Chapter 3 of The Bubo
In which Draco endures an embarrassing rant.
Friday, November 20, 1994
Draco caught himself smiling unwittingly several times during lunch as the Oxalis adventure replayed in his mind, the images fresh and heavy with emotion. It took a herculean effort to keep his gaze on his food and on his fellow Slytherins, and not glance even once in the direction of Potter’s place on the other end of the Great Hall, though his eyes were drawn to it like the needle of the compass to the north. He spoke and laughed louder than usual, brimming with excitement, till he noticed Professor Snape’s watchful eyes on him. Draco toned it down, then. But the golden glow in his chest persisted, pulsing with his heartbeat.
It still simmered, ready to burst out as laughter or theatrics at the slightest provocation, when he knocked on the door of Professor Snape’s office after the afternoon period.
“Yes?” came the tired drawl.
Draco pushed the door ajar and poked his head through. “I have the Oxalis seed, sir.” And he put forward the jar, rattling it a bit to show off its prodigious fullness.
“Indeed,” said Professor Snape. “Enter.”
Draco weaseled through the crack and came in, stopping a pace from Professor Snape’s desk. He cast about for a free surface to deposit the jar, but none was readily apparent. Every bit of space on the desk and the cabinets was taken by books, scrolls, quills and inkwells, potion-making glassware, tin boxes and jugs holding ingredients. Assorted oddities cluttered the shelves. The bizarre collection of sea monster carvings that constantly writhed, flapping their fins and coiling their tentacles, was especially distracting.
“Close the door,” Professor Snape instructed.
Draco blinked. He hadn’t been planning to stay. But he couldn’t well say no, could he?
“Put that down first, Mr. Malfoy. Or have you lost what little grace and reason used to set you apart from the rest of your cohort?” A sniff was followed by a muttered, “Not that it took much.”
Oh-oh. This sounded like trouble. More trouble. “Where might I—”
“On the counter behind you.”
And indeed, the counter was mostly clear. Draco left the jar there, closed the door, then turned to face Professor Snape again and linked his hands behind his back. “Sir, about before—”
“I’ll do the talking.”
Draco swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
“Sit.”
The armchair facing the desk must’ve been designed specifically to humiliate students. Its seat was so low that, no matter how straight one kept his back, one still had to look upwards to meet Professor Snape’s eyes. Too deep and too soft for comfort, it seemed keen to suck one in, envelop and smother them. Draco perched on the edge of the cushion, trying not to sink, and held his chin high, for all the good it would do.
“It pains me to say this, Mr. Malfoy, but the infantile behavior you indulged in this morning, disappointing as it was, hadn’t been altogether unexpected,” said Professor Snape. “Given the decline of your academic record, I wouldn’t be surprised to find you running amok with the first-years these days.”
Draco felt the heat of shame creep up his neck. He couldn’t hold Professor Snape’s cold, penetrating gaze, and took to studying his hands, folded neatly in his lap. The silence stretched thin, but he knew better than to speak.
“Mr. Malfoy,” Professor Snape said in a softer tone. “Draco.”
Draco looked up, startled by the use of his given name, and found an odd, pinched expression on Professor Snape’s face.
“Against my better judgment, I’ve grown… fond of you, Draco. Your father is an old friend, and you are… so very much like him. But you also remind me of myself at your age. Yes, I know it is difficult to imagine.” An eyebrow rose in reply to Draco’s dubious frown. “But I assure you, I too was fourteen, once upon a time. A student in these very halls. And I too had a Potter to contend with.”
Draco sat up even straighter, suddenly more curious than mortified.
“James Potter.” Professor Snape grimaced. “A rising Quidditch star and everyone’s undisputed favorite.”
Draco nodded. His pulse ticked in his ears.
Professor Snape nodded too, gravely. “He and his band of Gryffindors went to great lengths to make my life miserable, and, loath as I may be to admit it, they often succeeded. I was not as fortunate as you, to have powerful parents to dote on me, and loyal friends among my fellow Slytherins. Nor was I so fortunate as to grow into my manhood as quickly as the other boys of my generation. It was a difficult time… for a sensitive boy, like myself.”
Draco inhaled sharply. The phrase rang uncomfortably familiar; intimate, even, like something Mother might’ve said (Think of Severus! Think of Remus!) only he couldn’t remember when she could’ve said it. And he had the strange feeling that Professor Snape wasn’t talking about himself, not really. That he was talking about Draco. His shiny black eyes were drilling a hole in Draco’s skull and he felt naked, stripped of his masks and defenses, his deviant nature and all his pathetic little dreams laid bare.
“Which is why I want you to understand,” Professor Snape went on after what felt like a full minute of unbearable silence, “that you can talk to me about these matters.”
What Draco understood, or thought he understood, was that Professor Snape shared his… affliction. Draco had never considered it before, but he wasn’t surprised. There was something ineffable that gave men such as him, men such as them, away. Dumbledore was such a man as well, Draco was quite certain of it.
He wished he could be certain that Potter was, too.
