Kneeling

“Want to fuck me?”

Harry had heard that sentence a lot recently. He suspected that Draco knew exactly what it did to him when he said things like that, perfectly comfortable with articulating things that Harry couldn’t even quite think without blushing fiercely. It turned him on like crazy, making his whole body sit up eagerly, like a puppy hoping for a treat. It worked just as well this time around.

Harry swallowed and nodded, reaching out. As always, Draco was eager and responsive under his touches. He loved that, loved how capable and sexy it made him feel.
He let his hand slide between Draco’ legs, pressing one fingertip against his opening, and felt Draco flinch minutely. He drew his hand back quickly. Damn, should have used lube, but usually Draco didn’t mind when he put a fingertip in dry, as long as he was gentle.

“Sorry, did I hurt y- Fuck!“

His hand was wet with blood - not much of it, but still, how on earth had Draco gotten hurt there? They hadn’t fucked for a week, so that couldn’t be the reason. “What -?”

Draco just shrugged dismissively. “Cleaning spell. It does that sometimes. Wait, I’ll just -“
He reached for his wand, but Harry intercepted him, grasping his wrist sharply. He knew he was gripping too hard, could almost feel the bones shift under his fingers. He let go immediately when Draco flinched.

“Sorry. What do you mean, “it does that sometimes”? Has that happened before? That’s got to be painful!”

Draco shrugged. “Look, Harry, in the wizarding world it’s considered polite to take care of things like that before fucking. I’m sorry if this bothers you - I’ll make sure not to get any blood on you the next time, all right? I was careless. Sorry.”

Harry shook his head, shocked.

“Draco, this - you’re not supposed to hurt yourself! This is supposed to be good for both of us!”

Draco looked surprised and strangely pleased at that, like he’d really thought Harry was just shocked about getting blood on his fingers. Harry didn’t quite know whether to be insulted by that or once again worried that Draco was sleeping with him when he trusted him so little. He really should take better care of himself. (And wasn’t it fucking strange to be worrying about a Malfoy? But he did. He did.)

He’d endured Harry’s callous treatment of him during their first weeks together, without even so much as a complaint, and now this. Draco wasn’t exactly the most selfless of persons, so what on earth was it about Harry or their relationship that brought out this side of him?

“Don’t use that spell again, please”, he said, reaching out to touch Draco’s shoulder. Draco shrugged and looked down, but didn’t move away from Harry’s touch. He never did.

“All right. If it’s that important to you.”

“Damn well it is important to you! I’m not doing this at the price of your health! But anyway, there has to be a spell for this that doesn’t hurt you, right?”

Draco sighed. “I’m probably just doing it wrong”, he admitted grudgingly. “It’s not like I can look it up in the library, with half the school around!”

Harry didn’t argue any more at that point, but he didn’t fuck Draco that night, either. He did try some inexpert healing magic, which Draco claimed helped with the pain at least, although he might have been making that up.

Harry spent the next day in the library. It took hours of sifting through dusty tomes to find what he was looking for, all the time feeling Madame Pince’s knowing stare between his shoulderblades, terrified that someone might come in and see him in this particular section. After the first five minutes he was already sneezing from the dust, and flushed bright red with embarrassment even before that. Still, it was worth it just to see Draco’s eyes light up when he gave him the copy of the correct version of the spell he had meticulously written down.
Draco gave him the smile that always made Harry’s stomach clench a bit, the one that made Harry feel like the first person to ever do anything nice for him. Which was stupid, of course, seeing as how Draco was such a spoiled brat. It was kind of disconcerting how much he enjoyed that smile.

Time passed, and Harry got used to his very own kinder, gentler version of Draco. Of course he knew that he was probably not the only one who got to see this version - surely Draco was that way with his friends, too. In fact, he was probably that way all the time with anyone except Harry. But he still kind of liked the illusion.

And then suddenly his Draco, the one who let Harry fuck him, the one who was witty and sarcastic instead of snide and supercilious, started to blend into Malfoy, the asshole from class. Or maybe it was not all that sudden - maybe it had been happening for a while now, and he had simply missed the signs, as he managed to miss many other things at the time. But that was hindsight. At the time, it came as a complete surprise.


