CHAPTER NINE
Holy Palmers' Kiss
"Hatreds are the cinders of affection." - Walter Raleigh
"Today you are going to be conducting tests and observations of two different potions – which you will see in front of you in the table-cauldrons at your desks. Your task is to determine which is the poison and which is the antidote," said Slughorn. Finally, something interesting that would test Draco's ingenuity. "You might do well to compile a list of distinctions before you begin. Can someone identify one characteristic of a poison for me? Mr. Potter?"
Draco lowered the hand that had been hovering above the desk back to his lap. He looked at Potter with the rest of the class. The problem, however, was that Potter didn't notice. He was scowling at his parchment and stabbing it with the sharp tip of his quill, causing ink to bleed across the page like the black blood of mortal wounds. It made Draco nauseous to look at; images he'd taken great pains to bury reared their sickening postmortem heads again, like zombies from the grave. He averted his eyes.
He'd noticed Potter speaking earnestly to a stoic Weasley at breakfast this morning, while Granger fretted and dithered and did no good. Potter must be on the outs with the Weasel again. God, but that redhead embodied the cliché, he was so damn moody and unreasonable.
"Mr. Potter?" Slughorn repeated.
Potter kept stabbing. Draco kicked him under the table. That got Potter's attention; he paused his impalement of his parchment to glare at Draco. Draco inclined his head subtly toward the front of the room. Comprehension dawned in Potter's eyes, the green going from almost black annoyance to mossy anxiety in a second.
"Um, yes?" he addressed Slughorn.
Slughorn sighed. "Never mind, Potter. Mr. Malfoy, if you please?"
Draco preened. "When a catalyst is added to a poison, it will boil, while the antidote would have no reaction."
"Indeed. However, the catalyst is unique to each poison and will need to be identified before it does any good. And that's the only hint I will give you," he said, winking indulgently. "Well, then. That should give you an idea of how to begin. Off to work!"
"God, this is impossible," Potter moaned. "How are we ever going to do this?" He slumped backwards in his chair.
"It's not so bad. We need to find the catalyst, right? I mean, that's obvious. So first, we need to identify some properties of the potions. We can start with some basics – color, consistency, acidity – and see what that tells us before we make it any more complicated. Then we can start making hypotheses about what the catalyst is. After that, it's just trial and error, process of elimination," explained Draco, well aware of how Potter was looking at him – eyes wide and clear, lips slightly parted with something akin to awe or admiration.
"Well, if it's so easy you should have just said so," he said.
Draco rolled his eyes. "Honestly, it only sounds really complicated. In reality, even you might not be a complete hindrance for once."
"Gee, I'm flattered, Malfoy. I didn't know you cared," Potter said sarcastically.
Some kind of acidic fission exploded in Draco's stomach. "I don't," he snapped, an unwarranted overreaction.
"Um, right. I was just ... never mind," muttered Potter, the admiration snuffed out like a suffocated flame.
Slughorn passed by then, and paused to give them a wobbly but stern look. "Boys," he said, "stop bickering and get to work. Now."
Draco crossed his eyes in irritation at the professor's expansive retreating back, and heard a snicker to his right. Upon investigation, the snicker had been produced by Potter, whose eyes were crinkled and bright and whose lips were quirked against a grin. Draco's belly filled with a pleasant and unusual warmth, like he'd just taken a sip of hot tea.
"Here," he said, to diffuse the moment and distract his increasingly warm body, passing Potter one of two pairs of protective goggles that were sitting next to the cauldrons, "put these on."
Potter made a face.
"Poisons can be unpredictable – simmering away as calm as can be and then suddenly hissing and spitting toxic splashes," Draco explained in his haughty professor voice. "You have to be careful – unless you want poison in the eye. Frankly, I don't care either way, but it might be a shame if the Chosen One went blind on us. You wouldn't want to let down your legions of fans, now would you?" he added, simpering snidely.
Potter put on the glasses, his face scrunched in the facial expression equivalent of sticking out his tongue. "No wonder you like Potions so much," he said, mostly to himself.
