Chapter 2 of The Bubo
In which Draco fails to make Harry’s life miserable.
Friday, November 20, 1994
As the Slytherins queued for Potions with the Gryffindors the next day, Potter stood a few paces ahead of Draco, who couldn’t resist his curiosity, and carefully cut the distance short. Freshly shampooed, Potter’s hair had a deep, dark luster and smelled softly of strawberries and mint. The collar of a standard issue white shirt gleamed clean and crisp under the silken curls. His robes seemed straight out of laundry, impeccably pressed and giving off the familiar, faint scent of lavender. Even his glasses, which Draco could see through from behind, were free of greasy fingerprints, polished to a shine brighter than ever.
The doors swung open to reveal the unwelcoming scowl on Professor Snape’s face, and the crowd poured inside. Draco gave Potter one last glance as he passed him by. Among all the signs of unusually thorough grooming, Potter’s tie stood out the most. It looked… entirely adequate. Draco couldn’t help lifting his eyebrow in silent appreciation.
Their eyes met, and Potter lowered his at once, then slowly lifted them again, oddly insecure. His cheeks darkened. And Draco understood, in that inscrutable way he sometimes understood things about Potter, that it had been his own unscrupulous, judgmental scrutiny, cataloging the details of Potter’s unkempt person yesterday evening, that had triggered this remarkable transformation.
The idea put Draco in a state of such acute giddiness that he might as well have been turned into a ferret again. He didn’t hear a single word of Professor Snape’s introduction to the lesson, staring hopelessly, helplessly, across the classroom at the bones and veins in Potter’s handsome, wide hand as he copied down into his notebook, at the slow but inevitable slide of those dark curls down his temples, the curious movement of his ear when Granger whispered something smile-worthy. He turned to glance right at Draco, startling him into a blush that reached the roots of his hair. Granger must’ve caught him staring. He fixed his eyes on the blackboard, unseeing, while their shoulders shook at the margins of his vision. If Professor Snape were to ask him his own name at that moment, Draco would’ve been unable to give an answer.
Potter stood up, then, and walked toward the back of the classroom—to fetch something from the cupboards, Draco concluded after a glance at Professor Snape’s placid expression. Potter’s gaze met Draco’s, and Draco, feeling as bold as on the day of their duel, wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Potter ignored him. Not even a flicker of a response. And Draco couldn’t have that, could he? All rational thought banished from his bean-brain, he acted on spite alone, sticking his foot out in Potter’s path as he made his way back—in plain view of Professor Snape’s desk, and, to no one’s surprise, of Professor Snape himself.
Potter tripped and an armful of glass beakers, flasks and tubes crashed against the flagstones in a blinding explosion of light and sound. His ankle turned—his other foot landed onto a vial broken clean in half and crunched it—but somehow he found his balance before falling on top of the million razor-sharp shards.
He turned to stare at Draco with huge, unbelieving eyes.
Everyone was staring at Draco. Including Professor Snape, who had risen from his chair, wand in hand and mouth shaped into a voiceless O.
It was only then that Draco regained his full faculties and grasped the extent of the damage he could’ve caused. Had Potter fallen, his hands and knees would’ve been shredded to the bones. Possibly his chest and face too, even his throat. There would’ve been so much—no. Draco blinked himself out of picturing it and busied his quickened mind with an even more catastrophic outcome. Had Potter carried something else—those cupboards were full of volatile, hazardous components—he might not have been the only one injured.
But the narrowly avoided disaster wasn’t what made all the blood drain from Draco’s limbs. It was the cold horror at having been so utterly out of control.
In the ringing silence, Professor Snape lowered his wand, and his face seamlessly rearranged itself from wide-eyed shock to the more habitual grim annoyance. “Fifty points from Slytherin,” he enunciated. Cheers from the Gryffindors rose to meet the groans of the Slytherins, but Professor Snape wasn’t finished. “And twenty from Gryffindor.”
“What?” Potter cried. “Malfoy tripped me! You saw it! Everyone did!”
