Author: michi_thekiller

MOD WARNING: This fic contains depictions of sexual dynamics that many readers may find extremely disturbing, and, well, traumatic. That's half the point. But don't say we didn't warn you.

Rating: NC-17/ MA 15+, for dark situations, graphic sexual scenes featuring dubious consent, angst, humor/darkfic.

Author's notes:. This was inspired by a drabble/plot bunny over at the Big Bang forums written by Spaggel and requested by Aja. Sorry, Aja, I'm sure this isn't the story that you had in mind, but this is the story that ended up being written!
Also, this is of utmost importance: Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the deepest cockles of my heart to yuumoya, who was miraculously able to hold my hand and stroke my hair through this even at the worst of times, when I was snarling and foaming at the mouth. She made me believe in the impossible. Without her, this story would be little more than a pathetic dribbling of story-seed. It is our strange illegitimate lovechild. I love you, baby.

Summary: God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.
-Jacques Deval


-"In the country of pain, we are each alone."-

When his eyes are closed, there is always someone who cries.

It is the first thing that Harry hears when he wakes up in the morning, that fading whimpering sound. Sometimes it's a sob, heart-broken and wrenching, and sometimes it's a wail, but sometimes it is a quiet, lonely thing.

Today it's the just the sniffles, like the mystery crier has a bad cold more than anything. It washes into the sound of rain drumming on the window like a hundred thousand fingertips. On the clock/radio, they are playing the UK Top 40, and it's one of those bands with the bloke singer that sounds like a girl, and he thinks, this is a song that never ends.

"Really," Harry says to himself quite sternly, "life wouldn't be all that much better if I were dead." He counts it was his first Cheerful Thought of the Day. Then it occurs to him that he is talking to himself like a crazy person, and that is Not Such a Cheerful Thought.

He tries to shake himself of it. He feels particularly empty this morning. It doesn't help that he sent himself to bed without dinner. And there's also the fact that he's just had one of those dreams that seems so real that it convinces you that that is your particular universe, that that is where you belong, even when you try to tell yourself that it's only a dream. He can still smell the dream-smells, still feel the ghosts of touches upon his skin – there hadn't even been any weird parts to it, no pantyhose, not even a single slippery salmon.

It had been a good dream, this time, the kind that fills you with a warm sort of pleasure and is so perfect that it makes your heart ache. It had spread through his body like a hot cup of cinnamon tea. He feels bereft upon waking, and it is better not to try to remember it; good dreams like that one are the absolute worst kind.

He knows that most people would think that his dreams are dark, crawling with long spider leg shadows and snakes' tongues and bodies and blood. It's almost expected of them to think that; Harry at least takes comfort in the predictability. (Well, Wednesdays is spiders night, Thursday nights at 3 am he wakes up screaming from a war flashback, and every other Sunday is the strange one about the giant piece of toast, but that's after he's had too much leftover casserole.) It has been a long time since he has shared them with anybody. They usually don't like to hear it, although they never come out and say it, they get a certain kind of worried look on their faces. Hermione-looks. Hermione had suggested that he see somebody, maybe. PTSD, she had called it. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Do you have flashbacks, she had asked. Nightmares?

She had run down the other symptoms in a litany of concern. Emotional numbing, detachment, loss of interest in activities. Avoidance, difficulty sleeping and concentrating, irritability, hypervigilance.

(Say what you will about Hermione, but at least she never lost her passion for memorising textbooks. )

Of course not, Harry had said. Where would you get those ideas?

That's just a whole list of Not At All Cheerful Thoughts, and those are the kinds of things that keep you down.

In the shower, he turns on the water hot, hot, loving the almost painful soothe of it, watching his skin turn red. He washes his hair quickly and curses when he gets shampoo in his eyes. He trails his hand down the flat, muscled planes of his own chest, touching his morning erection idly. He tries to think of nothing when he comes. The splatter of white on the tiled shower wall looks kind of like an animal. A goat or a dog, something with ears and four legs. He's not sure whether that thought is Cheerful or Not, or maybe it's just Crazy Again.

Kreacher has made breakfast: two perfect eggs, sunny-side up like golden eyes, and toast and marmalade. Kippers, even. Harry eats as if he is starved, stabbing through the eggs with his fork so that their insides bleed yellow all over his plate. He can't seem to gain weight. He has spent his whole life being hungry, in various ways.

At least he and Kreacher get along fairly well now, "fairly well" in the sense that he's not afraid that the house elf will murder him in his sleep and then wear his skin like a superhero cape. He also cooks good food for him and Harry can eat it and trust that, 99% of the time, there are no extra "special" ingredients. The extra one percent is just mostly Harry being paranoid and indulging himself in Extremely Gross thoughts.

Mostly, he thinks.

Sometimes he glances over The Daily Prophet while he eats. He's no longer on the front page so much, anyway. He doesn't really miss it, of course, and walking in the street he still gets the random requests for autographs, from time to time. Once he signed a girl's tit (just one, mind you, not two), but he had to stop after that – he had no idea that it was such a downward slope, no idea that before you knew it, people would be pulling out body parts left and right.

Today he is stopped in the street by a man in a trenchcoat with a hat pulled low over his eyes. For a second Harry thinks he is a flasher, and is surprised at himself, but just barely, to find that that is actually a Cheerful Thought. Not that Harry's a pervert or anything, of course, but it would be nice to be surprised not by someone who wanted to kill him, but by someone who wanted to do something as wholly innocent as show off his bits. It would help to break up the dreary monotony of the day, after all.

The man is not a flasher, sadly, and instead wants Harry to sign a photo collection of himself that would rival Colin Creevey's. "Who should I make it out to?" Harry asks.

"Don't make it out to nobody," the man huffs gruffly. Harry's learned to stop asking questions about what people plan to do with his photos.

Autographs for nobody. Thinking on Colin's little dead body, Harry scrawls his name over his own face over and over again, and sometimes it looks like he's giving himself a moustache and sometimes it looks more like a beard, until his hand is all stiff and can't write anymore.

He reminds himself to wear disguises when he goes out, after that. Maybe a set of those Groucho Marx glasses, as long as it wasn't the enchanted kind that bonded to your face. Fred and George had sold something like that, back when it had still been Fred-and-George. George's joke shop tends towards a more morbid sort of humour these days, personalised chocolate coffins and Torture-Your-Own-Dark-Lord action figures (now with kung-fu grip). The kids love them. It's a sign of the times – these, our post-Dark-Lord times, the Daily Prophet would say.

Soon Harry arrives at the seemingly abandoned department store, past the sign that perpetually reads "Closed for Refurbishment," past the dummy that, today, is sporting a white leisure suit with sequins, platforms with goldfish inside, and a big Afro wig. He's pretty sure that the goldfish are dead.

Harry keeps his head down when he passes through the entrance, half not to be recognised and half because he doesn't really care to look at people with magical injuries anymore, no matter how ridiculous. It's hard to avoid bumping into people from time to time like this, however, and he ends up walking straight into a man who has a medium-sized shark protruding out of his chest.

"Hey, watch where you're—aren't you Harry Potter?"

"Y-you've got the wrong bloke," Harry stutters out quickly, escaping before the man can ask him to sign his shark.

The receptionist to the ward blushes when she sees him, ducking her head. Her name is Anne and she is a pretty but mousy little thing with soft brown hair. He gives her a smile.

"Good morning, Mr. Potter," she says.

"Morning," he greets.

"Here to see...?"

"Yeah."

"Go on right in, then."

The doors swing open for him and he always has to close his eyes a little, hold his breath a little, just before he walks through them.

First thing when he enters the ward, he stops a passing nurse. She wears white robes with slightly suspicious stains, her curly hair piled up on her head, a few tendrils escaping the pins. He's seen her around for a while now, and she's usually here when he comes, although he can never remember her name. "Mr. Potter!" she says. "How lovely to see you."

"How is he doing?" Harry asks instead, not rude since these are always the first words out of his mouth when he comes here. He knows that nothing is different, there is never a change, but to stop asking is the same as stopping all hope.

"Nothing since the last time you came, why don't you go on in and give a little greet, eh? He's missed you." The nurse pats him on the back and then turns to open the door. Her dark hair is pulled back into a tight bun, a spiral of darkness sitting on her skull.

Harry sighs and moves past her, "Yeah, I'll do that." Walking in, he sees the lone figure, sitting at a chair by the window and looking out. The grey eyes are as steady as iron, dull and unwavering in their scrutiny of a small tree just outside.

"Hey." Harry feels like the air has been forced out of him. Seeing Draco like this, there is a fist in his stomach, and the feeling reminds him of things that he'd rather forget. Some of them because they are too bad to remember, and some of them because they are too good.

"....H-h-arry?" The blonde opens up to him, stuttering over his name but eyes lighting up.

He forces himself to smile. "Draco," he says, and walks over, each step like moving through water. But it is Draco who turns to him, like a flower towards the sun.

"How are we doing today?" he asks, his voice deceptively cheerful, gentle. If Draco is a live flower, planted in the ground, Harry is one of fabric and plastic, collecting dust. He shouldn't be anyone's sun. (Or son, for that matter, since he apparently gets people killed, but that's a pun he doesn't much want to think about.) There are glass vases full of those colourful, horrible fake flowers here, all over the place.

"G-good," Draco manages to stutter out, and he slides his arms around Harry's waist, pressing his face into his stomach.

Harry inhales deeply, his fingers stroking pale, pale blonde hair. It looks faded and dull, like aging silk thread, not bleached brilliant near-white-gold by the sunlight. It's getting too long; they don't know how to take care of him here, not the way that he deserves.

"H-haarry days are b-best," Draco manages, and Harry does have to smile at that, even though it hurts.

The rain drums against the window. Draco's body is warm against him. The light in the room is grey and Draco's roommate keeps on knocking on the door...from the inside of the room. Even though the door is propped open.

Harry doesn't know how much longer he can take of this. That is a Not So Cheerful Thought. He tries to counteract that with a cheerful one and he comes up empty. The best thing he can think of is how easy it would be to slip poison into the sweets that he brings Draco when he visits.

"Draco," he says, "a cheerful thought, please."

"Cats," Draco answers definitively, with all the confidence he once had. Harry looks at him questioningly.

"They're s-soft," Draco manages slowly. Harry smiles in spite of himself.

"S-sneaky. And. Green eyes."

"That's a good one," Harry praises, and as Draco closes his eyes and presses into his touch, he knows that it is just a less arrogant way of saying of course it is, I came up with it, you dummy.

Harry supposes that he will have to forfeit this round. This is one game that Draco's just better at, these days.

On nice days he might take him out to the garden, walk around the path. Harry could bring bread for him to toss at the various birds. Draco likes to see them fight over it, and aims for their backs so that he can watch the poor unfortunate birds attacked by their fellow feathered brethren. It's better than throwing rocks at the birds and so Harry indulges him; it's worth it to see him laugh, even if this laugh is different from the scornful sound he was once so used to hearing. Draco holds onto his hand, tightly, their fingers laced and intertwined. Even his bones feel thin. Harry holds on to his hand as if afraid that the blonde might slip away if he lets go, like falling off a cliff, or being swept away by high water. That's something that comes easily to Harry now – gentle, reassuring touch, squeezing that hand back, tracing his fingers over the smooth skin of a cheek, brushing through the long strands of hair at the nape of Draco's neck.

Today it's not a going-out day. It's rainy and so they stay in. Harry touches him all the same, each finger careful and gentle, feeling the skin, soft and real. "Rain, rain, go away," Draco sings, "come again another day," over and over again until Harry makes him stop. The roommate keeps on knocking, knocking away.

It doesn't matter what Harry says to him, Draco almost always smiles when he's around. It makes him shiver, and it can almost mask that medicine smell that seems to waft off his hospital robes, that herbal scent of the potions that they feed him and that don't do anything.

Soon enough he has to leave; he can never stand to be there long, not with all the disjointed forms in the hallway, the sobbing and laughing he sometimes hears. It's not Draco, at least, not this time; it hasn't been, not since the very beginning. Leaving is the hardest part of visiting, next to coming in. Draco puts up a fuss, of course, spoiled brat even now, and it's reassuring to know that some things never change. When he leaves he hurries out, and he tries not to bump into anybody with anything protruding from their bodies.

When Harry goes home at night, he wants to curl up in the shower. He doesn't. He brews a kettle of tea but he doesn't drink it. Then he puts himself into bed early.

-"I like a look of agony, because I know it's true." -

It began sixth year. Of course, one could argue that it began from the very beginning, a dark robe shop, talk of half-giants and Quidditch, and then the train - layers upon layers of meaning and implications. Maybe it began even before that – the sins of the fathers, and similar bullshit.

Most stories begin 'once upon a time,' of course, but Harry never thought of his story like one of those stories. Ick.

