Archive of Our Own

“Jesus, Malfoy, try and keep up.” 

Harry lifted the lantern higher. The forest was dark early this time of year. Harry drew his cloak tighter around himself and listened for Malfoy’s footsteps on the path behind him. 

Finally, he drew level with Harry, who shot him a long-suffering look. 

“What?” 

Harry sighed and peered ahead. “You know what.” 

“For fuck’s sake, Potter. Not everyone spent their late adolescence tromping through these blasted woods five times a month. You can hardly expect -”

“Shut up.” 

“Don’t you dare order me about.”

“No, really, shut up.” Harry grabbed his arm and squeezed as hard as he could. The undergrowth ahead of them twitched, and Harry thought he heard the trampling of hooves, but after several seconds of silence, he let go of Malfoy’s arm and gestured to the ridge ahead, faintly illuminated by moonlight. 

“Let’s go. I think they’re growing somewhere on top of the outcropping.” 

Harry walked ahead, not waiting for Malfoy to follow him this time. There were Centaurs about, even if they hadn’t shown themselves, and if Malfoy wanted to draw attention to himself around a herd of restive creatures, Harry wasn’t particularly interested in stopping him. Best case, the Centaurs would carry Malfoy off into the depths of the forest, and Harry would be well shot of him. 

Harry cast a levitation spell on his lantern and began the work of climbing up the ridge. Six months ago, starved and sleep-deprived, Harry would have had a much tougher go of it, but a few seasons of moving rocks around in the ruined castle and working the grounds had given him muscles he’d scarcely dreamed of after a lifetime sporting a seeker’s build. 

He pulled himself up handily, arm over arm, until he was at the very top, and then turned and looked back down…

To find Malfoy staring up at him haughtily, making no move to climb up after him. 

“Well?” Mafoy said, his face pointy and sneering. 

“Well what ? Climb up and help me find the flowers.”

“Don’t think I will, thanks,” Malfoy retorted, examining his fingernails with an air of carelessness. 

“Malfoy.” Harry gritted his teeth and forced his wand hand to unclench. “This is the one day a month they’re blooming. I can’t harvest enough by myself. You need to come up and help me.”

“I don’t know how you were raised, in that miserable muggle hovel you were dragged up in,” Draco sneered, “but I wasn’t brought up to risk life and limb for potions ingredients. You’re mad if you think I’m clambering up there after you, like some half-breed gamekeeper -”

Harry scowled down at him. “How are you still this much of a bastard?”

“How are you still such an insufferable half-blood, Potter?” Draco said, having the gall to look self-satisfied at this last. 

“God, the mouth on you.” Harry dug in his pack and found a rope. He tied one end to a tree on top of the ridge and threw the other end down to Malfoy. “Go on. Get your pointy arse up here.”

Even from a distance, Harry could see Malfoy’s nostrils flare as a cloud of barely concealed rage flickered across his countenance, but Malfoy said nothing further and used the rope to begin pulling himself up to the top of the ridge. 

When he was about halfway up, his hands froze on the length of rope, and he stared up at Harry, transfixed. 

“Potter -” he said, half-choked.

Harry rolled his eyes. “What? Do I have a spot on my face?”

“There’s a -” Malfoy tried to point with his left hand, then realized he was using it to cling on to the rope, and frantically grabbed hold of it again. “There’s a -”

“There’s a what? ” said a deep voice from behind Harry, who startled and turned around. 

It was a Centaur, one Harry had never met before. He wasn’t as tall as Bane or Ronan; in fact, he looked quite diminutive, possibly juvenile, if it weren’t for the deep lines that crossed his forehead and the silver streaks in his hair. He wore a terrible scowl on his face as he approached the edge of the outcropping and looked over at Malfoy, still dangling dumbfounded from the rope. The Centaur drew his bow and notched an arrow into it, drawing it back and aiming directly for Malfoy’s face. 

“I -” Malfoy stuttered, “We’re only here for the poppies, we’re sorry to disturb you, we promise we won’t...” 

“Stop being such a weaseling coward, Malfoy,” Harry said,  mustering all of his own courage, stood up and faced the new Centaur, who even at a diminutive height was head and shoulders taller than the both of them. “Er - We did only come for the poppies. They’re for a potion, for the healer at Hogwarts.”

The centaur kept his bow trained on Malfoy, who looked like he might start hyperventilating. “Humans should not harvest poppy flowers,” he said, in a detached tone of voice. “It is not in your best interest. It is especially not in his best interest.”

“He’s not intending to drink the potion,” Harry said, trying his best to smooth things over before Malfoy went off half cocked and started insulting the centaur’s creature heritage. “It’s for medical purposes.”

This appeared to affect the centaur not at all. “I can’t allow this human to come near the poppies. He has -” the centaur paused, watching Malfoy’s white knuckles clutch and scrabble at the rope, trying to find cover from the arrow against the bare rock, “difficulty controlling his emotions.”

Harry snorted. “That’s an understatement.”

“You should turn around,” the centaur said calmly. “No harm will come to you.”

Harry was about to reply when he heard another set of hoofprints in the trees behind him. “Morpheus!”

The centaur holding the bow turned around. “Firenze. These manlings have come to raid the poppy fields.”

“Watch who you’re calling manling,” Malfoy snapped from beneath them. 

Firenze drew level with them. “This is no manling,” he said. “Morpheus, this is Harry Potter.”

The centaur called Morpheus peered at Harry through the thickening moonlight. “Harry Potter. What are you doing in the forest with this…” he looked back down at Malfoy, who had managed to half hide himself behind a crag in the rock. “Substandard wizard?”

Harry couldn’t help but laugh at that, and then again at Malfoy’s outraged protest. “I need help harvesting the poppies. Hagrid’s off with his brother. He was the only one at the castle available.” 

Morpheus gave Harry what could only be described as a look of sympathy, and then turned back to Firenze. “Look,” he said, nodding his head skyward. “Mars and Venus are both very bright this season.”

Firenze gazed upwards, following Morpheus’ gaze. Then, he looked back at Harry, with quiet comprehension. “Harry Potter. You should watch yourself carefully. There is much conflict in the stars,” he said cryptically. 

Harry shook his head. “I’m not sure -” he could never make heads or tails of what centaurs meant when they talked about the stars. It was like talking to a cross between Trelawney and Luna Lovegood. “Look, I promise I’ll look after all the poppy flowers, and carry them back myself. I only need help harvesting them. I won’t let Malfoy get into them, on my honor.”

Morpheus shook his head. “I am sorry, Harry Potter,” he said. “It is the centaur’s job to protect the forest, and all the beings that interact with it.” And with that, he took aim with his bow, and fired. 

Harry had a moment of panic when he thought that he had just watched Malfoy’s execution. Time slowed to a standstill, and Harry realized just in time that Morpheus had aimed away from Malfoy and hit the rope instead, snapping it in half. 

Harry took a dive forward, grasping down at the rope. He felt a surge of triumph as his fingers closed around it, but he couldn’t quite dig his heels firmly enough into the soft earth around him. 

“Potter!” Malfoy shouted as he fell back to the earth, the angle he’d assumed trying to escape Morpheus’s arrow dragging Harry sideways.

“Fuck,” Harry said, or at least, he thought it, as he felt himself pitch over the edge. He fell past a small waterfall, and saw Malfoy splash into a spring just beneath him. 

Grateful, at least, for a bit of water to break his fall, Harry closed his eyes and put his hands in front of his head. 

Everything went dark. 

-------------------------------------

Harry had been living at Hogwarts since just after his eighteenth birthday. 

Immediately following Voldemort’s defeat, he returned to Grimmauld Place. He couldn’t bear to go back to the Burrow, despite Ron’s insistence. 

He’d tried. Two days after the battle, Ron had woken him up in Gryffindor tower. Harry had slept for thirty six hours straight. Dying was exhausting. He was barely able to keep his eyes open, even after all that sleep. 

“I’m going home,” Ron said to him, looking just as tired as Harry felt. “Mum and Dad are leaving. Want to come with?”

Harry stretched and smiled, looking forward to a good feast, but when he got to the Burrow,  Molly was out of her mind with grief. When Harry came in, she was sat on the couch crying her eyes out, but the moment she saw him and Ron she dried her tears and gave him a falsely cheerful hug, and Harry knew he had to leave.  He would have stayed there forever if he thought she wanted him to, if, like Ron, she was comforted by his presence, but all she wanted was to be left alone to her feelings.  She clearly felt like grieving in front of him would be ungrateful, so Harry steered clear. The last thing he wanted was her faking happy around him when her son had died. 

And the same was true of George, and Ginny, and Andromeda, and Hermione… god, Hermione, who was so caught up in the trials she couldn’t spare a second to find her parents and fix their memories. For all he knew, they were still in Australia, but every time he raised the subject with her, she pulled a tight smile across her face and assured him that they would be fine, not to worry. 

So. Grimmauld Place it was, for two months or so. Kreacher kept him well fed in between hearings and funerals. Harry went to all of them. By the time the summer was over, he felt like he’d given more depositions than a crooked executive. He’d seen the Carrows sentenced to Azkaban, along with Fenrir Greyback (caught, at last, trying to flee to Belgium), Yaxley, Lucius Malfoy, and a number of other Death Eaters. 

Stan Shunpike had been exonerated - Harry had seen to that personally - and the other Malfoys, Narcissa and Draco, placed on probation. For the crime of aiding the Death Eaters by allowing them to live in her home, Narcissa received five years probation and was stripped of her property, which was sold and redistributed as reparations. The Prophet reported that she’d moved to a property in Italy owned by a distant Black cousin. 

Draco Malfoy’s crimes were mostly committed whilst he was under the age of majority, meaning he was protected against prosecution as a child soldier, though Harry did provide evidence during a pre-trial deposition that he had used the cruciatus curse as an adult. The court found most of Harry’s testimony exculpatory, and so placed Malfoy under a three year probationary sentence, but made it custodial - meaning he had to be under the direct supervision of the Ministry, though not confined to Azkaban. Where he went after his trial, Harry didn’t immediately discover. 

Harry’s 18th birthday was at once the happiest and saddest of his life. All his friends came to Grimmauld Place. Kreacher laid out a massive spread in the garden, and Hermione rented a marquee. George brought every firework in the shop. 

Neville led the toast. “To Harry,” he said, lifting a bottle, “the boy who lived!” 

It would have been a glowing, triumphant night, if Harry hadn’t found Ginny crying in his cupboard after everyone left. 

“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. 

“Don’t be,” Harry told her, patting her back. “Please. You’re supposed to be sad.”

There was too much grief, just now, to be properly happy, or to carry on with things like they would in a year’s time, or maybe two, when the wounds weren’t so fresh. And so, Harry found himself at loose ends by midsummer, never comfortable around friends, unsure of his purpose. 

It was these feelings of uselessness, uncertainty, that made him most receptive to a proposal he received the Monday following his birthday. 

It was from Hagrid. The letter came tied to the leg of a Hogwarts barn owl, and included a package of rock cakes.

Harry, 

Good to see you on your birthday. Many happy returns. 

I’m taking Grawp back to the mountains. He’s getting older, wants to find a lady giant and start a family. 

Minerva asked if I knew anyone to take over groundskeeping while I’m gone. Mind you, the job is a lot bigger lately - repairing the castle and such. If you know any friends interested, send them my way. They could stay in my hut or in the castle, but given the state of things, the hut might be more comfortable.

Leaving Friday. Let me know either way. 

Hagrid

Harry set the letter aside and opened the rest of his mail. The Daily Prophet had been delivered, which was unusual, as he was not a subscriber. It had been sent by Hermione, who had already read it - there were coffee rings all over the front page. It included a note, which read, I can find a way to blackmail this journalist too, if you’d like, which Harry found ominous. Spreading open the paper, he found his face just below the fold. 

Harry Potter Plotting to Overthrow Head Auror , the headline read, and the article included no less than five conspiracy theories that positioned him as the next major threat to wizarding government, none of them with any basis in fact. 

Harry had sighed, and picked up a quill. 

Hagrid, 

I’ll start tomorrow. The hut sounds perfect. 

Harry

------------------

The work needed at Hogwarts was extensive; so extensive, in fact, that Professor McGonagall was forced to send students and most of the professors elsewhere, to other wizarding institutions, for the first semester of courses. 

Harry hadn’t ever had a lot of experience with the outdoors until he was seventeen, and three months living in Grimmauld Place after a year in the woods made him understand the value of nature. He hadn’t properly appreciated it: that the forest had made his mind go quiet, even when he was sure he was being hunted. It had wrapped around him like a blanket, protective and silent. Going back to people, to the cacophony of humans, the whole mongering horde of them, had felt ruinously hazardous. 

But in Hagrid’s hut, at the edge of the forbidden forest, he could see anyone coming from a quarter mile away, at least, with the added benefit of anti-apparition wards. And he was sleeping better. Surprisingly, after all the conflict had wound down, Harry had not had the problems common to many veterans of wars; he had expected nightmares, jumping at loud sounds, fits of crying over people who’d left and weren’t returning.