Oddly, Draco was more concerned with the way Potter's goggles were hitching on his glasses and sending them both tilting at wonky, precarious angles across his face than he was with discerning the potential slight intended by Potter's comment. Potter was attempting to straighten the mess out, but was only making things worse. Soon his glasses would snap, or the whole lot would simply fall off.
Draco sighed. "Potter," he said, "hands off. You're making yourself look like a wonky, speccy prat."
"Hey, that's not –" Potter began, but broke off when Draco lifted his hands to Potter's face and proceeded to adjust the two sets of spectacles on Potter's nose. It had nothing to do with Potter and everything to do with disliking disorder, he reasoned. Even so, he tried to avoid contact with Potter's face itself, grudgingly aware of the disconcerting danger of such contact, but his hands nonetheless brushed against the warm, soft skin of the boy's cheeks. Equal parts aghast and excited, Draco's stomach buzzed.
They were so close, too close, but it couldn't be helped – the process mandated proximity, really. How was Draco to straighten Potter's stupid glasses from two feet away? Magic didn't even cross his mind. For his part, Potter stood still and watched Draco steadily with eyes that hardly seemed to blink. God, his eyes were green, even diluted through two separate layers of smudged glass. Was it possible for anything non-magical to possess such potent saturation of eye color? If it was true that Potter had inherited his mother's eyes, then Draco couldn't possibly blame Snape for being so hopelessly smitten with her.
When the tangle was sorted, Draco stepped back and pulled out his wand, pointing it at Potter's face.
Potter stirred and retreated backwards a step. "Watch it!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, will you relax?" Draco snorted. "I'm just going to clean your lenses. There's no point in wearing goggles – or glasses, for that matter – if they're so smudged that you end up causing more damage because you can't see straight."
Potter puffed out a sigh of resignation, so Draco murmured, "Scourgify," and that was that. He pocketed his wand and said, "I'm going to the cupboard to look for possible catalysts."
"And what shall I do?" demanded Potter.
"Wait, and don't touch anything."
"I'm not totally useless, you know," said Potter in a quiet, even voice. It was almost more like he was angling for Draco to acknowledge some use of his than it was an effort to stir up confrontation between them. However, the idea was so silly that Draco refused to indulge Potter either way.
"You are at this," he said smoothly.
Potter scowled and sighed gustily as Draco turned his back, like Romeo after unrequited Rosaline. How ridiculous, Draco thought, but he wasn't sure whether he meant Potter's sigh or the connotation it had conjured in Draco's mind.
He was absorbed in examining ingredients in the cupboard when he was disturbed by a light stomping of feet.
"Draco Malfoy," addressed a high-pitched, imperious voice, "you stay away from Harry."
He swiveled. "Ah. McDonnell." He smirked. "And on what authority do you issue this demand?" he asked superciliously.
"I ... I'm his ..."
"Not his girlfriend, surely?" Draco feigned surprise.
"That's none of your business!" she informed him self-righteously. "You just stay away from him, d'you hear?"
Draco sneered. "And what would I want with precious Potter?"
"Oh, don't be daft," McDonnell scoffed. "It's obvious that you're a poof, and it's obvious that you want him."
Draco gaped. He bloody what? "Excuse me?"
"You heard me! It's obvious that you want him, but Harry's not like that. He told me himself," she proclaimed.
Draco composed himself, though his mind was in turmoil. Somehow, in his plotting to upset McDonnell by flirting with Potter, it had never crossed his mind that he might be considered to actually fancy Potter. The idea was ... absolutely alarming. "I think you may have your facts askew," he said coolly.
"I most certainly do not. Harry is straight and he would never fancy the likes of you, anyway, so just get a grip and back off."
Now Draco bristled. Him not good enough for Potter? Okay, so maybe he'd agree with that assessment privately, but other people could not be permitted to reach the same conclusion. "I will not back off," he said caustically, "as I am not doing anything in the first place! And furthermore I most certainly do not fancy Potter!" he concluded scathingly, waiting for McDonnell to look cowed.
"Oh, please," she scoffed. "You take any excuse you can to put your hands all over him."
"I do not," Draco denied automatically, before stopping to consider that his petulance might damn him.
"You do. And I've seen how you look at him, too, like the sun shines out of his arse." Where have I seen that expression before? Draco thought sarcastically. Oh yeah – pot, kettle, black. "I do have eyes."
