Title: A Helping Hand, or A Hogwarts Bathroom Ballad

Author: AristideCauquemaire

Pairing: Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Severus Potter

Rating: M for grown-up language and sexual situations and themes.

Warnings: slash, slightly non-consensual situations (soon), original characters (recycled because that's how I roll. Get it? Cycle...? Forget it.)

/

Thanks to MoRaine25 for following, and to my Weird Guest for the review! (Better late than never ;] Hope your exams went/will go alright! Also: I'm not sure Al consciously knows that yet, so... shhh ^^)

Alright, guys, gals. Scorpius Malfoy's trek of tribulation continues...

~Chapter 9~

~18 days left~

When he was a toddler, Scorpius' favourite toy had been a toy broom his dad had given him for Christmas. It was built like an actual Comet 180, just tiny, and went about as fast as an exhausted mum was willing to walk to keep up with it, and about as high as she was comfortable seeing her offspring hover in the air, i.e. not very fast, and not much higher than ankle height. But four to six year old Scorpius had thought this piece of bristly wood was the awesomest thing on planet Earth right after his mum's chocolate chip cookies and building pillow forts with dad.

Thus, Scorpius had continuously loved flying on brooms as long as he could remember. All his life, brooms had been there, and they had been awesome. He remembered almost passing out for joy when his parents got him his first real-size broom when he was seven, a Nimbus 1700 he had since mounted on his wall in his room in the Manor. Brooms and flying and Quidditch had always been three of his favourite things.

This era had now come to an end. Or, at the very least it had hit a serious bump in the road.

Dressing up in the training gear had been almost ceremonial. The leathers, though well-kept and oiled over the winter months, were a little stiff and creaky when they put them on. They felt a little too small already again. He made a mental note to ask his dad for new kneeguards and maybe even gloves.

Carrying the brooms out onto the pitch had been a silent affair, with excitement seething beneath the silence.

Lloyd's speech had been short and to the point.

Everything was splendid.

Right up until the point when they mounted and took off.

When the wood of his broomstick pressed against his crotch, it felt as if someone had injected a fifteen centimetre tranquillizer dart right into his perineum.

Scorpius was too shocked to even yelp, all the air rushed out of his mouth in a gasp.

Momentarily losing control of his broom, he wobbled to the right and missed ascending Tami Patil by a hair's breadth. He just barely managed to keep himself from faceplanting into the green right away.

As gracefully as he could manage with the lower half of his body thus incapacitated, he pressed the soles of his feet into the metal crossbars, a position that was normally only used for purchase while diving, and tensed his back to lift off his crotch from the broomstick. Then he leaned backwards to pull the broom handle upwards and coax his broom to join the others up in the air.

Turned out flying wasn't as fun when all his attention was necessarily fixated on trying to stay as upright in the hip as possible to avoid crotch-to-stick contact. He was much slower than everyone else due to wind resistance, his moves and manoeuvres were clumsy. Plus, he was tense. Barely ten minutes into the training, his thighs were screaming and trembling with effort.

"Dammit, Malfoy! What do you think you're doing?" Lloyd was also screaming to make himself heard over the wind. "You're flying as if you're trying to get away from your bloody broomstick!" He was clearly still pissed that he hadn't showed up to 'The Dome' the day before yesterday, or so Scorpius thought.

"Just trying something new!" he yelled back through mostly clenched teeth.

The captain seemed unconvinced, but didn't comment further.

Albus, on the other hand, wasn't so easily deterred.

"You need to get up to my speed, Scorp! Get your feet off those stirrups and put your bony arse down or you'll never make it!" he yelled, somewhat less loudly because he was closer, hanging in the air two brooms' lengths away from him while the chasers had the field to go through standard combinations without the Quaffle.

"I know," he replied with an eye roll. "You know I've been doing this for more than a bloody decade?"

"Could've fooled me," Al said in normal volume, but Scorpius heard him still.

"I'm just trying out something new," he lied again, somewhat heatedly. "I've read in a magazine that they're doing this in Quodpot."

"Yeah, maybe. But we're not in America, and we're not playing Quodpot, and that seriously doesn't look comfortable. Or effective in any way. How about you save the random stuff for random hours and don't do them during official training?"