Sixteen is an age of trials and tribulations, even without the whole saving the world gig. It is strange emotions run high, changing bodies settling, a slow rupture from the awkward chrysalis of puberty to whatever strange insect stage of adulthood. Harry grew taller over the summer, but he wished he were a bit taller still. It seemed that he was forever doomed to be a bit on the short side, probably due to all the malnutrition as a child, not to mention being forced to curl up in small spaces. (It was the same thing with goldfish, wasn't it? The way that they only grow as big as their tank allows.) He grew stronger, however, and that was something to be proud of, he supposed. It was probably an admirable achievement, considering all the time he spent lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating Sirius. Most of his workout routine probably consisted of pacing around his room, punching things, and lifting his textbooks from place to place without reading them. (It wasn't so much cleaning his room as just moving shit around.) If he had been a more business-minded person, he probably could have made a tidy little profit on marketing this programme to gullible young first years. The Clinically Depressed Workout Regimen can work wonders.

There was a certain finality to it all the moment that he stepped onto Platform 9 and Ύ, respective Weasleys and Hermione in tow. He had spent his summer sticky with heat and with thoughts of death; already he was in a foul mood. It didn't help that as soon he was back on the Hogwarts Express, he spotted Draco Malfoy.

The last time he had seen Malfoy, he had been a slug. It was this image that Harry preferred to keep in mind, Malfoy fat and oozing, slicking the carpet of the Hogwarts Express with buckets of slime. Of course when he had run into him and his mother in Diagon Alley the fact of the matter was different – he was taller, for one thing, which was completely unfair, although he was as pointy-featured as ever. He filled out his robes a little better when he returned to school, or perhaps it was that they fit him better, which Harry could attribute to whatever posh robe designer they had gone to instead of Madame Malkin. He was not slug-like at all, and as a way of further annoying Harry, he was almost good-looking, in fact. Harry wasn't about to be fooled by this, of course, even though some girls were.

Malfoy was Malfoy and would always be loathsome. He was even more loathsome now because it was deceptive – their whole family was like that, deceptive, things that didn't look dangerous but were – like quicksand, or the very thin sheet of ice on top of the lake that could send stupid first years to a watery grave, if not for the giant squid.
When he looked at him, he tried to picture that same slug in his robes, the dark fabric clinging tightly to the wet, slippery body, made even darker in patches where the slime soaked through. It was an utterly satisfying image to have while biting into a wriggling Chocolate Frog.

"Are you all right, mate?" Ron asked, looking a little disturbed.

"'m fine," Harry replied, a mouth full of Frog with one leg sticking out and still kicking.

Staring at him in his stupid fitted robes, buttoned up to his throat, looking so stupid and pristine, Harry was positive that Malfoy was a Death Eater. He had seen the protective way he cradled his arm, after all, the way he had jerked away and yelled at Madame Malkin, insisting that she had been poking him with pins. Then again, it was possible that he was just being a twat.

Harry wondered if his new physique had come from the "My Daddy's in Jail" workout routine, but then decided that Malfoy was probably too heartless to care.

It was that very day, on the train that Harry ended up with a broken nose. It was a dirty, sneaky, underhanded ploy, just like Malfoy, to take advantage of him in his Petrified State.

He couldn't move, couldn't do anything, when the foot came crashing down, although the pain was instantaneous and the crunch of bone and cartilage was particularly crisp.
Harry, who had been waiting all summer to finally punch somebody, felt veritably cheated.

This called for revenge, of course.

First chance he got, as soon as he ran into Malfoy again, he would take him by surprise. He would grab him by those stupid high-collared robes and shake him, he would punch him and punish him for being – well, for lack of a better word – evil. He'd punish him for running off and joining the Death Eaters, and plotting to kill him, and for wearing high-collared robes when it was still too warm out, and for just, generally, being an annoying little shit.

The first day of classes, Harry got his chance. He could spot that blonde head from any distance, and today it seemed especially annoying, especially bright - glowing, almost, as a shaft of sunlight reflected off of it. Malfoy's head was bowed as he spoke to Pansy Parkinson, his two goons noticeably missing. Her brightly-painted lips brushed his ear when she leaned in, and when Malfoy smiled Harry was filled with righteous anger all over again. Junior killers-in-training weren't supposed to smile and date girls just like everybody else; they weren't allowed.

Harry had spent the summer mourning his godfather, trapped with family who didn't want him and never had. Harry, who always did what was good and right and who was meant to save the world, couldn't even keep a girlfriend on account of her mourning her dead boyfriend. Malfoy had most likely spent his summer in his big, comfortable mansion, coddled by his mother, throwing crazy Death Eater parties and orgies and having a blast sacrificing goats and who knew what else. Even though his father was in prison, here he was, smiling, holding hands with a girl who adored him, who probably told him she loved him, or whatever counted for the evil version of "love" anyway.

(Which was probably focused around making pureblood children and being rich and having lots of things, evil people were always so appallingly superficial. Malfoy would never have dated her before she lost all that weight, would break up with her if she got so much as a zit, he was sure.)

Before he knew it, Hermione was saying, "Harry, what are you doing?" and he had stalked over to Malfoy. Before the blonde could even sneer "Potter ," Pansy Parkinson was screaming bloody murder and before anyone could stop him, the first punch, just as he had promised himself, hit the side of Malfoy's stupid head with a satisfying sort of pound.

Unfair, some might say, even though he had always been into fighting fair. Split moments later his vision went black and there was a burst of pain and then he was tasting blood, coppery and warm, flooding his mouth.

His ears pounding to near bursting with the roar of blood, his chest thudding with adrenaline, he struck out again. A soft pink lip split, like a flower petal tearing, and the hot red blood spilled all over that pale chin, dripping onto the front of dark robes, where it seeped in, unseen.

Malfoy spit, spluttered, a few stray droplets from a spray of blood and spit landed on Harry's skin. He staggered back, clapped his hands over his mouth, and then he charged.

The pain that reverberated up his arm felt good, the way his fist seemed to connect with all bones. Malfoy was good to punch, just for that; that feeling of solid connection, the way his body yielded to Harry's fist. Malfoy packed a solid punch himself, although one would never guess it, not from looking at his slight frame, his slender limbs. Weak, girlish little spaghetti arms, Harry thought happily, although this particular spaghetti delivered quite a slap, as he was forced to admit when a fist connected with his jaw and he nearly bit his tongue in half.

True to his word, the first fight of the year was worse than ever. They attracted quite a crowd, of course, and with Fred and George gone it was the Slytherins that were taking bets.

At first it would be hard to say who had the upper hand. Malfoy wasn't as strong but he was twice as vicious, resorting to everything except a knee in the groin. But Harry was stronger, and Harry wanted this more, wanted to punch him and punch him, smear him into a bloody pulp, turn him upside down and use him like a strange thin mop and later he would deny it when Hermione mentioned that he might possibly have anger issues.

"Harry!" Hermione screamed. "Stop! He's not worth it!"

Worth it? No, Malfoy wasn't worth very much at all. But this wasn't about Malfoy's hypothetical worth, or what supposed worth even meant, it was about giving him what he deserved.

"Yeah! Go Harry!" Ron cheered in the background, bolstering him before his voice was lost in the crowd.

Harry welcomed each pain and bite of blood. He had spent the beginning of his summer feeling numb, watching the flies crawl on the ceiling of his tiny room at Privet Drive, thinking on someone who had gone and passed and who no one in the household had ever known. He might as well have been mourning jolly old St. Nicholas, or, in their eyes, the Boogeyman.

He wanted to punish Malfoy, not just for the train thing, or even the Death Eater thing. Even the whole making-my-life-even-more-miserable-for-the-past-six-years thing wasn't the whole reason behind it. There was something else here. Malfoy was Malfoy and then he was his own father and then he was his aunt and then he was his cousin –Sirius - and then he was just Malfoy again, blonde and thin and sharp full of angles.

It didn't last nearly as long as it should have, as Harry wanted it to. There was always the matter of interference. Just as he was on top of Malfoy, just as he'd gotten a hold on him, getting ready to smash his stupid blonde head into the flagstones, there were arms on him, large hands with strong, stubby iron fingers - he was being pulled off. Of course it would be Crabbe and Goyle, mountains of meat and muscle, Malfoy's bodyguards, coming to that nancy boy's rescue. It figured, after all, Malfoy could never fight his own fights.

When Crabbe and Goyle jumped into the fray, Hermione had her wand out and Ron and Seamus were right there with them. Even Neville had stepped forward, wand out like a sword in one of his moments of bravery and loyalty. Then there were other Slytherins – Harry didn't really know their names, but he was sure Pansy Parkinson incited them – and it was no longer just a spectator sport, it was more of a group activity.

For a moment it seemed like a Mexican standoff was about to happen – like in Westerns that Dudley occasionally watched on TV – everybody with their wands drawn and facing each other, the air tense; Harry felt a drop of liquid slide down his neck and wasn't sure if it was his own sweat or maybe Malfoy's blood. He felt sore and bruised all over, if not broken in parts.

And then Malfoy let out a small sound – a moan or a groan of pain? No, more like, a pitiful whimper – probably to get attention. It worked. Pansy was by his side in an instant, even Hermione was looking worried. Harry didn't want to think what he did, but of course he thought it; that girls were a soft touch, and Malfoy was too, too deceptive for his own good.
Everybody's attention was diverted then, although the glares remained.

"Maybe you should get him to the Infirmary," Hermione said.

"Look after your own before you even try to advise me on mine," Pansy hissed.

But that was ridiculous. Harry felt fine.

He touched his own forehead. His fingertips came away with a smear of red.

Okay, that would explain the headache. And the slight dizziness. Probably from that part where Malfoy had swung him into the wall.

"Harry, what was that about?" Hermione was shocked, appalled, as if seeing him for the first time all over again. Her brown eyes wide, her hair particularly wild, as if each strand were waving, quivering in their indignation, in order to reprimand him, too. "What happened just now? God, look at you."

Harry swallowed and could not answer. He tasted blood in his mouth, hot and coppery and salty.

"Harry, that was bloody brilliant!" Ron crowed. "You handed Malfoy's arse to him on a platter!" He clapped him heartily on his back. Harry winced, "Ow!"

Hermione said sharply, "Ron!"

"Sorry," Ron said, still grinning.

"Ron, you can't encourage this!" Hermione continued, hitting Ron. "Violence doesn't solve anything!"

"Ow!" Ron said.

Hermione turned her attentions to Harry. "We need to get you to the Infirmary."

"I'm fine," Harry insisted, blinking at her.

Hermione wasn't listening, already starting to guide him in the right direction. "Ron, take his other arm. And I don't know what possessed you to do that, Harry, but you were frightening. You could have killed him!"

Harry thought, personally, that this was all a gross exaggeration. After all, Malfoy could pick himself off the ground, (albeit with some help) and he certainly had enough life left in him to spit in Harry's direction – a gob of saliva, darkened with blood.

His jaw ached. He stumbled a bit and Ron caught him.

"Incredible," Ron said, still looking at him with a bit of awe. They were all looking at him with a bit of awe, Ron and Seamus and Ginny and Neville and even quiet Dean. It was only Hermione who glared at him, her face stony, judging, parental.

"I'd say Harry won, wouldn't you?" Seamus whispered to Dean. "The odds were probably in his favour, but money's money, right?"

Hermione turned her disapproving gaze on both of them, "And we're not even going to talk about how wrong gambling is."

The two groups made their way to the hospital wing, careful not to even give the impression that either group knew the other, aside from the occasional murderous glare from Pansy Parkinson– who, it was noted, was not actually carrying or supporting Malfoy, but rather bossily directing how Crabbe and Goyle ought to do it.

"Careful! Don't jostle him!" she said. And, "Be careful with his side!" And "Are you trying to walk him into the corner?"

One could only hope, of course, Harry thought.

Madam Pomfrey looked all too delighted to see them. Harry really hadn't seen her much last year, and he had forgotten the way her eyes would always light up when presented with the sick, the wounded, and the dying.

Unspoken, the two groups automatically move to put their respective charges on opposite sides of the infirmary, as if by natural magnetic repulsion.

"Keep your psycho-killer on your side!" Pansy said, glaring at them distrustfully.

Ron automatically took offence. "Right, as if Malfoy is so innocent—"

"Oh, yes, Draco really started it this time!" she retorted. "Such a horrible, indecent offence that he was minding his own business and actually –gasp! – talking to me! That's certainly worthy of a beating. I didn't think it was possible, but you're even dumber than you look."

"But you are horribly and indecently offensive..." Ron began.

Madam Pomfrey came around before Round II: Ronald Weasley versus Pansy Parkinson could happen.