"What an accomplishment. So do I." Honestly? That's the best you can come up with? That's not going to convince anyone, Draco, he thought to himself. Not even you. Oh, shut up, he argued back.
"Oh yeah? Then use them, won't you, and maybe you'll see just how uninterested Harry is in you."
"Whatever, McDonnell," he drawled, hooding his features with boredom to disguise the fact that he was running out of convincing ways to deny fancying Potter. Or perhaps he had run out a few accusations ago.
McDonnell pursed her lips and flicked her hair imperiously, then turned in a huff and strutted away. Well, tried to, anyway. Being McDonnell, her efforts fell rather flat, in Draco's opinion. As if to demonstrate what a true strut was, but more to reboot his self-confidence, Draco grabbed the ingredients he'd selected before she'd interrupted him and strutted out of the cupboard after her, back to his desk.
He returned to Potter decidedly crosser than he'd been when he had left. More and more he suspected that far from doing much of anything in the way of messing with Potter, his game with McDonnell was just digging him deeper and deeper into a hole he'd be much safer out of.
Potter was sitting at their desk like a physical actualization of one of the apparitions in Draco's mind – lips biting, eyes unguarded (or maybe it was just that Draco was looking) and tired, and Adam's apple on prominent, provocative display. Draco rubbed a hand though his hair in agitation. In quick succession, he thought first that nobody should look that good on the brink of exhaustion and then that he ought to castrate or Obliviate himself for thinking such a thing. His temper deepened with frustration at the poncy turn his increasingly idiotic subconscious was taking.
"Earth to Potter," he said snidely, to remind himself how things stood between him and the Boy Who Continued Living.
Potter started. "Oh, you're back," he said without a trace of the annoyance Draco had intended to incite with his puerile greeting. "Took you long enough."
Potter stood and extended his hands toward Draco. "Here, let me help you. Pass some of those over to me," he said, gesturing at the pile of ingredients Draco was bracing precariously against his chest.
Draco recoiled. "No," he refused abruptly. He didn't trust Potter not to carelessly allow their hands to collide unnecessarily in the process. God knows the poof would probably enjoy it. "I've got it."
Potter squinted at him, but backed off.
Draco deposited the ingredients in an ungraceful heap on the table. A couple bounced and fell to the floor and Draco had to bend down to retrieve them. When he stood up Potter didn't say anything, but his silence was more pointed than any remark would have been. Draco scowled.
"So now we just drop these in and hope they don't explode?" asked Potter.
"No," said Draco petulantly, "we do not just 'drop them in.' It is a much more subtle and ..." Draco trailed off. Actually, Potter was right; Draco just would have phrased it differently. "Yeah, pretty much," he amended.
Potter smirked affably. "You sound like Snape when you start talking like that, you know. 'I wouldn't expect someone like you to be able to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is potion-making, Potter'," he said in a voice that was a cross between an imitation of Snape's monotone and Draco's smooth, sneering drawl. It made Draco's skin prickle.
Normally, Draco would be preening at the comparison to Snape, but for some reason he felt hedgy about it, wondering whether Potter meant it as a compliment or not. It shouldn't matter. It did. "Well, it's true," was what he said. "It is an exact art and you don't have the ability to appreciate it."
Potter waved a hand dismissively at Draco, like "Yeah, yeah," but all he said was, "I have the ability to drop things in pots."
"A Squib has that ability, Potter," Draco retorted. "There's no need to get cocky."
Potter raised his eyebrows and looked amused. For some reason Draco blushed, then scowled at himself. "So may I?" he asked.
"Get cocky?" Draco's tone was as measured as ever, but his pulse hiccoughed subtly in his chest for no discernible reason.
"Drop something in the pot," Potter corrected.
"Oh, right. Okay – start with that one there," directed Draco, pointing.
Potter moved to the cauldrons and set to work, but instead of joining him, Draco remained warily off to one side. Even though it was a lesser angle for supervision, it left more space between him and Potter, and that was a good thing. It was, he repeated for the benefit of the ponce Potter had ingratiated into Draco's subconscious. The ponce that was urging Draco to step closer to Potter, to bump softly against him and pretend it was an accident, to suggest their ingredients are subpar and maybe they should retreat to the privacy of the cupboard to restock ...