“Everyone but you, Mr. Potter, busy as you were staring elsewhere. If this doesn’t teach you to watch your step, it won’t be for the lack of trying on my part.”
Potter let out a sigh that sounded like he had deflated, but then he kicked the disembodied neck of a large alembic so that it shattered against the dais under Professor Snape’s desk.
“Twenty five,” said Professor Snape. The warning in his voice preempted another wave of groaning and cheering, though the mood shift was obvious in the sour looks on the Gryffindor faces and the matching smirks on the Slytherins’. “Now kindly move your hind legs out of my equipment.”
Potter walked back a few steps and out of Draco’s panic-narrowed field of view. At the gesture of Professor Snape’s wand, the shards rose in glittering spirals like the arms of colliding galaxies to reform the glassware, leaving no trace of the incident.
Draco had been sitting very still throughout this exchange, staring straight ahead and clenching his fists against the shivers of shock and anxiety that vibrated through his back and neck. As another silence settled on the classroom, he allowed himself a sliver of hope that he’d seen the end of it. But no such luck.
“Mr. Malfoy,” said Professor Snape.
“Yes, sir,” said Draco, barely finding his voice.
“I have a task for you, commensurate with your mental maturity.”
Draco looked up. This didn’t sound good.
“I’ve been informed that a substantial batch of Oxalis Monstrosa has matured in Greenhouse Three. You and Mr. Potter will harvest the seeds. I know you are familiar with the procedure, but Mr. Potter may not be. You will instruct him to the best of your ability.”
About two thirds of the class, who, like Draco, came from wizarding families and knew what this would entail, started giggling. Weasley looked especially delighted.
Draco spoke before he knew it, blood retuning to his face all at once. “No.”
This was met with a slow rise of Professor Snape’s pointed eyebrow. “Am I to take it you would prefer doing it as part of detention?”
“Malfoy…” Potter groaned. Not that Draco needed an incentive to avoid detention. He was behind his schoolwork as it was, and missing the rest of this lesson would be bad enough without robbing him of his study time. He closed his eyes.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“As you should be, Mr. Malfoy.” Professor Snape levitated the glassware to his desk and stowed his wand. “Well, then? Off you go. And do not return until you have harvested the entire batch.”
Draco stood on wobbly legs. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Arse-kisser,” Potter whispered, but went out ahead of Draco meekly enough. Then, “What the hell is wrong with you, Malfoy?” before they even reached the stairs.
“What?” Draco snorted. “That got your knickers in a twist? You’re losing your touch, Potter.”
“It was stupid and dangerous, and look where it got us!”
They emerged into the entrance hall. Only a few students loitered about, as it was the middle of the first morning period. “Blah, blah,” Draco said, miming a yapping mouth with his hand. “I distinctly remember you and your cronies making light of my actual, legitimate injuries last year when I’d been mauled by a rabid hippogriff. By your own standards, Potter, getting stabbed with a few shards of glass should be nothing to worry about.”
“No one tripped you into being a prick to Buckbeak.”
“No one tied your eyes, Potter. What were you looking at, anyway?”
“Oh, piss off.”
Draco sniggered, but his cheer soon faded in the face of growing mortification. True to Professor Snape’s report, there were four full beds of mature Oxalis in the greenhouse, with something like fifty bloody seed pods.
“So, what’s the deal with this?” Potter said, eyeing the plants suspiciously. He reached for one of the plate-sized, heart-shaped leaves, and it obligingly folded itself in two at his touch. “It looks like giant clover. Like giant… exclusively four-leaf clover.” Having startled about a dozen leaves into folding, Potter turned to Draco for an explanation.
Of course, Draco thought, setting his jaw. Potter had grown up with Muggles. Of course he’d be clueless.
“The deal is…” He approached the nearest plant and lightly brushed one of the long, green pods, shaped like a large carrot or a small corn-clip, causing it to quiver with anticipation. Merlin. “One of us needs to… coax the seed out of the pod. And the other needs to collect it with the Summoning Charm.”