"Normally I would never hit a girl," Ron muttered to Harry later, "but for one like that, I think I might make an exception." Harry couldn't blame him. "Besides," Ron added, "she's a Slytherin, so it's not like she's a real girl, anyway. I'm pretty sure Millicent Bulstrode has a five o'clock shadow."

And of course Malfoy was in there, pretending it hurt far more than it actually did. There was blood on his face – but he certainly looked far worse off than he actually was. Pansy Parkinson made a fuss, even Crabbe and Goyle looked vaguely worried in their own, obtuse way, Blaise Zabini went between Harry and Malfoy, writing down the total damage to their bodies on a piece of parchment.

"A black eye is worth ten points," Blaise decided, "but a scratch can't be worth more than one or two."

"You bet against me?" he heard a bandaged Malfoy splutter to Pansy after they were released, cradling a hurt arm like a baby.

"I most certainly did not!" Pansy was quick to correct him. "Only Blaise did, and Marcus did, and I only lent Blaise a few Galleons since he was short at the time..."

"You're paying Zabini for unspoken services while I was defending my life? Harlot! Strumpet! Vile, wicked woman!"

"Draco, darling, don't," Pansy cooed gently. "You'll rupture something and give yourself a nosebleed again."

"Traitors!" Malfoy had cried, "Ingrates! Infidels!" He spluttered a bit and Pansy fretted over him, handkerchief fluttering about his face like some sort of attacking seagull, genuinely worried about the nonexistent nosebleed. Harry rather hoped he did rupture something – preferably a vein in his brain, or something just as good. She pet and soothed him until he calmed down, refusing to do so until he had forced a rather vocal declaration of loyalty out of her, and publically announced that he was the best-looking boy she had ever known, and the bandages just added to his rugged machismo. Harry thought that he was overreacting – it was clear that he basked in the attention- and privately added it to his list of Reasons Why Malfoy Deserved to be Punched in the Face. He was more than happy to provide this particular service, and he considered it to be a community service, in fact – a favour to himself, and to everybody else.

That night when Harry closed his eyes, he saw red and felt satisfied. His tired muscles sank into the bed; his sleep was deep and complete and sound.

-"I felt a funeral, in my brain, and mourners to and fro, kept treading, treading, till it seemed that sense was breaking through."-

Long, even strokes as a brush runs through fine blonde hair, as colourless as moonlight.

Draco seems to purr when Harry touches him, or maybe cooing is the word for that small, slight sound that he makes. He's so easy, so needy for touch and affection, Harry wonders if he was like this as a small child, and if his mother pet him the way his own mother never lived to do. He wonders if his father, as imposing and cold as he was, took him to the park, taught him to catch a Snitch, or if he held him and bounced him on his knee. He can't imagine Lucius Malfoy having ever been anything close to tender; he practically sacrificed his own son, after all, led him right to the slaughter, a pathetic thing in a den of Death Eaters.

(For he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son...")

Harry resolves to give Draco better care than anyone ever could.

Tuesday is Tuna Day and the whole ward smells like fish. Harry prefers Chicken day, not that the particular meat matters much, since the food usually all comes in one of two colours: either poop brown or goop grey.

Draco irritably bats the brush away as it catches a tangle and snags. For a moment Harry wonders if he'll try to bite it, like a kitten. What are you doing, Potter, trying to pull out my hair, in the most painful way possible? He might have said. Not that I wouldn't look good bald. At least my head is perfectly round. Yours is probably squashed from the Dark Lord dropping you on your head as a child.

Harry bops Draco on the nose lightly with the brush. "Be nice," he chides, and he smiles, just a little, at the pout.

"You're n-not being nice," Draco informs him. It's not much of an insult, but Harry supposes that it'll do for now.

"Don't you want your hair to be pretty?" Harry asks, and he rests his hand on Draco's neck, his thumb stroking the bones that hide beneath it. This Draco has a different set of words for speaking to, a different language.

Draco seems to arch back into his touch, just like a little cat, and just that motion is almost enough to make up for the poor quality of his comeback. Almost.

"'Course I do," Draco sniffs, a bit disdainfully. His hair slides through Harry's fingers like water, and his skin is soft and warm, and Harry resists the urge to pull him into his lap, because that's not exactly appropriate hospital visitation behaviour.

The best Healers in the country all sent back a negative prognosis. Healer after Healer shook his or her sadly, "there's nothing we can do for him," they said, and although their hair colour and accents changed, the words were pretty much always the same. At one point Harry even got desperate enough to escort Draco to the Wizarding form of therapy (which was considered a new-fangled and rather unresearched manner of treatment). Even after paying for a clinical hour in which Draco stared at food stains on the wall and called out names of animals, Harry was willing enough to believe (and that was part of healing, wasn't it? Keeping a positive attitude) that he paid for two months' worth of sessions. He didn't stop until after the Big Balloon therapy – even he had to admit that that was a little much.

Muggle psychiatrists were out of the question, of course; they would have no idea what to do with a Magical Mind. Not to mention that they were likely to have Harry committed the moment they heard that the cause of trauma was a snake-faced Dark Lord. Hermione still sends him psychiatry texts anyway, along with any other articles that she finds on diseases of the mind.

"Incurable," they said.

"There's no help for it," they said.

"I'm very, very sorry, but I'm afraid that..."

But I'm Harry Potter, Harry almost insisted, plaintively, and then he was immediately ashamed for it. There was nothing that they could do for him, and it had little to do with lack of trying.

"Have you tried looking into brain surgery?" Ron asked one day. "I've heard wonderful things about brain surgery. They just cut you open and fiddle around in the grey matter in there and maybe they put some stuff in or take some stuff out and you're fixed, just like that!" He had smiled, completely self-assured, with the air of one who knows exactly what he is talking about.

"Er, I don't think brain surgery works that way, Ron..." Harry had said.

"Sure, be all negative about it without even giving it some fair consideration," Ron said. "I think it's a very good suggestion. Nothing else works, anyhow. Plus," he added as a bonus, "they shave all his hair off. Imagine his reaction when he's himself again!"

Harry didn't think that this suggestion was very fair. Ron, after all, had never liked Draco, and for him, it is a win-win situation.

The long, thin strands of pale silky hair, tangled in the dark teeth of the brush, reminds him of the thin strings of memory he's pulled out into his own Pensieve. To clear his head, as Dumbledore had once said, and then the past is perfect and clear but the present is too foggy by comparison. He's tried to use Legilimency, once, to see into Draco's head. Surely the memories were in there somewhere, no matter how jumbled or locked away they might be. When he entered at first, he imagined crashing through a great brick wall.

There was no brick wall, no door with a lock keeping him out. Instead of memories with people and places, he was bombarded with a billion scents and colours and sensations, sense memories. There was no coherency. The thoughts rambled. There were people and faces but no particular scenes or events, or sometimes the wrong people in the wrong locations.
If he could put Draco's thoughts into words, it would have probably been something like:

Draco likes Harry days best. On the other days, the stars didn't look quite so rainbow, not quite so right. But the days when Harry comes it is all warm inside and outside and inside again, like drinking a big glass of buttery sunlight. Harry means big smiles and warm words and hugs sometimes and sweets sometimes and both are good, yeah.
Harry's eyes are green, just like grass and snakes and green-apple lollipops. Draco likes all of these things, so it is nice when Harry looks at him, even when Harry's eyes are wet, sometimes.

But of course the present would be jumbled, so he pulls further back, deeper and deeper, back into the time when things should still make sense. But there it's like there's a shroud that's all cobwebs and snake-fangs, lined with thorns for the hell of it.

This man is a Bad Man, and he is going to hurt, and the hurt is bad and Draco hates it.

"NO NO NO NO!" Draco screams.

Hurting hurting pain and black and it's warm and wet and that shouldn't be so wet there's so much red red eyes red wet screaming screaming

He retreated so quickly he fell back, his own head hurting, and Draco staring at him with wide grey eyes, uncomprehending. Harry doesn't try any more, after that. There is nothing to do, after all. Nothing but to keep visiting Draco and to keep bringing him sweets and to keep reminding himself that the price of arsenic is up these days, and it really isn't worth that long walk to the pharmacy.

-"Pacifism is simply undisguised cowardice."-

Lying in bed in the Gryffindor dormitories, Harry saw into Malfoy's mind in his dreams.

There must have been a satisfying crunch under his shoe, sickening and wet. Maybe he could feel the cartilage and skin and bone just yield and then mash to a pulp underneath him. The sound travelled up his leg, throughout his entire body, all the way up before settling with a splash in the acid wash of your stomach. It feels good in the worst way, horrible in the best way.

For breakfast he covered everything in a thick layer of raspberry jam.

Ron turned to him, beginning to talk about how he suspected that the house elves were sneaking his undergarments, because they were somehow missing. His mouth was full of scones, so he was spraying crumbs as he did, and Hermione looked about to be nauseous over either the horrid table manners or the inherent house elf discrimination.

The muffin didn't really smush into him as per the hopes of the thrower, but rather it bounced off of his head. It actually even hurt a little – what were the house elves making muffins out of these days, flour and ground-up brick? – and it left a smear of butter in his hair, yellow and thick and slicking some of the strands together like edible hair gel. A surprise attack! Of all the sneaky, underhanded things...

He whirled around, to see, predictably, who else could it be but –

No one.

Still, Harry was not to be deterred by this lack of person, because there was only one person who was evil enough to do things like initiate food fights at this ungodly hour of morning.

"Ah, Potter," Malfoy said, already healed, apparently, from the scuffle of a few days previous. Madam Pomfrey was a magic-woman with those wounds, which, Harry supposed, made sense. "I like your new pomade."

Pansy snickered. Goyle whispered loudly, "What's a pomade?" and had to be explained to.

"Thanks," Harry said casually, shocking Malfoy into silence. "Maybe you'd like to try some."

The butter really looked better all over Malfoy's hair than his own. All over Malfoy's face, in fact, smeared as Harry rubbed it around. The butter dish dropped to the floor with a clatter.

Malfoy didn't even make an attempt to punch him. With a shriek that could deafen a banshee his hands were on him, and Harry was treated to roughly about 9 stone of tall blonde boy trying to throttle him within an inch of his life.

Not that he wasn't giving back as good as he got.

In any other school, in any other life, Harry sort of guessed that a muffin-to-the-head would have instantly meant food fight. But that was other schools, and other lives, and other boys, who all presumably had never known a being quite as evil as Malfoy, and in this moment his primary concern was dashing that stupid blonde hard against the flagstones.

It was going very fine and well, splendidly, actually, until they were almost literally thrown apart by Professor McGonagall.

"Just what exactly is wrong with the two of you?" she demanded of them.

What was wrong with the two of them? Well, Harry could say, I'm an orphan and I've been abused for years by my own horrible aunt and uncle, and at eleven I had to face the Most Evil Wizard of Our Time, and since then I've known I'm probably going to have to save the world, and just recently I lost my godfather-cum-father-figure in a way that allows me to fully blame myself.

That could be a clue to what was wrong with Harry.

And as for Malfoy? Well, he was just a little shit. It was probably genetic or something.

McGonagall continued to lecture.

"You both know better than this. Honestly! Harry Potter! Draco Malfoy! For shame!"

Harry resisted the urge to say but he started it.

"I don't know what's gotten into you two," Professor McGonagall scolded, her mouth set into an upset line – the most upset that Harry had ever seen lines be, actually. It was a very ridiculous scolding, because she really ought to have known by now how things were between him and Malfoy; although, granted, they had never been up to initiating something so very early in the morning. "But this has got to stop. Fifty house points from the both of you, and the next time I catch you at it, you'll both be suspended from Quidditch – indefinitely."

Harry looked at her in shock; surely she wouldn't, not when he was Captain and he knew that she needed him to win that Cup this year. With a grim look she nodded; although, it stood to reason that at least Malfoy would be suspended, too, dealing both teams a crucial blow.

Perhaps Hufflepuff would win this year.

With a gulp Harry nodded, and then his eyes were on Malfoy, hating him with every last cell of his body and making sure that he knew it. Malfoy, on the other hand, simply looked contemplative – no, scheming, actually; he wasn't very good at being subtle when it came to his scheming.

Look at me, Harry almost shouted, and didn't.

They were then both treated to a long lecture about fighting against school regulations, and how they really ought to have known better, by this age. She made it as publicly humiliating as possible, citing her disappointment in both of them, although it was probably a better alternative to Snape, who would have punished Harry thoroughly and Malfoy none at all. Students returned to their breakfast, groaning because neither Harry nor Malfoy had won, and only Blaise Zabini had thought to bet on the "fight gets broken up by authority figure" outcome.

Finally, battered and buttered, they were both sent back to their respective tables, ordered to Scourgify and then prepare to go to class.

And it was in this way that Professor McGonagall effectively put an end to their fighting.

At least in public.