Having said that, he pulled his broom handle to the side and dove toward the stands at breakneck speed, a move that Scorpius would have been able to match every day of the week – except that now he couldn't. So he stayed where he was, hovering near the upper edge of the air dome looking down at the others and cursing loudly, in every language in which he knew how to curse. (English, French, German, Elvish, Gibberish.)

He could only guess why exactly this thrice-damned spell was acting like this now. Somehow, it must have evaluated the pressure of the broom handle as an attempt at 'intentional bodily stimulation'. Until now, Scorpius had never even (consciously?) thought of the possibility of pleasuring oneself with a broom. Was that even feasible for guys? For girls, perhaps...? ... Oh God you can't think about stuff like that now?! What the hell! He shook his head like a wet dog.

In any case, this was nothing short of a disaster. Three more practice sessions were scheduled until next week's Friday, and the first Slytherin game of the season, against Gryffindor, would be the day after that, on Saturday next week. There was simply no way for him to properly play like this.

He didn't have much time to ponder, though. Al came up next to him and tossed him his bat, which he caught with luck and because Al was a good thrower, and then the Bludgers were let loose and actual training was on.

With the possible exception of that one game in fourth year – against Gryffindor, in a raging thunderstorm that had incapacitated the Slytherin seeker and two chasers, leaving Slytherin behind by three hundred seventy points after five excruciating hours of playing – Scorpius couldn't remember when he had ever wanted for Quidditch to stop this desperately. He wanted to get his feet on the ground, get out of these clothes, put his broom away, have a long shower and ten solid hours of sleep. He missed one third of his shots because he didn't have the balance or wasn't where he was supposed to be, and the ones he did get flew everywhere except where he wanted them to.

It was painful, physically and psychologically, and exhausting. He almost cried with relief when Lloyd gave the signal to touch ground again.

"What in the bloody hell were you doing there, eh?" their captain spat at Scorpius who was too tired to bother replying except with shrugs. "You looked ridiculous and you hit like my blind grandma, dammit."

Scorpius expected him to grab him by the collar like the mob boss in a gangster movie and shake him or something, but Lloyd somehow refrained from it. He did have the dangerous whisper plus evil glare thing down, though. "If you're not taking this seriously, I'm going to find us a new beater. Do you understand me? I am not going to lose against the Gryffies just because you screwed up the training."

There was nothing he could say so he nodded, then turned and walked toward the locker rooms while Lloyd moved on to the others. Albus' look was almost palpable on his back.

From the shower conversation between the other six people of the team, facilitated by the air vent that enabled the girls to speak with the boys and vice versa while showering, Scorpius managed to piece together the briefing he had missed through his early departure. Apparently, Brice needed to upgrade to a better broom to fit in to the chaser constellation since Reedy had got a better broom for Christmas, Tami Patil needed some extra hours to get back into her keeper groove – she blamed her previously broken forefinger – and Lloyd wanted all of them to hit a little harder since he mysteriously knew that James Sirius Potter (Gryffindor captain, chaser, leading scorer of all house teams by 7%) and Rose Weasley (Gryffindor keeper, best keeper of all house teams by 18%) had been training throughout the winter at "the Potter Mansion". (Albus snorted at that but said nothing.) As if the Slytherin-Gryffindor enmity alone wasn't enough to ensure that it would be the hardest game of the year. It always was. It was tradition. People would be stretchered off the pitch bleeding or it hadn't happened.

Scorpius didn't want to face any of his teammates, but especially not Albus or Lloyd, so he hurried with the showering and when the others finished their own showers, he grabbed his clothes, found himself a nice restroom cubicle and waited until all the voices had gone. As he listened for the noises to die down and tried to get into his pants in the 1,5-square-metre bathroom stall (with the actual room to manoeuvre even smaller due to the toilet), he felt like an idiot.

After silence had come, he inched back into the dressing room.

He was just stuffing his training gear into his sports bag when a voice rang out behind him.

"We need to talk," Albus said. He had probably been standing by the door all the while.

"We do?" Scorpius asked, hearing the whiny tone in his voice but unable to do anything about it except for masking it. Therefore he asked sarcastically, "Are you breaking up with me?" and made a big, dramatic pouty face. This day had been too awful already.

Albus looked at him evenly for a moment, then sighed, apparently deciding to not even respond to the provocation.

"You've got a problem of some kind and it's getting in the way of... everything, really," he said quietly. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned back against the door, thereby casually blocking Scorpius' path out of the room.