“The Summoning Charm,” Potter repeated, deciding to focus on the least controversial part of what Draco had said. “You’ll have to do that. I’ll do the other thing. Just show me how.”
Obviously, he was yet to realize that showing him how to do the other thing was the essence of the punishment.
But there wasn’t anything for it. Draco pressed his lips into a firm line and gripped the pod. It fit snugly in his hand, just the right size to make this maximally embarrassing. Then he gave it a few nice, gentle tugs. And the seed came out, a hundred tiny pearls breaking through the seams that appeared along the pod’s length, spraying the leaves and large yellow flowers and even the damp stone floor like rain just turning to hail.
It wasn’t like wanking. It was wanking. He was wanking the bloody Oxalis in front of Potter, and it bloody came all over the place, including Draco’s bloody hair.
“And the other needs to collect the seed,” he repeated woodenly, enduring the burn of the blush in his cheeks with eyes shut tight.
“You’re having me on,” Potter said. Or more like… exhaled. Draco hazarded a glance at him and immediately felt a bit better. Potter was positively crimson.
“I wish,” Draco said.
“No, no,” Potter argued reasonably. “You’re having me on, and Colin Creevey is about to jump out of one of those empty pots and take a picture of me jerking off a herb. Or even better,” he laughed hysterically, “Rita bloody Skeeter!”
“No, I mean literally,” Draco said, incapable of holding back his own, slightly hysterical laughter. “I really wish I thought of that. It’s brilliant. As in, if I didn’t know better, I’d mistake you for a Slytherin sort of brilliant. Didn’t think you had it in you, Potter.”
Potter settled into a grin, and it was like the sun coming up from behind the clouds, shining upon Draco with golden heat. Potter said, “You know, I almost—” and Draco found himself hanging onto the promise of whatever was to follow with thirst the likes of which he’d never felt in his life. But instead of continuing, Potter licked his lips, cleared his throat, and shook his head, looking away. He was even redder than before. “And all because I can’t manage the stupid Summoning Charm.”
“People say you managed a fully corporeal Patronus last year,” Draco said, too quiet, too open, too earnest, and helpless against it. Just like that day in McGonagall’s office. Only then, he’d had the fresh trauma of being transfigured against his will as an excuse. He had none now.
“People say?” Potter snorted. “You saw it yourself. In fact, you were the first to see it. Before even I had the chance.”
Draco cringed, recalling the brilliant burst of magic that had erased what little he’d been able to see through the eyeholes of his ludicrous dementor costume. The stuffy air under it, thick with Greg’s sickening, pine-scented cologne, Vince’s belabored burps and farts, and his own overexcited exhalations. Potter had been but a distant, dark dot against the low-hung, tumultuous sky, yet Draco had mistaken his cry for thunder, and his spell for lightning, striking him down like the vengeance of the gods.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said, truthfully. “Just a flash of light.”
“Well. It’s true. And yet…” Potter pulled his wand out and made the correct gesture. “Accio seeds!”
Draco felt the swelling of Potter’s magic like a gust of wind whipping at the front of a storm. It was dense, dark, and adult, somehow; much more like Father’s than like Greg’s or Vince’s. Pregnant with power and rage and deep, pained longing. But after twirling about for a few seconds, blind and desultory, it dissipated, having moved not a single grain of dust.
“Huh,” said Draco. He took his own wand out and channeled his magic into the spell effortlessly. “Accio!”
The seeds poured in from all sides at once, not unlike the shards of the broken glassware in the Potions classroom under Professor Snape’s direction, assembling into a tidy, swirling ball. Draco levitated it in front of him.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Potter, rolling his eyes. “Showoff.”
But Draco had caught the momentary look of awe quickly hidden by the gesture. It almost made him drop the spell. “Don’t just stand there,” he barked with feigned irritation. “Find something to put them in!”
“Right.” Potter looked around, dashed to the nearest table, and returned with a filthy jar. He glanced at Draco, who wrinkled his nose with disapproval. Potter nodded as if chided, dipped his wand in the jar, murmuring something like please, don’t break, under his breath, then cast a wordless cleansing spell.
