Fifty Galleons

Fifty Galleons

He never told her. He never told anyone, but he never told her especially.

It would have been cruel to tell her, he reasoned. They had had enough pathos and conflict and epic battles to last a lifetime. Dank dungeons that reeked of overbrewed potions and the particular scent that followed the nasty end of a nasty journal, maleficent ink and malevolently crackling pages. When things like that were written across your childhood memories, you didn't need a marital spat to top it all off.

Besides, he didn't understand it himself. How could he explain it to her?

She was too practical to ferret (what a cringingly apt word!) out the meaning between the clumsy phrases he tried to work out in his head, those moments he thought of telling her. Someone else might have been able to understand the things he was too cowardly to say out loud--someone like Hermione, maybe, who seemed to have an intrinsic and entirely unsettling affinity for fishing the truth out of people. It was because she wasn't afraid to dive in, he thought. She rolled up her sleeve and plunged her fingers into the clam's mouth with barely a grimace and extracted, wriggling, the naked truth.

But when he thought of telling her, he began to shrivel in anticipation of the face she would make. She'd look just like her mother (and it was happening every day, more and more. He felt guilty for noticing the way her hips had thickened and her face gone ruddier and fleshier, but he couldn't help it. She was no longer the willowy young woman he had married, eyes starry with admiration for The Hero Who Saved Them All, never mind it had mostly been by playing dead. She was--he swallowed--motherly. It made sense, she was a mother. But still--). Her hair would verily light on fire and she would turn on him, perhaps brandishing a spoon, and unleash a flurry of questions upon his bowed head, and he couldn't handle that, he couldn't. He could handle utter evil and devastating choices, but Ginny Potter, nee Weasely, was quite simply beyond him at the best of times.

The memory was not in his Pensieve, as a result of this. Not that he thought she would snoop. She wouldn't, it would be beneath her. But he didn't take the chance. Not to mention that his was already nearly to the brim with gruesome visions of the violence that had permeated the world for those unbearable months. A mottled ear, lying separated from its owner. The look on his sister-in-law's face when she realized that her husband was to be scarred for life. The day they explained to Teddy Lupin that his parents were not simply on an extended vacation.

No. All of that was horrific, but she knew of it. This was, this was private.

It was so long ago, anyway. Sixth year, in the months before he was dating Ginny. He was sixteen, for God's sake, and had only a few sloppy kisses to his name. His days were shot through with sexual frustration. It was only to be expected that it would escape somehow, the way electricity escapes through your fingertips and takes you by surprise, and the one on the receiving end as well.

Only...only the identity of the recipient surprised him almost as much as the friction shock.

He'd been obsessed with him that year, more so than the preceding years. He followed him, learnt his schedule off by heart, and generally stalked him more thoroughly than he ever had Ginny.

And that night had been a bad night. He'd talked to Ron and Hermione in the common room, flicking his wand absently to see the fireflies zoom in from the open window and immolate themselves in the larger, brighter flame of the open blaze in the hearth. It was the little cruelties that you stopped noticing, after a while, he thought as he did so.

"Harry, will you stop," Hermione had hissed, exasperated.

"Why, going to set up a society for fireflies?" Ron had shot back. "What disgusting bodily function are you going to name this one after?"

"I thought maybe you'd give me some ideas, seeing as you're mature enough to make about sixty jokes a day with one of them as the punchline," Hermione snipped.

Harry wasn't really listening; he'd spotted Ginny across the room with Dean. Dean said something with a tender (Harry substituted "sappy") look on his face, and tipped Ginny's chin up to kiss her softly.

He looked quickly back down at the map in his lap. It was completely and utterly devoid of Malfoy, as per usual. Pity. It would have been nice to punch something, right now. He had a distinct compulsion to toss the map into the flames along with all the firefly ashes, but he knew he'd regret it later, if not for the loss then for the fact that Hermione would be certain never to shut up again.

"--I--but--is that even possible--?" Hermione squeaked, her face rather pink.

Ron snorted.

She made a rude gesture at him that took Harry by surprise; she wasn't usually one for things like that. "You imbecile!" she flung at him.

Ron opened his mouth, but Harry stood before he could speak and put the map in his robes along with his wand. "I can't handle the bickering, be back in a while," he said dully, and swept from the room. They watched him go with open mouths and ashen faces.

He didn't care. Ginny and Dean were inching ever closer to the boy's dormitory stairs.

In the hallway it was far from peaceful; two second-year girls rushed giggling toward the Fat Lady, pursued by a lanky, good-looking third-year boy who was rumored to be the most likely candidate for Seeker when Harry left the school, and his pudgy sidekick, who was huffing and puffing along next to him. Sweeney--was that the Quidditch player's name?--yes, it must be, it was--was amusing himself by enchanting the girls' hair to curl of its own accord and sing loudly:

Susannah and Trudy
You play games with my soul!
So heartlessly, cruelly
Oh, do it some more!

Cheesy little bugger. Harry scowled.

