Sweetness

Sweetness

(PG, Harry/Draco)

Draco didn't play any instruments; he didn't have the especially graceful fingertips or sharp ears for it. He didn't sing and he rarely smiled but rather gave trivial and half-flat smirks and sneers that seemed worried at the corners. During the day, when surrounded by his house members, Draco's mouth rested in a permanent frown. He tried to take up painting but his hands shook and his wrists went numb from reaching towards the canvas after only a few short minutes. By the time he was used to the way paint was supposed to look on paper, his wrists were so achingly sore and his fingers so shaky the lines squiggled around the page in what looked like a child's attempt at connect-the-dots.

He could be a remarkable boy. Draco was clever and intellectual and had a peculiar voice that lilted when he was angry. He wasn't ugly or exceptionally tawdry, and could easily scorn nearly everyone with stunningly unreliable rhetoric. He was quite good at playacting, too, something he secretly prized himself on.

Harry Potter didn't know any of this, and didn't particularly want to, and that was why Draco hated him.

Draco had to sit across from him in the tower. He wasn't, naturally, going to rattle at the door and curse like Potter, but was content for the moment to stare at the lone candle in the middle of the dusty wooden floor with his hands neatly folded in his lap.

Draco was much more important than Potter, anyway, with or without a scar. He was witty and had learned that it was far more infuriating to say nothing at all than to retaliate and far more impressive to silently leave the room and keep the door open than to storm out and slam it. Harry Potter knew none of this, obviously, and was a rude orphan who slammed doors and shouted at people across long distances.

"Damnit," Potter cursed, backing away from the indisputably locked door. He shoved a hand into his pocket and looked straight at the candle and very clearly not into the darkness where Draco sat. He frowned and used his free hand to push his glasses up the sloped bridge of his nose. "It's really dark in here," he commented, and his other hand slipped into his other pocket.

In the dim lighting and with the ridiculous way Potter always wore his hair, that all-too familiar bolt-shaped scar was virtually nonexistent. Draco could almost imagine that the boy standing in front of him wasn't Potter, but instead some ordinary, plain boy from Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Innocuous and not quite enough to warrant Draco's solid opinion.

Draco decided to do just that, actually, and it made the situation seem somewhat less tense, if a little more uninteresting. He sat back against the cold, slightly round wall of the tower and watched the plain, scar-less boy with dark hair and biting green eyes look completely uncomfortable. Draco hid a smile.

"Yes. Very dark," he answered vaguely.

"Do you want me to open the windows?" Potter asked him after another silly pause. Draco shrugged easily and tugged his robe around his shoulders.

"Do what you want."

Potter crossed the room and pulled at the length of a bolt, testing it's resistance. Draco's eyes followed him and narrowed even though he realised that both of their wands were still out in the hallway, kept out of reach by the locked door. Potter didn't seem to have the same thought and simply tore at the windows until the wood blocking them fell away.

Early moonlight suddenly filled the room and spilled over the floor, giving it a cold-looking cast. Draco grimaced and pulled away from the intrusion, tucking his legs underneath of him. The tiny yellow candle had been entirely impersonal and he'd liked it that way. Now, with blue-white beams of exposure dancing everywhere, he felt cold and naked and quite unsettled.

Potter nervously wiped the sweat from his palms on his thighs and turned to not-quite face Draco. "Is that enough light, or do you want more opened?"

He wanted to tell Potter to put the damn thing back up and let him suffer in peace but fought it back. "I really don't care, Potter," he sulked, turning his attention away from the boy before he even finished his sentence.

"Okay, then. I'll leave it like this," was the half-snapped response. Potter moved quicker when provoked and he looked more sure of himself. His hands were out of his pockets and balled into fists at his sides and Draco knew that Potter was just aching to call him a prat, but he couldn't. At least not yet, anyway. Irritated, Potter stalked to his side of the tower and dropped heavily to lean against it. "How long do you think we'll be here?" he asked, drawing up one knee and resting a palm on top of it. It struck Draco how often Potter made open gestures just like that one.

"Until Filch or some lucky student decides to come at let us out, naturally," he sighed, picking at a string on his cuff. He wound it tight around his finger and snapped it off, dropping the thing to the floor where it lost its colour against the dirt.

"Great," Potter murmured, just loud enough for Draco to hear.

"We'll be out come morning. We probably won't even miss breakfast, if we're lucky. The corridor is rather populated." His tone was unruffled, quiet and lofty. Perfectly Perfect Malfoy.

"Still doesn't change the fact I have to spend Saturday night sleeping in a tower with you."