The only thing he had trouble with at Grimmauld Place was a lingering vigilance at odd times of the night when he was meant to be sleeping. Harry attributed that to the habit of waking up to keep watch. It was annoying, but not particularly difficult; this being his only symptom of lingering trauma from the conflict, Harry counted himself lucky. 

However, once he moved into the hut at the edge of the forest, his nighttime wakings diminished to nothing. It was so quiet there, the stars so bright above him, that he fell into easy sleep and had only the most pleasant dreams. 

His days weren’t as easy, at least not physically. Everywhere he turned, there was nothing but hard manual labor, the great mountain of work in restoring the castle that could never seem to be accomplished with only his wand. Scrubbing, vanishing, hauling, lifting, coaxing, planting, weeding, chasing, flying. It was no wonder it had taken a giant to manage the grounds. 

At the end of the summer, it was him and McGonagall, Sprout, Filch, Aberforth when he was sober enough to join in, Madame Pomfrey and an occasional specialized workforce from the Ministry when the going got strange enough. Of the regular group, Harry was the youngest and most able-bodied, so he did most of the grunt work and left the charming and transfiguring to the more experienced. 

He spent most of his days with Professor Sprout. Pomona. She worked outside with him, restoring the cursed and trampled greenery, resodding the Quidditch Pitch and ridding the grounds of all the abominable plants the Death Eaters had seen fit to encourage. By the end of August he had his first ever tan, and forearms that could snap iron. 

It would have been perfect, if it hadn’t been for a late arrival who absolutely insisted on pestering him. 

He turned up at the very end of summer, right before the equinox, looking paler and pointier than normal, like he had the polar opposite summer from Harry: no sun, no exercise, and nothing to eat. In fact, he looked half-starved, if Harry was being honest. Even so, he took no interest in the food in the Great Hall, pushing it around his plate sullenly, managing to look at once pitiable and insouciantly bored. 

Harry ignored him. Or, at the very least, tried his best. It was difficult, what with there only being a half a dozen people at the castle, and McGonagall taking him under her wing so closely. She was responsible for him - he was in her custody, as part of the Ministry’s requirements for his probation. “House arrest, they were calling it, though of course, he had no home to which he could return. 

So here he was. 

Harry did what he always did, the first day Draco Malfoy came to Hogwarts, which was to throw himself into his work until he was exhausted. The pitch had been more or less destroyed by the giants that invaded Hogwarts, and since then had been infested by gnomes who were nesting in the craters they left behind. 

He was about a tenth of the way through the degnoming process, late in the afternoon, when he turned around and caught a flash of blond hair on the hillside disappearing just beyond the stands. Harry had the eerie feeling of being watched. 

There were so few of them in the Great Hall, just a half dozen professors remaining, that it was impossible to avoid him. They all sat at the same table, but Harry made a point of taking a place at the end of the largest table. He wasn’t a professor; he was thirty years their junior, at least, and they all had better things to do than chat him up. In any case, he was usually too tired to make idle conversation. 

The first week, Malfoy sat with the professors, about three chairs separated from Harry’s place at the end, but the next week, he had edged a chair closer to him; the third week, he’d come a chair closer, and by early October, Malfoy was sitting right next to him. 

“Malfoy,” Harry said, the first morning he came to breakfast and saw him slumped into the chair next to Harry’s usual spot, “what are you doing?”

“Am I not allowed to sit next to His Royal Highness at the head of the table?” Malfoy said, arching his brow.

“God, you’re such a prick. Sit where you want, just don’t expect me to talk to you.”

Aside from the satisfaction Harry got from being able to freely insult Malfoy whenever he pleased, Harry found his presence mildly annoying. And it wasn’t just at the breakfast table - Malfoy was turning up all over the place, popping up on Harry’s duties on the grounds, interfering in his repairs to the castle walls, offering to “help” Harry restore the hedges, and then loafing about whinging over the unseasonable heat.

“For fuck’s sake, if you don’t like it, go back inside,” Harry snapped. 

Malfoy looked at him, and then said, in a very small voice, “But there’s no one to talk to inside.” 

“Do you have to be entertained every hour of the day? And since when did you think I was good enough company for the likes of you?”

Malfoy shrugged and picked at a thread on his trousers. 

Harry thought that would be the end of it, but by mid October Malfoy had evidently become bored enough that he knocked on the door of Harry’s hut one evening. 

Harry opened it groggily. It was only half past eight, but he had already been dozing off in front of the fire. 

“Malfoy? What - what the hell are you doing here?”

Malfoy’s expression fell. “I - I only thought -”

“Is something wrong at the castle?” Harry was waking up, and felt alarmed. Surely Malfoy hadn’t come all the way out here to… “Did McGonagall send for me?”

“No, you berk,” Malfoy said angrily. “I’m bored. I thought we could… we could…”

Harry stared at him. 

“You know…”

“I don’t.”

Malfoy glared defeatedly at the ground. 

“... hang out?”

Harry fought the urge to laugh, which was easy, as he was magnificently offended. “Hang out? What, like we’re friends? We’re not friends, Malfoy.”

“Yes, thank you, you’ve made that very clear.”

“No, you’ve made that clear. Don’t act like a total arse for eight years running, insult my friends and family, and torment me at every fucking turn and then expect me to entertain you when you’re bored and desperate. Get the fuck away from me,” Harry finished, his jaw tight, “and don’t come back.”

Harry turned back to the hut and prepared to close the door, but there was something about the slump of Malfoy’s shoulders that softened him. Fuck , he realized, I feel sorry for Malfoy. He was, after all, alone, with no work to accomplish and no friends to see. At least Harry could meet up with his on weekends at the pub. 

Harry knew he was going to regret this. “Malfoy.” He drew the door open a crack. “Fine. Come in.”

It was all downhill from there, really. 

-----------------------

Allowing himself to be used as Malfoy’s last resort for entertainment had its upside, namely that Harry could act on the urge to cuff him when he was being a prat, but it had its downside as well: Malfoy was a prat. 

He was an insufferable prat. 

Nearly every time Harry allowed Malfoy in his presence, something came out of his mouth that was simply infuriating, like, “Nice hovel, Potter, it suits you,” or “Merlin, are those the only shoes you own?” 

The first five minutes, things tended to go well, as Malfoy realized being admitted into Harry’s presence was, in essence, a favor, granted entirely out of pity, but somewhere between five and ten minutes he forgot that fact entirely, and reverted back to his original…

Total cuntishness. 

“Would you please put that down and come help me,” Harry snapped, feeling immensely peevish. He had been levitating rocks for the past ninety minutes, and all Malfoy had done was stare at him blankly and toss a quaffle to himself. 

“Don’t think I will, thanks,” he replied. “I’m enjoying the show.”

Malfoy was weird. That’s a thing Harry had discovered. He was a fucking weird prat, in addition to all the other ways he was also a prat. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Malfoy turned a bit red, like he hadn’t been expecting Harry to hear him. “Nothing. Want to play a seeker’s match?”

Harry sighed and glanced at the massive pile of rubble he still had to transfigure back into the sixth floor wall. “Sure. Whatever.”

Even playing quidditch together was difficult, as Malfoy hadn’t lost the habit of cheating. He played dirty somehow, every time they got on brooms. The first time, Harry hadn’t been prepared for it and had been caught unawares by the bristles on his school broom catching fire. 

Harry had tried insisting that Malfoy leave his wand on the ground, which he’d done after a great deal of protest, but they were old enough now that they were both proficient in at least a few wandless spells; last match, Malfoy hit Harry with three wandless stinging hexes in a row, claiming each one was “purely accidental, Potter, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” 

This time was no different. Elbowing one’s opponent out of the way of the snitch was technically within the bounds of the rules, but surely kicking them in the bloody chest was a step too far. 

“Malfoy, you tosser. Get off me,” Harry said, struggling against him in midair.

“You’re the one pulling my hair like a bloody girl, Potter,” Malfoy said, twisting away under Harry’s grip. 

Harry looked down at his own hand, astonished to find a fistful of blond hair carded between his fingers. He pushed Malfoy away angrily. “If you weren’t such a filthy cheater -”

“Like you don’t cheat, Potter.”

“I don’t!”

“Oh right, all that shit you talk is completely within regulations.”

To be fair, Malfoy had a point. It was, technically, out of bounds to insult the parentage of one’s opponent, but it was difficult not to insult Malfoy’s parentage when pressed for an off-the-cuff insult during a sports match. “Inbred freak” simply rolled off the tongue so nicely, mid-air.

In any case, while their behavior towards each other in the castle grounds wasn’t exactly civil, it certainly beat the hell out of the miserable meals they shared together. Harry had done his best to discourage Malfoy from sitting next to him at the table, but he couldn’t very well shove him off onto poor McGonagall or one of the other professors, who’d had more than enough of his rotten disposition whilst teaching him. 

“Is that how all muggles hold forks?” Malfoy had asked him once, a look of plain disgust on his face. 

“No, they -” Harry stopped himself. “I’m not a muggle , Malfoy, and anyways, what does it matter? This is hardly a formal dinner, is it?” Harry gestured around to the empty Great Hall, which was still partially pulverized on the north end and open to the elements. 

Malfoy coughed into his napkin, so delicately Harry felt like making fun of him for being a ponce, but didn’t. “Are you… doing anything for the holiday?”

“Don’t insult me and then try and make conversation,” Harry told him, angrily shoving the plate of scones Malfoy had been eyeing up in his direction. 

Harry did, in fact, have somewhere to go for the holiday: Australia. Ron and Hermione had been there a month, helping Hermione’s parents successfully recover their memories. Now that they were out of the spell damage ward in the big wizarding hospital in Melbourne, the three of them were taking a trip to Western Australia. 

Harry was looking forward to it. It was summer there, and Australia had magnificent beaches. Growing up in England and never going on holiday, Harry had never actually been to a proper beach. Even Ron had been on a better holiday, in Egypt. Besides the opportunity to re-apply tanning lotion, Harry was looking forward to visiting a place where no one knew his name or recognized him on sight. 

He left that next Tuesday via international portkey. 

There were a number of benefits to being anonymous, chief among them, Harry discovered, was the ability to go out to clubs and have casual sexual encounters. He could never have done that in England. None of the women or men he went home with in Australia had any interest in selling the story to the newspaper; in fact, one of them even treated him terribly, calling him all sorts of degrading names and then turfing Harry out of his flat when Harry had finished fucking him, a novelty which Harry bemusedly found he enjoyed. 

He returned from the Perth portkey station to Scotland feeling well-tanned from the beach, well-loved by his friends, and exceedingly well-fucked. 

He didn’t see Malfoy for a number of days. Harry assumed he’d been to see his mother on the continent. The beginning of January was a bit of a mad rush to get the castle in habitable condition before the students finally returned, and Harry was rather enjoying the burst of productivity he had sans Malfoy, when he opened a door in the Charms corridor and ran smack into him. 

“Fuck, sorry -” Harry said, bringing a hand up to his smarting nose, “I didn’t realize this room was - Malfoy? What are you doing here? It’s still Christmas holiday.”

Malfoy pushed past him in a rush to get through the door. “Sod off, Potter. Can’t I get any privacy in this infernal ruin, bloody hell.” 

Harry was left in a now empty room with a slightly bloody nose from where Malfoy’s head had struck him when they ran into each other. He looked around. 

There was a… camp bed, of some kind, in the corner, with a stack of books next to it. Three desks had been pushed together, and there was a plate of half eaten food on one end of them. On the other, there was a cauldron, and a collection of potions ingredients, and at the end of the desks, was Malfoy’s trunk. 

He’s been living here, Harry realized, and then immediately wondered why Malfoy hadn’t gone back down to the Slytherin dungeons. 

Harry had only been down there a handful of times, but being that they were so far beneath most of the battlegrounds, they hadn’t needed much rehabilitation. The students were returning next week, and Malfoy would surely have to clear out of here. 

Decidingly to make Malfoy’s new living arrangements none of his concern, Harry went about setting the rest of the corridor to rights, a project that took the better part of the day and involved three other professors. Slughorn had returned and was working with them; Harry had half a mind to mention something to him, but Harry doubted Slughorn was interested in looking after a disgraced ex-death eater. Anyways, it was none of his concern. 

The students returned. Most of the restoration was complete, aside from the very fiddly bits restoring the art and sculptures of the castle, a job for which Harry was uniquely unqualified, so Harry found, to his delight, that he had a great more free time than he had once enjoyed. He did have some groundskeeping to look after, but as Hagrid was planning to rejoin them in March, he was able to put off most of the big projects for when he returned. 

Harry began going out more regularly, now that the Great Hall was full once again. It was awkward to sit at the head table and endure the stares of five hundred curious school children. He began stopping by the kitchens for breakfast, picking up a sandwich for lunch while he was there, and heading to the Hog’s Head for dinner.

This was an ideal arrangement, until, of course, Malfoy started turning up at the Hog’s Head himself. 

Harry was sitting at the bar, contentedly tucking into a lamb pasty, when he saw, out of the corner of his vision, someone slim and blond belly up and order a firewhiskey. 

