have to, oh, there's Hermione, need to see her about something," and he mumbled his way through a fast goodbye, disentangling from Stuart's companionable grip, feeling ten times worse than before.

***

Harry shuffled miserably toward the kitchen, balancing a tray of dirty dishes that Pansy had shoved at him as the party wound down and people started saying their goodbyes. Sometimes he still thought the emancipation of the House Elves had been a really bad idea.

A real hero, that's me all right, he thought. That's why Draco's run off to jump from high places with Mr. Perfect and I'm left to save the world one kitten at a time.

Just as Harry's deepening self-pity was getting to the really good part, he walked around a corner into the kitchen and stopped short. On the other side of the room, Stuart was leaning forward to whisper in Draco's ear. Draco's back was to Harry, but Harry could see the flush of color creeping up the back of his neck, and from the way that Stuart's fingers were tightening on Draco's hip, Harry didn't need a hearing augmentation charm to know exactly what kinds of things Stuart was saying.

He dropped the tray of dirty dishes on the table with a clatter. Stuart jumped a little and looked up at him over Draco's stiffened shoulder. When he saw it was Harry, he grinned sheepishly, and gave a little wink as he stepped back. Draco had half turned around, just enough so that Harry could see that his cheeks were flushed and his lips were red and a little swollen. They had been kissing. Draco had been kissing another man just before Harry walked into the room.

Harry's throat tightened and he swallowed hard. Nobody else was supposed to make Draco look rumpled and - and warm. He felt the shock of it in his gut, like an unexpected blow to the midsection. All day he had been doing his best to ignore the fact that Stuart was going to be leaving with Draco, that they were actually together as a couple. As long as he hadn't seen them acting like one, he'd been able to keep pretending it wasn't real. And now ...

Merlin only knew what they'd do when they got back to Draco's flat if this disgraceful behavior was how they acted at a public party but Harry had to stop that line of thinking immediately because his belly was filling up with the sharp hot feeling of a pure jealous rage and a teacup on the tray he'd just set down on the on the table was starting to rattle in its saucer. He hadn't blown anything up without his wand since a particularly bad seventh year Potions class. It would really be rude of him to ruin Pansy's good china.

Harry wished he had just begged off and stayed home from the party. He couldn't believe he had thought that he'd actually be able to hurt Draco just by wearing an old pair of trousers. Nothing Harry could do was going to hurt Draco, now that he had his dashing and debonair and rich new boyfriend who was perfectly thrilling and exciting in every way that Harry was definitely not. Harry clenched his fists as the heat moved from his stomach into his chest and throat. The effort to control himself was harder than he remembered and for a moment he felt like he was being squeezed by a giant hand. He wished fervently that Stuart had been a complete bastard instead of a nice guy, so that he could accidentally hex him and not feel at all bad about it.

"I'll wait for you in the car," Stuart said to Draco, then turned and headed out of the kitchen. The door had barely closed behind Stuart when the rattling teacup finally won and launched itself off the tray.

Draco's hand shot out and snatched the cup from midair just before it shattered against the door. He glanced down at the wayward piece of dishware, arching an eyebrow in his usual way. The knife in Harry's heart twisted one turn deeper.

"Nice catch," Harry said. As he turned to leave he was just glad that his voice hadn't cracked when he said it.

***

The plaintive cries of the ginger kitten sitting on his face were not quite enough to get Harry out of bed the next morning, but the insistent banging on the front door of his flat was probably going to get his landlady in a huff. Grumbling, he pulled on a pair of shorts and yanked open the door. Then all he could do for a few seconds was blink, because Draco was standing on the doorstep in what had to have been the ugliest orange suit Harry had ever seen.

"Have I taught you nothing?" Draco said, sweeping past him into the room, a large bundle clutched in his arms. "I mean, it's not like a rogue Death Eater's going to answer honestly, but you should still at least say 'who is it' if you're going to insist on not keeping the protection wards up around the door." He saw the kitten sitting on the coffee table, and reached out a hand to it, but it hissed and jumped away.

"What do you want," Harry sighed, flopping down onto the couch. A stack of newspapers slid off the cushion and fluttered to the floor, the pictures on the front page clinging to each other and shaking their fists at him as they fell.

