Always Interrupted

Always Interrupted

Draco decided he liked Ginny because she smelled like Harry, just in that one instant; a combination of summers spent at the Burrow and cut grass and soap. For a moment, her long red hair was dark, and much shorter, and her brown eyes were green, but then he had touched her (thinking she really was Harry), and he'd known that Ginny was Ginny and Harry was Harry, but Ginny was there and willing and understood, and Harry was nowhere to be found.

Draco had been looking for him, much, much earlier, the half-hearted attempt one makes at searching for something they're not really sure they ever possessed, but his knowledge of Harry's hideaways didn't extend much farther than beneath the stands of the Quidditch Pitch and the place where the lake bent like sunlight through the glass prism Professor Binns had passed around in Muggle Studies. Their place.

That's where he had found Ginny, curled up in the afternoon sun beside the large rock Harry had shoved Draco up against in rare show of anger, hard enough to leave a bruise on his left shoulder-blade that Harry had kissed over and over. But that had been months ago, when everything was still so new and he was still learning how to tolerate that bloody, revoltingly Gryffindor desire to rush headlong into disaster and squelch his innate disgust for people with red hair.

He hadn't done too badly, he mused. Ginny was still, but strands of her hair blew across his arms and stuck to his damp chest and got in his eyes. It was very thick, and though darker, a deeper, purer red than the rest of her family, she was still a Weasley, and still a Gryffindor, and she still rushed headlong into disasters like having sex with boys that liked other boys in broad daylight, especially when one of those boys was a Malfoy and the other was a hopeless relic from the past.

She'd slept with Harry, too, he knew, probably in this exact spot. Perhaps that was another reason he liked her; somehow, they'd all been in the same place, enjoyed the same things. He imagined the disgust on Harry's pale face if he ever said that to him, and smiled, because Harry wasn't there to see him or admonish him for having vulgar thoughts about his best friend's little sister.

"I'd rather have vulgar thoughts about you," he said aloud to the silence, and a bird chirped in response, and landed near his head.

"Not you," he told it, overcome by a sudden wave of need to hear Harry's voice. "Not you."

"And not me, either," Ginny said quietly, rolling over, and he felt the superficial loss of her nearness. Her bare skin was very white against the green of the grass, but when he raised his head to meet her eyes, they were brown and steady and calm, just as they were when he had first stumbled upon her.

"It's my birthday," he said.

"I know," she answered. "You were eighteen one hour and six minutes ago."

His face must have betrayed at least an inkling of surprise, because her face twitched as if to smile and then she sat up, not the least bit self-conscious. She reached for her hastily-discarded clothes, and tossed him his shirt from the pile. He put it on, frowning.

She started to leave, but half-turned as a thought struck her. "Harry likes constellations," she said. "And he didn't forget about your birthday, either." She added the last part as an afterthought, standing backlit against a sun just beginning to dip down below the clouds, and she looked much taller and broader than she really was.

"You seem to know an awful lot of things," Draco said. This time, she smiled fully.

"Yes," she agreed, and disappeared around the lake.

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After supper (Harry was conspicuously absent), Draco sent Harry an owl.

It's my birthday, it said. He tied it carefully it to Nevermore's foot (who was really a raven, not an owl, but nobody cared about details like that, except for Harry, who paid too much attention, sometimes.), and she flew off, flapping her great black wings like a herald of death.

Come to think of it, it really irked him that everything was about Harry, now. He had fucked Ginny because of Harry, because she smelled like him after rolling around in the leaves and the grass and the outdoors. He was having an absolutely miserable birthday, because of Harry, and Malfoys did not, under any circumstances, have miserable birthdays.

Harry, who cared about stupid things like ridding the world of evil. And then there was him, Draco, who cared about important things like wearing matching socks, and who was quite possibly part of the evil Harry was eventually supposed to eradicate.

"You aren't evil."

The familiar voice came from the doorway of the Owlery, and Draco didn't even have to squint to recognize Harry's tall, thin frame and the shadows his wire-rimmed glasses cast on his face in the dim light. He had a small package tucked under his arm and Draco's one-line letter in his hand, and as he drew nearer, Draco could tell how tired he was by the way his forehead was creased and the appearance of those tiny lines around the corners of his eyes.

"You've got that 'I'm-going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket' look on your face again," the boy explained. He reached for Draco's hand, but Draco leaned away, purposefully ignoring the surprise on Harry's face.

"Did you have a good day?" Draco asked pointedly. He stepped deftly around Harry and walked out the door without waiting to see if the other boy followed. Harry did.

"No," Harry said. "It was perfectly awful. I didn't forget your birthday, you great stupid prat, if that's what you're on about. I was picking up your present in London."

"I didn't think you forgot my birthday," Draco huffed. The thought had never crossed his mind.

Harry smiled. "Yes, you did."

Draco said nothing, and they walked in silence for a few minutes, until they were nearing the lake and their place, and Harry spoke again.

"You're very hard to shop for, you know. It's hard to buy you something that you don't already have and you hate my taste in clothes..."

"But not in handbags," Draco interrupted seriously, and Harry knew that he was forgiven for disappearing. He grinned, shoving Draco's one-sentence owl into his pocket. There was the curve in the water and there was the rock on the grassy bank. Harry unceremoniously dumped his broom on the ground and shoved the package into Draco's hands.

"Open it," he said.

So Draco did. He undid the cardboard box by hand, because magic just seemed superfluous then, and pulled out what seemed to be some sort of Muggle sign...a door hanger, perhaps. He flipped it over.

Harry looked nervous. "I wasn't sure...but. I hope you like it. I thought it was good, because we're always getting interrupted and Muggles use these all the time at hotels when they want to shag in peace...not that that's all we want to do. But I snuck it from the Ritz-Carlton, and..."

Harry had gotten him a Do Not Disturb sign.

There was Ginny to talk about, and much more that should be said and plenty of things to do and atone for, but Draco kissed Harry and thought that everything else could wait, because it was his birthday and he'd gotten what he wanted.