Draco flushed hot and choked internally.
He diverted his attention to Potter, hoping the task of watching (to be sure his partner didn't make a mistake that would send both of them to the hospital wing) would distract his thoughts from even more dangerous outcomes.
He watched Potter's concentration tug at the corners of his lips and eyes and the lines of his forehead as he bent his head over the ingredients. He watched Potter push his fingers absently through that thick, black mess of unruly hair that was as quintessentially Potter as the spectacles and the scar. The gesture was meant to push the overlong fringe away from dangling in his eyes, but moments later it would invariably tumble back down to ever-so-slightly curl around his glasses. Draco watched this cycle repeat itself several times before his eyes shifted to Potter's face. He was vaguely conscious of the fact that he was letting himself get distracted again, but not enough to stop himself.
That face – that oh-so-familiar face. He'd been staring at it in various shades of contempt and impetuousness, up close and blinking back at him from the cover of the Daily Prophet, for years. So why was it only now that it struck Draco how nice a face it was? The slightly square curve of Potter's chin, how it blended so gently into that strong jaw line, or the pleasing fullness of his lower lip, almost twice that of his upper lip yet balanced in an imperfect harmony. How all the constituents of Potter's face coalesced in a magnetic unity whenever Potter smiled, or how despite everything he'd gone through his face still managed a boyish charm. The dramatic accent of his dark eyebrows above those famous, striking eyes.
Those eyes, at least, Draco hadn't missed. They'd always burned when directed at Draco, burned so they were impossible to ignore. Or maybe they were only impossible for Draco to ignore. What was it about Potter that never failed in arousing him to some height of passion? And why was it that at the same time that he'd started noticing that Potter's famous face was nice, Potter's stares had started causing heat to rise up all over his skin and hum in his lips and seize in his belly? It wasn't a fitting response for someone like Draco to have to someone who galled him like Potter did, not at all.
Nonetheless, Draco remained fixated by Potter's face, unconsciously giving up the pretense of supervising the poison altogether. Potter's face was a fascination – always in constant motion, seeming to register each emotion as it flickered to life and died within him. It was so unlike Draco's own controlled countenance, which years of practice had trained to allow only that which Draco chose to expose to be discernible in his expression. It never faltered, except in moments of highest emotion. Funny how those always seemed to involve Potter, in some way. Funny wasn't the right word. Alarming, that was a better one. Problematic.
Potter's expression narrated the catalyst identification process without Draco needing to look once at the poison in the cauldron. First, wariness as he dropped an ingredient into the poisonous solution, then disappointment when nothing happened, and finally concentration as he chose which ingredient to attempt next.
Draco watched the rustle of Potter's robes as they followed the curves and small movements of his agile body. He watched Potter's fingers, strong and nimble, as they folded and stretched. They were nice hands: capable, but still supple. And soft, Draco could attest to that. The same sort of complementary contrast could be said of Potter himself: slender, but not scrawny, lithe, but by no means weak, volatile and even a bit dangerous (though Draco would never admit it), yet soft around the edges. Draco had a feeling that over the sinuous layer of muscle that shifted with each of Potter's movements – not that Draco was looking, god, not like that – was a layer of softness that would feel as good to the touch as the down comforter against Draco's naked skin at night.
Draco had lulled himself into a sort of trance – calm mind, thumping pulse – surveying Potter with his head cocked and his arms folded comfortably across his chest, oblivious to his surroundings and even to the currently muted logic of his own shrewd mind.
Potter turned his head and seized Draco with that bright gaze, that magnetic face. "Something's happening," he said. "I think it might be boiling."
Draco was tugged forward and accidentally-but-maybe-sort-of-on-purpose ended up directly adjacent to Potter's side. Coherent thought had pretty much dissolved. He almost felt Imperiused – moving without thinking or questioning, through a fog of content obedience. Only instead of a malevolent outside force, it was Draco's own body directing him, and he wasn't even making a pretense of fighting it anymore.