“Oh no. Get out,” Harry said. 

Malfoy gave him an unsteady look in return. He was already most of the way to drunk. “Fuck you, Potter. You’re not in charge -” he hiccuped “-of this place.”

“That’s right,” said Aberforth, sliding a tumbler full of whiskey Malfoy’s way. “Tell him. He needs to be knocked down a peg or two.”

Harry spread his hands, outraged. “What’s that for?” It wasn’t as if he was rolling up to the Hog’s Head on a motorbike with an entourage, chased by paparazzi. 

“I call it as I see it,” Aberforth said. “Nothing against you. You’re alright, Potter, but everyone needs a challenge now and again.”

“He certainly is a challenge,” Harry muttered. Malfoy was slumped over the bar top, already fairly deep in his cups. Aberforth went into the back and came out with a basket of chips, setting it between them. 

Harry sighed and reached for one. “Alright. Fine. How was your holiday.”

“Shit,” Malfoy said around a mouthful of chips. “I spent it in the charms corridor.”

“Didn’t see your mum?”

Malfoy looked at him like he’d gone mental. “No. Potter, I’m restricted from leaving the country.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh. ”

“Er.” Harry didn’t know what to say next. Obviously, he had been to Australia, which he couldn’t now say but which was the natural progression of the conversation. He’d always been shit in awkward situations. If Ron was here, he’d think of something natural to say, but Ron wasn’t here, so all Harry said was, “er,” for a second time. 

“Potter, you are scraping the bottom of the barrel here for conversation. Merlin.”

“What’s that say about you, then, if you’re always chasing after me?”

Malfoy turned red. “That I’m desperate, I suppose, if I’d take up with the likes of you. Fuck's sake, Potter. It’s like you have two settings: insults and malfunctioning golem. You wouldn’t get laid for the next century if it weren’t for being famous.”

“Joke’s on you,” Harry retorted, knocking back the last of his butterbeer and grabbing a few more chips to take out the door. “I got laid plenty in Australia, and nobody knew who I was.” 

“You must not have opened your mouth once. Saves anyone from having to get over your horrific personality.”

“Oh, I opened my mouth alright,” Harry said as acidly as he could manage while stuffing his face with his fistful of chips. “This is the worst friendship I’ve ever had.”

He was halfway back to the hut when he realized that he’d admitted, out loud, that he and Malfoy were friends. 

----------------------------------

This was how they ended up in the forest: 

Madame Pomfrey was running out of Dreamless Sleep. Many of the returning students (and a number of the professors) experienced regular nightmares from the entirely nightmare-warranting circumstances they’d recently lived through. As a result, the population of Hogwarts had nearly run through the infirmary’s stores. 

As groundskeeper, Harry had a job to do:  wait for the full moon and then go into the forest to pick a certain species of poppy flowers, as many as he could. For one dose of the potion, they’d need forty poppy flowers, and the school population was going through at least two hundred doses a month. 

He needed help. So he asked Malfoy for a friendly favor, and then they fell into a spring. 

Harry blacked out hitting his head in the fall, for quite some time evidently; when he came to, he was in the infirmary, with Malfoy in the bed next to him and a peevish looking McGonagall at the foot of his own. 

“Er…” Harry said, sitting up very slowly and putting a hand to his temple, “what happened?”

“You took a fall, it would appear,” McGonagall replied. “Into the Spring of Oneiromancy.”

“Into the… what?”

“How you get yourself into these scrapes, time and time again, I will never know.” McGonagall shifted in her chair, as if barely restraining herself from reaching out and shaking him. “The poppies you were out gathering grew next to a brook, which went over the ridge in a waterfall, and formed a spring at the bottom, and that spring is -”

“The Spring of Oneiromancy,” Malfoy said, waking with a dazed and astonished look on his face. “It must have formed from the runoff…”

“Of the poppy flowers, combined with the magic the centaurs have been cultivating there for centuries,” McGonagall finished. 

“No wonder they tried to warn us off,” Malfoy said. Then, his expression went rigid with horror. “Oh. We fell in together.” He looked up, aghast. “We’re not… there isn’t going to be any… any side effects?”

McGonagall shifted again, uncomfortable. “We won’t know for some time, I’m afraid.”

Harry stretched his hand out in front of his face, and looked around the room. He still had full use of his faculties, as far as he could tell. “I feel fine. What side effects should we be looking for?”

McGonagall sighed and took off her glasses. “Oneiromancy, Mr. Potter, is the art of divining the truth through dreams. Dreams are highly vulnerable to suggestion, so I think it’s best if we don’t tell you what the side effects may be, lest you begin experiencing them simply because I’ve told you what they are. If you do experience symptoms, you should tell Madame Pomfrey at the very first -”

“But how will I know I’ve experienced any symptoms if you don’t tell me what they are?”

Malfoy groaned beside him and threw his face behind his hands. “Potter. You’ll know .”

----------------------------

Ever since Harry had stopped having the creepy Voldemort war dreams, he hadn’t really remembered much about the time he spent asleep, and he resolved to keep it that way. Whatever strange magic the dream-fountain had, it probably wouldn’t affect him much, he reasoned. He hardly remembered his dreams. Sometimes they came to him in scraps and fragments: a broken clock, a Quidditch match played underwater, a waterfall when he really needed to get up and use the loo. But besides that, not much happened in Harry’s dreams anymore.  He didn’t even have the standard issue sex dreams, now that he slept in his own room, no dormitory mates to worry about and the freedom to wank whenever the desire struck him. 

After he and Malfoy fell into the spring, Harry didn’t expect things to be any different. 

But they were. 

Around three hours prior to waking, two nights after the incident, Harry’s awareness shifted as he slept, and he found himself in an unfamiliar dreamscape. He was in a cavernous room. The walls were painted silver, and green damask covered the panels. Harry looked down, and saw that his bare feet were subsumed in a lavish carpet. He took a step forward, and then looked back up. 

Twenty feet away was a massive four poster bed, hung with emerald green drapes. They were partially closed, but Harry could see a man behind them with long black hair tied in a top knot. He was at least six foot four inches tall, and he had broad shoulders and massive thighs. He was dressed in red robes… Auror robes, Harry realized, and there were strange noises coming from the area by the pillows. 

He took a step closer. There was a man lying on his back, head resting on the pillows. His arms had been restrained with black ribbons, tied in neat little bows around his wrists and anchored to the bed frame.  His pale skin stood out starkly against the black satin, which ran in a criss cross pattern up his straining forearms and biceps, and crossed his chest and abdominal muscles. Harry stood, dumbfounded, admiring him. He had the most beautiful body Harry had ever seen. The man’s face was buried sideways in the linens, but Harry would recognize his blond hair anywhere. 

It was Malfoy. Malfoy was naked and tied to the bed, with a furiously leaking erection jutting into the air. 

Harry gasped, and clapped his hand to his mouth, but he needn’t have worried about being overheard, as just then the Auror barked out, “You need to be punished, Malfoy,” and the Malfoy on the bed cried out, “Yes, yes please. Anything.”

“Do you need the crop?”

The Malfoy on the bed shuddered cravenly. “Oh please. Please yes, sir, with the crop.” He was begging. Begging. Harry wanted to go to him and untie him, or suck his cock, which was so hard it looked like it was pulsing. Malfoy was begging for it. Fuck. 

The Auror conjured a riding crop out of midair, and Harry watched, astonished, as he drew it back over his mountainous shoulder. “Tell me what you’ve done wrong, Malfoy,” the Auror said. Harry thought the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. 

“Everything sir,” Malfoy said, his head still nestled into the silk pillow. 

“Tell me specifically.”

“I’ve insulted you, sir.”

The Auror snapped the crop forward, striking Malfoy’s cock square on the tip with all the force he could muster. It couldn’t have felt good, Harry thought, but this was, after all, a dream, where anything could be true, and sure enough Malfoy’s cock bounced back upwards, harder than it was before, and Malfoy made a noise that could only be ecstasy. 

“What else?” the Auror demanded, drawing the crop back again. 

“I’ve cheated at Quidditch.”

The crop came down again, this time on Malfoy’s testicles, spanking them so hard that the leather snapped viciously against them. Malfoy cried out and writhed, in pleasure or in pain, Harry couldn’t tell, except that Malfoy thrust his hips forward, as if asking for more. His cock humped the air in front of it, seeking friction, seeking the Auror’s hand, or the crop again, anything, and Harry wanted to beg the Auror to touch him on his behalf. 

He didn’t need to ask. The Auror gave it to him, bringing the crop back twice again. “You have. You’ve been rotten, Draco.” 

“I’m so sorry, sir. Please, please don’t stop. I need -”

“I know what you need,” the Auror said, gently, although he began slapping the leather of the crop hard against Malfoy’s thighs. “I know what you need Draco.” The noise of the crop was going straight to Harry’s cock, which he realized was hard for the first time. He palmed it through his nightclothes, rolling it between his fingers. 

“Yes, say my name, please sir, say my name again,” Malfoy said. 

“Draco,” the Auror said, reaching down and finally, finally grabbing at Malfoy’s cock, and relief flooded through Harry, so much that he felt it low in his belly, and Malfoy turned his head and opened his eyes, which looked up at the Auror with adoration, so flawlessly supplicant that Harry thought he would float away…

And then Malfoy’s eyes locked onto Harry’s, and he sat abruptly. Instantly, all the ropes vanished into thin air, and he rushed forward from the four poster bed. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Malfoy cried frantically, half tripping over the curtains and pushing Harry away. “What are you doing here? You can’t see this.”

“I was enjoying it,” said Harry, nakedly truthful in his subconscious dream-state. He felt heavy, like he couldn’t move - like he didn’t want to. Malfoy was still pushing him, ineffectually. “Don’t stop on my account.”

“Don’t be stupid Potter,” Malfoy said, slamming the curtains closed on the Auror and trying to draw a sheet around himself, but failing. The sheet kept melting away as if it was made of air, leaving Malfoy naked and blushing. “Get out. Wake up.”

“What?” Harry said. “I don’t want to wake up. Draco, please, let’s go back to bed.”

Draco looked stricken. He stopped trying to cover himself. “Potter. This isn’t real. Wake up.”

“No,” Harry said, stubborn as ever. He reached out to touch the acre of pale, naked skin in front of him. It was so gorgeous, flawless, like marble, but warmer. “No, I want to stay here. God, you’re so pretty, Draco.”

Draco closed his eyes as Harry’s hand met his skin. Harry pressed his advantage, touching everything he could reach, Draco’s shoulders, his neck, god, his hair, blond and bright and perfect in the dim light of their dream. Harry pulled on it, snapping Draco’s head back cartoonishly, and groaned. 

That brought Draco back to reality. He shoved Harry back again. “No. Potter. Wake up. This isn’t your dream. You don’t belong here. Wake up, you idiot,” and Draco stamped on his foot as hard as he could. 

Harry woke up. 

---------------------------

He debated all morning about going to see Madame Pomphrey. On the one hand, he had been told to report any strange dream symptoms to her (Malfoy’s admonition that he would know it if he saw it now seemed strangely prescient), but on the other hand, he didn’t fancy telling the school nurse that he’d had a kinky sex dream about Malfoy’s cock getting beaten up by a tall, strapping Auror. 

But he couldn’t get it out of his head. He kept thinking about it, even after he’d had a drawn out wank in the shower. 

By lunch time, he was feeling edgy and nervous, made worse by the fact he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Malfoy all morning. Had Malfoy seen the dream? What if he knew what Harry had been dreaming about? Harry’s gut recoiled with sickening mortification.

It was that thought that finally drove Harry to Madame Pomfrey’s office, which he was horrified to discover was already occupied by one Draco Malfoy. 

“What -” Harry’s voice squeaked and he pitched it into a lower register. “What are you doing here, Malfoy?”

Malfoy looked around furtively. His shoulders were drawn tight with nervous tension. He looked wound as tight as a drum, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Same as you, most likely. What… what exactly did you see?”

Harry felt himself flushing. “That’s none of your concern, Malfoy. I had a funny dream, that’s all.”

Malfoy visibly relaxed a fraction. “Well. Obviously there have been some… effects,” he said, in what Harry thought was a terrible understatement, at least from the dream that he had. 

Madame Pomfrey took that moment to enter the waiting room of the infirmary. “Mr. Potter. Mr. Malfoy. Back again so soon? I take it you have -”

Malfoy cut her off. “May I speak to you in private?” 

Pomfrey looked between him and Malfoy skeptically. “I suppose, if it’s necessary…” 

“It is,” Malfoy assured her firmly, and preceded her into the office. 

When they had both gone through and shut the door, Harry systematically searched every one of his pockets, berating himself for not keeping an extendable ear on his person at all times, the way he used to. He drew his wand and whispered, “Accio extendable ear,” but as he hadn’t left one one out of his trunk, he had little hope of anything flying into his hand. 

Giving up, he approached the door and pressed his ear to one of the cracks as carefully as he possibly could. 