But Draco found the comparison distasteful otherwise. Professor Snape was a halfblood. Everyone knew it. That alone set them far enough apart. And Draco was himself a rising star of Quidditch, even if he wasn’t the only one, and a favorite of a great many among the students and the faculty alike. But more importantly, Draco wasn’t a sensitive boy, regardless of his… tastes. Ask anyone! They’d tell you he was the most insensitive of all the boys his age. Why, he’d honed insensitivity into an art form!
Pfft. Snape knew nothing.
“You don’t believe me,” Snape said, as if he’d read Draco’s thoughts. He kept staring at Draco intently for a few more seconds, then heaved a long, tired sigh. “Just as I didn’t, when one of my professors tried to approach me. It is one of the greatest tragedies of wixenkind, that we do not seem capable of learning from the mistakes of our elders.”
Draco focused on his hands again. A thick, sharp cuticle stuck out from the side of his thumb nail, likely from all the manual labor he’d been forced into with Potter. He started to pick at it.
“Let us try a different tack, then,” Snape said after another pause. “What do you suppose your chances are of making prefect next year if this dismal trend in your grades continues? And how do you suppose your father will feel if you fail to meet that milestone, as he most certainly expects you to?”
Like I don’t know that, Draco thought. Anger sparked inside him, hot and blinding. Like I don’t think about it every bloody day! He pulled on the cuticle savagely and winced with pain. It bit into the flesh much deeper than he had expected, all the way to the base of the nail. And now there was blood too. A big fat drop, more than enough for the kidney pie he’d eaten for lunch to make an unscheduled comeback to the back of his throat.
“Look at me while I’m speaking to you,” Snape intoned.
Draco swallowed back the bile, tied his hands into a twisted knot, and made himself raise his eyes. But he couldn’t make himself demure. He wouldn’t. He and Snape both knew that if Draco didn’t make prefect next year, he wouldn’t be the only one to suffer Father’s… disappointment. The old snake gave fewer fucks for Draco and his grades than there were galleons in the Weasley vault. He was just looking after his own slimy arse.
A deep crease was wedged between Snape’s brows, but otherwise his irritation was only discernible in how viciously he enunciated: “Will I need to owl Lucius?”
“No, sir,” Draco squeezed through clenched teeth.
“Excellent.”
Draco opened his mouth to say something to the contrary, but then shut it, dropping his gaze to his tangled hands once more.
“Go on, Mr. Malfoy,” said Professor Snape. Apparently, he too had realized that addressing Draco by name had been a mistake. “If there’s any way I can help with your… studies… or anything else, it is my duty, as the head of House Slytherin, to do my very best.”
“How am I supposed to compete with Potter and that mud—with Granger?” Draco spit out. Obviously, this had nothing to do with his own grades, but it felt good to air his anger and place the blame on someone else, at least for a little while. “He never gets punished, no matter how often, or how badly he breaks the rules. And everyone—well, not you, sir—but everyone else lets him get away with far less in class than is required from the rest of us. It’s not fair! And Granger—she knows everything ahead of time. I don’t understand why she even bothers coming to the lessons!”
“Have you ever genuinely tried?”
Draco looked up. “Tried what?”
“To compete. With Potter and Granger.”
Draco frowned, uncomprehending.
“How do you suppose she knows everything ahead of time?” Professor Snape insisted.
“Maybe she has a time-turner? How should I know!”
“Has it never occurred to you to spend the last few weeks of your summer pouring over next year’s textbooks so you could have the answer to every question before it is even asked in class?”
Draco was appalled. “Of course not!”
“Of course not.” Professor Snape started at him stubbornly until, little by little, Draco understood. He let himself lean back into the possessive hug of the armchair. How could he have been so stupid?
Reading him like an open book, Professor Snape leaned back in his own chair as well, heaving a heavy sigh. “I am not one to bestow much praise, even when appropriate. And so, you may not be aware that I believe you’re one of the most talented young wizards of your generation. Perhaps even… the most talented. Everyone has laid their bets on Potter as the next Dumbledore, and they might be right, where sheer power is concerned. But there’s more to great magic than great power. Unlike Potter, you have an aptitude for deep understanding, fine control and remarkable creativity.”
Draco’s eyes trailed, unseeing, over the items on Professor Snape’s desk, from the massive marble inkwell shaped like a bird skull to the teetering tower of essays, as he remembered Potter’s frustration with the Summoning Charm, and further back, his boorish use of the Cleansing Charm Draco had taught him on the first day of school. That Potter and his fellow Gryffindors were brainless brutes was nothing new, of course. But Draco had never looked at it from this angle. He had never once had trouble learning a new charm. He had even invented several of his own, though they were mostly useless, childish things. Was that… creativity?
“I also believe you’re among the most mature, your recent antics aside,” Professor Snape went on. “You are certainly old enough to be told, if you haven’t realized it yourself by now, that the sense of entitlement that’s been drilled into you since you were a toddler will do you no favors in pursuit of academic accomplishment, or even just in passing your OWLs and your NEWTs without embarrassing yourself and your family. You want to shine as bright as Granger? You’ll have to put in the work. Knowledge, I’m afraid, is not passed on through blood. But if you set your mind on it, if you apply yourself, Draco, as I know you can, you’ll leave her in the mud…”
Where she belongs, Draco heard loud and clear in the way Professor Snape trailed off.