The natural swing of his hand as he moved forward caused it to bump against Potter's. Their tangential hands were swallowed by the folds of their robes. Draco's eyes, which had been vainly making an attempt to survey the contents of the cauldron, unfocused upon contact. He felt frozen, unable to move his hand away from Potter and unable to do anything more. They both stood still, staring intently into the cauldron. Then Potter moved. His hand swiveled next to Draco's until their palms faced each other. Then, hesitantly, he pressed his palm against Draco's.
Draco's skin erupted in a vibrating applause of nerves; he hadn't known hands could feel quite so alive. Potter's palm was warm and just a little bit damp. It pressed quietly against Draco's, not accidentally but not doing much else either. Draco felt like the touch was feeding some kind of dye into his bloodstream that turned his skin pink inch by inch as it left the contact point and circulated throughout his body. All his insides curled in a private, absurdly and stupidly pleased smile, and Draco momentarily forgot to remind himself to be disgusted.
He and Potter pointedly refrained from looking at each other or in any way acknowledging what was going on inside the folds of their robes, the many impossible barriers they were transcending, if not overcoming, with that small touch.
Without thinking, on some kind of subconscious, tactile instinct, Draco's fingertips curled against Potter's, a prelude to a caress. A corner of Draco's mind, apparently Imperiused by The Bard, supplied narration for the moment – "palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss ..."
With this thought, Draco's consciousness hiccoughed violently and he came back into full cognizance with a sickening jolt, ripping him out of the self-induced Imperius. What the bloody hell was he doing? He jerked away from Potter, disjointed and sudden, as if Potter's fingertips had shocked him with super-charged static. His cool countenance shattered as he gaped into Potter's nonplussed face, aghast and disgusted with himself and strangely bereft, all at once. Then he took a quick, deep breath, sucking in the scattered pieces of his composure and pulling himself back together.
"You fucking fairy," he hissed, embarrassment and panic and a confusion he didn't care to evaluate fusing into a hot, self-righteous anger deflecting from the true source – himself – and funneled toward Potter. "Keep your hands off me."
Potter looked like he'd been slapped. He was at a loss for words for a moment, his expression manifesting thorough whiplash, but then his face flushed with what seemed to be a similar cocktail of embarrassment and self-protective indignation and he whispered acerbically, "You didn't seem to be minding all that much a minute ago."
Draco swallowed a snarl because, damn him to hell, Potter was right. "I was ... paralyzed with disgust, Potter. There's something wrong with you if you mistook that for pleasure."
Potter flushed darker, giving any Weasley a run for their money (what money they had, anyway). "Really? You didn't seem so very disgusted all those times when it was you touching me and not the other way around."
Draco's pulse thundered irregularly in odd, distracting places in his body – his ears, his belly, his neck – and he felt not unlike he had behind the bookshelf that fateful afternoon. The wary calm between him and Potter was erupting – fast. Part of him was exhilarated by the elevated passion of it, and part of him was running frantically after himself, panicking about getting too far ahead of himself and not being able to catch up.
"That was not the same thing," Draco sneered – or tried to, anyway. It was really hard to muster the composure to sneer when one was quite this worked up, he was realizing.
"Why not?"
"Because I was just manipulating you, and you actually meant it," Draco's voice was escalating and he could sense other people in the room starting to take notice, forsaking their work in favor of watching the familiar wildly riled deterioration of a Potter/Malfoy confrontation.
"Manipulating me?" Potter spluttered. "To what end, exactly?" He was fairly shouting now, too.
"Mr. Potter!" Slughorn bellowed, their argument having reached a decibel that failed to escape his attention. "Mr. Malfoy!
They didn't even turn to look at him, locked together by their glares as they were, stiff and irate. With his eyes narrowed and sharp, his nostrils flared, and his lips tightened threateningly, Potter looked nothing like a docile, noble Gryffindor. He looked dangerous and erotic. Draco made an unintelligible noise of wordless irascibility.
"I suggest you take this out in the hall and resolve it before I am forced to take action against you."
… & …
Malfoy turned and stormed from the room, and at the sight of his sinewy, sleek retreating form, Harry couldn't deny that his current state was heightened by both infuriation and arousal. It was a maddening combination.