"I," Draco started, and then he suddenly seemed very interested in staring at the large gray bundle he was holding. "When did you get a cat?"

"I dunno, sometime. What is that thing, anyway?"

"It's a parachute," Draco said. "Can you believe that Muggles jump out of perfectly good airplanes?"

"I repeat, what do you want?"

Draco tugged at one of the straps of the parachute pack for a minute, and then looked up at Harry from under his lashes in a new and unique way that Harry had not seen before.

"I wanted to tell you," Draco said, "that after giving it some careful thought this morning while I was very high in the sky and waiting to plummet to my certain death, I think I might have been wr- what I mean is, perhaps I was mist- er, I may have been too hasty in my departure."

"Too hasty," Harry repeated, laughing bitterly. "I thought you missed the exhilarating feeling of being alive."

"I don't have to jump out of a fucking airplane to feel alive. What do you think I am, insane?"

"You must be," Harry said coldly, "if you think you can run off for a couple of weeks and have your flings and then come back here and expect everything to be just peachy again."

"I don't expect that," Draco said. "I wouldn't expect that. I just want to know if - do you think there's a chance that we could maybe try this again?"

They looked at each other. For just a moment, Harry dared to hope that maybe Draco was sincere. Maybe they could start over again, in fact. It might work this time.

Except, he thought, his eyes falling on the pile of newspapers, nothing had really changed. And wasn't that the whole point in the first place?

"I need it to be real," Harry said finally. "And the problem is that, for you, right now, it isn't. You're just lonely or something, and you're probably bored again already, and that's all that this is about. You were too scared to jump out of a plane and so you came back here where everything was nice and safe. But after a few days back here you'll remember why you left in the first place, and I'm not getting my hopes up just for you to break my heart again. Now please go. And take your parachute with you." This time his voice did crack, but Harry didn't care any more.

Draco sighed. "Fine, I'll go if that's what you really want. But I want you to have something," he said, reaching out with his left hand. Harry just looked at him. Draco motioned with his hand. "Go on, take it."

Frowning, Harry reached out and touched the glittering golden object in Draco's hand - and there was a wrenching at his gut, a pulling from the middle and for a moment the old panic set in a portkey oh fuck a portkey and then the world steadied around him. When the spinning stopped he blinked with surprise.

They were standing on the side of a dusty lane in front of a large cottage. There were tall, leafy trees in the yard, and red and yellow flowers grew on either side of the stone walkway that led to the front door. There were birds twittering in the sky and butterflies alighting on bushes. Bright curtains hung in the windows. Ivy trailed up the stone chimney. All in all, it was a very cozy looking scene.

Harry turned to Draco with a frown. "What is this?"

"It's yours. Well, I had intended it to be ours, but ..." he trailed off.

Harry looked around in awe.

"I thought I'd missed being single," Draco went on. "I thought it would be more fun, coming and going as I pleased, eating what I liked when I felt like it, leaving my dirty socks on the bathroom floor. And for the first two weeks I was gone, it was fun, like taking a vacation from responsibility. But then I realized that there were just too many things missing."

He put his arm around Harry's waist, and Harry didn't pull away. "I missed waking up in a warm bed with your arms wrapped around me and those little whuffling breaths you always make so soft on the back of my neck. I missed the sound of the television and I missed the way you always have newspaper smudges on your fingers." Harry laughed a little at that, and as he looked at the beautiful little cottage, he felt something inside his chest let loose, like a clock that had been wound too tight and had finally started to tick again.

"I thought I wanted something different. But that wasn't what I wanted at all," Draco said, more softly than Harry thought his voice could have ever been. "I just want you, and I want you to be happy."

At that, Harry gave up, gave in, put his mouth over Draco's and couldn't quite muffle the whimper of joy that escaped from his throat.

When they finally pulled apart for a breather, he looked carefully into Draco's eyes. "I'm the same old ordinary person you left," Harry said softly. "It's a lovely house, and I can't wait for us to move in here. But I'm not going to change."

Draco laughed, pulling Harry back into his arms. "That's what I'm counting on."

Fin