Draco snorted, hoping his own awe wasn’t written as clearly in his face as Potter’s had been moments ago. “Who’s the showoff now?”
Potter struggled, and failed, to hold back a smug little smirk.
And Draco, to his horror, couldn’t hold back a matching little grin of his own. Quickly, he maneuvered the seed into the jar and released it. He let out a sigh of relief. Levitating so many small objects at once, even if they were weightless, left him feeling like he’d been holding his arms over his head too long. “Your turn,” he said.
“Oh.” Potter pushed his glasses up and gazed thoughtfully at the Oxalis. “I don’t know, Malfoy. Seems like a delicate operation. Can’t expect a Gryffindor brute like me to master all the details from a single example. All brawn and no brains, remember?”
Draco stared at him for a few beats, affecting exasperation, then heaved a theatrical sigh. “Fine.” He reached for the open pod. Potter would have to do all the rest, anyway.
“Er. You already did that one.”
“Er,” Draco mimicked him. “It’s not done till it shrivels up.”
“No way.” Crossing his arms over his chest, Potter pinched the bridge of his nose, massaging beneath the pads of his glasses, and laughed breathlessly. His blush had gone very dark and blotchy. Draco suspected he was doing no better himself.
“Pay attention, Potter. You asked for a demonstration, and this is the last one you’ll get.”
Potter looked up, face twisted between laughing and cringing, as Draco took hold of the pod once more. And seeing how neither of them could possibly get any more embarrassed, Draco decided to make the most of it. He caught Potter’s eyes and held them brazenly. “Nice and even,” he said, tugging on the pod and feeling it vibrate in his hand. “Firm, confident strokes. You don’t want to squeeze too hard. But if you’re too gentle, the seed… won’t… come.”
It was a drawn-out, deliberate speech, delivered in a voice Draco had never used before. A bit deeper than his normal timbre, and darker, somehow. Husky. He didn’t even know he could do this particular voice, let alone that it could sound so… seductive. So… lewd.
And Potter reacted to it alright. His contorted smile trembled, then faded out into slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder. It didn’t look like he was breathing.
For a moment, Draco allowed himself to imagine there was really a throbbing cock in his hand instead of the cursed pod. His own, Potters—there wasn’t time to sort it out and it didn’t matter anyway. Desire forked through him like lightning.
Potter actually gasped when the pod spurted, and Draco found himself smirking at him wolfishly, like he knew exactly what he was doing, like it was all on purpose, like it was Potter revealing some humiliating vulnerability, learning all these new things about himself, and not Draco.
Finally emptied, the pod sagged, and Draco shook the small accumulation of seed from his hand with a dramatic gesture. “Try your Accio again,” he offered, and his voice was flat and steady, as if he weren’t hiding a galloping heartbeat and a burgeoning hardon under his robes. Gods, but he was good at this. Hiding things. Sometimes it scared him, just how good he was.
“What?” said Potter, jumping slightly. He was no good at it at all.
“The Summoning Charm?”
“Oh.” Potter started for his sleeve, where he usually stowed his wand, only to remember his wand was already in his hand. For how still he had been moments ago, now he seemed unable to stop fidgeting: patting his pockets, adjusting his glasses, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back. He looked so uncomfortable, Draco almost felt sorry for him. But at last, Potter cleared his throat and gestured with his wand. “Accio seeds!”
Once again, his magic rose, even more forceful than before. All around them, things started rattling: shears, trowels and forks, jars, pots and buckets. The chandeliers swayed. Soil lifted from the flowerbeds, falling upwards like black snow. The glass panes rang between the mullions. Draco’s skin prickled.
Yet for all the fuss, Potter was no closer to actually summoning anything.
“Think of the seed, Potter,” Draco suggested. Feeling unhinged, he put on a dirty smirk and mimed the motions of wanking.
Potter’s wand-hand dropped, and soil rained on them. “Is that your idea of helping?”