*********


“I will remind you again that this particular potion takes extreme care and diligence. This means, of course, that most of you imbeciles will not be able to brew it. I would however appreciate it if you at least tried not to blow up my classroom with your stupidity. You have five minutes left.”

Harry bit his lip and stirred the contents of his cauldron doubtfully. It didn’t really have the right cerulean colour, even if it was kind of blue, and this potion was volatile enough that he didn’t want to add the next ingredient before he was sure that the mixture was absolutely right. As much as he loathed Snape, he’d also learned to heed his warnings carefully, especially as this time he had repeated them several times. He didn’t really want to blow the whole dungeon up, as ghastly a place as it was.

He read through the ingredients at the blackboard again.

Three pieces of carrott - check.
An ounce of chopped frog’s liver -check.
Six sliced dried poke roots - damn.

That was it, then. He’d added only three of the roots instead of six. There was no time left to prepare more now. The careful slicing of the tough dried roots had taken him an eternity, and it had to be done especially properly and accurately for this potion. There wasn’t anywhere near enough time left to do three more of them.

He swore softly under his breath. Hermione turned to give him a concerned look. “Harry? Something wrong?”

“I haven’t got enough poke roots. We need six, not three. Must have skipped a line, or something.”

“Oh Harry…” Hermione sounded as concerned as she always did when he screwed something up at school, but this time he shared her concern. He needed a good potions grade if he ever wanted to be an auror, and this wasn’t the first lesson where he’d mangled a potion this year, either. Damn.

“Here, take those”, a voice whispered beside him, and Harry turned to see Malfoy pushing three neatly cut roots into his direction.

He stared at them suspiciously, trying to see where the hook was. They looked perfectly all right, evenly cut, nicely dried, and coloured just the right shade of purple-brown. What on earth could Malfoy have done to them - and more importantly, what would they do to his potion if he added them? They’d probably make his cauldron explode or something. He narrowed his eyes. “What are you playing at, Malfoy?”

Malfoy rolled his eyes impatiently. “Those are perfectly all right. In fact, I was planning to use them myself.”

“So why are you giving them to me?”

“Because I somehow read that as nine roots, and if you hadn’t said anything, I’d have added all of them. Which would have blown up the roof, and probably half the school along with it, so you can have them.”

Harry could have sworn that Malfoy looked embarrassed as hell, but it was hard to decide clearly over the tumult of thoughts in his own head. What the fuck? And that was Draco’s mischievous smile flickering in Malfoy’s eyes, the one that was a mix of a little your stupidity amuses me and a lot just as paranoid as me, aren’t you?

It was an expression without any real malice. Seeing it on Malfoy, in the middle of potions class, surprised him so much that he took the roots meekly, as if in a daze. It wasn’t like it mattered - the potion was ruined anyway. He was going to get another bad grade in any case, so what if he blew something up on top of that?

Still, he took care with adding the roots, stirring them in one by one, even counting the turns of the ladle - and the potion turned brilliantly blue.

He stared at it, surprised. It looked exactly like it was supposed to, which of course wasn’t possible. He was very, very careful when he added the next ingredient, ready to duck under Hermione’s desk the second the cauldron started to do something unexpected. (Hiding under one’s own desk, he knew from painful experience, was generally a very bad strategy. It provoked things like boiling potion dripping on the exposed part of your lower back, or the desk collapsing on top of you, complete with searing hot cauldron.)

But the only unexpected thing that happened was that the potion did exactly what it was supposed to do - turning a pale shade of violet and starting to smell faintly of mint.
He poked it with the ladle. It didn’t turn into anything awful. (Neither the ladle nor the potion.) Out of complete paranoia, just waiting to be unpleasantly surprised by something, he pretty much butchered the adding of the next few ingredients, but at that point, the critical phase had passed. While the potion didn’t stay quite perfectly within prescribed parameters, it turned out pretty decent anyway. For once, even Snape refrained from snide comments.

And Malfoy was smiling at him. Harry stumbled out of the classroom, still staring at that familiar, completely-out-of-place smile. Of course fate had to seize the moment and make him stumble backwards over the threshold. He suspected that it was mostly the continued absence of the expected taunts that made him lose his balance and twist his back quite as badly as he did.