Ambiguous

Draco’s hands are like his mother’s. Long, thin, with faint blue lines lying closely under the skin. His nails are oval and pale to white at the tip and he cleans and trims them every week, buffs them until they shine, and makes sure the half-moons are cleanly visible above his cuticles. This is the sort of thing that's important.

In Potions, he stares at the irregular nails of Nott, the dirty lines of grit and potion ingredients caught between finger and nail. Nott bites at his cuticles – they are ragged and uneven – and Draco knows he should be repulsed. But he isn't.

He catches Zabini’s hand at lunchtime, when they are alone, or as good as. Zabini has a broad nose but an expressive mouth and his hands are small but square, fingers long and competent. The nails are too long and the cuticles overgrown but Draco finds himself wanting to trace the veins on the back of his inferior's hand and to see how the plump base of his thumb would feel between his teeth.

Draco waves him away, impatiently, and finds he has lost his appetite.

Perversely, he sits on his own hands as much as possible in Transfigurations. Granger gives him an odd look and he pleases himself by transfiguring her delicate silver box into nasty, common brass when she's not looking. He thinks this is more appropriate.

McGonagall gives her an Outstanding, anyway, and Granger opens and closes the lid of the box to show all the secret compartments she has created. The class 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' but Draco fixates on her hands. They are long and slim, dusky brown from a sunny summer holiday. Her nails are glossy – a clear, pinkish polish that is subtle enough to be ignored by professors but still feminine. Utterly uninteresting but, perhaps, he had expected this to be otherwise.

Perhaps not.

His box is ebony and when McGonagall tries to open it, it attempts to bite off her fingers, flashing superbly sharp teeth. She hisses through her own teeth – just as sharp - and Draco remembers the feline that she could be.

In bed that night, before lights-out and while Goyle and Crabbe are comparing the scars they got from training that summer, Draco inspects his feet. Slim, pale, like his hands. He wiggles agile toes and strokes a finger over his arches and around the balls of his feet. Through his eyelashes, he looks the short distance across the room to where Crabbe’s hairy limbs are draped over the edge of his bed. He has fat, hairy feet, the toenails barely visible between bulging flesh.

Draco turns his head away and stretches across his bed, arching his back, pointing his toes and reaching his hands above his head to grasp at something invisible.

Lights-out, curtains surrounding his companions, the green velvet shields him as he unbuttons the shirt of his silk pyjamas. He slides the trousers down and they slither from his ankles like nothingness.

He runs his hand over his chest, brushing past hardened nipples, over the planes of muscle and the hard bumps of hipbone covered by thinly stretched flesh. He is nearly completely hairless, except for a trickle of dull blonde from navel to groin, spreading to springy curls and then to sparse, white-blonde hairs on his thighs, down his legs.

He sits and circles under his knee, where the skin is particularly sensitive, traces the blue veins up his thighs and then the crease where thigh and groin meet, his cock hardening and thickening with the slow building wisps of pleasure.

Draco imagines another body, another pair of hands, unfamiliar to him. They trace the arch of his feet, thumbs digging in to the sensitive flesh, then run up the backs of his legs and drag fingernails over his thighs, catching those fine, blonde hairs.

He leans back onto his pillows, his hair fanning around him, the neat ends brushing his shoulders. He strokes and teases, licks a finger and circles his nipple, a sizzle of magic scoring a line down to where his cock is damp, the flesh silky and hot. Draco sighs out loud.

Snape’s robes are unremittingly bat-like. Draco cannot find it in himself to approve. He likes silks and satins, loves the softness of cotton and cashmere, the sleekness of suede and the scent of leather. Colours and details, embroidery, buttons, those strange Muggle zips, laces and ribbons. At home, Draco has capes of shimmering Chinese silk, waistcoats that reflect the colour of the sky, belts with snapping dragon buckles and boots in the softest of dragonhide.

He strokes his fingers through his hair, dragging long strands down until they reach past his shoulders, resting coldly against the black of his robes. Zambini watches surreptitiously over his eggs and toast and Pansy raises a hand to trace a dark low-light along the back of Draco's head, murmuring something with wide, long-lashed eyes.

He kisses her that afternoon as she seems to expect it, outside in the courtyard where the sun is autumn warm and the breeze foreshadows a hard winter. She closes her eyes and Draco avoids her face, looks beyond her and sees the golden trio of Potter, Granger and Weasley, all of whom look nauseatingly cheerful. They don’t look his way and Draco presses against Pansy, sliding his hands down to the dip in her waist, the flare of her hips. Her breasts are a strange, not altogether pleasant weight against his chest.