Draco laughed. “There’s no helping you. You’re hopeless!”
“And you’re a right wanker!” Only Potter’s attempt at angry delivery failed spectacularly on account of laughing himself.
“I mean,” Draco said, “that was Snape’s whole point, sending us down here, wasn’t it?”
Apprehension fluttered in his stomach as he waited for Potter to deny his involvement, to back away, disgusted by the very notion of us—but he didn’t. He laughed even harder, and finally had to push his fingers under his glasses to dry his eyes. “Alright,” he murmured through the giggles. “Let’s do this.”
And he threw himself at the task with all the impatient enthusiasm one could expect from an exemplary Gryffindor. They’d both been so flushed already that little new evidence of overwhelming embarrassment surfaced while he emptied his first few pods. He started by following Draco’s half-serious instructions, milking the pods slowly and gently, but he soon realized that doing it at top speed worked just as well, much like with actual wanking.
Sitting on a table behind him and gleefully dangling his legs, Draco could observe without being observed, and he enjoyed himself far, far more than he was supposed to. All his daydreams of forging a relationship with Potter were chock full of angst and drama: heart-wrenching confessions while one of them hung from a cliff by his fingernails or drew the last breath on his deathbed, betrayals and infidelities that drove one to attempt suicide and the other to repent, begging on his knees for pardon, not to mention the myriad scenarios where Father locked Draco away and Potter left everything behind to find and rescue him. Of course, they all ended with passionate snogging. But that was beside the point.
The point was, none of them could hold a candle to just how much fun it was to be around Potter when they weren’t at each other’s throats.
When his right arm tired, Potter clumsily switched to the left. This launched them into a new fit of blushing and laughing as they “discussed”, in broken sentences and without really saying much of anything at all, the merits of teaching oneself to wank with either hand—and to brush teeth, and write, and cast. They did the silly thing where you tap your head with one hand while rubbing your tummy in circles with the other. Of course, they both ended up doing it the other way around after the switch and laughed till they cried. Then Draco tried to do the summoning charm with his left hand. It went about as poorly as he had expected, with more disturbed soil peppering their heads and robes. And when Potter tried to do the same, just in case his left was somehow better for it, he managed to break some pots he then refused to repair, on account of being the “muscle” of this operation, and a tired one at that.
“Come on,” he babbled, shaking the seed out of the last two pods, one in each hand. “Come for daddy. Yes, baby, yes!” He’d been at it—mouthing not-quite-obscenities—for a few minutes now, embarrassment long forgotten. Draco had a stitch from laughing and missed the jar twice in a row, levitating the final batch of seed. The wand trembled in his grip.
“Guess you got a workout too,” said Potter, groaning as he rolled his shoulders. “My arms are sore already.”
“I could eat an erumpent,” Draco agreed.
And then, suddenly, there was nothing left to do, and they stood there stupidly, looking at the seed-jar, three-quarters full.
“You could make about three hundred swelling salves from this,” Draco said, just to keep talking. The unreality of the past hour was starting to catch up with him, and he didn’t want to go back. Not yet. “They’re good for loads of things. Bags under the eyes, bumps and sprains, insect bites, even zits.” He thought of Vince and his bubo, the last night’s strange dream, and his gaze went up in search of Potter’s scar.
Just like yesterday, Potter knew at once what Draco was looking at. And perhaps it was nothing to wonder about: he’d probably had that scar gawked at a million times. His hand went up on some kind of reflex.
“Don’t touch it,” Draco said, and Potter froze. “Your hands are filthy. You’ll make it worse.”
“It’s a scar.” There was something at once petulant and plaintive in the way Potter said it. He let his hand fall away. “It’s not supposed to get worse.”
“Does it hurt?”
Potter’s eyes were very round and cautious as they searched Draco’s face. For cruelty or mockery, no doubt, and it stung a little, but also felt like a triumph, a little. “Sometimes,” he said.