Harry stormed after the irate blond into the corridor. His anger made him oblivious to anything other than its source. He hadn't even heard Slughorn's warning and mandate, but was following Malfoy simply because all his passions were tied up in the sodding, seething git at the moment, and he couldn't possibly have dragged himself anywhere else. He didn't have that kind of control.
He slammed the door behind them and Malfoy swiveled to face Harry, eyes narrowed in such a way that it sent a jolt of adrenaline straight into Harry's gut.
"You know what I think?" Harry taunted.
"I don't give a damn what you think," Malfoy snarled.
Harry ignored him. "I think you don't have any ulterior motives, Malfoy. I don't think you're manipulating me at all. Not this time."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah."
"What exactly are you implying, Potter?" Malfoy said, fairly spitting the last word.
Harry looked hard at his rival and spoke in a voice as measured as he could make it under the circumstances, feigning a greater confidence in his words than he really had – which was none. "I think you like it," he said, pulling the accusation wholly out of his arse. He knew no such thing. He was just saying whatever he guessed would incite Malfoy the most. So far it was working.
Malfoy blanched. He looked winded, like Harry had just thrown him against the wall with his admittedly powerful Expelliarmus. "What?" he shrieked, all composure forsaken. Good. Harry liked him best this way. "I do not fancy you, Potter. I'm no bloody poof, unlike you."
It was Harry's turn to be disturbed. "I'm not the one who's been flirting all year!" he exclaimed, for lack of any better comeback, and unable to refute the charge with any firmer denial.
"You don't know the first thing about flirting, Potter," Draco said, his voice draining its volume and becoming all the more dangerous for it.
"Don't I? I suppose it's another of your subtle art forms, is it?"
"Yes," said Malfoy through gritted teeth. "So, naturally, you're a disgrace."
"A disgrace that made you blush well enough," Harry retorted. Okay, so he wasn't the smoothest of philanderers, didn't have the most experience ... but he'd been operating purely on instinct back there beneath their robes – hadn't been thinking or planning at all – and it had served pretty damn well before it had been interrupted.
"You were the one going all palm to palm, Potter! You were the one who decided to hold hands! That makes you the poof!" Malfoy exclaimed shrilly. Harry wasn't quite sure what exactly they were arguing about anymore.
"We weren't holding hands, you idiot. And you accuse me of mistaking something little for something more? We were barely bloody touching! And I think you're forgetting one crucial point: you fucking liked it! So if you ask me, it's you that's the poof."
"I didn't ask you, and I did not bloody fucking like it! I'm not a sodding poof, you poof!" Malfoy yelled.
Harry had never seen Malfoy lose his temper so completely, in such a spectacular fashion, before. It was something of a marvel to watch Malfoy's pale skin go splotchy magenta, to watch his gray eyes harden into sharp steel blades glinting where the light hit them, to see his lithe body tighten with infuriation, and to follow the heavy rise and fall of his chest as he panted. That is, until he lunged at Harry.
Harry flinched and his eyes closed instinctively, anticipating the blunt pain of the blow that was surely to follow. Malfoy's hands clenched around the neck of Harry's robes and yanked him forward so that their bodies collided. Harry winced. Then Malfoy's hands released Harry's robes and clutched the hair at the base of his neck, and grasped roughly at his cheek. Harry's face jerked forward and he was starting to panic at what Malfoy could possibly be doing to him when something soft collided ungracefully with Harry's mouth. For a second, Harry pushed frantically against Malfoy's body, still struggling under the assumption that he was being attacked, before his mind could catch up with what was happening to his body. In a sense, he was being attacked, but by lips instead of fists.
Malfoy was kissing him.
This realization battered into Harry like a branch of the Whomping Willow and he was frozen in a complete, marrow-deep shock. He neither kissed back nor made any further movements to push Malfoy away. He simply attempted to force his stuttering mind to process the fact that the soft, arched lips pressed purposefully against his, not moving much but a determined pressure nonetheless, belonged to Draco Malfoy. However, before Harry could even make enough progress to start reacting, Malfoy's hands let go of him for the second time and relocated back to his chest, where they shoved him – hard – backwards. Harry stumbled, still stupid with shock.
They gaped at each other, gasping. Judging by the uncharacteristic, explicit shock on Malfoy's face, Harry guessed he hadn't been expecting that any more than Harry had. It didn't matter.