Scorpius stuffed his gear and sweaty clothes into his sports bag in a manner his mum would definitely find alarming. "Yeah, so," he said. "It's my problem. I'll sort it out." Murmuring, he added, "In eighteen days." Almost three more weeks. An eternity away.

"That's the point," Albus said, audibly trying hard to sound non-confrontational. Which he rarely did in the first place, but especially now. "It's not your problem alone any more. You've made it mine. Today more than ever." He gave a groan. "Seriously, you almost tipped off your broom there. Suddenly you can't hit a Bludger properly if your life depended on it. You keep this up and I'll end up beating with bloody McDonough for the rest of the year. Don't do this to me, man."

Lars McDonough had continuously come third in Slytherin Beater's try-outs for four years now. The kid was in fifth year, looked like seventh year plus one grade retention, was, genetically speaking, possibly 25% gorilla, and he was simply one of the meanest bastards in all of Hogwarts. Not surprising that he would only try out for the spot in which he would get to swing a thirty centimetre cudgel of solid hard wood around other people without immediately being punished for it.

Suddenly, Scorpius actually felt sorry for his friend, and with that came a tide of pure exhaustion. His shoulders sagged a little. "Sorry," he mumbled and meant it, even though he couldn't say it while looking him in the eye. "I'm... um."

"If you think you can't tell me, that's fine, I guess. Except that, you know, you can tell me," Albus said into a stretching silence, apparently a little confused about where to go with the sentence. "I just... wished you'd let me help you. Lend a hand, if you need it, or something."

Oh, I seriously, seriously doubt that, Scorpius thought, pressing his lips together trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the notion.

"And I wished you'd go back to normal. Like things were before the Christmas hols."

Scorpius huffed a sad little laugh out of his nose and said, "That makes two of us."

There was a silence, broken by the high shriek of the zip of Scorpius' bag when he pulled it shut.

The thing is, Scorpius started in his head as he shouldered the strap, my... uh, penis- He winced. NO. Just NO.

"So, uhm." Albus uttered, apparently not sure whether it was a prompt for himself or for Scorpius, and took a step further into the room and toward him.

You know how we boys, uh, kinda need to, uh, do this thing every other day at least to not go crazy and maybe take up a chainsaw and start killing people? Yeah, I haven't been able to do that in twenty four days because your uncle went a bit overboard with birth control.

Albus hesitated palpably for another moment as if to give him another three seconds of extra time to start talking, then exhaled loudly when he didn't and said, "If I had known that you liked Rose that much, I-..." He looked up at the ceiling as if divine help might drop down from there, an expression of actual distress on his face. Thus, he didn't see Scorpius glaring at him. "I don't even know what I would have done. I hoped I'd have been a better friend to you, and been honest from the start. I know that you had serious feelings for her. I'm sor-"

"Al, shut up!" That was the only thing that came to mind. That, and storming past him and out the door before Al could recover and follow up on it.

The rest of the day – two mercifully short hours, that was – he stayed away from him and every other Quidditch team member, also from every girl, and from everyone who might want to talk to him. Basically, he avoided everyone and didn't look anyone anyone in the eye for another two hours before getting into bed, curling up in a fetal position and falling asleep thinking '17 days left'.

/

~17 days left~

Slim. Not too tall. Slender, not at all voluptuous. Flexible. Strong. He liked that.

How she could move. Bend. Writhe. It drove him crazy.

Her fingers ran all over his body while her voice dripped into his ear.

"Scorpius," it said.

He let out a soft moan. It was so warm. Her hand on his shoulder.

"Scorpius."

So warm. Sweaty. Mhh.

"Scorp. Scorp, wake up."

He did, with a start. The disorientation hit him like a Bludger in the face.

Where had the girl gone? And the light? And the nice feelings and everything?

"You were dreaming," someone informed him with a whisper. "Noisily." The someone turned out to be Albus who had half bent over him in his bed and was just stepping back.

Scorpius blinked as his brain restarted.

The girl was gone – she had never been real, except for the touch on his shoulder, but that had been Albus.

The feelings had been real, though.

Some of them still were.

Visibly, under his blanket.

/

/TBC (tomorrow)

One round of serious pity for the millions of boys who are betrayed by their bodies every day. I don't know how you survive.