"Talk to the walls then, if I'm such a bother," he mocked, carefully keeping himself from rolling his eyes or smirking. A twitch formed just under Potter's left eye. "I didn't ask you for your companionship, did I?"

"Malfoy," Potter shook his head as if terribly baffled. "Why do you still behave like such a prat?"

"And how did I know you were going to say that?" He didn't bother to hide his exasperation; that much was actually genuine. Irritated, he untucked his legs and tapped his nails against the floor. "I haven't done anything to you, Potter. I've stayed in my place and left you and your fickle friends alone. We get caught in a tower, I don't want to talk, and suddenly I'm a tyrant." Draco stopped tapping and studied his fingernails. "Really, Potter, aren't we past fourth year?"

"Just barely," was the canned, lacklustre retort he got. But Potter wasn't patient enough to wait for his turn again. "But you always goad me!"

"Mm. No, from where I stand, your Weasley friend makes snide comments about inbreeding while Professor Snape's back is turned during Potions and he's promptly elbowed in the ribs by that fuzzy-haired Granger girl."

"She hasn't got fuzzy hair."

"That's not the point. I don't say anything. In fact, I think that has to be the most slanderous thing I've said about your company in all of this year."

Potter blinked at him through those ridiculous black glasses and from under his ridiculous messy black hair and decided there really wasn't anything to say. Draco sat back and checked his other cuff for strings and considered getting up to secure the shutters. Moments passed, or perhaps minutes, and Potter was getting fidgety. Draco didn't look up from his cuff and hummed softly.

"Are you in league with Voldemort?" was what Potter blurted out after a remarkable four minutes of silence. Draco couldn't contain his bark of laughter.

"Well, I bet you've been dying to ask that one," and he went back to his cuff and didn't look up. Another beat of tinny silence.

"Well, are you?"

Draco's eyes narrowed fractionally and he glanced up from inspecting his sleeve. "Does it really even matter, Potter, whether or not I give you an answer?"

Potter shifted. "I think it does."

"If I say yay, you'll be sneaking after me in the dungeons in your blasted Invisibility Cloak until you find away to send my family to Azkaban. If I say nay, you'll sneak after me in the dungeons until you find away to see whether or not you need to send my family to Azkaban." He arched an eyebrow.

"You don't think I should trust you?" he curiously questioned.

"Bloody hell, Potter! Not everything is yes or no, all right!?" He cooled instantly and shifted so he was staring at a space on the wall a good deal away from Potter.

"What about maybe?"

Dead silence.

"You are an ignorant bastard, aren't you?"

"Damnit, Malfoy!" And that was all he could seem to say.

"Potter, I'm not a Death Eater, all right? Are we quite finished?" Something hovered on the tip of Potter's tongue, he could tell, probably something as novel as 'why should I trust you?' but it was clamped down on. "Thank you."

"I always thought you were a Death Eater," Potter whispered.

"Yes, and I always thought you were a bloody snake because you're a Parseltongue," Draco snapped back, unaccountably annoyed with the assumption.

"Your father-"

"My father is a spy, Potter," Draco said shortly, "and I've just you the chance to have my family killed."

"I wouldn't do that."

"I guess you wouldn't, would you? Too righteous for that, even if you detest me."

"I never said that!"

"No, and I didn't say you'd do it on purpose." He needed to do something with his hands so he started tapping them against the floor again. "If Voldemort captures you - or anyone you're prone to tell, even - I'll be dead before the next sunup."

A careful, thoughtful pause from Potter, one Draco knew didn't come about very often. If Draco was honest, he'd admit he was being far too harsh on Potter, but a lingering resentment from their years of rivalry kept him from being too objective. Potter wasn't stupid. He was awkward (on the ground) and never seemed to say the right thing. His grades (except for Defence Against the Dark Arts) just didn't compete with Draco's, either.

"I'm not going to tell anyone," he murmured. To prove his point (or to try and intimidate him, Draco couldn't tell yet), he stood up and crossed the floor to where Draco sat.

"Oh?" he managed, and it was as tired as he was.

"No," Potter responded firmly, seating himself in front of Draco.

"And why not?"

Harry Potter smiled, and then he kissed Draco Malfoy.

It wasn't at all like he would have imagined, if he ever would have thought about such a thing. His lips were warm and moist and suckling along the edges of Draco's, catching his surprised gasp with a full, deep kiss. Rapidly, though, his boldness failed him and he surged forward and steadied himself on Draco's shoulders.

By all means, the kiss should have ended there. Potter should have pulled away, Draco should have given a startled cough and they wouldn't have spoken to each other for the rest of the night.

But the kiss didn't stop then.