“It is unethical for me, as his Healer, to not inform him of the full -”

“If you tell him, I will… I will…”

“You’ll what?” Madame Pomfrey challenged. “Have me fired? Report me to the ministry? You forget your place, Mr. Malfoy. You are no longer -”

“I will kill myself. I will kill myself, if he finds out.”

Harry felt his jaw drop open. What could make Malfoy want to kill himself? Harry wondered. Was he having massively fucked up sex dreams about Harry, the way Harry was dreaming of him? What could he be seeing that was so bad? Perhaps Malfoy was homophobic or something, and the thought of having sex with Harry was so awful he was driven to self-harm. Or perhaps he wasn’t having sex dreams at all. Maybe the spring had made him have nightmares - reliving his experiences with Voldemort, or seeing Harry cut him open in the bathroom...

“Do you mean that?” Madame Pomfrey asked, in a shocked whisper. “Mr. Malfoy, if you’re serious, there are things I must do to support your health and well-being. It is likely that he will discover the nature of the dreams.”

Harry heard Malfoy sigh. “I don’t have a plan to harm myself,” he conceded.  “But it’s unethical for you to disclose my situation. This is going to keep happening, and eventually he’s going to find out that -”

“There are steps you can take to remediate the circumstances. Dreamless sleep, for example -”

“I can’t take it,” Malfoy said, a note of panic rising in his voice. “I’m under Ministry supervision and they’re testing me for potions use. If you’re after a way to get me sent to Azkaban, then by all means -”

“Occlumency, then. I’m aware you were Severus’ pupil in that particular discipline.” 

There was silence behind the door, except for the sound of Malfoy taking several deep breaths. 

“You are well-trained,” Madame Pomfrey said bracingly, sounding more encouraging now than firm. “I have every confidence that you will be able to keep things private until St. Mungos can brew a potion to reverse your condition.”

Harry returned to the middle of the room and sat down in the chair. A half a minute later, Malfoy and Madame Pomfrey emerged. 

“I’ll speak to Mr. Potter,” Madame Pomfrey said. Malfoy nodded and left the room.

“Mr. Potter,” she began. “I assume you have been having some sleep disturbances?”

“What’s this about? What were you talking about with Malfoy?”

Madame Pomfrey paused, and appeared to consider her next words very carefully. “The spring you fell into can… it can change your dreams, so that they are not a true reflection of your inner thoughts and feelings. Mr. Malfoy and yourself fell into the spring together, so it is… forcing you to have dreams about each other. But the dreams are not necessarily of… they may not originate from your own thoughts.”

Harry was relieved, but confused. It was alarming, to have a sex dream about Malfoy, of all people, and a relief to hear that it was the result of falling in the spring; but even if his own subconscious hadn’t generated the dream, he had still enjoyed it, and still tugged himself off in the shower over it. It was like watching a really messed up porn flick, and finding he liked it more than he expected; he might not have shot the film, but he certainly enjoyed the show. Certainly, Harry had never before thought about having sex with Malfoy - at least not consciously - but fuck if he wasn’t thinking about it now. Repeatedly.

“Please don’t be alarmed,” she continued. “In a month’s time, St. Mungos will brew a potion that will reduce or eliminate your connection to… to the spring.”

“Right,” Harry said. Something wasn’t quite clicking into place for him. “Wait. If the dreams aren’t my own thoughts and feelings, where do they come from? Are they… are they from the centaurs? Or the flowers?”

Pomphrey looked down, and appeared to consider the floor in great detail. “I can’t answer that, Mr. Potter. It would be best for you not to interrogate the dreams you have over the next month too carefully.” 

Feeling entirely unsatisfied, not to mention unsettled, Harry left and went back to work on the seventh floor repairs.

--------------------

The next two nights, his dreams were much different, but no less curious. He dreamt that he was in a labyrinthine room, surrounded by doors. Some were the size of the great hall’s portals, some the size of a cupboard, still others the size a fairy might fit through. 

All of them were locked. Harry woke feeling exhausted. He’d spent the entirety of his dreaming sleep systematically testing each door, trying to open them one by one. He’d think he’d cleared a hallway in the labyrinth only to have another one appear in an unexpected direction. The next night, he resolved before sleeping not to bother with them if he saw them again, only to try and dream of something else; of course, once he was in the labyrinth again, he was overcome with a compulsive need to go about opening them fruitlessly. 

The third night, he despaired when he found himself right back in place again, but set right to work tugging on all the doorknobs. He’d gone down a dark passage this time - there was very little light in this direction, and the doors were warped and strange. Some of them audibly snarled at him; others weren’t just locked, but covered with thorns or pus. One of them was actually on fire, and another was guarded by a massive hound that barked threateningly as Harry worked on all the other doors around it. 

Harry could feel himself starting to wake up. It was nearly morning, surely. He felt like he’d been trapped in this corridor for three hundred years, with the way dream time distended, when he saw it: a small door, about three feet high, towards the back of the corridor. Glowing around its edges was a shimmer of golden light. In fact, there was a great deal of light coming from it, because… 

Because it was ajar. 

Harry felt a surge of excitement. He walked steadily towards it, and pushed at the handle. It opened, and he stepped through. 

Momentarily blinded, he felt around him in order to get his bearings. The place he was in was soft, and cushy, like clouds. He opened his eyes. 

He was in a bedroom again, though not the one he’d been in before. He was, in fact, surrounded by clouds, though not real ones: they were notional clouds, big fluffy balls of cotton plush floating everywhere with a bed hovering in the center. And on the bed…

It was the Auror again. His build was magnificent, and the topknot on his head was the same as last time, but now he wasn’t wearing his Auror robes. He wasn’t wearing anything. Harry could see every inch of his tanned, brown skin as he sprawled, face down on top of Draco… only Draco didn’t look like Draco usually looked. 

He had breasts. Huge, naked, perfect breasts, and one of them was being suckled by the Auror as Draco cradled his head and gasped deliciously. 

Harry watched as one of the Auror’s hands dipped down from where it had been fondling Draco’s left nipple, past the strangely feminine flatness of his belly, and down to his hard cock, which was trapped beneath a tight V of baby pink lace. It was straining against the fabric so visibly that Harry could nearly feel it on his own cock, and it made him want to run over and rip the knickers off, or, paradoxically, grind the fabric down against Draco’s length so he could feel every bit of it on his shaft. 

The Auror evidently wanted much the same, only he went about it so, so gently, running his middle and ring fingers along the cleft of Draco’s cheeks and then dragging them heavily all the way up to Draco’s slit, which was just peering out over the waistband of the lace, and fucking hell, both of Draco’s nipples were standing at attention, exposed to the cold air and glistening with the Auror’s saliva. 

“Darling,” the Auror said, in a voice just as low and commanding as Harry had heard last time he’d been in this dreamscape, only this time it had gone broken and gravelly with tenderness. “Darling, I think we need to get you out of these knickers so we can take care of you properly.” 

Draco whined as the hand was removed from his cleft, pushing his hips up to chase the pressure. Giving up, he rolled over onto his side so he was on his hands and knees, and the Auror moved with him, affording Harry a look at his face. 

It was him. Harry. The Auror. Harry was the Auror. Harry was having a sex dream about himself having sex with Draco Malfoy, only he wasn’t having the sex, he was watching it, and the version of himself having the sex was four inches taller than he was and three stone heavier in the muscle department. And there was a Hungarian Horntail tattooed on his chest. 

Harry heard himself make a noise, a half-strangled, sort of hopeful note of disbelief, and Draco’s head snapped around and saw him standing there, with one hand down his pants and the other clutching his own chest in surprise. 

“Fucking hell, not again,” Draco said, sounding utterly defeated. He turned to the giant, sexy version of Harry. “You’d better leave,” he said, and then pulled a robe out of thin air, wrapping it around himself, to Harry’s great disappointment, as the breasts he’d been admiring disappeared. 

Harry walked towards him. “Please don’t. I mean, I’m sorry, you were clearly enjoying yourself with him. Me. I mean, I’ll just go.” 

Draco sat back against the bed, regarding Harry steadily and quirking one of his eyebrows. “Is that really what you think you look like?”

Harry looked down at himself. “Yes? This is what I look like.”

“It’s what you used to look like, before you grew three inches and started lifting rocks five hours a day. Christ, Potter, don’t you have a mirror in that hut of yours?”

Harry thought for a moment. “Actually, no, I don’t. But anyway, I certainly don’t look like him ,” he said, waving at the space the Auror once occupied. 

“You would do, if you put your hair up.” 

“I don’t have a bloody tattoo of a Hungarian Horntail on my chest!” 

Draco looked troubled. “Yes, you do. Everyone knows you do. Pansy heard it from Romilda Vane, who heard it from Ginny Weasley…"

This was a ridiculous line of conversation. Leave it to his subconscious to have a banal argument with Malfoy when all he wanted to do was bury his head in his tits and have a good suck. “Malfoy. Shut up and answer me. What are we doing here?”

Draco sighed and picked at his robe, and frowned. He started to speak, and then abruptly closed his mouth, as if having an internal debate about what he should say. Finally, he responded.  “You opened a door that you weren’t supposed to, and now you’re here.”

“Is this a dream the spring made up? The one we fell into? Is it forcing me to have weird sex dreams about you?”

Draco closed his eyes. “It would make things easier if you believed that. Fine. Yes, of course that’s what’s happening.”

Harry laughed. “Alright, let’s do it then.”

Draco looked up at him, horrified. “What?”

Harry climbed up on the bed, pulling his t-shirt off as he did so. “Yeah. It looked fun when I was doing it before. It’s my dream, I can do whatever I’d like.” 

“Um,” Draco said, but he wasn’t stopping Harry; the robe fell open and then disappeared entirely, Draco’s breasts spilling all over Harry’s hands. 

“Oh fuck,” Harry said. They were gorgeous. Harry had never seen anything quite like it - Draco’s chest, soft and lovely, his cock just as full and engorged as they were, and it was all leaking.  His nipples and the slit of his cock were dribbling liquid all over Harry. Harry squeezed, and milk and come spurted at him from three different directions. 

Draco let out a breathy cry. “Oh,” he said into the pillow, lost in his own head, “oh, it’s even better than I thought.” 

Harry lowered his head to Draco’s leaking nipple, and began to rut against him. The friction was heavenly, the lace just the right amount of discomfort against his overstimulated cock. Something wet filled his mouth, and he felt himself right on the knife’s edge, wanting more and more, wanting to suck on Draco forever, to cover them both in gallons of milk and come and sweat. 

Draco thrust back up against Harry, his cries a litany of pleases and yeses and perfects until Harry felt himself coming, spilling all over Draco’s knickers, his eyes shut tight. When he was finished, he took three gasping breaths against Draco’s hot neck, and then opened his eyes...

He was in his own bed, entirely alone. 

----------------------------

Harry didn’t know quite what to do with himself the next day. He supposed that he should do what Madame Pomfrey advised him to, which was not think about the dreams too closely. So Harry didn’t. 

He did, however, look at himself in the mirror. Dream-Malfoy had been right: he had changed. His muscles were roughly the size of the Auror he’d dreamed of. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed before; not being vain, Harry had never spent too much time looking at himself. 

He looked now. He’d gotten taller. His shoulders were wider. And his hair had gotten long enough to draw up into a knot. So he transfigured a bit of string into a hair tie and pulled it up, and then went off to breakfast. 

Malfoy was at breakfast, an unusual occurrence since the students had returned, sitting alone at the end of the staff table. When he saw Harry, he swallowed heavily, turned his face away, and appeared to contemplate his options before quickly gathering his things and making to leave. 

“Don’t,” Harry said, pulling out a chair. “Look, I don’t know what kind of dreams you’re having…” 

“Ha!”, Draco said. It wasn’t a laugh: he actually said “ha,” a bit aggressively. 

“But it doesn’t matter. It’s just the spring, right? The dreams will be gone once we have the potion. So whatever it is you’re seeing, whatever awful nightmare you’re having, try to ignore it.”

“Ignore… ignore it.” Draco’s knuckles were white where he was gripping the table. He looked up at Harry. “Wait. You think they’re… I mean, you’re having nightmares?”

Harry shifted uncomfortably and tried to evade the question. There was no way he was admitting to Malfoy that he’d been having sex dreams about him, and liking them. NO. WAY. “Er. Yeah. Nightmares.”

Draco slumped in his chair. “Brilliant. Thank you for the pep talk, Potter.” 

Harry pulled a bowl of porridge in his direction. “No problem.”

The next dream was even stranger than the one before. 

He had no recollection of walking down the hallway, or trying to open any of the doors. This time, he was walking through a baroque garden, past topiaries and fountains and marble sculptures, when he came across a man with long, blond hair sitting on a chaise lounge and weeping, his head buried in his elbow. 

“Hello?” Harry said, approaching cautiously. “Are you alright?”

The man’s head thrust further into the crook of his arm. “Oh, not you again. Go away.” 