* * *
His mood battered by the whole thing from sky-high elation to subterranean, damp and moldy sulk like a paper kite under heavy rain, Draco excused himself from the common room after dinner, claiming, truthfully, that he had to study.
But as he opened his trunk to get a fresh roll of parchment, his eyes landed on his sketchbook. It had been ages since he’d opened it. With a groan, he remembered the History essay, and that it was still a foot short of completion. He dug it out of his bag and transferred the drawing of the beating heart to an empty page in the sketchbook. The spell for it was one of his invention: a variation on the Duplication Charm, with a wand gesture inspired by the Thought Extraction Charm, wordless. All he needed do was tap the drawing with his wand, draw the pigment out, and deposit it in a new location, shrunken, enlarged or otherwise altered according to his whim.
But the page looked unbalanced with only one corner filled. Draco sat cross legged on his bed, took the quill and the inkwell from the nightstand, and drew an Oxalis plant in three stages: budding, flowering and ripening. Then he used his wand to combine them into a single animated picture. Next he drew a barely recognizable Professor Snape, his mouth gaping at the glassware cataclysm in the classroom; Potter’s mutilated scar, trying to recall the way the ragged edges of it caught light and cast shadows, like a shallow canyon carved out of skin; and finally, Vince’s bubo, which proved the most challenging for the absolute lack of landmarks or features, other than hair, under his meaty arm. The drawing ended up smelling faintly of sweat.
Draco put down his quill. The page was full.
He had forgotten how fun it was to draw. Leafing back through the sketchbook, which he’d cracked open last Christmas, he frowned at ample evidence that he had not, in fact, miraculously improved in the months since he had gradually dropped the habit of drawing daily. Apparently, if you want to shine, you have to put in the work. Because skill isn’t passed on by blood.
Looking around the vacant dorm, Draco was reminded of other things that had used to be fun, and that he hadn’t touched in months. The Witch Trials of Salem: A Magical Perspective, which he had genuinely enjoyed, but left around the half-mark after the ferret episode. His broom, which he had barely taken out while the weather had still been fair, and not at all since mid-October. The old Arithmancy textbook, which had been retracted from the curriculum because it contained some elements that were now considered dark, for which he had painstakingly secured the restricted section permission slip from Professor Vector, but had not even opened it.
All because of his stupid obsession with Potter.
Potter, Potter, Potter. He was the first thing Draco thought of upon waking up and the last thing he thought of before falling asleep. He ate Potter for breakfast, lunch and dinner, learned about him in all the classes, dreamed about him almost every night. Which would all be entirely fine, if there was even the slightest chance for his feelings to ever be reciprocated. But there wasn’t.
For one, Potter was likely straight. The “evidence” to the contrary that Draco had gathered over the years—the many long looks passed between them, the way Potter stared at older boys and, more importantly, the way he never really stared at girls—it was all circumstantial. And even if he turned out to be anything but boringly heterosexual, he hated Draco. And even if he were to somehow stop hating Draco, that was still a million miles away from actually liking Draco, especially like that.
And even if he did. Even if everything else somehow fell into place, they could still never be together. Father would sooner have Draco burnt at the stake than tolerate it, and there was nothing Draco could do to change that. Elope and leave his whole life, his family behind? Never see Mother again? Forsake the duties, but also the fortune and the privilege of his heritage to be a… nobody? An outcast, living in squalor like aunt Andromeda? Not bloody likely.
No matter how desperately Draco wished for Potter to like him, to want him, some part of him knew that it would only make everything even worse.
And yet… he cherished the obsession, even when it hurt. It inspired him. It painted the world in bright, vivid colors; made him feel present and alive. It had grown up with him, from childhood stories and toys, through the blessed year when he’d had Potter for an imaginary friend, to starstruck infatuation as he’d awaited meeting his hero at Hogwarts. It had been cut at the root by Potter’s rejection, but it hadn’t died; though twisted beyond recognition, it lived, and thrived, and at last it bloomed, together with Draco, into something sexual, dark and ravenous. He could not recall a time when it hadn’t been a part of him. He could not be sure how much would be left of him, if he were to ever let it go.
* * *
Enshrined behind the closed bed curtains and his Silencing Charm, Draco wanked like a man possessed that night to lurid fantasies of Potter. His big, bony hands all over Draco’s body; his fingers, gentle, in Draco’s hair; his rudely muscled arms on either side of Draco’s head, caging him against the mattress. His blushing cheeks and his bashful smile and the spark of fondness in those inimitable eyes. Draco pictured Potter’s face going slack as he hung on the edge, his long, black eyelashes fluttering, his voice breaking between the two syllables of Draco’s name—and came with a gut-wrenching swoop in his belly that left him breathless and tearful.
Gods. He was lost. Completely, utterly lost.
Author notes:
The sketchbook scene went through a lot of revisions as I moved parts of the story up and down the timeline. You can read two alternative versions of it here and here.