-*-

-"Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you..."-

There's a new bulletin on the board outside of the unit today: a piece of pink parchment advertising the Spring Social. A dance. For the patients in the unit, as if they, too, should dress up in their best robes and ask each other out and use Sleekeazy's hair potion to smooth out their matted, ratty, food-encrusted hair. The poster features flowery magenta script and dancing figures all over, happily waltzing the night away. Harry stares at it until his eyes water and the figures blur together so that they look like they're doing something illegal and physically improbable with a llama.

Harry can't keep this up. He goes to see Draco more and more these days – (not like he has anything better to do, really, his Friday nights wouldn't even make a nun jealous) - but each time he can stand it less and less. As soon as Draco's in his arms, like a bundle of warmth and sunlight, everything is okay. But before that...before that, Hell must be like those moments before that.

When the nurse undoes the lock from the other side, the double-doors to the unit swing wide open. Harry walks in and he thinks he smells death. Or madness, at least. The air is thick and sickly with it.

What he really is smelling is lunchtime, the processed and steamed food overpowering, floating on a wave of mixed scents: lemon cleaner and antiseptic masking urine and shit – some of these patients too crazy to even stop from messing themselves. He can think that word, crazy, even if he can't say it, because that's all this unit really is, isn't it, a madhouse.

It's like the asylums of yore, where they locked up the prisoners and shocked them with electricity, let them be mad and foam at the mouth, and maybe people would come around once a month or so to cut their hair for wigs. Draco's hair might have made for a nice wig, once, but now it is too dull. There's no bars here, no locked rooms and certainly no jailer with his big set of keys on a ring, but the desolate air is the same, that sense of things floating and lost and wandering.

It is, however, better than Azkaban. At least here they're clean and the nurses don't try to suck your face.

Well, not for the most part, anyway. Harry doesn't altogether trust the night shift.

What Harry can't stand anymore, really, is all their empty eyes. Draco is better than that, than those empty eyes.

Harry doesn't want to face them, doesn't want to think about what doesn't lie behind them, and moreover, he doesn't want them looking at what is his. He didn't mind it so much once but it's all he can think about, now. He can't really explain it, but it's like, the idea of the dead things staring at the one live thing in this white-walled place, staring at the thing that he likes to look at...he doesn't want to share that gaze. He doesn't want to look at Draco and feel their eyes.

There's the one who set himself on fire, who is all scars and pink shiny smooth flesh now. There's Gilderoy Lockhart, as broken as ever. Sometimes he comes over and tries to talk.
He's happy, though, at least. Or at least he seems happy. Maybe cheerful.

It makes Harry uneasy.

There's the one who cries all day, his face wet and marked with tear-tracks, eyes sandy-white and crusty. And there's the one that laughs at everything. Harry wishes that he could just think that he seems happy too, but there's something that's even more terrifying about laughing all the time, rather than just crying.

This isn't exactly the type of crowd that Harry thinks of as the dance party kind.

They're ghosts, drifting in and out of this place, shadows of people, gliding about in their robes of off-colour white, sometimes in inoffensive light blue, the kind you never see in the real world, in real life. Ghosts, like the Grey Lady, who was always so quiet and sad, and Nearly Headless Nick, who would spend the rest of eternity hanging on by a thread. Draco isn't like that, these ghosts, he's warm and he's alive. He's not who Draco Malfoy once was, he's someone else, someone different, but at least he's someone, at least he's a person.

He bumps into someone in the hallway. "Oh, sorry!" he says quickly, before he looks up to see. This person is limp yellow hair, yellowed brown eyes, crusts of yellow in the corners of his eyes.

Another ghost, then. "French film," the ghost declaims. "French film, French fish, fresh fish, catsup, catsup—" His voice sounds more like an echo, and Harry recalls an echo, once, in a Great Hall, somewhere - And now, for a few words: nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak. He shudders and walks quickly away and before he knows it, his pen is moving on the papers, signing 'Harry James Potter.' A Medical Director, with thin wire glasses and a big rubber stamp, a pad of red ink, receives the papers. He probably has stamps with ominous words like "DENIED" and "INSANE" and "DECEASED", and it could be any of them that he chooses to put down, any of them that could ruin Harry all over again, that red ink like so much blood, if he wants to get melodramatic about it. (He is feeling kind of melodramatic, these days, and his taste in music reflects that.) The scroll of parchment comes back "ACCEPTED FOR RELEASE."

-"Violence is the ultimate human degradation."-

The small piece of parchment read:

Potter, you stupid arse –
Third floor. Outside of the statue of the humpbacked witch. If you dare. Harry almost expected it to say, "Be there or be square."

He recognised a challenge when he saw one, lame as it may be, and he was prepared to face it.

He took his Invisibility Cloak in case it was a trap, and shrugged it off around the corner when it wasn't – just Malfoy standing there, his stupid hair all glowy in the moonlight. He looked a little lost, a little impatient, and when Harry had stared at him for a while and he looked like he was about to leave, it was then that he appeared and stopped him.
"What the hell do you want, Malfoy?" Harry said, expecting to be jumped on by Crabbe and Goyle even this late in the game. Because Malfoy was Malfoy, and he did Malfoy-ian things, like plot plans for the sole purpose of having Harry foil them.

Malfoy looked only slightly startled, and for a moment his face showed a flash of –what? Relief? Fear? – something, gone too quickly to identify.

"Hit me," Malfoy said simply.

"Wait, what?"

What? Really now, what? Harry blinked at the blonde, taken aback by the response. He could have taken anything else into stride – death threats, an attempt on his life, even a rehashing of the Triwizard Tournament, where Ron would be there under the lake with all those horrid mermaids that were ugly in real life and he'd have to pay ransom or something to get him back. All appropriately evil things for Malfoy to do.

But for Malfoy to ask to be hit, this sort of masochism coming from the boy who had whined and whimpered like a pansy (to Pansy, too) at a ripped robe, the barest of scratches from a hippogriff – it was unthinkable. Uncharacteristic.

It had to be a trap.

Crabbe or Goyle was probably around the corner, just waiting to record him beating on pathetic, defenceless Malfoy so that he could tattle to McGonagall and get Harry suspended from Quidditch, a brilliantly evil plan for Slytherin to win the House Cup in this most essential year of years. Maybe they'd even stolen poor little Colin Creevey's camera to document the deed.

Malfoy sighed in a long-suffering manner, as if Harry had failed to grasp that perhaps one and one equalled two, and the sky was blue, sometimes. "Have I finally done it? One too many blows to the head and you've gone deaf, or perhaps you've just gone stupid? I said, hit me."

"I know what you said," Harry snapped back, instinctively. "But why would you—how could you -- You're barking mad," Harry said.

"And you're absolutely pathetic, Potter," Malfoy countered.

"I'm not going to just...hit you!" Harry said. It was unnecessary to mention, of course, that up until this point he had had no problem hitting Malfoy. But that wasn't the point.

"No, of course not," Malfoy agreed. "There's nobody around to see, now is there? Not so brave, are you, without your little fanclub to cheer you on?"

"You're one to talk about brave, stepping on people's faces when they're Petrified," Harry retorted.

A slow smile spread its way across Malfoy's face, as if savouring the memory, his mouth almost humming a little, as if just the thought of it tasted particularly nice, like a sweet. "I never said I was brave," a shrug, a smooth roll of shoulders. "You probably think running into the jaws of death year after year is considered brave. It's not brave, it's just plain stupidity. Mixed in with a good amount of your attention-whoring tendencies."

Harry bristled; he could feel his hand clenching itself into a fist without notifying his brain of its decision to do so. "It's smart to ask for a beating, is it?"

Malfoy didn't reply to that. Instead he sneered, infuriatingly, as if he knew the answers to all the secrets ever, and Harry felt much the same way he did when Malfoy brewed a perfect Amortentia potion, praised by Snape, of course, where his own had the nasty side effect of giving people warts in sensitive places.

Suddenly, it didn't matter why Malfoy would want him to hit him, whether it was that he had managed to cast some sort of Charm that would make Harry's own attack hit him back tenfold, or whether it was that he had Rita Skeeter waiting in the wings, like a beetle on the wall, to write her new exposι on "Harry Potter, Bully of the Blonde and Defenceless, Raper of Babies." What mattered was that Malfoy had called him all the way out here to make this strange, masochistic request of him, and like hell he was going to give Malfoy what he wanted.

"Do you want to hit me or not?" Malfoy asked, casually.

Yes. "No!"

Malfoy sighed. "I knew I expected too much from you to ask; you just can't do it."

But then again, maybe it was reverse psychology. Hermione had been using that on Ron lately.

("Maybe I don't want you to do your Transfiguration homework."

"Wait, why wouldn't you want me to do your Transfiguration homework? Do you think I can't do my Transfiguration homework? I'll show you who can or can't do their Transfiguration homework!")

Of course Malfoy wouldn't want to be hit; he was a coward who was perpetually running to save his own skin. Which meant, of course, that Harry should give him the beating that he was practically on his knees begging for.

If it was reverse psychology, that meant Malfoy really didn't want Harry to hit him (which would make sense) and by not giving him what he wanted, Harry was actually giving him exactly what he wanted.

Ow. His head hurt, and nothing had even happened yet. This was a truly evil plan.

"You're touched in the head, Malfoy," Harry said. For some reason, whatever reason, he did not turn around and walk away. Walking away from a challenge was perhaps not amongst his list of things that he associated with himself. He was probably physically incapable of it, just like Malfoy was physically incapable of being tolerable.

"You can't do anything right, can you, Potter?" Malfoy continued. "Forgive me if I don't place my life in your incompetent hands."

"Right, you'd rather place your life in the scaly hands of the Dark Lord," said Harry. And some part of him knew that he shouldn't, but - "It sure helped your father."

Grey eyes glittered and narrowed.

"My father will get out of prison in due time, Potter, and he'll be in one whole piece. Can't exactly say the same for your parents...or even your little dog, hm?"

Harry couldn't help it.

He hit him.

One moment he had been standing in place, fist clenched but ready to turn around and go, and the next, his fist was colliding, rather solidly, with Malfoy's jaw.

He couldn't even see him as a person anymore, could not think in words or images, could only feel the black sensation of connection, and the bright red of pain.

Truth be told, Harry had been increasingly irritable the last couple of days. Because they were expressly not allowed to fight (anywhere they could be caught, at least) Malfoy seemed to delight in going out of his way in order to needle him, again and again and again. He knocked against him in the halls, as if pretending not to see him. The sharp, bony shoulder dug into his, like a blunt blade, and no, Harry didn't want to fight him at all, never mind that all the times that he'd passed by him in the halls in the past week he'd just barely checked himself from giving in to the urge to jump Malfoy and beat him down where he stood.

Hermione worried, a bit, too much, of course – she said that Harry had been withdrawn, could not comprehend that unprecedented unprovoked show of violence. Harry could barely comprehend it himself and didn't want to either be lectured or constantly have to tell her, "yes, I'm fine!" when asked if he was okay. Everything seemed to irritate him, and he didn't know what Malfoy was talking about when he had viciously called him a timed explosive psychomaniac waiting to lose it. He didn't mean to be rude to Ron when he stole something from his plate at breakfast, as he tended to do, and he didn't mean to snap at Hermione for note-taking too much.

Harry didn't think that he'd be feeling it, really, since before Malfoy had actually asked him to do it, and he never ever wanted to do what Malfoy wanted him to do. He hadn't been in the mood; you couldn't just ask a person to get into it like that.

Only once he hit him, it was all surprisingly easy. Everything was easy. It was easy to wrestle him to the ground, easy to avoid the fist aimed for the head, easy to get the fist in his stomach, easy to feel his own head smacked into the floor.

With no audience watching, it was still the same as before, even though he had heard the crowd both times what mattered was Malfoy under his hands, gritting his teeth and hitting him back.

They went on until both were panting and exhausted, glazed with a sheen of sweat. No major damage this time – could they afford it? Out in the hall at night as they were, when Mrs. Norris could come by at any moment?

Neither would give up; Harry managed to somehow flip Malfoy onto his back, but the blonde tripped him up and he crashed to the ground. By the end of it, everything was sore and ringing and they had tired themselves out.

When he was tired, (head ringing, bleeding from his lip, staring at the ceiling) Harry didn't feel so angry anymore, but he didn't know what to say. What did one say after something like this? Good fight? I'm sorry I didn't hurt you more? Yes, I was trying to kill you, you twat?

Malfoy saved him the trouble. After they seemed to come to an unspoken standstill, he simply got up and walked away.

-"First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me." -

"Draco," Harry says, "Draco, you won't have to be in the hospital anymore."

Draco should hate hospitals. After all, Harry does. And Draco should want to live with him, to be taken care of by someone who knew what he needed.

Or maybe, maybe Draco shouldn't ever want any more than this, to be happy when Harry just looks at him, perpetually delighted, perpetually easy to please.

