Children of the Eighth Day

Not the normal kind, either. It was some sort of garishly turquoise Muggle monstrosity which had been carefully applied in artful loops and swirls all around the crown of his head. A great quantity of it had also smeared onto his satin pillowcases, and he was fairly certain that the House Elf who had been stoking the fire when he woke was also trying desperately not to laugh. He could tell by the way she kept stabbing herself in the foot with the poker.

His whole head reeked of spearmint, and when he trudged into the bathroom to survey the damage, the mirror began to snicker.

"Potter," he growled.

It had started rather maliciously in their last year at Hogwarts, though he couldn't remember who had perpetrated the first atrocity. Billywig stings in his breakfast cereal, which begat Fire Slugs in Potter's satchel, which begat itching powder in his shampoo, which begat sleeping draughts in Potter's pumpkin juice, which begat half of a Flobberworm still twitching in Draco's bed.

That had been the piece de la resistance. The declaration of war.

Of course, after that, they had all gotten rather preoccupied with the actual war...

Draco scowled the mirror into silence and waved his hand at the tub compelling the hot water to spill into the porcelain with a rush of steam. "I'll need as many oranges as you can find. At least three dozen. Right away," he said to the limping House Elf as he turned to shut the bathroom door, "and cancel my morning appointments." He glanced back at the mirror and shook his dentifrice decorated head. "Something's come up," he murmured.

It was an odd sort of arrangement to have when you woke with something foul stuck to your head and knew it to be an invitation to lunch. The blue gel he was currently soaking out of his hair told him that Potter was back from Africa with more certainty than if he'd received the news in the man's own hand.

An odd sort of arrangement indeed. Especially because he wouldn't dare call it a friendship. Not even to himself.

What had started as rivalry had morphed into blind hatred over the years. The kind of hate it is only possible to feel when one is terribly young, when everything is a matter of life and death, and when passion boils beneath every word, every action, every look. He remembered all too well that deceptively cheerful sunny morning when old Dumbledore had stared at them across his desk and informed them that they would have to put aside their hatred for the greater good.

Like asking a raven to stop being black. Impossible.

Dumbledore had too much faith in his fellow man even then, even when his fellow man was a pair of angst-filled teenage boys who would just as soon have hexed each other into hospital as shared the same breathing space. Too much faith by half.

And yet...

That was when the pranks had begun. Because they could not lash out at one another in public, they did so in private, leaving roaches in the chocolate box and dungbombs in the inkwells; simple pranks, childish at first, then increasing in severity, bordering ever closer to dangerous or even reckless. A public humiliation, a private slight, a series of machinations in a sinister game of one-upmanship to decide who was the better man.

A magical pissing contest, if truth be told.

And then there was no more time for games. Dumbledore, in his infuriating ineffability, had guessed correctly once again. Oh, he had tried to explain it when it was all over; put it down to some ridiculous self-fulfilling prophecy more ancient and more obscure than even Voldemort's hoards would investigate. A load of fairytale hoo-ha Draco had thought at the time, but it had worked. Two halves of a whole. Two sides of a coin. A yin and a yang. They even looked the part; one with his absurdly noble expressions and appallingly anarchic black hair, and one always cool and calculating under silver white blond. The four houses united under not one, but two leaders.

Because Salazar himself would have climbed from his crypt and done the Highland Fling before his namesakes would have followed Potter.

Draco, on the other hand, had been born to be a prince. He simply wasn't wearing the mantle he had always assumed was his.

Life, as they say, went on. The world rebuilt itself in much the same way it was before. There was no great revolution, no sweeping reforms, and while talking about "purity" was now dreadfully passé, blood was still what counted in the right circles. The children of the war had earned their N.E.W.T.s in life, were given their ticker tape parades, and slunk off to nurse the wounds that no one could see. They had survived -- mostly intact. Mostly whole.

But because there were parts of them still missing, parts still not whole, it had somehow not seemed strange when one morning, months after he'd sold the Manor and purchased a more fashionable flat, months after the reporters stopped banging on his windows and the paparazzi only flashed their cameras at him when he went out to the clubs, months after he thought he'd put them all behind him, he woke with his living room filled from wall to wall with Bubotuber plants squirting pus all over his leather sofa, antique armoire, and bewildered kitchen staff.

Later that day he'd received an invitation to lunch at the Ritz. Such was Potter's way of saying hello.

Scrubbing the last of the water from his head with a clean towel, Draco glanced at himself in the mirror. He had chosen his best black suit with a black silk turtleneck and his damp hair stood up in the perfectly mussed style that was currently in vogue. He'd joked at their last encounter that Potter's hairstyle had finally come into fashion.

He was rather annoyed to note, however, that not even his most expensive aftershave could completely mask the clinging minty fresh scent.

In the living room, the House Elves had dutifully left several large wooden crates of oranges for him. He glanced at his watch even as he drew his wand and smiled. With a flick of his wrist, the fruit disappeared, and Draco fancied he could almost hear the outraged yelling amid the staccato of fruit cascading down on Potter's head as he drank coffee in the kitchen of his dismally homey flat. It was Draco's way of accepting the invitation.

Because turn about, after all, is simply fair play.