The map was still Malfoyless the second try. Harry was about to put it away in despair when, to his astonishment, a small dot labeled Draco Malfoy appeared out of thin air on the seventh-floor corridor and began to make its strident way towards the stairs.

Harry broke out into a run.

The portraits scowled at him on the way, but he didn't care, he almost had him, he could feel it in his bones. He would prove him to be--something solid he could fight against. Not this vague creeping sense of dread that had infiltrated the school. He couldn't stand that, it was like having his hair plucked out a single strand at a time. It made him ache to hurt something.

He bribed a stairway into turning the right way and pelted up its obliging length, pausing only to snap, "Mind your own damn business," to the inquisitive knight who wished to know if he had a young lady he was intent upon wooing. The knight drew back, offended in an aloof sort of way. Knights were like that. They got annoyed if you made fun of their helmet plumes, too. Ron had made a peacock joke in fourth year and had been forced to avoid the knights' portraits all year, as they shouted fourteenth-century obscenities at him whenever he came near.

Harry swung around into the stairwell and nearly ran over Draco Malfoy, who sat hunched at its foot.

They both sprang back, drawing wands, breathing hard. Harry was pleased; it seemed Malfoy was as ready to fight as he was.

"What are you doing here, Potter?" Malfoy snarled, but Harry couldn't help noticing it was not up to its usual standard of drawl and his robes were crooked and--was he wearing spectacles?

"Went for a walk--are those glasses, Malfoy?"

Malfoy colored and his hand went to his face, snatching the frames from his nose. "I need them for reading. Not that you'd know anything about that. What was it you got in History of Magic again, a D?"

"I had a reason--"

"Sure, your little disfigurement. I suppose we can't let exams get in the way of vanity."

"I--that's--not the point!" He huffed out a breath through his nose, thriving strangely on the familiar combat. "Why are you here?"

"Project for class, none of your business," Malfoy said smoothly. "Why, afraid I'll pass you up? It's a bit late for that."

"I know you're doing something up there. I want to know what."

"I'm running a brothel," Malfoy said without a glimmer of expression. "It's twenty-five Galleons a girl, fifty a boy if you swing both ways..."

"I--what? A broth--"

"Oh, no, you can't have taken me seriously," Malfoy drawled. "It's too good, my sides are splitting."

Harry glared at him.

"Well, Potter?"

"Well, what?"

"Will that be twenty-five or fifty?" Malfoy asked patiently.

Harry blinked. He knew what the real question was, and he shouldn't have had a doubt. Except that sometimes it wasn't always Ginny he thought about. The other person always, sometimes even more, on his mind, was in front of him, with that infernal curl to his too-red lips and the light from the skylight somewhere in the ceiling giving his hair a satin-white sheen.

So Harry didn't answer, he did what he knew how to do, which was hit at solid things and hope they went away. He was the epitome of a hero, and that was his one failing--he was far too simply constructed, left helpless in the wake of tangled feelings. He solved them physically, or not at all.

His first punch left a strawberry mark on Malfoy's cheekbone. His second simply resulted in the crack of a skull against concrete. And only when he was sitting on his stomach, beating the shit out of Draco Malfoy, did he realize that Malfoy wasn't even fighting back. He just lay there and let Harry hurt him.

That wasn't how it was supposed to be.

He was too thin, with bruised skin where his eyes met his nose, in that thin skin that was too dark and made him look pinched and worried. His mouth looked abnormally red on the inside, like a cut in his face, but maybe that was just because he was so pale. His ribs pressed like skeletal fingers into Harry's thighs.

Harry stopped, and really looked at him.

There must have been something like pity, or revulsion, in his eyes. Something to that effect, something that betrayed the fact that he thought under his bedclothes that Malfoy's lips curled like cupid's bows at the corners and detracted from his Slytherin swagger. A truly nasty person didn't have a mouth like that, no matter how he tried to hide it by twisting it into sneers and malicious grins.

Harry leaned closer and Malfoy's eyes widened and this was more frightening to him than being hit by Harry could have been, and that was satisfying, it was this that made him press his mouth to Malfoy's for a butterfly instant.

There was a breathing, terrified instant and then Harry leapt to his feet and dashed out of the stairwell, shoes echoing against the stone walls.

Malfoy's face was pale and shocked against the darkness as he stood, and Harry heard him call, "So that'll be fifty Galleons, then?" because he was a bastard who was never at a loss for how to say something.

Not like Harry.

Harry, who had found and married Ginny. Harry, who watched her bustle around their children like a great motherly hen and wondered, sometimes, when he hadn't had his coffee, what he'd gotten himself into. Harry, who had no idea how to tell her something that seemed important, even though it wasn't, hadn't been for over nineteen years, since the war.

He saw him at the station and felt his chest contract when he saw him with his family. Their eyes connected briefly over the heads of their offspring, and then Harry looked away, and turned back to Ginny, dutifully. She opened her eyes wide at him and still he never told her.

He never told anyone, but he never told her especially.