Real Draco wasn't like that, of course, Real Draco was horribly difficult to please, and for real Draco Harry just being Harry and here wouldn't have ever been enough. He misses that even if he hated it once, misses the way that Draco was practically impossible to deal with. God, he even misses how annoying he was. But he still feels a flush of pleasure with the way this Draco smiles and turns into his touch.

"N-no h-h-hoss-pital?" Draco echoes. Harry frowns at that tremulous voice, suddenly irritated with it and not sure why, like an unlocated itch from the unseen spider hiding in your bed.

"No more hospital," Harry says quickly, almost sharply.

No more Healers who can't Heal, no more ineffective Potions, no more fake flowers and cheap bleached cotton sheets, no more crazy roommates and empty-eyed ghosts all around.

No more Tuna Day, that was for sure.

Because it shouldn't be like this. (Nothing should ever, ever be like Tuna Day – that was cruel and unusual.)

Not this, not here, when his next breath is filled with the lemon scent covering up that subtle smell of urine from when the guy down the hall pissed himself. Not here with the fake flowers that would be collecting dust if not for the fact that they were achingly clean with the swish of a wand. They're enchanted to smell and feel just like real flowers, upon closer inspection, but they never grow, never change. Never die. Every room has at least one wall with these bright blobs of colour on it, like children's drawings – that change shape, now a giraffe, now a zebra, now a smiling, happy face. They're supposed to be soothing. Harry personally thinks they're sick. There's an aquarium outside with a grindylow named Maurice. Draco's robes are grey and he looks dingy, washed out, the sleeves hang especially loose on his wrists. How many sick people had worn them before him, how many would wear them afterwards? How many people had messed themselves in them, how many had made a mess – whether it was with food or something else, like the guy in room 121B who could not stop wanking, watching the other patients and their visitors. The nurses had to apply ointments to his down-theres, Harry overheard, and he often winced in sympathy – when he was exceedingly depressed he had once done it 7 times in one day, and had to stop when he started to develop a blister.

There is an almost overwhelming scent of coffee; Harry had bought it for him from the trendy coffee shop on the corner. They sold coffee for two sickles in the cafeteria downstairs, but Draco always turned away from it, declared it "icky," no matter how much cream and sugar Harry had tried to persuade him with. It was a relief to pay the overpriced nine sickles for coffee, instead, the silver coins heavy in his hand.

Draco smiles at Harry cautiously.

The Healer knocks on the door. He's that arsehole Healer that says "condition" – not like it's some sort of disease or something disgusting, but more in a bored way. Like he's given up before he even tried. He's young, brown hair and thin spectacles, a smile; Harry's been to his office, has seen the pictures on his desk of the happy young wife and their happy ickle baby all smiling and cooing and dancing around inside the silver frames. These are the people he saved, the ones he defeated evil for, so that Baby can grow up in a Dark-Lord-free world. So that this particular Healer can go home to his nice little house and take his nice little wife upstairs to their nice little bedroom for a nice little fuck. Harry's delivered them from evil, saved them from a life in servitude to some snake-faced reptilian Overlord and how do they thank him? With "I'm sorry, the damage is irreversible." Can't even save this one person, Draco Malfoy – who, come now, Draco, you know this - never was as important as he always thought he was, a small insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, really, a grain of sand on the beach of life, surely, an ant in the grass of God's Quidditch pitch.

They couldn't even do this little thing for him.

Harry subtly shifts his chair so that his body is between that man and Draco.

"Hello, Draco," the Healer chirps. Call him Mr. Malfoy, Harry bristles but he doesn't correct him.

Draco isn't concerned with him, after all. Draco doesn't have eyes for anybody but Harry. And isn't this what Harry always wanted, all of Malfoy's attention, all for himself? Sure, it's almost disturbing in its complete single-mindedness now, but that shouldn't bother him so much.

"Going home today, are we?" says the Healer, as if speaking to a small child. Harry doesn't like it, and his hand tightens on Draco's wrist.

Draco nods in lieu of answering. His grey eyes watch Harry. Harry is watching the Healer himself, the smooth lines of his face, the falsely cheerful blue eyes, uncaring, the large dark mole just on one side of his chin. He hopes that it's cancer.

"Now," says the Healer, turning to Harry, "I'm sure you've already been spoken to about the various things you'll need to take care of, now that Draco is going home. "

Here to say his goodbyes, Harry supposes. Perhaps to express his relief that he won't have to see this patient anymore, this patient who lives and breathes here and takes up space and is technically in his care but there's no caring to do.

What does it matter, after all? It's not a physical ailment that afflicts Draco. No amount of Skele-Gro can grow back what's been broken. There are no special potions that he needs to take; they're placebos, really, not for Draco's sake, but more for Harry, who always insists that there is something that can be done.

Harry pours himself a glass of water. He takes a sip from it and leaves it on the table.

Harry is going to take him away from all this, from the vile potions that taste like cruddy oil but do nothing, from all those horrible, suffocating smells, from the Healers who've long stopped poking and prodding and have since given up. He can rescue him, still, even if his figurative hero-cape has been hung up for seven years now.

The Healer runs down a list of do's and don'ts. Harry listens half-heartedly, mentally willing for him to leave or for his head to explode, whichever comes first. When he finally finishes he gives a fake smile and reaches out to touch Draco or something, maybe give him a handshake?

What a dick.

Harry intercepts the touch and shakes his hand, before it even comes near Draco's skin.

"Congratulations, Draco," the Healer says, even though it's a pretty inappropriate thing to say. It's not as if he's done anything great, after all – but perhaps this is like one of those big events, like a wedding or a new baby, that you just say 'congratulations' for. "Good luck and take care."

"Thanks," says Harry drily. "And we will."

-"In violence, we forget who we are."-

Sleeping with a body covered in bruises, no matter how soft the bed, wasn't exactly comfortable. Harry would consider it akin to something like sleeping lying down in a large barrel full of stones, and it would have been impossible if not for the fact that he was blissfully tired. He slept, a stone amongst stones, and stones did not dream.

He was sore in the morning, tender, like a piece of meat that had been beaten with a mallet. He avoided Ron and Hermione (the former who was sleeping like a corpse, that is, if corpses could snore, and the latter distractedly doing some advance reading for her Arithmancy lesson) and stopped by Madam Pomfrey's instead. When she asked him what happened he said that a door opened on him, which was the best that he could come up with on short notice.

"A door," she repeated, evenly.

"They're rather dangerous," Harry had supplied, perhaps a bit too hopefully.

The Dark Lord would have to be stooping pretty low, but hey, it could happen. First evil doors, evil chairs and tables next. Dudley had always thought that lamps were evil, ever since that one time that Harry was probably all of six and it had crashed to the floor in front of him, blocking his rotund cousin's path.

Fortunately for Harry, Madame Pomfrey wasn't above the idea of evil-infused furniture. Well, either that or she was actually all too delighted for a patient to really care about the actual misfortune that brought him into her capable, Healing hands.

Her eyes gleamed with unholy, sent-by-the-Dark-Lord-Himself light as she made him show her his wounds, as she squeezed into each bruise and scrape to see him wince, and asked him to assess his pain, on a scale of one to ten. She even had a poster of a helpful chart illustrating faces for each number, in case you couldn't speak or someone hexed your voice away or something. Number one was a vaguely-smiling face and number ten was in tears.

Harry really didn't see the need for all those gleaming sharp metal instruments, though. It wasn't like she actually planned to use them, right? That was what magic was for, wasn't it?

Much pain and plenty of bandages afterwards, Harry couldn't figure out why Malfoy had approached him that way, had sought him out just to fight. He did know, however, that he had not dreamt of death, nor Sirius, nor red-eyed Dark Lords and how and who they wanted to kill.

Putting the proper person into his proper place forced Harry to do some re-evaluations on all the people around him. Ron and Hermione just wanted to help, after all, and it couldn't be helped if they just didn't get it so much of the time. He watched Ron watch Hermione touch the quill to her lips before scribbling furiously away at her latest essay. Ron looked up and caught his eye and laughed a little nervously; clapped him on the back and Harry winced only slightly because of a bruise. Later on Ron would convince him to try out his new cheat deck of Exploding Snap cards and accidentally catch Hermione's hair on fire in the process – "Barely even a fire," Ron would claim, when hiding from Hermione in a cupboard. "She's really blowing this all out of proportion. It's a little more singed than anything. You can't even see it if she keeps her head tilted at the right angle!"

It was good to have friends. Ron was good people. Hermione was smart and diligent and kind. Gryffindors were good people. He didn't mind when Neville slipped on that pod in Herbology and ended up covering him with banana slugs. He didn't even have the urge to rip up his homework parchment when Snape singled him out to give him an impossibly long assignment. He overheard Seamus remarking to Dean that he was either finally over his PMS, or that he had finally gotten laid.

Beating up Malfoy made life better. Somehow, Harry couldn't be too surprised at this.

As for Malfoy, maybe he was a closet masochist all along. He did live in a dungeon after all. Maybe this was something all Slytherins were secretly kind of into. Of course, his evil treacherous brain then had to go and supply images of Snape, Millicent Bulstrode, and Crabbe and Goyle decked out in whips and chains and leather and little else and he began to understand the appeal of blunt trauma to the head.

Strangely enough, Malfoy began to avoid him after the incident. As the bruises faded, so did Malfoy's presence from his life, it seemed, and he saw him little outside of mealtimes, where he was always surrounded by his (possibly kinky) housemates.

When he did see him, the blonde even refused to make eye contact. As if he couldn't look Harry in the face, now, not after what had transpired between them. Hallways, dining halls, class – something about the Slytherin looked particularly shifty, even moreso than usual, which was a difficult task.

Harry would never understand Malfoy, not really, but he knew when he was Up to Something.

He unfurled the Marauder's Map and watched him. The same way that, year after year, he sought out the blonde head at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, his eyes zeroed in on the little moving black dot with the script that read Draco Malfoy.

What was he doing? Where was he going? Why was he acting so strangely?

He cornered him late one night down in the dungeons to ask these very important questions, but Harry had never prided himself on being tactful or eloquent. He ended up hitting him, instead.

This time, they went to the Infirmary together.

"Ow!" said Malfoy, "ow! Ow! Ow!"

Malfoy whined an awful lot.

"Hold still," Madam Pomfrey said firmly, grasping his arm as she poured the bubbling liquid over a wound.

Harry couldn't help laughing, even though it hurt his bruised ribs.

"Are you trying to kill me?" Malfoy demanded. "Augh! What is that? What does it do?"

"What is that? What does that do? is it going to burn my skin off?"

"OH GOD WHAT IS THIS, ACID? IT'S ACID, ISN'T IT," Malfoy cried, generally making a scene. "MY SKIN IS MELTING OFF! HELP! HELP!"

Harry's ribs really hurt by this point.

"Don't tell me you're going to have to amputate. You're going to have to amputate, aren't you?"

The blonde was now staring at his arm as if it had become dead zombie flesh that he did not recognize, mutating as he watched the liquid foam and bubble, healing his wounds. "YOU'RE TRYING TO MELT ME DOWN TO MY BONES FOR YOUR TWISTED MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS."

To which Madame Pomfrey calmly replied, "Don't be ridiculous. I already have a skeleton, and his name is Horatio."

Malfoy glared at her. "I hope you have a good lawyer." He then turned his glare onto Harry. "Same goes for you, Potter. This is nothing short of cruel and unusual."

"Can't we cast Silencio or something on him?" Harry asked.

"No," Madam Pomfrey answered him, reaching for the next liquid.

Maybe Malfoy was right, she really was spitefully cruel.

"Wait till the Daily Prophet hears of this, mauled in the hallways!" Malfoy cried, as his arm was stabilised and slowly bandaged. "Innocent student attacked by the Boy-Who Lived!"

Harry spluttered."But you started it!"

Malfoy gave him a look of complete and utter disdain, "No one told you that you had to join in."

Someone like that was unbearable.

It felt good to hit Malfoy, felt good afterwards, to hurt him. The feel of a knee in his gut, so that he doubled over, the feel of grabbing all that pale blonde hair and yanking him back, watching him grit his teeth.

The sickening crunch of bone when his fist met – not his nose, but one of those damnedly sharp cheekbones, sharp as a piece of broken porcelain. Only that it was Malfoy that got cut, not Harry.

He caught him when he was alone, always, in conveniently secluded corridors, the entrances of classrooms empty for the day.

It began without a word the next time. Harry didn't like to talk. Malfoy did, Malfoy liked to talk too much – his mouth pouring out vitriol and insults, each one of them sharp like a winged thing with teeth of its own. He was a wasp, a hornet, this annoying insect that could sting, again and again.

Because he deserved this. Because no one else could pay for Sirius and Malfoy would have to do. Because he had made the wrong decision and he was evil even though he was just Harry's age, and Harry didn't even know what he was doing, half the time.

