Harry Potter's eyes flickered down the page, almost skimming, as if he knew what he was reading before he started. Granger looked antsy, like she wanted to grab the entire thing out of Potter's hands. The Weasel? Well, he kept right on ranting, even if in perfect, spellsung silence. Kind of creepy, that, Malfoy thought, and resolved to watch Potter instead. After the first was skimmed, he dove straight into the second. And then the third. Draco was careful to keep a smirk off his face, try not to be insulting, you're trying to convince these people you can actually be trusted. Ha, what a laugh! Anyone trusting a Slytherin. Hell, Draco could hardly trust his own mother, and he surely didn't trust his own father, the rapacious bastard. It took Potter twice the time to read the third, which Draco wasn't surprised about in the slightest. And then Potter started counting, not bothering to read more than a few lines on each plan. Finally, he looked up at Draco and spoke. "Well, Draco Malfoy, I'd estimate that the first three plans here each have a 40% chance of killing me, and combined, more than a 95% chance." Potter looked at Draco, with a searching look on his face - Draco smirked inwardly, he won't be getting any tells off me. "So why are there fifteen more, after that?"
Draco Malfoy leaned backward, and drawled, "Stress relief, if you must know. I couldn't have been terribly serious about anything past about the third, and I wrote the first when I was eleven, after all."
"And this is supposed to show that we should trust you? When you've been busy planning my death as a sort of stress relief?" Potter looked flabbergasted, but as this was the general result of a civil conversation between a Slytherin and a Gryffindor, Malfoy didn't pay it much heed.
"It's supposed to show you that I'm perfectly able to come up with better plans for killing you than spending a nice afternoon taking tea together. Rather a brutal ordeal, that. Just why wouldn't I use an Avada? It would all turn out the same, wouldn't it, now?" Malfoy said, rather pointedly.
Potter looked down, reading over a few more of them - and then started skimming, differently. He was clearly reading some part of it, but not everything. And not on every file either. What has he figured out? What is he looking at? He's caught some sort of pattern, hasn't he? Malfoy thought, eyeing him closely.
Half a minute later, Potter looked up and asked, "Seven, eight, Twelve, and fourteen? They're missing something, aren't they?" The words came out sharply, interrogatives that were more statement than question. Suddenly, Potter sounded uncertain, "You were planning on killing Voldemort, weren't you?"
Malfoy responded with a smooth nod, drawling, "Why Potter, however did you guess? Twelve was for killing my aunt though, not dear old Tom."
While Potter frowned down at the notes, Granger started at Draco's appelation for Tom Riddle, opened her mouth to squawk something utterly thoughtless, before Malfoy interrupted, "My ears are bigger than you think. And you spoke of him often enough at school."
Still frowning, Potter looked up at Malfoy, and said slowly, "There's no room to gloat, on those. There's a sense that this starts something... it's in how the ending is set, the circumscription of it. If you were only bent on killing me, you could kill me in any number of ways... but those feel tight like a straightjacket, constricting like a snake." Potter's voice had started slowly, but had picked up speed as he went, the last words nearly tripping over his tongue.
Malfoy muttered to himself, "Sometimes, I forget that you can actually think." Here goes nothing. Malfoy twirled his finger under the table, and gentle as a cat's padded paw, brushed against Potter's thoughts, as brief as the glint of starlight on a cloudy night. And then he waited.
Potter's eyes widened, as he stared, intently, at Malfoy - and then Malfoy felt the gentle heat of Potter's mind touching his. Quickly, he pulled up a memory. "It's easy, all you have to do is skim the surface" Goyle, Crabbe, and Malfoy had been at the Black Lake, and Malfoy had been teaching Goyle how to skip rocks. Malfoy looked over at Crabbe, on the wooden dock, before saying drily, "If you look too deep, you'll fall in." Crabbe, in the memory, had been leaning over the edge of the dock, trying to see into the depths. Thinking very deliberately, Malfoy showed the kelpy seaweed stretching out, swirling, ready to grab someone so foolish as to fall into the mirky depths.
[a/n: I am sorry! Malfoy and Potter's conversation is going to be longer and more involved than it needs to be... They're using a fairly clunky version of communications, and I want it to show...
Read and review, let me know if that I Love Lucy crack was entirely too off tone, or if the whole "mindreading" thing seems out of place. (Potter's a natural at legimency, otherwise he wouldn't be pulling this off with next to no training).]