Harry's senses and coherence came tumbling back and his anger surged, redoubled, through his body, sending his blood coursing and bubbling like contained lava.
"You bastard!" he yelled, recalling that Malfoy hated that term but not caring at the moment. His voice came out choked and gravelly. "Why did you do that?"
Malfoy just stared at Harry, breathing heavily and looking like he might just as easily either vomit, break down, or slug Harry.
"Why the hell did you do it?" Harry repeated, advancing on the mute Malfoy. "Why?" he demanded, his voice cracking the word in half.
Then he shoved Malfoy back squarely in the chest, and Malfoy came back to life, hitting Harry back. They fell into each other in a rush, fury feeding and growing between them as they punched anywhere they could make contact. Sloppy, blind thrusts of fists, knees, elbows, and feet toppled them to the ground, yelling incoherently. Somehow, Harry ended up on top of Malfoy, though he was doing his best to toss Harry aside and climb on top of him for the upper hand.
Peripherally, Harry heard the classroom door slam open, and then the next thing he knew the wind was being knocked out of him as he was slammed against the wall. When he sat up, he saw Slughorn standing between him and Malfoy, quivering with outrage and wand raised – he'd clearly Blasted them apart. The class spilled into the corridor behind him.
Making an effort to stand, Harry felt his energy pouring out of him in rivulets, puddling on the ground at his feet as his adrenaline cooled.
"I told you to work it out," Slughorn bellowed, "not try to kill each other! Go to the Headmistress's office! Now!"
It was a long, silent walk to McGonagall's office, residual exacerbation so taut between them it was almost tangible. For Harry's part, his mind jumped frenetically between murderous thoughts toward Malfoy and a molten, aching regret that Malfoy had pushed him away before he could properly enjoy his first kiss with someone of the appropriate gender for his sexuality. He hadn't even reached the point of wondering why it had happened; his mind was still spinning too fast to be concerned with anything more coherent than straightforward action and reaction.
The stone gargoyle opened as soon as they approached it; evidently, McGonagall knew that they'd be coming.
She greeted them with a hard glare as they stepped into the office. Harry noted that it was plainer than when Dumbledore had inhabited it – free of Fawkes and the Pensieve and the many other spinning gizmos Harry had never identified.
"I must say, with the war over and reconciliation healing old wounds throughout our world, I'd had hopes that inner school rivalries might be subdued this year, even between you two. I'm disappointed to be proven wrong," McGonagall said at last, after skinning them with the sharpness of her gaze. She looked sideways at Harry in a way that said to him as plain as could be, "Especially by you, Harry." Her reproof stung. Dumbledore had been a master at this, too – the disappointment hurt more than raised voices ever could. They waited in penitent silence for her to continue, becoming uncomfortable when the moment prolonged and she did not.
Malfoy cleared his throat. "Are we to be expelled?" he asked. "Ma'am?"
"No," said McGonagall, and Harry felt his chest sag in relief. He hadn't even thought to worry about expulsion until Malfoy brought it up. "I am going to leave your punishment up to Professor Slughorn."
As if Summoned, Slughorn entered the room just as his name emerged off McGonagall's tongue. He was much calmer now than he had been in the corridor; the quivering of his jowls had stilled.
"I was just telling these boys," McGonagall informed him, "that I will be deferring their punishment to you."
"Aha," said Slughorn, eyes alighting on Malfoy and Harry, who was sincerely regretting ever disposing of the Half-Blood Prince's book and thus forfeiting his status as Slughorn's favorite. "Detention, I think. Every night for a month. And since I sent you out into the corridor in the first place to make peace, I think it would only be fitting for you to serve those detentions together. Perhaps a month spent in each other's company will force you to reconcile your differences."
Harry's stomach simultaneously sank with dread and surged with a masochistic hope. He dared a glance at Malfoy, and immediately wished he hadn't. Worse than looking indignant or infuriated by their conjugal sentence, Malfoy looked visibly nauseous. Harry swallowed against a rising lump of suddenly bruised feelings. He looked down at his feet and nodded his understanding to Slughorn.
"Okay then, it's settled," said Slughorn, satisfied. "Report to my classroom tonight at eight o'clock. Do not be late."