Malfoy bruised rather pretty, dark purple if he left it too long, the exact same shade as an eggplant.

Harry got used to the taste of blood.

Madame Pomfrey, according to Malfoy, was a sadistic maniac. Harry told him that he was just a maniac, but it was true that she poked and prodded their wounds and bruises for a very long time before using Episkey.

"An unnecessarily and excruciatingly long and painful time," Malfoy interjected, discussing it as Harry was bandaged.

"Sissy," Harry said, and then, "Owwwww!"

Madame Pomfrey came to expect them. She took a brutal sort of delight in their treatments, and the more damaged they were, the more broken and bruised, the happier she was to see them.

He was beginning to look like an abused housewife.

"Are you still fighting with Malfoy?" Hermione asked.

Sweet Hermione, so well-meaning and proper, a prefect who'd of course disapprove. There was no way that she could understand.

"What?" Harry answered. "No, no, of course not."

"Ahem," she said, and poked a fading bruise on his cheek, just under his eye.

"Ow!" said Harry.

"You're not doing what now?"

"What, that?" Harry shook her off. "I fell."

She gave him a Look, but he was pretty sure she bought it.

"I'm very clumsy," he added, just to seal the deal. It was one of the many adjectives Malfoy had for him, along with oafish, stupid, moronic, idiotic, bloody, fucking, blasted (when he was being particularly villain-esque), and nincompoopy.


"You are the bane of my very existence," Malfoy said. "If your mother had lived, she would have soon killed herself just to avoid the embarrassment of having you for a child. Just looking at you makes me nauseous. Your face looks like something your neck chewed up and regurgitated to feed to its little neckling young, with black hair sticking out of it. You've got a Hero's complex that you didn't earn, you're idiotic and mostly lucky, you're an embarrassment to all wizarding kind, it's no wonder your horrible Muggles shoved you away in a broom cupboard, I really hope you die, you're arrogant and your sense of entitlement is—"

Malfoy broke off suddenly in the middle of his tirade, gave him an inquisitive look and simply said, "Potter, you're a dick."

Harry thought that this was an unfair judgement. If anybody deserved to be called a part of the male anatomy, it was Malfoy. In fact, Malfoy wasn't just a part of the male anatomy, he was the whole genitalia. Malfoy was such a dick that he was the dick and balls, the whole shebang, pubes, too, probably.

If anything, Malfoy was a giant penis!

This of course conjured very strange images and Harry had to punch him. The packing, smacking sound of flesh hitting flesh rang in his ears.

Later Harry sat in class and tongued a loose tooth that he would need Madame Pomfrey to fix, as much as he dreaded it. He could taste the thin trickle of blood from the cut on his gum; he swallowed it down.

- "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."-


The journey home is a slow one. Because it's been so long since Draco's actually been free, Harry helps him change into the Muggle clothes that he's bought for him –doing it as quickly as possible, barely even eyeing all that pale flesh- and they take the tube and walk instead of Apparating. He's chosen a soft grey jumper for him (kitten soft, as it was noted) that makes his grey eyes look blue and a pair of denim jeans.

The jumper was just a little bit big for him – they didn't feed him right there, the abusive bastards, or had Draco been unwilling to eat? He is a brat, after all, and then Harry dismisses it. Draco would have said something like, "Oh, yes, I'm watching my figure. Really, Potter, the malnourished prisoner look is very chic this year."

The too-big jumper exposes just a bit too much collarbone. Don't look, I'm indecent, Draco might have once drawled, even as he posed at just the right angle for the jumper to slip and expose even more pale skin. This Draco wears it casually, unnoticing, the too-long sleeves covering his wrists and half his palms.

Harry had asked for help from the store attendants; he prefers shopping at Muggle stores more these days, seeing as how the sales clerks are less likely to fawn all over him and try to offer his purchases for free. He wouldn't have been able to pick out this outfit on his own, of course, and he's sure that Draco never would have worn it, if he did. Even now, with the mind of a child, he probably still had that innate fashion sense.

Draco holds onto his sleeve, when he can't hold his hand.

When they get to the subway platform, Harry steps in front of him, keeping him back from the edge, far away from that too-thin yellow warning line. "Mind the gap," Harry says, unnecessarily, maybe, but the platform had been polite enough to remind him of its dangers, and it was only good manners to heed it. It would have been nice if more things came with warning labels.

They board the train with the afternoon crowd; just the beginning of the evening work rush home. Harry keeps a hand on Draco at all times, ready to reprimand him for shoving the other people out of the way. The reprimand is unnecessary, and so he clears his throat instead.

The train rocks back and forth as it runs along the tracks under the city of London. Draco's eyes are everywhere, watching, taking it in, seeing it all for the first time. The light from the windows passes over his face in rectangular patches as the train tunnels through the belly of London, like some great speedy intestinal worm. The advertisements are bright but they don't move. Real Draco would have been seeing this for the first time, as well, Harry muses, and so this is okay because the reaction is similar, if not the same, and it's genuine.

People are staring at them, surely. A man in a crushed hat has wooly eyebrows that climb up his forehead, and he rustles his newspaper –the Times, not the Prophet – and hides his face behind it. A black woman in a crisp business suit looks over at them; she uncrosses and recrosses her legs, only going in the other direction. Then again, maybe no one is looking at them at all.

A man at the station wants to know if they want to buy flowers; live ones, freshly cut, their stems probably still bleeding green juice. Draco is more interested in the idea of balloons. The flower vendor's eyes roam over him, touching the coat that Harry's bought for him, eyes touching his too-long pale hair, his slender, willowy figure (thin, far too thin, Harry thinks). Harry watches the pale, exposed expanse of skin of Draco's bare neck and throat, that slice of collarbone. He watches the way his Adam's apple bobs a little when he makes a pleased sound at something. Harry thanks the vendor and then goes on to buy Draco a scarf from the stand nearby.

Harry gets him home in one piece, a victory both large and small on his part.

-"No pain means death of feeling; each one of our joys is a bargain with the devil."-


There was no finesse to their fighting. A lot of it consisted of simply grabbing whatever they could, hands fisting in each other's robes, hands twisting around. His hands around Malfoy's throat as he struggled and writhed underneath him, like a large, pale flopping fish.

Malfoy, of course, fought dirty, every chance he got.

Malfoy even bit.

That little fucker.

"I'm watching you," Harry would growl, menacingly, "I've always got one eye wide open."

Mainly because, these days, with all the fighting they did, he tended to always have one eye swollen shut.

Malfoy, of course, when noticing that one eye was healing, would always punch the other one. To even it out, he said, bastard that he was.

"I've always been a passionate fan of aesthetic symmetry," he'd sneer.

Harry returned the favour by giving him a bloody nose.

"Just look at you two," Madame Pomfrey tsk'd. "Now how do you manage to consistently mess yourselves up so horribly?"

"He did it," they said in unison, each pointing at each other. Harry hated Malfoy all over again for stealing his line.

"Can't you just leave each other alone?" Madam Pomfrey said. "Honestly, next time I'm not administering any pain-relieving potions of any sort whatsoever."

That was the other perk of the Infirmary – the pain-relief. Madam Pomfrey's favourite pastime was to administer painful treatment and then deny the pain relief unless they had been "good boys."

God, maybe everyone in this school was a kinky sex maniac.

The pain-relieving potions, Malfoy said, were his favourite part. If given the correct dosage the whole body went numb; no one could feel anything. Harry preferred the pain, how it made everything sharper, how it made him feel. He would work up a sweat and be sore and hurt all over afterwards and somehow it was good.
Malfoy, on the other hand, downed the potions (which, quite frankly, tasted like bitter mildew and were the consistency of slime) like pumpkin juice. He looked blissful afterwards, even pleasant.

"I think you're developing a problem," Harry told him.

"I don't need to develop a problem," Malfoy responded. "I already have a problem. Its name is Harry Potter, and it's really fucking annoying."

When Harry showered, his torso was a patchwork of colours: angry reds and dark purples, healing yellows and greens. He was filled with a flush of pleasure at the thought that Malfoy must look the same, if not worse, anaemic-looking as he was and all, with the tendency to bruise darker. (That weak, sickly pale look must come from all the inbreeding, Hermione said.) Red and purple marks tended to look better on pale skin, anyway, like marble stained with colour.

"Look at this," Madam Pomfrey might say over Harry's bared body, voice shushed with both awe and barely-suppressed enjoyment. "It's a wonder that there's no internal bleeding." She poked the soft area with her wand, just to watch him wince, his famous green eyes squeezing shut in pain.

It made him feel like a slice of meat, to be perfectly honest about it.

"Well, I'd apologise," said Malfoy, "but I hate lying."

"That was just a lie," Harry pointed out.

"Well, yes," said Malfoy, and he smiled nastily.

That satisfying crack, a strangled cry of pain. Insults screamed through a spray of blood.

"Glass jaw" was the term for it, Harry learned, when you were particularly vulnerable to a knockout punch. But Malfoy, despite his very good impression of a delicate boy, did not have a glass jaw. His was all pointy, all sharp corners, and even when Harry managed to land a punch there, he did not go down but rather came back fighting, even stronger than ever. There was no shattering here.

"You fight like a girl," Malfoy spat.

"At least I don't look like one," Harry countered.

Okay, okay, even Harry had to admit, they were running just a little low on material. But then it didn't matter, because with Malfoy's hands clenched around his neck, his blunt nails digging into his skin, the only thing that mattered was wrenching the blonde off of himself so that he could hurt him.

They started to get inventive with the excuses that they told Madame Pomfrey.

"I walked into a staircase," Harry said. At her sceptical look he added, "They...they move."

Malfoy was considerably better at lying. It figured, after all, it was probably a Slytherin Pureblood thing – Malfoy had probably been lying before he learned to speak. Harry would have bet anything that his first words were, "It wasn't me!"

"I was playing Quidditch," Malfoy might say, "diving for the Snitch when a Roc – the bird, not like, a big rock, you know - swooped down out of midair, intending to take me home to feed its young. Of course, since I am a bright, pretty, shiny thing, it would be attracted to me, and possibly want to keep me forever. I expertly dodged its clutches, escaping the grasp of its talons by a hair's breadth, but I fell off my broom in the process, and, of course, stupid Potter here got the Snitch, because he is oblivious to anyone's plight save his own."

Or:

"There I was, minding my own business, when I was absolutely mobbed by a giant mass of ardent ladies, each of them gone mad with lovesick passion. They tore off my robes and tore at my hair in an attempt to get a piece of me to take home with them. They molested me very hard. For a very long time. Some of them even attempted to violate my person, but alas, I do not fault these poor girls, for who could blame their youthful, romantic hearts? Yet, I was lucky to have escaped within an inch of my life."

"Oh?" asked Madame Pomfrey.

"Yes," replied Malfoy. And damn the bloody bastard, he was completely straight-faced throughout.

And also there was:

"There I was, innocently walking en route to Care of Magical Creatures, when I saw a gang of wild Sea Lions set upon a hapless young first year. Being Slytherin Prefect, of course it was my duty to defend him. I fought them valiantly, claw, tooth and nail, but sacrificed my fine, fine self in the process."

"You were attacked by sea lions?" Harry asked. This was ridiculous, even for Malfoy. "Those animals with whiskers and flippers and that balance red balls on the ends of their noses?"

A gang of sea lions, no less. He imagined that they had spike collars and leather jackets, to boot. The collars would have to be red, of course, to match the rubber balls. Perhaps they even waxed their moustaches and made them curl upwards and he had definitely been spending far too much time with that lunatic Malfoy.

"They're a type of Magical Creature, you pathetic simpleton," Malfoy had hissed back. "Go look it up."

"A Sea Lion, Harry?" Hermione asked later. "Why, yes, they're creatures with the forefront of a lion, webbed forepaws, a dorsal fin, and a fishy tail. One of those heraldic creatures, you know."

"Damn," Harry said. Now he owed Malfoy five Galleons.

"Why?" asked Hermione. "Is this a...you know...Dark Thing?"

"Erm..." Harry said.

It was Ron that saved him. "A fishy tale?" Ron asked. "You mean like the one about the guy who gets swallowed by the whale?"

Hermione proceeded to educate Ron about the Whereabouts, Diet, and Mating Habits of the Sea Lion while Harry contented himself by imagining Malfoy being beaten by a gang of circus sea lions, bouncing their red rubber balls off his stupid blonde head while barking.

And then there was that doubled-over feeling of being punched in the gut, the air forced out in one big rush of breath.

A spill of blood splattered across the flagstones, an image that was suddenly horrific. A small white object in that puddle of dark liquid and Harry realised that it was a tooth. It was at that point when he decided that this was getting ridiculous, and he really hoped that Wizard Dentistry was better than the Muggle kind. Hermione probably had a thing or two to say about the matters

"Muggle Dentists use drills?" Madame Pomfrey asked, incredulously. "Well, I never! That's absolutely barbaric."