It was Draco. He sounded just like he had the other time Harry heard him crying, in the bathroom. He reached a hand out to his shoulder. “What is it? Why are you crying?” Draco’s shoulders shuddered underneath Harry’s hand; Harry’s touch was making him cry harder, but he didn’t draw back. He watched as sobs wracked Draco’s body, throwing his hair off his shoulders. He was shirtless, and Harry noticed with detached interest that there was a tattoo of a constellation on his left shoulder blade. 

“Merlin, this is so inconvenient.”

“What’s inconvenient?”

“ Everything,” Draco said in a dramatic huff. 

“Is there…” Harry felt like an arse for saying this while Draco was crying, but fuck it, it’s not like this was real -it was a dream, this wasn’t Draco, the actual person in front of him- “is there anything I can do to help you feel better?” and he lowered his hand farther down Draco’s back, so that he was getting perilously close to touching…

“Are you actually trying to have sex with me right now? While I’m crying my eyes out in the Manor gardens?”

“Is that where we are?” Harry asked, looking around. “I mean, it’s my dream, and I’d like to have sex in it, if that’s alright, but could we not do it at your creepy old house?”

Draco sighed and raised his head. “Fine,” he said, snapping his fingers, and the garden around them dissolved. “There. Happy?”

Harry looked around. They were in a dungeon of some kind, only the stones were all painted red, and mounted on every square inch of wall space were…

“Holy shit,” Harry said, walking over to one of the displays. “I’ve never seen so many sex toys in one place.” He poked at a dildo the size of a fire hydrant. “This wouldn’t even fit inside a horse.”

“It’s a dream, Potter,” Malfoy said flippantly. “We can do whatever we like.”

Harry grinned, picking up the dildo and turning around. “You’re right,” he said. 

The dream version of Draco swallowed thickly, just as he had when Harry saw the real Draco at breakfast. “Um. Even if it is a dream, could you maybe use a bit of lube if you’re going to stick that in me?”

Harry walked over to a cabinet that contained a number of viscous looking liquids in jars. “Do you want one that warms or cools?” he asked. 

“Warms,” Draco said decisively. “And get a blindfold too.”

-----------------------

For the next week, Harry spent as much time asleep as possible. 

For some reason, he never had very interesting dreams whilst napping in the afternoon, but nearly every night his sleeping mind treated him to wonderfully inventive sex dreams. His subconscious imagined sex he had never even heard of before, and which certainly wasn’t possible in waking reality: he dreamed that he and Draco were covered in fur, fucking like animals; he dreamed that they had sex on the back of a dragon, soaring through midair; he dreamed that he fucked Draco with a Quidditch broom, which went all rubbery and vibrated in a way Harry was sure betrayed the normal behavior of physical matter. 

Since they were dreaming, Harry would have thought that all of Draco’s weird personality problems would sort of fade into the background, but for some reason Dream Draco was still a spectacular cunt. He would spoil a mood just for spite, disappearing out from under Harry right at the moment Harry was coming, for the pleasure of laughing in his face, or growing a tail or horns to put him off, or making Harry chase him and pin him down. Once, right in the thick of it, he transformed himself into Percy sodding Weasley.

“You’ve killed it. You’ve killed my cock,” Harry said. “I won’t get hard for a fucking week.”

“Of course you will, Potter.” Harry shoved him away. “I’ll make it up to you. See?” and when Harry looked over, Draco had transformed again…

Into a muggle nurse’s outfit. The kind you might see in a fantasy. Which this was. 

“Do you like it?” Draco asked, his voice gone all funny and high. He was wearing knee high boots, and his hair was done up in braids on either side of his head. 

“Uhhhhhh,” Harry replied.

“I would say your incoherence is affirmative, but given how you are normally…”

And that’s how Harry found out he had a medical kink, bent over a conjured exam table, Draco’s fingers deep inside him, his strange high voice coaxing him along.   

It was the more normal dreams that he dwelled on most, when waking. One dream in particular stood out in Harry’s mind; he chased it, trying to find it again nearly every time he fell asleep. 

He was in a hot spring, somewhere in the mountains. It was frigidly cold. Steam was rising into the air, and snow blanketed the rocky mountainside around him. Harry was floating, in the dream, in the middle of the spring. His backside, submerged in the water, was warm, and his chest and face, floating atop it, smarted in the freezing air. 

He became aware that Draco was floating next to him. One minute he was there, and the next, awareness of his presence popped into Harry’s dream consciousness. He turned his head and saw him. 

Harry flipped upright in the water and swam closer. 

Draco closed his eyes. “Hey,” Harry said, expectantly. “Do you want to…”

“You’re insatiable, Potter,” Draco muttered. “Do we have to do this every night?”

Harry splashed water at him. “It’s fun.” Draco rolled his eyes. “It’s my dream. I can do what I like.” At this, Draco raised an eyebrow, but said nothing more in protest. 

They had wound up half in, half out of the shallows. Harry cast a warming charm to keep away the chill, but that wasn’t strictly necessary: a snap of his fingers, and they could have gone somewhere more comfortable. But Harry didn’t want that. He wanted to take Draco in the snow. 

“Your bollocks are really tiny,” Draco said.

“I should smack you for that,” Harry told him, but Draco only managed to look more excited. “It’s cold. Quit being a wally.” 

“Who even says 'wally'? Are you an old age pensioner, Potter? How can you be so famous and this fundamentally uncool?” 

Somehow, he got Draco on his hands and knees, and Harry kissed the back of his head, and then his neck, and down his spine, past the tattoo of a constellation Harry didn’t recognize, to the small of his back, and then Harry properly got a look at his hole, in detail, for the first time. He’d had dreams about fucking Draco a few times, but this was the first time he’d put his face next to it, and it was painfully erotic looking. Harry spread his arse apart, and Draco groaned. 

“Please, Potter, for fuck’s sake, do something.”

“What do you want me to do?” Harry asked. 

“Anything. Fuck.” Harry stuck out his tongue and licked a stripe through Draco’s cleft. “Oh shit,” Draco said, as surprised as Harry was. 

Harry did it again. “Do you like that?” he asked. 

“Merlin, you make me feel like such a slag, Potter.” Harry kept it up until Draco was hardly able to string a coherent thought together, until he was pushing back against Harry’s face, wiggling and wiping himself against Harry’s rigid tongue. It was intoxicating, the taste of him, the soft feeling of his testicles nestling against Harry’s chin. It was the most intimate moment of Harry’s life, and yet, it wasn’t, because this wasn’t real, it was a dream, there was no one else here…

Harry dragged himself away from Draco’s arse to concentrate, and slick appeared on his fingers. Harry rubbed the tips of them around Draco’s hole, and Draco keened and pushed himself back. 

Harry obliged by allowing his fingers to enter the place they were seeking, and since it was a dream, where anything is possible, somehow Draco’s arse acquired… vacuum like qualities, and began sucking Harry’s hand inwards, consuming more and more of it, Draco moaning like a whore the whole time, until Harry was buried in Draco’s arse up to his elbow. 

They’d both come quickly thereafter, and Harry woke the next morning intending to spend some time in the restricted section of the library. Surely such a thing was possible, if one studied the right extension charms. He was a wizard, after all; the question was, who would he find that was willing to do such a thing? Perhaps there was a club in London where he could find individuals interested in this specifically. 

It wasn’t always like that. Sometimes, the sex he had with dream Malfoy had wasn’t kinky or strange at all - it was just pleasant: Harry stretched out in a sunny, grassy meadow, with Draco bouncing on top of him at a leisurely pace; Harry entering Draco slowly, nibbling on his neck and whispering sweet things into his ear; the both of them rutting up against each other on a comfortable couch, without any particular goal in mind besides feeling wonderful and kissing each other until they were dizzy. It was these dreams that stood out in Harry’s head the next day more than any other, that made facing Draco in the rare moments they saw each other in the halls or at the table so very difficult and uncomfortable. 

Fortunately, Malfoy was making himself scarce these days. Harry didn’t blame him. The students were nasty to him, and between the overt threats from the sixth and seventh years and whatever dreams the spring was foisting onto his sleeping mind, Harry was surprised he saw him around at all. Harry was so curious about what Malfoy’s dreams might be, but he didn’t dare ask him. The tenuous, acrimonious companionship they’d accomplished in the first term had evaporated. 

The more Harry spent in the dream world, the more he noticed that the dreams he was having in which Draco was present weren’t always sex dreams. Sometimes, Harry was having a perfectly normal dream, perhaps about eating ice cream at Florean Fortescues, or watching a television show, or drinking in a pub, and Draco was sat next to him, or working in whatever dream-shop Harry wandered into. 

In fact, now that he was attenuated to Malfoy’s presence in his dreams, Harry wondered whether he had been in more of them, before Harry had seen the first one, where Draco was whipped by Auror Harry. That had been two nights after they had fallen into the spring - had he had perfectly normal dreams, in the hours of sleep before then, that had also featured Draco? 

One night, Harry had a rare nightmare, which featured, of all people, Uncle Vernon. When Harry was five, he had upset a tumbler full of expensive whiskey on a night when Vernon had failed to make a critical sale, and he had come unhinged and chased after Harry, going purple in the face and screaming at the top of his lungs, and in the nightmare he was much the same, only instead of arms he had giant purple tentacles like an octopus. Harry dreamed that he was running pell-mell through Number 4, crawling under furniture and bouncing off rubbery walls, when he finally made it to the cupboard under the stairs and slammed the door. 

Vernon was still out there, trying to slip his tentacles under the door, when someone behind him whispered Diffindo, severing them completely, and Vernon retreated, screaming. 

Harry turned around in the tiny space of the cupboard. Draco was there, holding his wand and looking murderous. 

“Er,” Harry said, his voice high and tinny, like a child’s. “Thanks.”

Draco’s wand lit up with a wordless Lumos. “You’re welcome,” he said, not unkindly, but his eyes were flashing and the knuckles around his wand were white. 

“Do you…” Harry looked round the cupboard for something to do. It was awkward to sit here, even with a not-real, dream version of Malfoy, with nothing to talk about, and his weird octopus uncle howling outside the door. “Do you want to play Knight with me?”

“Knight?” Draco asked. 

“Yeah,” Harry said, reaching into the cubby where he kept his favorite one. “Look, I’ll be the Knight, and you can be the dragon.” He pulled out the Knight with the broken sword and handed Draco the stuffed green dragon that Dudley had dropped into a puddle. One of its eyes was missing. 

Draco stared at it, and then looked at Harry, and then looked back at the dragon, his mouth going queer and trembly. Finally, he said, “Alright, Harry,” and they played with the toys for a bit before Draco asked him if he would like to go somewhere else altogether. 

“Okay,” Harry said. 

Draco took his hand, and the world started melting, all the colors falling away like they’d been washed off with a hose. Draco was changing too, getting younger, until he was the same age as Harry was when he’d spilled Vernon’s drink. 

They were in a garden, on top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill was a lake; around its shore was a flock of peacocks, all with their feathers down. 

“Where are we?” Harry asked. 

“The Manor,” said Draco. Harry startled at the sound of his voice, which had gone all high and ridiculous. It made him laugh. 

Draco thumped him on the arm, but he was smiling. “Shut up. Look!” Draco grabbed Harry’s arm. “Look, here I am now.” 

Sure enough, a version of Draco identical to the one Harry was sat next to marched across the grounds. He was followed by a young woman - not his mother. A nanny. She was carrying a bucket and Draco was marching ahead of her in the direction of the lake. 

“Here it comes. Watch this, Potter, you’ll love it.”

Tiny Draco had something clutched in his little fist. As they approached the birds, he began to look more and more apprehensive. “Go on, Draco,” his nanny said to him. “It’s alright, they won’t hurt you.” 

The Draco by the lake turned back to the peacocks, deliberating, and then threw a fistful of food pellets in their direction, startling them and making them throw up their feathers. 

“AHHHHHHHH!” cried the tiny Draco. He threw his hands up in the air, screaming, and beat a hasty retreat into the skirts of his nanny. 

Harry fell all over himself laughing. “Oh, oh my goodness,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “Oh, look at you, you’ve nearly gone and pissed yourself.” The tiny Draco was wailing and turning red with fright. It was the funniest thing Harry had ever seen, though he felt a bit wicked for laughing at it. 

“I thought that would cheer you up,” the Draco next to him said. 

Harry stopped laughing and leaned into Draco. They were grown up again, stretched back out into their adult bodies. Harry rested his head against Draco’s. “It did. Thanks.”

“Now we’re even,” Draco said. 

“What do you mean?”

“I saw something embarrassing from your childhood, now you’ve seen something from mine.”

Harry frowned. He felt something in his head very nearly click into place - the last piece of a puzzle he was trying to solve, but the dream shifted again, and he lost it. 

The next night, he found Draco again rather early. He’d fallen asleep just after dinner. Usually, it was later in his sleep cycle that he found Draco - what felt like two or three o'clock in the morning, or after several hours of dreaming on his own, but in this dream, they met up nearly immediately. 

They weren’t having sex - in fact, they were fully clothed - but they were lying on a very cozy bed, underneath a blanket. There was rain pattering against the window pane, and Harry heard the soft noise of distant thunder. A candle was burning in the corner. Harry looked around, and saw they were in the charms classroom, where he’d found Draco camped out over the Christmas holiday. 