Draco knew how to make the swelling salve. It would only take a pinch of Oxalis seed, and any edible oil would do as the base. A dash of dragon’s blood from his own potions kit, to soothe the inflammation, but also for the color, the aroma, the mild calming effects and last, but not least, his personal touch. A few weeks of regular use, and the scar would no longer draw the eye quite so readily. One batch would see Potter through to the end of the school year.
Draco could offer. To… help. Seize this moment to gain Potter’s favor, maybe even a modicum of his trust. And more importantly, to have Potter indebted.
But his pride couldn’t stand the risk of rejection. Draco was never, ever, going to offer anything to Potter again.
“You could ask Madam Pomfrey to give you something for it,” he said instead.
But Potter was shaking his head. “It’s not that bad. Anyway. We should probably get going.”
“Hold out your hands,” Draco said.
Potter gave him another assessing look, but did as he was told. Draco cast a cleansing charm over Potter’s hands and forearms, taking special care of the shirt cuffs which had been gleaming white when they had descended, but were now mottled with dirt, pollen and sap.
“Shame to let a clean shirt go to waste,” he explained. And almost winked in answer to Potter’s perplexed little grin. “Do I look normal?” he asked once it was done.
“Just a bit of… stuff in your hair,” said Potter sheepishly. “I can—” and he readied his wand, but Draco lifted a hand to stop him.
“No thanks, Potter. Almost bit my tongue off the last time.”
“Alright. Then let me just…” He reached toward Draco, who froze, but only for a second. Then he bowed his head and, unseen behind the veil of his hair, shut his eyes, the better to feel the gentle treading of Potter’s fingers against his scalp.
Draco’s memories of his brief stint as a ferret were vague, but he could recall with some clarity the first few minutes after he’d been turned back into a boy, and those memories were all of Potter’s touch. His firm, warm hands on Draco’s back, in Draco’s hair. The silky embrace of his robes. The scent of his skin, the moisture of his breath. There was no going back to that, not unless Draco found the courage to provoke Moody into turning him into a ferret once more (and Draco considered it almost daily).
But this was the next best thing. Shivers cascaded down Draco’s neck and spine. Goosebumps rose all over his limbs. Potter made brushing motions and plucking motions and it was all Draco could do to not start purring like a cat. He loved having his hair touched. When he was little, Mother kept his hair long and spent hours combing it into intricate coiffures, to Draco’s unfaltering delight. She’d do it now too, if he were to let her. But he wouldn’t anymore, not after the last time, this summer, when he had dozed off while she had been at it, and started awake with a hardon.
He was definitely going to get one now if Potter kept at it.
But no such luck. “Shake it out,” Potter said, stepping back.
Draco tossed his head back, acutely aware of the slow slide of Potter’s stare from Draco’s hairline, over his eyes and lips, down to his throat. Intense enough to leave trails of prickling sensation.
And then it was truly over. They climbed the stairs of the deserted entrance hall dragging their feet a bit, or perhaps it was just Draco’s imagination. Anxious and exhausted, he clutched the jar against his chest. He’d carry it to the dungeons after lunch. There was no point going back to Potions; the morning period was about to end.
They stopped at the door of the Great Hall.
“You know—” Draco said.
“This was—” Potter started at the same time.
Startled, they looked at each other and laughed.
“Ladies first,” Potter said with a little flourish.
Draco flipped him off and stayed pointedly silent.
“Yeah, alright.” Potter scratched the back of his head. “Thanks, I guess? This was a lot less horrible than it could’ve been.”
Draco lifted an eyebrow. Had Potter forgotten it had been Draco to get him in trouble to begin with? “Next time I’ll make more of an effort.”
It looked like Potter had more to say, but just then the bell rang and within seconds, they were swept up by the lunch crowd.
Author notes:
Oxalis is an actual plant! A weed, really, that looks like clover. And it’s just as perverted as I painted it here, only without magic, its little dick-like pods are tiny. But still so much fun! I have done irreparable damage to my garden by letting the oxalis spread because I can’t resist stroking its ripe pods to watch the seed burst out and spray all over the place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