She pulled out a handsaw. "Now, open wide."


"You know, I think you two go out of your way to pick fights with each other," said Hermione.

"That's ridiculous, Hermione," Harry said. "I'm not fighting Malfoy."

"Right..." Hermione had said, and pursed her lips with concern, and Harry nodded. She opened her mouth to start something – a confrontation, or a lecture perhaps – but then Ron came in complaining about how his homework wasn't nearly done and it was due tomorrow, and Harry congratulated himself on his well-learned evasive tactics.

The fading bruises did not come from nowhere but Anger was a very natural part of the grief process and so she did not pursue the issue.

They began to initiate the fights on the way to the hospital wing, simply for convenience's sake.

Sitting together in the Infirmary, Madame Pomfrey shook her head at them both, trying to look clearly disappointed but failing miserably. She looked a bit too pleased, instead.

One time, Malfoy actually vomited on the way to the Infirmary, his face pale and sickly green in the moments just before it happened. That had been particularly bad. Harry hadn't known what to do.

He cast Scourgify on the mess, bits of lunch and dinner combined – he thought he could see cranberry sauce and a bit of pie. With a trembling hand Malfoy pushed stray strands of hair back, out of his face, which was flushed red from the exertion. Harry didn't know how someone could look flushed and pale at the same time, but he did. The flush wasn't attractive – it made his skin splotchy with red, as if with disease or a bad rash. Malfoy stumbled a bit when he stood up again. He wavered on his feet. Instinctively, Harry went to help him, to catch him if he fell, and that thin, cruel mouth twisted into an ugly sneer and with surprising strength Malfoy pushed him away.

"Save your pity for someone who needs it, Potter," he spat, even with the spittle of vomit still on him.

It was a talent, truly, to make someone want to hurt you, even in your most hurt and vulnerable state. It wasn't exactly marketable, sure, but Malfoy would probably find some way around it – he was sneaky like that.

The whole thing made Harry uneasy. He wanted to hurt him and yet he didn't. His body had grown accustomed to the aching and the pain; he rarely even had nightmares anymore.

The next time he met up with Malfoy, he meant to tell him. But then Malfoy started hitting him, hitting him and hitting him and then Harry hit back and they went into it all over again.

-*-

-"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul..."-

Harry wonders if being at 12 Grimmauld Place will jar Draco's memory – it is like the kind of old house that he might be used to, after all, especially since Kreacher now works to keep it clean. The portraits surely wouldn't scream "blood traitor," not with a Malfoy in the house. No, Malfoy blood stayed pure until the very end, even when it ran bright and red.

Of course, before he moved back in, after the war, he had ordered Kreacher to take almost all evidence of the Blacks (save Sirius's room, of course) and hide it, and the same went for all the war-things; had insisted that he would go mad if he returned and found the house the way it was when it had been their headquarters. He figured that Kreacher would only be too happy to hoard all those wonderful possessions – set himself up in a little house-elf nest or something. He had come home to find his orders taken literally – all of the furniture under sheets, disguised as something else. Harry imagined that he was living in a house full of pack animals on Halloween, all of them with the same costume – horses and donkeys and camels and elephants as sheet-ghosts, with two eyeholes cut out.

He lived with the animal-ghosts for a while, before he found that he missed the familiarity of maps and priceless antiques. The sheets came off and for a while he was comfortable
but woke up every morning expecting to do battle. He considered an Extreme Makeover: 12 Grimmauld Place Edition. He came to a compromise – for fear of house elf spit and worse than spit in his food – and compromised by buying stuff. Stylish chairs and simple, sleek sets of furniture from Muggle Swiss furniture stores. Chests of drawers that wouldn't snap off his fingers if he forget to stroke them right. Flowery pillow shams and little embroidered cushions for the red velvet couches. Tea cosies hand-knit by grandmas, complete with Comforting Grandma Smell. Ceramic animal salt and pepper shakers in the shape of lions. Stuff.

A sign that read "Home Sweet Home" was probably too much, but "Warbase Sweet Warbase" had a certain ring to it, and that was allowed to stay.

When they step into the door, everything at 12 Grimmauld Place seems to welcome them; even the snakes on the carved into the wood panelling here and there seem to smile, which is actually...disturbing. Like little worms with happy-faces, or something.

"Home...?" Draco asks, his smooth voice wavering now, as if with the uncertainty of youth.

"Yes, Draco, home," Harry says.

For a moment Harry can see Real Draco and what he would see – how horribly mismatched everything was, the way the checkered upholstery clashed with the flowered curtains clashed with the striped tablecloth. Harry can see the look of disdain he'd give, if not the look of absolute horror – stricken, at first, and then that wrinkling of his nose, as if he were smelling something rotten or faecal or both. He can hear his voice, sneering, Good God, Potter, you actually live here? What is this? A museum of horrors? I can't look. I feel sick. Harry wants Draco to like it, though, he wants him to appreciate his things and be happy with him.

Is this an experiment, perhaps? A tribute to bad taste? You really hate me, don't you.

"'S nice," says Draco happily, "home."

Harry can't help the smile that spreads across his face.

-"...It is the tie that binds, and binds, and binds."-


Then came the day when he heard that Malfoy had gotten into a fight with Seamus and Ron. Something about it made Harry's gut twist and writhe – cut him open, and his intestines would likely resemble a tank full of eels. It wasn't that Malfoy didn't deserve it, knowing him, he probably did – a well-placed insult about Ron's family, perhaps, or maybe a bigoted death threat, Harry didn't know. Blood traitor and Half-blood and Mudblood, it was all too easy. Didn't even have to be about them. And it wasn't that he wasn't beaten up very badly – from what Ron had bragged about in great, breathless detail, he must have resembled a jelly doughnut, with all the jelly beaten out.
Harry cornered Malfoy, demanding to know the meaning of this. Well, it was more that he pushed him into a wall, not a corner, but the idea was pretty much the same idea.

"Get into a fight with Seamus and Ron, did you?"

"What?" Malfoy spat, shoving him back. "Here to defend your precious Weasel's honour? They won, you know, but then again, with two against one, I feel the scales were tipped just the slightest bit in their favour."

"You're not...you're not...oh, bugger this." Harry growled with frustration; that wasn't the point and Malfoy clearly didn't get it. "Who told you to fight them?"

"I think they perhaps invited it when they said, 'fight us, Malfoy,' or perhaps it was when one of them tried to hold me while the other swung and took a punch."

"You shouldn't have been fighting them! You want to fight someone, fight me! Keep your paws off everybody else!"

"What?" Malfoy spluttered, going even paler with rage. "You don't own me! You have no right to tell me who I can and can't fight! I'll fight whoever I want!"

Harry punched him, aiming for his jaw. It clipped the side of his head instead, but it was effective enough, in its own right.

Malfoy let out a howl and tackled him. He swung at him with an insane sort of passion, fist connecting solidly with Harry's face, and did he make up his own little war cry? It could have been, that would have been just like that stupid, crazy Malfoy, because he was insane and they should really call him mad Malfoy. Or, it could have just been the sound of Harry's ears ringing.

Ow.

Either way, either way, later, they were both back at the Infirmary, Harry squinting at the glare of all that sunlight on all that white. His nose was swollen and broken and was likely to swell to the size, shape, and colour of an eggplant because Madame Pomfrey hadn't gotten to them yet – the wounded Hufflepuff Quidditch players had priority, simply because they were just a little less suicidal.

"That's favouritism," Malfoy insisted. "Unjust discrimination." One eye was swollen shut and half of his face looked as if it had been stung by bees.

As Harry was holding an ice pack to his bruised nose, everything throbbing with pain, he decided that he felt a little better.

-"Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it."-


The key to feeling better is to better yourself.

At least, according to one of the many books Harry has on Getting Over the War.

There are shelves upon shelves of literature at home, blue and brown and red binding with their titles embossed in gold, shining helpfully out at him. One of them even tries to lend a hand – literally – every time you pick it up: "The Helpful Book of Helping (Yourself)." The disembodied hand emerges from the pages and follows you around, trying to help out with household chores. Kreacher resents it.

This is because Hermione's answer to everything is books. There wasn't a lot of post-war literature at first, but to counter that, there were the post-war support groups. There were the veteran organisations that Hermione advocated, insisted upon even. Every week there was a new, colourful flier that she waved in Harry's face, like some sort of giant disoriented butterfly.

"Harry," she'd say, "I really think you ought to give this one a chance. It's a big part of the healing process; it could be a good opportunity for you."

As a show of good faith, she promised that she would attend the support group as well. To show even better faith, she forced Ron to go, too.

"Why do I have to go?" Ron had whined. "I'm not the one who's fucked-up, here!...Er, no offence, mate."

"None taken," Harry said.

Hermione had hit him. "It's very important that we show our support for Harry!" she had chided. "Find a Support System," she had quoted. Harry could hear the capitals. "Let your loved ones support you, help you, and love you. Now is the time to be supported, helped, and loved. Would it kill you to be a little more sensitive?"

Ron rubbed his arm where he had been smacked. "I am sensitive, especially there! That's my war wound you're hitting! Where's my support, help, and love?"

"Love hurts," Harry had said, sagely.

This had been in the days before Rose was born, and the two of them plus Harry had still all had a life together. After Rose, their nights out were replaced by nights in, bottle feedings and early bedtimes. They urged Harry to continue his wild bachelor lifestyle (which had included such wild escapades as attending support group meetings) but Harry had just smiled and shaken his head. Instead he spent his Friday nights playing with Rose or helping Ron fix his DVD player (broken, again, because Ron had placed something in it that didn't belong –"What? Pancakes and DVDs are a similar shape!") and every now and then one of them asked about Ginny.

At the support group meeting, Hermione had nodded along to everything the group leader said, while Ron drank cup after cup of free coffee, his small plastic plate piled high with slightly stale, free baked goods.

Harry doodled on in the margins of his worksheet. It read, "Bee positive!" and showed a small picture of a bee with a slightly disturbing manic grinning face. It had crazy eyes – that's what Draco would have called them – its eyes were full of The Crazy.

Harry drew a Crazy Home for it, and then he decided that it must be lonely, so he drew it some Crazy Bee Friends. It was a honeybee, probably, so it must produce honey, even if it was Crazy, and so he etched in some honey dripping from a hive. But this would surely attract a bear, which was evil (with glowing red eyes, those hateful red eyes), and then the bees were Fucked, since the bear was so powerful, and he had to come up with a military strategy for them, they had to get organised--

"Are you paying attention, Harry?" Hermione asked. "This is important."

Right. Important. He had to pay attention to the matter at hand.

Constant vigilance, as he was once taught, before that teacher had died as well.

Paying attention had rarely changed anything in Harry's life. Paying attention wouldn't bring anybody back from the dead.

There was George, only half a person without his other half. Angelina Johnson, he heard, had lost an arm. Lavender Brown was burned and scarred, her pretty face ruined forever. And they were the "lucky" ones, supposedly, since they were still among the living.

Paying attention to some bloke in checked robes telling them that "every day is a new day" probably wouldn't be much to help them.

To Harry the idea of the meetings seemed more sad than anything else. Then again, he supposed that organisations and meetings and gatherings helped some people, like Dumbledore's Army had once made Luna Lovegood feel as if she had friends.

There were War Survivors support groups. There were War Veteran Support Groups. There were support groups for the Families of War Victims, the Friends of Families of War Victims, the Pets of the Friends of Families of War Victims.

There were probably even Ex-Deatheater support groups. Harry could see it. They'd have a 12-step programme.

Step One: Admit that you had a problem; you were powerless against the urge to be evil.

Step Two: Seek help from a greater power to overcome the urge to be evil.

Step Three: Make a decision to turn lives and will over to the Ministry, Step Four: Make an inventory of all the ways you were evil, etc.

And then one Amycus Carrow had approached him, his hair slicked back, looking particularly clean and polished.

"Excuse me, Mr. Potter?" he had said. "I'm on step nine of my programme, and I must make amends to everyone I've wronged. Except when to do so would injure them or others."
Of course, Harry couldn't think of anything that he could have him do to make amends to him, and Amycus Carrow followed him around all day, swearing that he was in his debt as punishment for his wrongs. Finally Harry gave him a grocery list and made him run back and forth to the store at least ten times. By the end of it all, he had 16 gallons of milk, 14 dozen eggs, 8 pounds of flour, 6 pounds of butter, and 7 jars of jam, 9 pounds of meat, three Christmas hams, and one salted herring.

He hoped that it had made him feel useful. Harry has enough trouble trying to think up ways to make himself feel useful, never mind someone else.

