Then He Opened His Mouth

Rating: PG-13 to start, working to R later
Pairing: HP/DM
Summary: Harry Potter has a “despise-hate” relationship with Draco Malfoy. Slashy goodness will ensue, so if you don’t like slash, don’t bother reading.
Disclaimer: I don\'t own them and I don’t want to. I’m just borrowing them for a bit, but they will be returned, no harm done.
Feedback: Please read and review, but no flames, please!
A/N: Thanks to a wonderful beta and a good (and reassuring) friend, Chark and Laura. Any errors left behind will ine ine alone. Thoughts indicated by parenthesis.


Chapter Two
Beloved Enemies

I really can\'t remember when exactly it was that I\'d allowed Harry Bloody Potter to get under my skin. That\'s not at all how I\'d intended it to be. If I were going to be honest, I\'d have to say that the skinny boy with the enormous green eyes I\'d spotted in Madam Malkin\'s showed definite potential. You know the type. He was a loner, and a bit on the scruffy side. I\'d thought that I might be able to manipulate him, you know? That sad scrap of a boy I spied standing there would be so grateful that I\'d deemed him good enough that he would allow me to mold him into my mirror image.

I couldn\'t have been any more wrong if I\'d tried.

Of course, back on that day I\'d had no clue that he was The Harry Potter. The famous Boy-Who\'d-Fecking-Lived. Scar and all, courtesy of the Dark Lord himself. Who knew Potter would end up being such a pathetic slip of a boy? Surely not I. But apparently father had recognized him, and he\'d made certain to point out my error. He\'d even gone so far as to threaten me if I didn\'t befriend Potty once we got on the Hogwarts Express. By that time Potty already had the Weasel latched onto his side. I\'d have had a better chance of befriending a Dementor than I would have had molding Harry Potter for my own purposes.

And for once, I\'d been right.

Believe it or not, I was responsible for Potty becoming the youngest seeker in the History of Hogwarts. Had I not nicked Longbottom’s rememberall and flew off with it, Potty would never have raced to the rescue. And that old battleaxe McGonagall would never have seen his brilliantly stunning effort to retrieve it. As I\'d seen it, that meant Potter owed me. It had been a shame he had not seen it that way. From then on, we became sworn enemies.

Through the years, hating Potty and his friends had become like sport to us. I\'d provoked him, duelled him, and treated him like scum at every opportunity. And he\'d just look at us with his goofy grin, like butter wouldn\'t melt. I can\'t count the number times that I\'d wanted to twat the face off of that four-eyed bastard, but held myself back. And then there were all of the miraculous things that Potty and his mates had managed to pull off. He\'d vanquished a dirty great troll, and found the Philosopher\'s Stone purely by chance in our first year. Second year he\'d managed to not only kill a bloody basilisk, but he\'d banished Voldemort. Again by sheer, dumb luck.

And so it went. He\'d become the bane of my existence.

By third term, old Potty had gotten a Firebolt, and any chance I\'d ever had of beating him in Quidditch flew out the window. Father had gotten completely unreasonable about him; he thought that his only son and heir should be better than some mudblood passing himself off as a great wizard. Everyone that was anyone knew that only the finest pureblood wizarding families were destined for greatness. I’d begun to feel as though I was letting my family and my housemates down. It was a terrible way to feel at age 13, and everything in my orbit started to slowly and silently turn to shite.

During our fourth term, the Triwizard Tournament was supposed to have brought the spirit of inter-school competition to Hogwarts, but all I’d managed to accomplish during this time was antagonise the Weasel and get turned into a ferret by some mad, one-eyed git playing at being DADA professor. Then the entire school went into an uproar when Potter\'s name became the fourth name to come spitting forth from the Goblet of Fire as Hogwarts second champion. Another first for the Boy-Who-Lived-To-Make-My-Life-Utterly-Miserable. Potter had done fuck all, and they had still lined up to kiss his bleeding arse. I’d decided to knock him down a peg or two, and made several “Support Cedric Diggory/Potter Sucks” badges. The stunt had the desired effect, it put Potter off his mark and we’d ended up duelling before the day was over. It all should have made me deliriously happy, but all I could manage was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The evening of the Yule Ball had arrived, and because of father\'s need for me to associate only with purebloods, I’d been forced to escort Pansy Parkinson. She may have been a pureblood and Slytherin, but she also had a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle. It didn’t help matters that I’d recently discovered myself having carnal thoughts about other boys, and I hadn’t been sure exactly how I felt about that.

On the day of the final task, I’d come to the conclusion that it was Harry Potter I was having those erotic thoughts about, and that terrified the hell out of me. But what had terrified me more was the look on Harry’s face as he came stumbling out of that maze clutching Cedric Diggory’s body in his painfully thin arms. The stories the boy had told were chilling; what he alluded to was more frightening than anyone could believe. And thanks in part to me, no one had believed him when he’d insisted that Voldemort had returned. It had been the cruelest thing I’d ever done to him, and for the first time in my sorry life, I‘d found myself regretting my actions. To say that I’d deserved the hexes I’d received on the trip home was an understatement of the highest magnitude.

Our fifth term was quite possibly the worst imaginable. Ieen een confused about what I’d come to feel for Potter, and as a result I’d gone out of my way to get into altercations with him. Our first major blowout had resulted in Potter and the Weasley twins being banned from Quidditch for life. I’d certainly wanted my time in the spotlight, but I hadn’t wanted it at Potter’s expense.

There had actually been a few bright spots in our fifth year. One of them was that father had been hauled away because of his involvement in the whole Ministry break-in debacle. The second, and probably the most important thing was that I’d finally come to terms with the idea that I’d developed romantic feelings for Harry Bloody Potter, and I had nothing to lose by telling him. So on that long train ride home I began making my elaborate plans to do just that.

TBC