For a long while, they did not speak. Harry ran his fingers through Draco’s hair. It was quite fluffy in this dream, not meticulously styled, as Harry usually saw it. And they were both wearing fuzzy flannel pajama trousers. Harry didn’t have a shirt on, but Draco did - a lovely, soft t-shirt that felt very nice on Harry’s chest. 

Harry had never done this with anyone in real life. He’d never laid close to someone and cuddled while it was raining outside, and pet their head. It was heavenly, but it made Harry a bit sad. It was such a normal thing to do, to have physical contact with another person, and yet it had been a part of his life he’d heretofore never experienced. He wasn’t even experiencing it now; this was a dream, and the person in bed with him wasn’t really here, however much Harry might wish he was. 

“Is this where you live?” Harry asked. 

“Before the students came back,” Draco answered, snuggling more deeply into Harry’s shoulder. He smelled lovely and fresh. “Now I’m sleeping in the cellars, with the elves.” 

“The elves?” Harry asked, alarmed. “Why won’t you go live in the dungeons, with the other Slytherins?”

Draco bit his lip and gave Harry a steady look. “I could show you,” he said. 

“What do you mean?”

“I could make the dream go down a corridor,” Draco said carefully, intertwining his fingers with Harry’s. “And open a door, and you could see the memories I have of the Slytherin dungeon from last year.” He kissed each of Harry’s knuckles, one by one. 

Harry closed his eyes. The sound of the rain was lovely, and Harry’s feet were trapped in between Draco’s calves. “Would we have to leave this place?”

“Yes,” Draco said. “But we could come back afterwards.”

Harry leaned his forehead against Draco’s. “Let’s stay here,” he said. “Let’s have sex now.”

Draco took his face in his hands and kissed him, very lightly, on the lips. “Harry. We’ll do whatever you’d like, but I think...” And then he drew back, Harry’s mouth chasing after him. 

“Let me kiss you again.”

“Don’t,” Draco said. Harry smirked and tried to pull him back, but Draco was firm. “No. We shouldn’t. Not anymore.”

Harry thought he must be joking. “Is this some new kinky dream sex? Do I get to beg you for it?”

“I only think maybe it’s not quite ethical for me to be… to be taking advantage of you like this.”

“Taking advantage?” Harry laughed outright. “It’s my dream. I can do whatever I like.”

“You keep saying that. But. Potter. You don’t know all the things I know. It’s not fair to you.” 

“Whatever,” Harry said, losing the will to fight the direction the dream was pushing him in. He was so tired; he was, after all, asleep. “Let’s just go to sleep, then.” He curled his arms around Draco, drawing his slender body closer. 

“Mmmph,” Draco said into Harry’s chest. “You’re squishing me.” 

On his way back to sleep, while the dream was collapsing into a whirl of color and sounds, Harry whispered, “Draco?”

“Yes?” 

“Can we do this in real life?” It was slipping through his fingers, the dream and the memory of it, but he could still feel the soft fabric of Draco’s clothes against his skin. “Draco. Please.”

But the dream had already vanished. 

-------------------------

When he was awake, Harry spent a great deal of time, while going about his duties, trying and failing to puzzle out how exactly the spring was affecting him. Madame Pomphrey had recently reassured him that the potion would be ready soon, so he supposed it wasn’t really materially relevant, and tried to forget about it. 

He couldn’t. 

There were several very strange details about the dreams that appeared to be manifesting in real life, and Harry couldn’t quite reconcile how that could be so. For example: he went down to the cellars to find an afternoon snack, two days after the dream about the charms corridor. While the elves were loading up a tray to take back to the grounds, Harry caught sight of a rucksack in the corner. It was monogrammed with the initials DLM, surrounded by a snake. 

Harry turned round to see an elf appear with a basket of food. “Um. Is that Malfoy’s bag?”

“Master Draco is leaving it here whenever he leaves his quarters,” the little elf replied. 

“His quarters? Does he - he doesn’t live here?”

“Master Draco has taken a room in the cellars, Harry Potter. Would you like to leave a message for him?” the elf asked eagerly. “We would be honored to assist the great Harry Potter with whatever he needs.”

“No,” Harry said. “Don’t tell him I asked.”

It was odd. He was positive he hadn’t seen Draco coming and going from the cellars before, and Draco certainly hadn’t mentioned it. He wouldn’t have done - Harry was sure he’d be mortified to discover Harry had found out he’d been bunking with house elves. 

But Draco had told him that he was living in the cellars in a dream, and then it was true in real life . How was that possible? 

Harry thought about what Hermione would say: Harry had somehow already known that Draco was living in the cellars, or had guessed it, and the dream was a coincidence, or his subconscious generating a situation that Harry already was aware of. 

That wasn’t the only strange coincidence, however. Harry knew for a fact that he had only seen Draco shirtless, in real life, once, and that was on the day he cut him open - and on that day, Draco had been face up on the floor while Snape worked on his wounds. 

Therefore, Harry was fairly certain he had never seen Malfoy’s back without clothing, except of course, in his dreams. In the dream where Harry had happened upon Draco crying, in the Manor garden, he had seen a tattoo on Draco’s back of a constellation, and it had made an appearance on a number of occasions since then, when they were occupied doing… what they usually did, in Harry’s dreams. 

The Quidditch pitch was nearly entirely repaired. In a few weeks time, the students would be playing their long delayed matches, and it was Harry’s job to make sure the buildings that served as locker rooms were properly sealed to the elements. He was inspecting one of them when he ran into Malfoy changing into Quidditch gear, his back to the door, with that same constellation tattooed right there on his shoulder blade. 

In real life. Not in a dream. Harry was sure of it; he pinched himself, hard, trying to wake himself up. But it stayed there, real and dark blue against Malfoy’s skin, just as it was when Harry met him at night.  

After thinking on this latest development for a few days, Harry resolved to tell Malfoy everything, save the most embarrassing bits. The overlap between dreams and reality were troubling him, and, loath as he was to admit it, he needed Malfoy’s help to make sense of it all. But every time Harry tried to corner Draco to talk about things, Draco practically sprinted in the other direction. Their situation was a puzzle Harry simply couldn’t solve, and it was infuriating . Harry’s only escape from his ( torturously erotic) dreams was manual labor. 

In any case, there was still a good deal of work to be getting on with. The walls along the border of the pumpkin patch had all been destroyed in the invasion of the grounds, and Harry wanted to repair them before Hagrid returned in a fortnight. Harry was looking forward to seeing him again, but he was also a little unsettled that he would be turfed out of the hut he had become so accustomed to. Harry was lost in thought about where he might live after his work at Hogwarts concluded, hammering away at a bit of stubborn masonry, when he saw a slender, blond figure slip through the line of trees at the edge of the forest. 

On instinct, Harry followed him. He’d seen Malfoy about the grounds before, on his way to the Quidditch pitch or “taking a constitutional”, but Harry could see a sense of purpose to the way he moved through the trees, and he knew Malfoy was going back to the spring. He ran back to the hut to fetch his cloak, and then he was after him like a shot, zipping through the trees as quickly as he could without disturbing the undergrowth and betraying his position. 

Sure enough, Malfoy was clambering down a rise through a meadow, directly south of the Spring of Oneiromancy, when Harry caught up with him. 

“Is anyone here?” Malfoy called out, raising his lantern in the direction of the ridge, where he and Harry had encountered the centaurs on their last visit to the forest. “Hello? Answer me!” 

A bush at the top of the ridge twitched, and the centaur called Morpheus emerged, frowning. “Centaurs do not respond to commands,” he said, and made to turn in the other direction. 

“Wait!” Malfoy said. “I need your help. I can’t - I can’t control it anymore.”

Morpheus’ tail twitched irritably. “I warned you away from the poppies. The blame lies with you.”

“Me? Potter’s to blame for this, he’s the one who dragged me out to this miserable -”

“You would do well not to insult the home of those whom you ask for help,” said Morpheus coolly, though Harry saw a bit of detached amusement in his expression. Malfoy had no self awareness. It’s adorable how stupid he is, Harry thought, and then caught himself thinking Malfoy was adorable and became deeply troubled. 

“I’m…” Malfoy closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Sorry. Please - I need advice. The healer in the castle hasn’t helped me. You’re my last resort. I can’t keep him out of my dreams.”

“Wizards have a potion for precisely this circumstance,” said Morpheus. “Take it.”

“I can’t use it, and besides that, he’s been seeing my dreams for weeks.”

“How do you know that you’re not seeing his?”

“Because -” Malfoy turned red, but he continued. “Because I’ve been having the same sex dreams about him for years, and there were two of him there. The one I was dreaming about, and -”

“The one that was the manifestation of his dream self,” Morpheus responded. 

“Right,” said Malfoy. His shoulders sagged, and all the color left his previously blushing face. “I can’t keep letting him see what I want from him. He hates me, and he’ll figure it out and I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do if he finds out. There must be something I can do to stop it.”

Morpheus must have said something in reply. Harry heard the words “occlumency” and “obliviate” and “oneiromancy,” but his head was ringing like he’d just taken a blow from a bludger, and he had to lean up against a tree to keep from falling over. 

He was seeing Malfoy’s dreams. Malfoy’s real dreams. Malfoy and the Auror - that had been Malfoy’s real fantasy. Their minds were connected in their dreams. 

The spring you fell into can change your dreams, so that they are not a true reflection of your inner thoughts and feelings. Madame Pomphrey had danced around it so carefully, the link between his and Draco’s minds, after Draco had begged her not to tell Harry. Harry could see why, now, Madame Pomphrey hadn’t told him everything about the spring to begin with, and why Draco had been so mortified upon waking up in the infirmary. He’d known Harry would likely see the dreams he’d been having, as he’d said, for years. 

Harry was torn between pity for Draco and his own mortification: Draco had seen his dreams as well. He’d seen Uncle Vernon, and the cupboard, and all the sex dreams Harry’d had about Draco - he’d seen those too. They’d started out as Draco’s dreams, but Harry had jumped in with both feet. Every weird, subconscious sexual desire Harry had… sucking milk from Draco’s tits, turning into an animal, fucking Draco in every conceivable position and situation, from every angle and dynamic. He felt violated; at the same time, he felt he’d violated Draco in turn. 

It was awful. Harry knew he ought to leave. He’d intruded too much already, on what Draco assumed was a private conversation between him and the centaur. 

“I already tried Occlumency. I locked him out of everything. All the other doors held fast except the door to those sorts of dreams. I don’t know why it didn’t work.”

“It didn’t work because you don’t want to keep him out of those dreams,” Morpheus answered disdainfully. “This conversation is useless. You’re asking me to help you lock Harry Potter out of a part of your head that you want him to see - that you invited him to enter. I cannot help those with no desire to help themselves.”

“ Invited him to enter?” Draco was practically screeching, in his poshest tone, and Harry snapped out of his panic. “I did no such thing. I would never - the very last thing I’d like him to know about me is that I want him to hold me down and… Merlin,” Draco kicked the ground uselessly. “This is...I’m never going to live this down. I may as well violate my probation and go straight to Azkaban. My life is over.”

Morpheus turned his face skyward. “Don’t be so sure.” 

-----------------------------

For the next two nights, Harry took Dreamless Sleep before bed. 

He should have been doing it every night. In the back of his head, he’d known - or at least suspected - what was going on, that he and Malfoy’s heads were linked together when they were sleeping. The evidence was so obvious, but he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself. 

Because now that he admitted it, he had to take measures to stop it. 

And Harry didn’t want to stop. He wanted to keep dreaming with Draco, and not even for the sex they’d dreamed up together; Harry wanted to sleep with him under a set of warm covers while it rained outside. He wanted Draco to touch him, to beg to be touched; he wanted Draco’s presence next to him, quiet and sure, while they slipped in and out of each other’s dreams, each other’s skin. 

Draco awake was nowhere to be found. He’d practically disappeared. Harry went looking for him in the kitchens, but he’d cleared out when he saw Harry lurking by the door. Harry suspected he was in the Room of Requirement, as he couldn’t see him on the map. Harry didn’t look too hard for him. He couldn’t imagine a version of Draco Malfoy that wanted to see him, Harry, while they were awake.  

Harry keenly felt the lack of him, as if they’d broken up, which was absurd, as they’d never been together. Not really. But he was so miserable that after two nights, he owled Hermione, who was back in London, and she met him at the Three Broomsticks. 

Harry explained with as few details as possible. Naturally, it being Hermione, her first reaction was intense skepticism. 

“Oneiromancy? That’s dream divination. It’s not real.”

“Trust me,” Harry said, slumped over into his pint. “It’s real.” 

“But it can’t be. Divination is… it’s based on assumption, or past experience, or guesses.”

“I saw his dreams,” Harry insisted. “There’s no other explanation.”