Potter turns before entering the school and stands for a moment, watching. The sun catches his glasses and the flicker of blinding white-gold has Draco closing his eyes and tilting his head at the sudden rush of warmth in his veins.

The summer had been strange.

Draco grew, felt his bones stretching, and awoke to aches and pains that no potion could cure. Days outdoors had his skin failing to colour under the sun that permanently shone over Malfoy Manor. His mother was a sybaritic creature who basked in sunlight, and, as such, had a talent for weather casting. Only on the nights when she longed for Lucius would the rain come.

The Dark Lord did not touch the Malfoys during that summer. Letters from Goyle, from Crabbe, Nott and Zambini, described the various ways their families were being perverted to You-Know-Who’s cause but Draco, tucked away, behind walls of sunlight and wards spined with the Malfoy blood, remained free from the acts of Darkness that so thrilled his companions.

He saw his father once. In a room, surrounded by Aurors, in a Ministry fortified by Dumbledore and other great wizards, Draco had knelt in front of a fireplace and saw his father’s face filled with soulless tragedy. Keep your honour, Draconis.

The Dark Lord will not touch the Malfoys. He has no allies in Draco’s family any more.

Draco stands in the showers in the Prefects' Bathroom and lets the water trickle down his sensitive back, over the base of his spine and the curve of his arse. He opens his mouth and tilts back his head, ignoring the sting of shampoo and water in his eyes. He imagines hands, again, a blur of knuckles, strong fingers and broad palms.

He sits behind Potter that morning in Defence Against the Dark Arts. Potter, who twirls a shiny metal object in his right hand, pauses every so often to press his thumb down on one end, eliciting an odd sound – hard and metallic and un-wizardly. Click.

The professor – aged, smelling like books of the Dark kind, and surely not the person who should be educating the heroes of the coming war – pauses in his endless monologue. Perhaps Mr. Potter would like to show the rest of the class his Muggle toy instead of distracting them all with it.

Draco sends Crabbe and Goyle out before dinner to steal the pen from Potter. He justifies this frivolity as his need to ensure his continuing superiority to them, as well as Potter.

Draco lies on his side in bed that night, this pen under his pillow, where Draco can touch it. The metal grows warm under his seeking fingers.

He repeats pen under his breath. Potter’s pen.

He keeps the pen in the inside pocket of his robes, where it bounces against his chest when he moves. Sometimes, when sunlight from the stained glass windows hits him just right and the warmth makes his ears tingle, he thinks of Potter's hands, too.

Draco can still remember Christmases from his childhood, filled with family and acquaintances. Back when his father was at the height of his power and Azkaban and the Aurors had not conspired with Voldemort to pick off the more interesting relations. The Blacks were all mad, of course, his mother included. But that didn't mean they weren't family.

The Christmas after his father’s incarceration is lonely but not unbearably so. Draco long ago learned loneliness is to expected of the Malfoy heir – peerless as he is in his bloodlines and consequence. With his father gone, the mansion seems bigger and his mother smaller than she had been at summer, when Lucius’s absence had been fresh. It snows nearly continuously and sometimes Draco walks into a room and finds her sitting and staring into space.

On Christmas Eve, he gives her the ebony box he transfigured in class and in return he gets everything he asks for. A lingering feeling of loss remains when the last present is taken up to his room by a house elf, but he waits for night to fall before, dressed in evergreen silk pyjamas and a softer-than-soft robe, he reviews the four-scroll list of presents he’d made earlier that month. To his displeasure, he is unable to discover what had been missed.

He lies back amongst soft pillows and rosemary-and-mint-scented sheets. The scrolls of paper roll up, their edges brushing the sliver of skin revealed by the rising hem of his shirt. He breathes a little too fast and thinks of the things he won’t ask for as he closes his eyes.

Draco turns sixteen at the beginning of January and, like most pureblood families, the occasion is celebrated with the release of his first trust fund. His mother escorts him to Diagon Alley for this special occasion and they both stand at the entrance to his own personal vault, where a modest amount of gold, silver and bronze rests in neat piles. As the last seconds of his fifteenth year tick past, Draco finds his eyes glazing.

Next year, he assures himself, will be better.

In his pocket, Potter’s pen rests securely in his clenched fist. And when he turns sixteen, gold and silver falls from the ceiling in a seemingly never-ending stream. At his side, a goblin’s eyes fill with tears.

Draco buys himself the latest broom for his birthday and then makes a promise to himself that he will actually beat Potter this year. Not for his father, not for his house, but because he is sixteen now and, really, metal pens and minor hand obsessions aside, enough is enough.