The Mystery Wife

One extremely cold shower later, Draco took Sevanna's advice and headed down to breakfast in the Great Hall before his exams.

And really, really wished he hadn't.

The Daily Prophets started to arrive by owl before Draco had even managed his first cup of coffee. The arrivals were punctuated with shrieks, with gasps, with howls of laughter, with a "HOW COULD YOU?" and a slap from Ginny Weasley to Harry Potter, and that, of course, immediately sent Potter into a welter of panicked explanations and apologies, with a great deal of pointing and gesturing in Draco's direction.

Draco didn't even have to look at the Prophet to know they'd managed to make the front page. He looked anyway, the second his own arrived.

And really, really wished he hadn't.

He and Potter were sprawled on the ground in a photograph that spanned nearly the entire top half of the page, just above the caption, "The Shagger of the Wizarding World?!"

Draco was gasping with the impact of their fall, Potter was grunting, and to add insult to injury, the photograph was set in an endless motion loop that made it look like Potter was thrusting manfully away on top of him.

Oh, the shouting.

Oh, the hexing.

Oh, the food fight that would be.

Draco drew a mighty breath to express these admirably coinciding desires.

"What the HELL are you pointing at me for, Potter?!" he shouted across the Great Hall, flinging the Prophet down onto the Slytherin table. "YOU'RE the lightweight that can't hold his firewhisky!"

"And YOU'RE the one who said we should get drunk!" Potter fired back. "Let's go to the Hog's Head, get drunk and bury the hatchet, you said! It sounded like a good idea at the time!"

"It did?" Ron Weasley said dubiously. "Since when is going anywhere with Malfoy a good idea?"

"It sounds like it would have been an excellent idea, if it hadn't happened during exams," Hermione Granger threw her two knuts in crisply.

"Nobody sodding asked you, Granger! It would have been fine, if he hadn't had the drinking experience of a First Year and the coordination of a Blast-Ended Skrewt!"

"And what kind of drinking experience did you expect Harry Potter to have, exactly?" she asked archly. "He's been a little busy saving the world."

Potter went red. "Hermione, stop helping me," he begged.

Draco went white to the lips and snatched up the Prophet again, scanning it furiously. "Who took this photo? Who wrote the article? GOD, let it be Rita Skeeter... I'll destroy the bitch. She'll never work again. I'll see her grubbing for cockroaches to sell for liquor money, before I'm through with her."

No such luck, unfortunately. If it was Rita Skeeter, she must have recognized the older form of the boy who'd once given her so much juicy inside information at Hogwarts, because the article claimed to have been written by an Anita Clue, based on a photograph by a Mundungus Fletcher.

The writing style, though, was pure Skeeter.

In a life marked by tragedy and heroism, it read, there can be little doubt that the Boy Who Lived is embarking on a whole new adventure. A dangerous and thrilling adventure, no doubt, filled with the lure of illicit and forbidden love, the love that dare not speak its name. And would any such tale be complete without the joining, as it were, of two former enemies? Young Draco Malfoy, the utterly beautiful son of Death Eaters Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, was a well-known rival of Harry Potter's at Hogwarts for many years. But, my dears, was passion secretly brewing, sublimated into years of fights and schoolboy pranks? Were all the hexes and insults they traded a secret code of adoration? We can only wonder, as neither boy was available for comment after this photograph was taken in the Main Street of Hogsmeade last night. We must hope that the Boy Who Lived is not being lured into a tragic mistake, or worse, a trap, perhaps fueled by a powerful Love Potion.

"Dung took that photo?!" Potter shouted. "I'll kill him!"

"After the NEWTs, you can kill him after the NEWTs!" Granger cried, catching Potter's arm and holding on for dear life as he tried to storm off.

"Do you think we could both kill him, without everyone assuming we're shagging during THAT, too? Because if not, I'll let you have him-- that's a little too kinky for me," Draco remarked with acid sarcasm, and flung the paper down again with hands that were trembling with fury and humiliation. His reputation was utterly destroyed. Again. "Do you have any idea what my parents are going to say?!"