“Yes there are,” Hermione said, stubbornly. “There are dozens of possible -”

Harry slapped the table angrily. “That’s besides the point, Hermione. I don’t care whether it was real, or it was my dream or his. The point is I had them, and I… God. I want what I had in them. I want to…”

“Harry,” said Hermione, her face ashen. “Harry. What kind of dreams were you…” She broke off and took a bracing sip of the drink in front of her. “Never mind. Don’t tell me.”

“I won’t,” Harry said, running a finger listlessly around the edge of his glass. “But they were… I dunno. Compelling.”

“Compelling enough to make you want to… ugh … with Malfoy? Of all people, Harry.”

“I don’t know!” Harry whined. “He’s hot -”

“Noooo, no he isn’t,” Hermione protested. 

“But he hates me.” 

“Evidently not.”

“Well, he mostly hates me.”

“And you find that attractive?”

Harry’s nostrils flared, and he thought about it. “Yes. I think. Yes.”

“You’re attracted to someone who hates you?”

“It’s not really hate, though,” Harry said. “It’s more like… antagonism, at this point. I can’t decide whether I want to punch him or -”

“Not. Another. Word.” Hermione stood up and fetched another round of drinks from the bar. When she returned, her voice was steady, but her hands were trembling a bit. “Can’t you speak to… I dunno, Ron, about this?”

Harry snorted.

“Right.” Hermione drank from her glass. “Don’t suppose you can. Alright. What are you going to do? Can’t you tell him that you know, and that you’re…” she swallowed a look of extreme distaste - “into it?”

“I can’t find him,” Harry said. “He’s hiding somewhere.”

“Wait until he’s asleep,” Hermione said. 

------------------------

That night, Harry went back to the hut and tossed and turned for hours. Now that he was looking forward to falling asleep, that he was excited about it, he found it nearly impossible to allow himself to doze off. 

In the wee hours of the morning, he finally managed it, then cocked it up by startling himself back awake. 

A half hour later, he was exhausted enough to fall asleep and stay that way. 

He was in the hallway again, with all the doors, which he now realized were doors to different parts of Draco’s unconscious mind. He wondered what was behind some of the more well-guarded ones. Nothing pleasant, probably. Harry thought of Draco’s last year of school, when he’d been living with Bellatrix, Voldemort, and Fenrir Greyback, and shuddered. 

The door he usually entered was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and Harry stepped easily through…

And found himself right back in Hagrid’s hut. 

It was raining again, and it looked like midday outside the window, and Harry wasn’t in the bed - Draco was there instead, naked and wrapped in heavy furs, his skin warm golden ecstasy in the damp firelight. 

“You’re here,” Draco said, drawing one of the furs open so Harry could climb in. 

“Yeah.” Harry thought for a moment whether it might be better to resist, to have it out with Draco before they got to touching each other; after all, it wasn’t fair to do this, to know Draco in this way, if he didn’t understand that Harry knew it was real. Or real-ish. 

But he couldn’t resist. Draco looked like everything Harry had ever wanted: sharp and open, dangerous and perfect. 

Harry crawled in and flipped Draco over, so that his back was against Harry’s chest and his hair was tickling his nose. They lay there, breathing, listening to the rain, until one of them - Harry couldn’t be sure who - moved the slightest bit, a twitch of the hips, a caress of one body against the other, and before long they were rocking against each other, slow and excruciating. Harry’s clothes, whatever he’d imagined himself wearing, disappeared; Draco’s thighs slicked up and Harry was fucking in between them.

Harry grabbed Draco’s hair with one hand and pulled on it, the better to ravish Draco’s neck. “I wish you would let me devour you,” he said, tugging on Draco’s cock, and strangely, plucking at his nipple with a weird, third hand he’d grown especially for that purpose. Draco moaned, and Harry drove into his thighs. “I could eat you alive.”

“Do it,” Draco said, and the next time Harry sank his teeth into Draco’s neck, it crumbled in his mouth, fresh and savory, the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. 

When they were finished, and Draco’s physical form had reconstituted into a lanky expanse atop Harry’s heaving chest, Harry grit his teeth and decided it was time to come clean. 

“Draco. We need to talk.”

“Did I taste rotten?”

Harry smacked him, right on the arse, but not hard. Draco winced. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

“Don’t be serious, Potter. It’s middle class.”

“I am middle class.”

“That’s a bit of wishful thinking, isn’t it?” Draco asked, perfectly earnest. He wasn’t taking the piss. Harry put his head in his hands. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, you’re awful.”

“Yes, I’m aware, thank you. Everyone’s already told me. You don’t need to pile on.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“Doing what? Fucking someone so far out of your league?”

Harry inhaled deeply through his nose, willing himself to overcome his anger long enough to say what he'd come to say. “I want to do this in real life, Draco.”

“I’m sure you do,” Malfoy replied, tossing his head conceitedly. 

“Stop being evasive,” Harry said. “Look, I followed you into the forest. I know this is your real dream. I know the spring connected us.”

“You. What?” Draco’s form began flickering in and out of existence now, and his face got dark. Not metaphorically: there was an actual shadow in front of it, so Harry couldn’t properly see him. 

“I’m sorry. I should have told you before we…”

“It’s not real,” Draco shouted, and he was slipping through Harry’s arms. He’d turned to liquid, and he was rushing off the bed, puddling on the floor. “I’m not here. This isn’t… it’s not real. Wake up.”

Harry wanted to laugh, as Draco had just transformed into a panicked, anthropomorphic puddle. It would have been funny, if this wasn’t the most surreal interpersonal conflict of his entire life. “Don’t be worried. Come back. I mean… be yourself again.”

“No,” Draco said, petulantly. The puddle oozed underneath a chair by the fireplace, where it was surely hot enough for it to evaporate in short order. 

“I want to talk to you.”

“Wake up,” said Draco, panicked. “Wake up, wake up, wake the fuck up .”

“I’m not going to wake up,” Harry said, trying to move the chair out of the way. “Turn back into a person and we’ll talk.”

“WAKE UP,” Puddle Draco shouted; the next instant, he was gone, and Harry was alone before the fire. 

-----------------------

The following morning, Harry woke up to an owl from Madame Pomphrey, informing him that the potion to unbind his dreaming mind from Malfoy’s was ready and waiting for them. 

Harry did not pretend to himself that he was happy. He didn’t want to give up the fantasies he - they - had been creating. The reality was, once they’d drunk the potion and Hagrid returned in a few days, it was likely that Harry wouldn’t be spending any time with Draco at all, awake or asleep. 

He somehow managed to drag himself to the infirmary. Draco was an infuriating arse, but Harry had come to think of him as his infuriating arse, and before they parted ways, Harry was going to make a last ditch effort to… he wasn’t sure, exactly. 

When he finally arrived, Draco was there, looking just as fantastic as he had done in Harry’s dreams. He had deep circles under his eyes - Harry guessed he’d been up most of the night, keeping Harry out of his head - but his hair was combed just so, and his clothes were pressed as always, so that Harry had an overwhelming urge to push him against the wall and muss him up. 

“Mr. Potter?” said Madame Pomfrey impatiently. Harry realized this was the third time she had said his name. 

“Sorry,” he said, shaking himself awake. 

“Right this way,” she said, guiding him and Draco over to a table, where two vials of translucent, purple liquid bubbled over a set of blue flames. 

Draco reached out for one. “Thank Merlin. I’ve been desperate,” he said, but she smacked his hand away. 

“You have to drink them at the same time, or they won’t work,” she told him, holding out a vial in Harry’s direction. 

Harry took the vial. “Right, on three, Potter,” Draco said, glaring at him. 

Madame Pomphrey began counting. “One.”

Harry looked at Draco. He was smaller than Harry remembered. Perhaps that’s because Harry had a growth spurt over the summer, and his self-image hadn’t caught up with it. In their dreams, they were usually of equal height. 

“Two.”

Draco raised the vial to his lips, and his eyes fluttered closed. Harry had a flashback to a scene they’d played, last week. Draco was blindfolded, and Harry had tickled him with a long quail’s feather, running it down his hard stomach, his thighs, Draco moaning and arching up into the faint touch of it. 

Harry set the vial down. 

Draco heard the noise it made on the table, and his eyes flew open. “Potter. Pick that up this instant. 

“No,” said Harry, and turned toward the door. He had to get away from here, to someplace private. He walked swiftly out of the infirmary and up to the seventh floor. By the time he made it up to the Room of Requirement, he could hear Draco’s footsteps pounding behind him. 

“Stop it at once,” Draco said imperiously, every inch the poncy git. Harry opened the door to the room, and Draco tried to slam it shut on his fingers. 

Harry pulled them out of the way just in time. “Don’t think I will, thanks.” He pulled the door open again.

This time, Malfoy hexed him. “Ouch,” Harry said, bringing a hand up to his stinging cheek. “Cor, don’t be such a bastard. Come in for one minute.”

He finally managed to strong arm the door open, and wrenched his way inside. Sighing dramatically and clucking his tongue, Draco followed him. 

“Right. You are going to come back to the infirmary and take that potion, Potter, or so help me, I’ll -”

But that was as far as he caught, because Harry had pinned him up against the wall with his whole body, lifting him at least six inches off the ground so that Harry had to reach up slightly to kiss him, which he was doing. Hard. He was kissing Draco hard, and it was… honestly, a bit unpleasant, compared to what they’d been doing in their dreams, where Draco’s mouth was always pliant and teasing. 

Draco’s mouth now wasn’t pliant or teasing. It was much like Harry imagined kissing a venomous snake: the body he was containing against the burnt stones of the room was writhing against him, trying to free itself while simultaneously initiating more contact, and his mouth was tearing at his, practically gnashing against Harry’s. After a minute or two of fumbling, trying to adjust their angle, and finally failing to get at all comfortable, Harry realized he had no idea what he was doing. 

He pulled away, to catch his breath and regroup, but Draco’s legs wrapped around him and yanked him back forward, and they kissed again, fast and awful and so hot Harry couldn’t breathe. 

They had all their clothes on. This was wrong, but Harry couldn’t pull himself away long enough to do anything about it, and Draco’s hands were clutching Harry’s rugby shirt so tightly that Harry didn’t reckon he could free himself long enough to take it off. Harry’s cock had gone fantastically erect in the span of the thirty seconds they had been touching each other; it was so hard that he felt like gasping, that he was gasping, and then not rubbing but grinding and slamming it against the seat of Draco’s trousers. 

Draco’s cock was caught up against Harry’s stomach, and he was pulling at Harry, his ankles behind Harry’s knees, squirming as best he could, practically demanding that Harry press forward with his whole weight. 

Harry tried to pull away, only succeeding in creating maybe an inch of space between their mouths. Draco lunged toward him, after another taste, but Harry pulled away, stoic and teasing. 

“I thought you didn’t want it,” Harry said lightly, tracing circles on the tiny bit of bare skin he’d found on Draco’s hips. 

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Potter. I said no such thing.”

“You want to drink the potion.”

Draco made as if to shove Harry off him, but all he really did was worm his legs around Harry’s thighs more firmly. “I don’t want you in my head anymore,” he said quietly. 

Harry leaned forward and brushed his lips with a kiss, gentle for the first time; he was trying to tempt Draco, to tease him, but he betrayed too much of his own longing. “But it’s so good when I’m in your head,” Harry pleaded. “I like it.” Draco closed his eyes and leaned into him. “I like it so much, Draco.” 

“Don’t -” Harry went to work on Draco’s neck, and Draco threw his head back so hard that his skull made a cracking sound. “That - ow, that hurts… ah. Yes, that’s better, that’s…” he lost himself for a moment in what Harry was doing with his teeth, but then recollected the thread of their conversation. “Harry.”

“Mmph.” Harry was lost, deep in the crook of Draco’s neck. He smelled incredible. Was it cologne? Or something he was washing with? 

“You can’t be in my dreams anymore. It’s too weird. I’m not… fuck, yes, that’s so good…”

Harry had never paid attention to what his lovers smelled like, except for Ginny, and she usually smelled clean, if she’d just showered, or freshly sweaty, as they’d done a lot of fooling around after Quidditch practice. Draco smelled heavenly. It wasn’t fair, how good he smelled. Harry wanted to spend the rest of his life inhaling, as close to Draco’s skin as possible. He wanted the scent to be on him, all over him, covering every bit of him. 

The situation was fast becoming overwhelming, for both of them. Draco was nearly sobbing, and he was so turned on he could hardly speak anymore. Harry backed away from the wall and found a waiting bed, just behind them, with a tub of lubricant on an end table. Harry grabbed at it, but he was clumsy and it fell to the floor. He just managed to catch it before it shattered. 

Draco was so out of his head that he paid not attention. Instead, he was struggling out of his clothes, not bothering with his shirt or his socks, but getting his pants and trousers off. Harry thought he looked like sex on legs, his cock bobbing out from under his rumpled shirtsleeves, and his white socks still on his feet. 

Harry wasted no time, unzipping himself and slicking himself up, and then scooting forward on his knees. 

“Wait,” Draco said, looking apprehensive. “It’s. I’ve never…”

“You’re joking,” Harry said, incredulously. "After all those dreams, where you were... I though you had loads of experience!"