It makes sense that Hermione is also a big advocate of Groups. She always has been – it used to be SPEW, and then there was the DA. Now there was "Soldiers United and Carefully Keeping Sane."

Walking into a group, the room cheery and light, the decor pleasant and bland, the smell of pastries and cheap free coffee in the air, looking at a circle of sad, traumatised faces; Harry couldn't help thinking of the same way that they had looked so hopefully out at him during the war.

Of course, during the war, there had been less coffee and free pastries.

It's really a matter of the naked leading the blind, here. In some cases, it's the blind leading the blind. Or, more accurately, the blind leading the scarred and amputated. Well, except for the leg amputees. They're not going anywhere, unless they've got wheels.

It was supposed to be therapeutic, healing, sharing his experiences with a bunch of strangers (and some of them not-so strangers, and some of them just strange). Some of them have lost friends, some of them lovers, others have lost family. They've lost limbs and bones and bits of flesh and skin.

None of them, however, have ever faced the Dark Lord (and lived to tell the tale) and when it was his turn to speak the room went silent, their eyes watching him, marvelling at the legend made flesh. His hurts couldn't possibly mirror their own, and surely both blood and pain ran different in Saviour veins.

"What was it like, facing You-Know-Who?"

"Were you scared...no, of course you weren't."

"I hear you rode in on a dragon and defeated him with a single Expelliarmus, is that true?"

"Okay, okay, so when the papers asked you, 'Harry Potter, you just defeated the Dark Lord, now what are you going to do,' did you really go to Disneyworld?"

He was their Hero, brave and unafraid, his very design immune to suffering. What was he doing here?

"I have to go to the washroom," Ron whispered to Hermione, loudly. "It's all that damn coffee."

The name of this group was Living One Second at a Time.

Another one that Hermione wanted him to possibly attend is DRUGD: Daring Resistance Under Growing Depression.

Soldiers Healing Internally with Time, Harry thinks.

An anger-management group could also prove useful, Hermione said: Functional Usage of Controlled Temper.

Embrace Life! They said.

There Can Be Life After Devastation! They said.

Choose Life! They said.

Heal Yourself! They said.

"Mr. Potter, may I please see you after session?" the Group Leader asked.

Harry had expected questions. Maybe a harrowing account of lying in the trenches, seeing the bodies mired in mud, eyes wide open and gazing at an uncaring sky.

"I'm so pleased you came to my group today," the Leader said, taking his hand and pumping it up and down, as if he expected Holy Water to start spurting out of Harry's mouth if he did it for long enough and hard enough. "I can't tell you what an honour, what an absolute honour it is. It means a lot to the rest of the group that you're here, you know, and I really hope you grace us with your wonderful presence again. Oh, and, by the way...can I get your autograph?"

Harry had refused to go back, when Hermione asked him about it, later. Ron had refused to go back without Harry – because he was perfectly normal and well-adjusted, he insisted; well, that and the coffee had given him the shakes and kept him up all night. He had had strange dreams when he finally did get to sleep, something about birds and bees in a basket.

Hermione had been forced to give up, but that didn't stop her from giving Harry the best helpful literature that she could find.


When she first found out about Draco it had first been a shock; she had been stopping by to drop off a cake that Ron had baked. (Hermione had been a horrible cook, they discovered, but Ron had been forced to pick up a thing or two from his mother, and while he had been adverse to the idea at first, he soon decided that wearing her pink apron was an even trade-off for ingesting something edible every night.) Rose in one arm and the cake in the other, she had let out a little cry and dropped the cake on the floor when she saw Draco hiding behind Harry, clinging to his arm.

It could have been worse, Harry supposed. She could have dropped the baby.

The next week she was back, with a pie and an armload of books.

"Magical Maladies, A-Z" by Melody Malady. "Spell-Damage Does Not Always Spell Damage" by Miss Destruction Dupree, Mediwitch. "Living with Drain Bamage" by Lockeroy Gilderhart. "How to Deal When Your Ex-lover That You're Still Hung Up On Has Irreversible Brain Damage for Dummies."

"The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taking Care of a Five Year Old in a Grown Wizard's Body."

"Little Boys, Big Wizards...wait, this isn't a self-help book. Hermione!"

Hermione had blushed and immediately snatched the book back. "Erm, sorry, that one's not for you."

Harry had stared at her; not even facing the Dark Lord had ever unsettled him like this.

"Erm, it's not mine. I mean, it's not for me, it's for a friend," she kept blushing and tucked the book away.

"Don't tell Ron," she said.

"I won't," Harry promised, faintly.

Where the hell she found those books, Harry would never know, but she was Hermione Granger, Mistress of the Written Word. She was as sharp as a whip, and with a single flick, the books came crashing to their knees in obedience, eager to fulfil her bidding.

Something like that.

There is a way to beat this, there is always a way to beat this. Even if he actually doesn't know what to do with Draco, now that he's got him home. He opens up a book, searching for guidance. He reads aloud, "You can't put a Band-Aid on every boo-boo you've made; some just need time to heal..."

Draco cocks his head to the side, clearly confused. "B-band-aid?" he echoes. "B-boo-boo? Wh-who's got...got a boo-boo? Wha-whassa band-aid?"

Harry tosses the book to the side. It lands with a soft thud on the carpeted floor.

"What do you want for dinner?" he asks Draco, pushing a strand of pale pale hair back from his pale face. "I'll get Kreacher to make it for us."

Help, support, love, even if it hurts.

Take Life One Step at a Time, They said.

-"Trust not yourself, but your defects to know. Make use of every friend and every foe."-

It wasn't too far into the semester that they got caught.

The fighting couldn't go on forever, of course. It was true that they didn't give Professors Snape and McGonagall enough credit, because somehow they found out just how often it was that Harry and Malfoy visited the Infirmary.

"You're both idiotic if you ever thought that this could escape notice for long," Snape sneered. "Draco, I am particularly disappointed in you. This sort of recklessness and stupidity I would have expected from Potter, but from you?"

"It was self-defence, Professor," Malfoy said, always eager to sell him out. "Potter is a madman; dangerous, even. I never would have sought him out on my own!"

Harry spluttered.

"Ah," Snape said, with sudden understanding, "Aggression problems, Potter? Bullying your fellow students? I should have expected as much, considering your father. Like father, like son, I suppose. Perhaps you could benefit from counselling, I'm sure we could work it into your detention..."

"Shame on both of you," Professor McGonagall interjected, before Harry could attack Snape for attacking his father. Aggression problems? Ha! Not bloody likely.

"Severus, you know as well as I do, that considering the history between these two that it takes two to tango."

Malfoy made a face. Even Harry had to agree it was a poor turn of phrase, and then he was upset with himself for daring to agree with Malfoy.

McGonagall gave them both a steely look over her glasses. "So to speak."

"True," Snape conceded the point, much to Harry's surprise. "Malfoy, fifty points for fighting on school grounds. Potter, one hundred points for fighting and for tempting Malfoy."

Well, at least that wasn't a surprise.

McGonagall bristled a little, her face stern. "Fifty points from Malfoy for exciting Potter."

Malfoy made a small sound of outrage.

Snape's eyes narrowed. "Fifty points from Potter and one week's detention for fighting when already given a warning."

"Fifty points from Malfoy and two weeks' detention for fighting when given a warning and setting a poor example as a Prefect," McGonagall countered.

"I can't believe they're having a pissing contest over us," Harry muttered surreptitiously to Malfoy, the only person available that he could complain to about the immaturity of adults.

"At this point we'll be in detention until graduation," Malfoy muttered back, as the two professors continued to argue and mete out their unjust punishments. "I hate you, Potter. This is all your fault."

"My fault? You started it!" Harry hissed.

"Well, maybe if you didn't have such a stupid ugly scarry dumb face...ow! Professor, Potter hit me!"

Snape whirled around, robes swirling with dramatic flair. "Another fifty points, Potter. You saw that one, Minerva."

"Tattletale," Harry muttered.

"Malfoy most likely incited him," Professor McGonagall said. Harry had always liked Professor McGonagall. She was tough, but fair.

And then she and Snape began to argue all over again.

It was then that Madam Pomfrey made an appearance, summoned by the sound of the 'Ow.' 'Ow's probably rang out for her like the tone of a golden bell (and for whom does the bell toll?). She had come to love them in her own sick way over the past couple of weeks, Harry supposed, since they always came to her so bruised and bleeding and broken.
She also must have been, predictably, reluctant to let them go. She had been using them as her personal guinea pigs for her twisted, sadistic Experiments.

Malfoy's words, of course.

"You're actually more a ferret, if you were a furry little animal," Harry had reminded him at that point. Malfoy responded to this by biting him, the little ferret. "Ah! You took off a piece of skin, you fucker! What the hell is wrong with you?" Madame Pomfrey came over with her new salve for bite wounds that result in missing skin, and it seemed to sting as much as it healed.

Harry had been suddenly, ominously, reminded of Fred and George and their experiments on the first-years. He could see Madam Pomfrey as a Hogwarts student, chasing younger students around and squealing, "Let me Heal you!!"

And now their torturer was their saviour, in an ironic twist of Fate – as most twists of Fate tended to be.

"Surely their pain is punishment enough," Madam Pomfrey said. She was an angel of mercy, truly. "What is most important here, after all, is not rules but their health. Boys will be boys, you know."

It was a sane enough sentiment to bring the two professors back to their senses.

"Right, right. But if you send each other to the Infirmary one more time this year," Professor McGonagall threatened, "I'll see to it that you're both suspended from the Quidditch team indefinitely."

"And rest assured," Snape added, always eager to have the last word, "you'll be serving detention for me."

They couldn't do this ever again.

It was Officially Over.

It had become second nature by now, however, to want to fight when he saw Malfoy next. To need to punch and be punched, to hit and be hit, to cause pain and to hurt and to feel and to have his pain pounded out of him.

Harry tried to hold it back. Only Malfoy knew exactly how to look at him, what to say and how to sneer in the right way, in just the perfect way to get his blood boiling.

It was as if Harry had given him a literal shiny, big red button, and told him not to push it.

A little fighting wouldn't hurt. Just a little punch, he promised himself, just a tiny one.

Malfoy stared at him. And stared at him, and stared at him. It was creepy, those clear grey eyes sharp and jagged and trying to pierce into him.

"What the hell do you want?" Harry snarled.

"As if I'd ever want anything to do with you," Malfoy sneered, lip curling. He paused for a moment, and then added, as if in afterthought, "I hate you and you smell like fermented vomit and everyone close to you dies. Parents, dog, et cetera."

It wasn't his best, but Harry wanted it too much to care. He punched him, hard, and then again and again and he felt a satisfying crunch as his fist smashed into that pale face.

"Fucker!" Malfoy cried, and then he was upon him, knocking them both to the floor. Harry struggled to push him off but then he felt the blows rain down on his face. "Fucker, fucker, fucker!" Malfoy cried with each punch. Bright pain exploded behind Harry's eyeballs as Malfoy lifted Harry up by his robes and slammed him into the floor, but instead of continuing as anticipated, the blonde made a noise of disgust and dropped Harry instead, leaving him momentarily stunned on the cold stone floor.

"By nose!" Malfoy said.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Harry said, when he finally pushed himself up. His tooth felt loose again.

"You broke by nose, you fucker!" Malfoy said, hand pressed against his face. Bright red blood began to trickle out from between his pale white fingers.

"Yeah, so?" Harry said, hand on his ringing head. "I've done way worse before."

"You idiot!" Malfoy said, shoving him hard with one hand, the other still cupping his nose. "Dis dime we can'd go indo the Infirmary and if I can'd cast Episkey righd it's going do heal crooked."

"Oh," said Harry, but he found it a bit hard to care, since he could taste blood again.

"Oh, god, dis was part of your evil plan all along, wasn'd id? You were so jealous you had do go and dry do bake be as ugly as you?" Malfoy cried, voice both nasal and high-pitched. He pulled his hand away from his face to look at it, saw the bright red and grey eyes went comically wide. "I hade you! I hade you so much! Fuck you, Harry Podder!"

This was bad. Not that he actually cared about the little wanker, but if Malfoy showed up to any of his classes looking the way he did, they were both certain to get punished.

"Look," Harry said. "Look, calm down, I'll heal you."

Malfoy laughed, a little hysterically, a weird burbling sound that seemed to bubble out of his hand along with the blood that was trickling out between his pale fingers. "Whad makes you think I should trusd you?"

"Well," Harry said, tongue tenderly probing inside his own rapidly bruising cheek, "mainly because I'm not you."

"You'd hex id off. Dun think I dun know you. I had such a cude nose, doo," Malfoy said, mournfully. "Goodbye, dashing good looks. Goodbye, beaudiful aesthedic symmedry. Goodbye, dreabs of living a life withoud hideous deforbity."

Harry touched hi