Potter stopped in his tracks, and Granger finally stopped tugging on his sleeve. The look he gave Draco seemed genuinely sympathetic, and perhaps a little wistful, and it occurred to Draco that Potter probably would have loved to have had parents to yell at him. "Look, Malfoy, this isn't your fault. Your parents shouldn't blame you, they should blame me. I mean, look at us. I'm the one fumbling around on top..."

"And that right there should tell everyone that we weren't actually shagging," Draco drawled, still shaking with the effort of keeping his temper. Yes, they bloody well should blame him, everybody should. But the Golden Boy could do no wrong, of course, and Draco was the evil Death Eater bastard plying him with love potions...

"Everyone knows we weren't bloody shagging," Potter sighed. "Look at us. Still fully clothed, aren't we? Besides, it's us. Who'd believe we had some weird furtive secret passion for each other?"

Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil raised their hands immediately.

Granger glared at them. "Alright, now that we've heard from the Brainless Bint Brigade, would anyone with a triple digit IQ care to weigh in?" The girls glared back at her.

"Thank you," Draco said in Granger's direction, also glaring at them. "For your information, the mad passionate furtive love affair lasted two hours and consisted of a bottle of firewhisky, some bitching about the war, and several loudly and badly sung rounds of 'A Wizard's Staff'. During which, on the way back, Potter tripped and knocked us both down. On a street which by then had two dozen people leaning out the windows, wondering what all the bloody noise was. Shagging would have been, if not an impossibility, more exhibitionistic than even I'M willing to be."

The two idiot girls gave up glaring at Granger, and giggled at Draco instead.

"Mr. Potter," came a dark, silken voice at Draco's shoulder. "Mr. Malfoy." Draco whirled to find Snape's ghost, looking rather paler than it had, floating and translucent in midair beside him. "A word of advice. I will not bother asking if I might be so forward, as I intend to be, and nothing short of Armageddon will stop me. I am given to understand that you brought three fugitive Death Eaters in to the Ministry last night, and helped to uncover a larger conspiracy. By this time tomorrow, you will be heroes, and the Prophet will be eating its own words and falling all over itself to retract today's unfortunate article. You need only suffer this indignity for another twenty-four hours or so, and in the meantime, you both have an extremely difficult NEWT to pass on very little sleep. I would recommend you find a pot of coffee, down it, have as much breakfast as you think you can stomach without returning it to the world in any spectacular fashion, and focus on your NEWTs. Tomorrow will be a marked improvement, I suspect."

Lucius' eagle owl flew in through the nearest window with a red howler in its talons, and Snape calmly destroyed the letter unopened, in a swift burst of blue flame. The owl screeched in protest as its package disappeared, or possibly as its feet were burned, and another flick of Snape's wand sent it away again, having apparently forgotten the entire affair in mid-shriek.

"I do not believe you particularly need to hear that, today," Snape said mildly to Draco.

Draco simply looked back at him for a moment, wide-eyed. He was probably showing noticably more than gratitude on his face, but just then, he couldn't be arsed.

Mostly because he was fighting back the words that were coming to him FAR too easily of late. My god, I love you. Will you marry me?

No. Oh, buggering hell, no.

For once thing, no sane person would HAVE him at the moment.

For another, students did not propose to the bloody Headmaster. Not even graduating students.

Certainly not when the Headmaster in question was also male, however temporarily. And supposed to be DEAD.

"Thank you, Professor Snape," he managed to murmur back, without either embarrassing himself or blowing their cover story. Ten points to Slytherin for a small, but unexpected and unlikely, victory.

Snape's thin lips quirked in amusement, those dark eyes curiously affectionate as they rested on Draco. "Win or die, Mr. Malfoy."

The old Slytherin adage had never been more true than it was for the pair of them.