Draco was blushing. “Well, when would I? I was a Death Eater when I was sixteen. I had bigger fish to fry than getting fucked. Not all of us had time to go whoring around while the war was on, not like the Golden Boy.”

For all his nastiness, Draco was looking a bit vulnerable. Harry tried to slow himself down. “Don’t insult me because you’re insecure. I’ll go slow.”

Draco nodded and then lay back and looked at the ceiling, taking deep breaths. Harry had the impression he was steeling himself, in case Harry was awful, and was suddenly struck by an unexpected sense of responsibility. 

He dipped his fingers back into the lubricant and pulled them away, sticky. It wasn’t the kind Draco preferred in their dreams; it wasn’t warming, and it didn’t smell like candy. It was just normal lubricant, but it did the job alright, helping Harry’s fingers push past Draco’s rim. Harry went as slow as he could, but even so, Draco looked a bit uncomfortable, and Harry had to back off a minute. 

“Is that alright?” he asked, after Draco’s body had relaxed again. 

About five minutes later, Draco had stretched open, though he was still so tight, Harry didn’t know how this was going to work. For all their dry humping against the wall, they had both gone very still, though their movements were no less urgent. Harry got his fingers back, and Draco pulled his knees up to his chest, too nervous to make eye contact. 

“Hey,” Harry said. “I won’t do anything you don’t want.”

“Please, just do it,” Draco whispered. “I want it.”

Harry did it. 

He pushed in, his eyes closed, and fuck, it was tight, just as he’d thought, clinging and sucking him in, and the feeling plus the thought of what he was doing, what they were finally doing together after a month of dreaming, was enough to make him lose it, and he was coming inside of Draco, moaning, embarrassed and too turned on to care, all at once. 

He collapsed into Draco’s neck, which was shaking with suppressed laughter. 

“Stop,” he said, weakly batting at Draco’s side. “I’m not usually… I just got overwhelmed is all. I’ll be better next time.”

“Next time?” Draco asked, archly. 

“Don’t be a git. Next time.”

---------------------------------

Next time came in about five minutes, anyway. 

Draco was still hard, and after Harry had recovered a bit, he gave him a blowjob. Harry had never actually given anyone a blowjob in real life, and he didn’t expect himself to be good at it. He wasn’t, at first. His teeth were in the way, and he hadn’t any idea what to do with his hands, but his saving grace was that he could suppress his gag reflex. It was much like throwing off an Imperius: he simply point blank refused to give into his body’s signals to pull off Draco’s cock, and in no time at all, Draco was coming down the back of Harry’s throat. He didn’t even have to decide to swallow, as Draco’s cock was in his actual throat, a feeling that made Harry hard all over again. 

“No,” Draco said breathlessly, when he felt Harry’s erection rubbing up against his thigh, about three minutes later. “I can’t. I’m still sore.”

“Sore?” Harry scoffed. “I was in you for like, thirty seconds.”

“Yes, I remember,” Draco said, pulling the duvet over himself. “Would you be quiet? I like to doze off after I’ve had an orgasm.”

Harry muttered to himself discontentedly, but wrapped himself around Draco’s back all the same, and promptly fell asleep. 

----------------------

Probably because they’d just made each other come while awake, not a quarter of an hour previously, the dream they entered had nothing to do with sex. 

They dreamed that they were sleeping. 

Not talking, or kissing, or hitting each other with riding implements, or fighting with each other. 

Sleeping. 

Harry had his eyes closed, but he was aware that they were in a bedroom. He could hear noises outside: taxis, police cars, people chatting as they walked past the window, and the loud rumble of a double decker bus. It was late morning, just as it was in real life, but they were in a city, with bells sounding in the distance and the smell of last night’s curry wafting in from the hallway. 

Draco shifted next to him and wiped his face with his hand. 

“Harry.”

Harry didn’t move. He was so comfortable. He pretended that he was still asleep - which was odd, as he was, in fact, still asleep. 

“Harry. Hermione’s coming by. You said to wake you.”

Harry put a pillow over Draco’s head to stop him from talking while he tried to figure out whose dream he was in. Clearly, he and Draco were living together. He opened an eye a crack and looked around the room. There were two broomsticks on the wall, and a pile of Harry’s clothes, next to an orderly hamper, which is where Harry assumed Draco kept his own dirty laundry. There were framed photographs of Ron and Hermione, in wedding outfits, and Teddy, a bit older than he was now. 

It could have been either one of them that dreamed this up. It didn’t matter if it was his idea or Draco’s. Harry wanted it, either way. 

“Harry,” Draco said, but this time he didn’t try to wake him. Instead he took his hand, and wound his fingers around his wrist. The room got sunnier as the dream went on, but Harry didn’t stir. 

---------------------------

They drank the potion, in the end. 

Draco was right. It was too weird, to have someone in your head night after night, seeing all their weird subconscious desires and childhood traumas and buried, unspoken kinks. That level of enmeshment wasn’t the basis for a relationship.  Harry missed the surreal, reality-bending sex they were having, but on the whole, he had no complaints. Or at least, very few. 

Okay. So he had some complaints. 

As it transpired, sex in real life, as an eighteen year old, with another eighteen year old who, despite fantastically detailed and flawlessly realized BDSM dreams, was both recently a virgin and accordingly, quite reticent to come out and tell Harry what it is he would actually like to do in real life; as Draco and Harry did not have a history of successful communication, to put it mildly, having mutually fulfilling sex was difficult. 

But they were trying. And that was fun. So Harry didn’t have too many complaints. 

Harry was having fun in other ways as well. 

“You’re not serious.” 

Harry handed Hermione a napkin. “Here. No it’s… it’s all down your front as well. I’ll go to the bar and get you another.”

“ Sit down. You’re not serious. This is a dream. Wake up, Hermione. They’re not moving in together, you’ve been excused from taking your N.E.W.T.S., and you’ve always been fully clothed in the Wizengamot. Wake up.”

Harry reached across the table and pinched her. 

“Ow!” 

“Just trying to be helpful.”

Hermione stood up. “I think I will need that drink. Would you like one yourself?”

“No, thanks. We’re moving the furniture in later today, better not drink too much.”

They’d found a flat not far from a nice bar district in Shoreditch. They hadn’t intended to move in together. Moving in together was something people did when they were in love, which Harry and Draco most certainly weren’t; most of the time, they could hardly stand each other, and the apartment shopping process had more than demonstrated their lingering mutual acrimony. 

“It’s fucking hideous.”

“It’s what we can afford.”

“I am not accustomed to sharing a hallway with… with…”

“Go on, say it,” Harry goaded. 

“They’re performers.”

“They’re in a band. It’s entirely normal, for young people in the East End to be in a -”

“ I can’t. It’s barely acceptable that we’re sharing a building with anyone else, let alone -”

“You slept in the kitchens. With house elves.”

“How dare you bring that up? I don’t go round throwing all your worst moments in your face -”

“You do, actually,” Harry said, and he walked right out of the flat and down the street, leaving behind his fuming boyfriend and a gape-jawed estate agent who elected to “focus more closely on pre-existing clients” afterward. 

But they weren’t moving in together because they were in love, so all the fights they had over which borough to rent in and which furniture to bring over from Grimmauld Place didn’t put them off in the slightest. They were moving in together because Harry couldn’t stand to see Draco trapped in a castle that had traumatized him, and the Ministry would only release him into the custody of… well. That was its own story. 

Hagrid returned in the middle of March, to Harry’s delight and simultaneous consternation. Delight, because he hadn’t seen Hagrid in ages, and consternation, because it meant returning to Grimmauld Place, which he hated. 

Hagrid was very kind and allowed him to stay in the hut until Harry’s hangover, ensuing from the giant’s jolly return, had run its course, but it was clear that Harry’s time at Hogwarts had come to a close. He packed his things and chased down Draco, who had been staying with him in the hut for the week or so between drinking the potion and Hagrid’s arrival. 

With the help of the map, Harry found him in the library under several heavy-handed notice-me-not charms. 

“What do you mean, ‘visit you in London’? You know very well I can’t.”

“Ohhhhh, right, yeah,” Harry said, feeling exceptionally dense. His probation. He was being monitored by McGonagall. He wasn’t allowed to leave the premises without her. “Sorry. I’m… I feel stupid.”

“I can’t imagine that’s a transitory feeling, Potter. Ow!”

Harry put his wand away quickly, before Madame Pince caught him casting hexes in the library and turfed them both out. “I was trying to be nice. I didn’t want to leave and never see you again. I… I like you.”

Draco arched one eyebrow at him. He was always doing that. It was driving Harry spare. “Wonders never cease.”

“Look. There’s got to be a way.”

“Unless you want Minerva McGonagall chaperoning our… erm… encounters, I don’t see that there is one.” 

“You can’t want to spend the next… what is it, three years?” Draco nodded. “Three years cooped up in Hogwarts. You hate it here.”

Draco sighed and rubbed his temple, where Harry’s hex had caught him. “I do. But I haven’t any other options, unless you know someone the Ministry trusts as much as Minerva Mcgonagall to take over probationary custody, and who’s willing to house me in London.”

“Er…” Harry squinted past Draco’s face, looking at the mullioned windows instead of making eye contact. “It would probably be a really bad idea, but…”

It was the worst idea, in fact. 

They fought over everything. Every little thing. People who had such a long history of hating each other weren’t meant to go from that to living together in such a short span of time. It gave Harry whiplash. One minute, they were necking companionably or feeling each other up through their clothes, and the next, Draco would throw a book at his head or smash a plate. It wasn’t healthy. 

“This isn’t healthy,” Ron said, the first time he came over for a beer after work. 

Harry sat on the couch, staring at the hole Draco had blasted in the wall before storming off. “Yeah,” he agreed. 

“You could send him back there, you know,” Ron said. 

“No, I can’t.”

“You’re not obligated to save him out of a sense of pity,” Ron told him. 

“It’s not that,” Harry explained. “He’s. Look, we shouldn’t be living together. But it’s the nature of the situation, and I do like him. And eventually, we’ll work things out, and it will get better.”

“What makes you think it will?”

“Uh,” Harry said, unsure of how much he was willing to freak Ron out. “So, do you remember in sixth year, when we found that magazine in Fred and George’s room, and it -”

“Do. Not. Nope. No.” Ron was covering his ears with both palms pressed flat against the side of his head. “I don’t ever want to think about my best friend tied up, or, or…”

“It’s actually him that gets tied -”

“Thanks for the beer,” Ron said, grabbing at his jacket and making for the door. “Let’s do this again sometime, shall we?”

Things did improve, by degrees. They could speak to each other, now. Draco was more willing to tell Harry what he wanted when they were having sex, and not only what Harry was doing wrong - naturally, telling Harry what he’d done poorly had been second nature, but coaxing Draco into letting Harry know what was going on in his head took weeks. 

They never quite lost the habit of fighting with each other, of being at each other’s throats, but one day, Harry came home from a run and Draco had cleaned the flat, a task he had sworn up and down he would never perform, it being beneath his station; that’s when Harry knew they would be alright. 

“Mmph. Potter. All I did was tidy up a bit and vanish the messes. You don’t have to… actually, yes. Yes you do.”

Harry had got his mouth all the way around him and couldn’t reply, but he cast a wordless spell that bound Draco’s wrists behind his back, in case he tried to get handsy. 

“Yes, that’s it. Suck it, Potter. I command you.” Harry let Draco see him rolling his eyes. He was the only person Harry knew that would order around someone to whom Draco had, only three days ago, confessed (haltingly, in the blushing manner he had when he asked for something sexually) that he wanted Harry to treat him like a proper submissive. 

Harry liked Draco asking him for things almost as much as he liked giving them to him. That was the best part of it: overcoming their inhibitions enough to say it out loud, to confess to each other what they wanted. It took so much courage for Draco to come out and say it that Harry felt… he was proud of him. Of them. 

“So how long were you having sex dreams about me?” Harry finally asked, after they’d collapsed in a sweaty heap next to each other. Harry dried his face with his undershirt; it was unseasonably warm for June. 

“Do you really think I’m going to answer that?”

Harry rolled on top of him and pinned him to the bed, enjoying the feeling of him struggling beneath him. “I thought you wanted me to boss you around?” Harry said cheekily. “You - hey, that hurts, ouch, stop it - you are physically incapable of taking orders, Draco. Stop.”

Draco’s body stilled underneath his, and Harry took the opportunity to press his nose to Draco’s neck and inhale deeply. 

“I...More or less always,” Draco said in a small voice. 

Harry pulled his head back. “So, what. Were you never going to tell me?”

“You wouldn’t have done a thing about it, Potter.”

“Only because you were such a brat. If you had been nicer -”

“You never would have looked twice at me.”

Harry would have conceded it was true, but Draco’s skin was warm against his, and then Draco leaned in to whisper, “besides, I like being a brat for you,” which was perhaps the hottest thing Draco had ever dreamed up, and Harry was obliged to fuck him again, and again, all afternoon and into the evening. 

At last, sated and bruised and shagged out, they fell asleep.